In the Lives of Puppets

Published in 2023, T. J. Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets is an adult science fiction novel billed as a queer retelling of Pinocchio. Twenty-one-year-old Victor Lawson is a human inventor raised by an android named Giovanni. After Victor discovers and repairs a mysterious android named Hap, Giovanni’s past comes back to haunt him, and Victor must undertake a dangerous journey to save the machines he loves. Klune is a Lambda Literary Award winner, and the novel explores themes of free will, love, and human nature.

This guide refers to the e-book edition released by Tor Books in 2023.

Plot Summary

An android named Giovanni Lawson builds a home and raises Victor, a human child, in an uninhabited forest. Victor Lawson grows into an inventor like his father. His two best friends, Rambo and Nurse Ratched, are decommissioned robots that he rebuilt. In secret, Victor works on a mechanical, replacement heart for his aging father, who worries about his son’s dangerous visits to the Scrap Yards, which are guarded by machines called Old Ones.

At age 21, Victor discovers a broken but exquisitely realistic male android in a pile of scrap and takes it home to his personal laboratory. He conceals the android from his father and spends weeks repairing it. Victor uses the mechanical heart he built for his father and a drop of his own blood to revive the android, whom he names Hap. Hap has no memories of his life before the forest, and his confused rampage in Victor’s lab draws Giovanni’s attention. Hap flees into the forest but sacrifices his chances of escape to save a monarch butterfly, a decision that allows Giovanni to catch up to him. Giovanni is shaken by the realization that his son bled into the android’s heart and explains that this will change the android in unpredictable ways.

A week after Hap awakens, Victor, Nurse Ratched, Rambo, and Hap return to the Scrap Yards and find three uniformed androids examining the ground where Victor cut his hand while retrieving Hap. The machines serve the Authority, which controls most of the world’s machines through a neural network. Seeking the source of the human blood, the androids fly to Victor’s home in a ship shaped like a monstrous whale. Giovanni asks Hap to protect Victor, seals them and the robots in a secret underground bunker, confronts the uniformed androids, and destroys his heart so they cannot access his memories. The androids carry Giovanni’s lifeless body onto their ship and set his home ablaze.

In the bunker, Nurse Ratched shows Victor a recording Giovanni made a few days prior. Giovanni explains that the Authority tasked him with destroying humanity and that he created the androids of the Human Annihilation Response Protocol (HARP), including Hap, to carry out that purpose. Giovanni began to question his programming and escaped to the forest with the help of a machine called the Blue Fairy. Giovanni confesses to Victor that he lied about Victor having biological parents and that he actually created his son from the last known human ovum, given to him by the Blue Fairy. Once Victor was born (from his gestation in the vats in Giovanni’s lab), a drop of Victor’s blood gave Giovanni the capacity to love. In his recording, Giovanni entreats Victor to live his life rather than try to find him.

Victor decides to travel to the City of Electric Dreams in search of his father with the help of Hap, Nurse Ratched, and Rambo. By accessing data from an Old One, the group determines that the city lies 700 miles southeast of their location where Las Vegas once stood. Along the journey, an android called the Coachman captures Victor and his friends and makes them part of his traveling Museum of Human Curios and Curiosities. Four members of the Authority, including a HARP android who looks exactly like an intact Hap, search the museum for humans, but they do not discover the captives. After learning that Victor is a human, the Coachman becomes his ally. The android explains that he helped Giovanni escape the city at the request of the Blue Fairy. He also reveals that Victor is the first living human in centuries.

The Coachman brings Victor and his friends to the City of Electric Dreams and gives them a gold coin that will grant them an audience with the Blue Fairy, who is their best hope of rescuing Giovanni. The Coachman bids Victor and his friends farewell after sneaking them into the city. Before the Blue Fairy agrees to help, they test Hap and Victor’s loyalty by showing Victor Hap’s memories, which include the slaughter of hundreds of humans in his time as a HARP. Hap’s more recent memories are all about Victor, prompting the young inventor to realize that Hap is in love with him. When Hap starts to overload, Victor severs the Blue Fairy’s link with Hap causing Hap to revert to his original programming, and he nearly strangles Victor. Victor restores Hap to himself with a kiss. Satisfied, the Blue Fairy agrees to help them rescue Giovanni and gives them a virus capable of freeing all of the machines under the Authority at the cost of the machines’ memories. Victor and his friends spend the night in one of the Blue Fairy’s guest rooms. Victor assures Hap that he isn’t afraid of the android despite his past, and they share another kiss.

The next day, the Blue Fairy helps Victor complete a replacement heart for Giovanni before he and his friends set out for the Benevolent Tower. Victor and the robots enter the tower by pretending to be Hap’s prisoners. Another HARP realizes that Victor is human. Although they manage to destroy the attacking android, the replacement heart breaks in the fight. They find Giovanni’s laboratory and try to reach him, but he doesn’t remember them and alerts the Authority to their presence. Hap uploads the virus created by the Blue Fairy, causing his heart to explode. With the Authority’s hold over the machines broken, the city’s residents begin to adjust to having free will.

With a heavy heart, Victor takes his father and Hap’s bodies home to the forest with Nurse Ratched and Rambo’s help. As the seasons pass, Victor builds and installs two new hearts for his father and Hap. One day, Victor and Hap find a kaleidoscope of butterflies, and the android kisses the human, a promising sign that Hap’s memories are returning.