The Love Makers arrives! Nov 23 2021

A chance encounter between two women and a road trip into the future: It’s Christmas Eve, and Scarlett, banker-turned-technologist, is leaving a secret underground lab to catch the last flight that will get her home in time to open presents with her three-year-old son. She offers a lift to a young woman in distress, who shares her intimate life story as they drive to the airport. These revelations will have devastating consequences for both of them….

The Love Makers is a philosophical thriller about female friendship, class, motherhood, women, and work—and how artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire.

"Wild, innovative and alive with intelligence and imagination, Aifric Campbell's novel is a dark Thelma and Louise road-trip for the AI generation." Arifa Akbar, Guardian, author of Consumed

The Love Makers combines Aifric’s novel with essays from leading scientists and commentators Ronny Bogani, Joanna J. Bryson, Julie Carpenter, Stephen Cave, Anita Chandran, Peter R. N. Childs, Kate Devlin, Kanta Dihal, Mary Flanagan, Amanda Sharkey, Roberto Trotta, E. R. Truitt, Richard Watson who examine what’s at stake in our human–machine relationships. What is our future as friends, parents, lovers? Will advances in intelligent machines reverse decades of progress for women? From robot nannies to generative art and our ancient dreams of intelligent machines, The Love Makers blends storytelling with science communication to investigate the challenges and opportunities of emergent technologies and how we want to live.

Simultaneous release US & UK: Available at AMAZON Waterstones WH Smith Barnes & Noble and other retailers

"Keenly intelligent and deeply humane, The Love Makers is an essential handbook on the ways in which artificial intelligence has already changed the relationships between human beings, and will only continue to do so." - Louisa Hall, author Trinity and Speak
Goldsmiths Press, 2021

GUARDIAN Review: The Love Makers by Aifric Campbell (Goldsmiths, £19.99). Campbell’s fourth novel is a suspenseful, plausible near-future road trip that is published alongside 14 essays by experts in fields ranging from robotics and artificial intelligence to law and ethics. In the fiction Scarlett and Gurl, the titular characters are a wealthy tech entrepreneur on her way home for Christmas and the stranded dancer to whom she gives a lift. Scarlett, involved in the development of new uses for AI, resists its inclusion in her own life, insisting on hiring a succession of human nannies instead of the iMom her peers rely on. Gurl shares her boyfriend with a sex robot she looks upon as her best friend. These types of future tech may not be so far away; AI and robotics are already part of our lives. The essay by Kate Devlin begins “The first thing to know about sex robots is that there are no sex robots,” but it goes on to consider the role of the virtual assistant, and reveals that a Japanese company which makes “a voice-driven AI with an associated projected holographic anime character” has thousands of male customers who would like to marry their virtual assistants. This book, created with the aim of raising awareness of potential social impacts of developing trends in technology, provides much to think about. It deserves attention.

E&T REVIEW Oct 2021 : The Love Makers “.. explores human-machine relationships with empathy, fully fleshed-out characters and genuinely original ideas.” https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/10/review-the-love-makers-by-aifric-campbell/#.YZEbnIh7sIM.twitter

Chicago Review of Books, Nov 2021

“The novel, as well as the twelve short contributor essays that follow it, are presented as an exploration of gender, attachment, and the transformations of technology. These cross-disciplinary essays are thought-provoking considerations of human-machine interaction: its potentials, its limitations, and its pitfalls. Some commentaries are provocative, such as Kate Devlin’s “while (alive) {love me;},” while others, such as Margaret Rhee’s poem….” 

Congrats E.R.Truitt, whose wonderful essay excerpt in THE LOVE MAKERS is published in MIT Press Reader

Surveillance, Companionship, and Entertainment: The Ancient History of Intelligent Machines

“Robots and AI in fact and in fiction serve the interests of powerful elites, often by violently policing boundaries (of places and social groups) and surveilling subject populations. They act as liminal objects, and are often used in imaginative texts to think about and interrogate boundaries between natural and artificial, between living and not. Intelligent machines raise issues of autonomy and consent….posing philosophical questions about the ethics of making and what we owe to what we create.” – E.R. Truitt

My Valentines evening as panel speaker, 2021 Imperial LATES

Crash, Crisis, Crypto: My story published on the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis: my story on Lehman Brothers collapse.

“It’s September 15 2008 and you carry your heart in a cardboard box across the concourse with the world’s TV cameras in your face.” Click to READ


Thanks to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for my residency at the Dora Maar House

MONEY TALK, my short story for Almeida theatre London, 2018:

A mother teachers her 9-year-old son to play poker. Now he’s the king of sovereign distress …

MONEY TALK was commissioned by the Almeida theatre, London for LIES, an interactive production on economics and high finance.

Great to see my story KAROLINA in Bridport prize anthology  

Fiction on finance: I review of A Game of Consequences, Irish Times 2018

“Ten years after the financial crisis we are reminded yet again of the toxic culture of cowardice, cronyism and greed that brought Ireland to its knees and the players who, for the most part, went unpunished.”

Aifric speaks at University College London May 2018

Symposium: Women’s Writing and Science.  Joint address on creative writing and identity, with Anita Chandran, alumna from my Creative Writing class at Imperial College who is combining a PhD in experimental physics with a creative anthology about women in science.

Are we raising girls to fear competition? 

Competition remains one of the most controversial areas in the discussion about women and work –

Extract from a forthcoming business book by Aifric Campbell & Tara Ricks, Irish Times, 2018

“The car park at my son’s school is full when arrive, so I know the triathlon is under way. A few girls come streaking out of the pool house in wet togs – they’ve already cycled three times round a large field and swum 10 lengths and now they’re heading off for a cross-country mile. By the time I take up position at the finish line, a 12-year-old girl – let’s call her Ellie – is powering ahead when she suddenly slows down…” READ MORE

On the Floor, Fiction on Finance, longlisted Orange Prize 

Picador USA

What the critics are saying: ..the smartest financial novel since The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the first with a fully drawn female heroine – Frank Partnoy /.. brilliantly combine[s] the best elements of the modern financial thriller and the nineteenth-century coming-of-age story to create a commanding work of fiction—Stephen Amidon / It’s that rare work of fiction in which the financial world functions as more than a mere backdrop – Bloomberg / Campbell, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, punctures the seamy darkness of banking with acute observations- Publishers Weekly / Of all the contemporary heroines, Geri Molloy might be the most badass. Watch out, Lisbeth Salander. —Marie Claire. 

Aifric spent 14 years at Morgan Stanley where she became Managing Director on the London trading floor. Her first novel, The Semantics of Murder (2008) was inspired by an unsolved murder of a brilliant mathematician in LA. The Loss Adjustor (2010) tells the story of a woman who is haunted by the loss of her childhood friends. Short fiction:  New Irish Short Stories (2011), The Book of Men and the Irish Times. FILM: C.K. (2012)  inspired by the real life case of an Amsterdam accountant who embezzled 16mill euros and disappeared. Aifric holds a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia.

The Novelist in the Fly Lab, Aifric presents at Imperial College London 2017

Aifric reviews in the Wall Street Journal: The One Percent

“On April 3, global news outlets simultaneously released 11.5 million confidential documents from a Panama law firm that exposed how the rich and powerful conceal wealth and evade taxes….”READ MORE

Aifric addresses Brexit summit 2016 

Irish writers: where we set our novels + My take on Trump, Irish Times“

“0335  Dublin, the witching hour. I’m singing Woody Guthrie as a defence against demons. This land is your land /This land is my land / From California to the New York Island……..  0445 I make a list of the American writers and poets who have sustained my entire life…..”.READ MORE

Aifric reviews VERSAILLES Irish Times 2016

My take on Brexit : Irish Times 2016

“The real crisis in the UK is the widening gap between rich and poor, between opportunity and despair.”

Why bankers need book clubs:LossAdj paperback thumbnail my OpEd Irish Times 2016  

“The truth is that novelists were picking up on troubling long-term trends in the financial sector long before the strategists.”

Scientists outshine arts students with experiments in creative writing: my OPED Guardian 

With no publication angst and a killer work ethic, science students easily match their peers in the humanities in the art of creative writing. It even makes them better scientists, writes novelist and teacher Aifric Campbell…

 The Global Novel: Aifric with John Banville & Neel Mukherjee 

Writing is an act of confidence” Aifric in Grierik

“I came to Brussels to start my fourth novel. In fact I came to write it – to “get black on white”. I am always dishing out Hemingway’s blunt advice to my students because it’s true: without text there is nothing, there is just the idea in your head.…” DOWNLOAD pdf 

How to Make an Impact: Aifric’s guide on how to do business  

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, senior female executives are failing “to assert themselves in high-level meetings”. So why do many women founder?  A failure to prepare and practice, says investment banker-turned-writer Aifric Campbell Download pdf 

“An appetite for risk is key to success”- Aifric addresses the Global Economics Forum 2013 

  

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How do you tell stories about financial markets? Aifric addresses London School of Economics 2013

TV3: Aifric on life, work and what women want 

WATCH

Aifric grew up in Dublin and moved to Sweden where she read Linguistics and lectured in Semantics at the University of Gothenburg. After 14 years in investment banking she decided to focus on the fiction she’d been writing since childhood. She received her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2007 where she has also lectured. Her writing has won awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a Thayer Fellowship at UCLA and various writing residences at Yaddo in New York. Aifric teaches at Imperial College, London and has previously taught at the University of East Anglia and the University of Sussex. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, The Irish Times, ELLE, Tatler, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Business Post. She lives in the UK. 

Watch TV Interview with Wim Brands, leading Dutch arts prog boeken-13-05-2012

Aifric on BBC R4 TODAY:  Does finance make good fiction?

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