FILE UNDER BAROQUE-PUNK 1649, North Sea. The great philosopher René Descartes carries a heavy heart and a target on his back. Sick with pneumonia, pursued by powerful enemies, he flees by ship to Sweden and a new life. His companion: a sentient android replica of Francine, his beloved, dead daughter. But the ship's captain has other plans. Accusing Descartes of sorcery, he tosses the droid overboard, plunging Francine into a bizarre afterlife: a machine graveyard ruled by malignant necromancers. There, she hacks the dying philosopher's mind, glimpsing the birth of A.I. in a timestream parallel to our own. 'Even Animals Are Machines is luminous, melancholy and charged with real soul.' -Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas 'A work of genuinely original and literary science fiction.' -D. Harlan Wilson, author of Outré 'A marvellous blend of historiography and provocative allegory.' -Paul McAuley, author of Fairyland