“In The Lives of Puppets” is a thought-provoking fantasy tackling relationships with artificial intelligence.

Author TJ Klune grew up in Roseburg, and his latest novel, “In the Lives of Puppets,” begins deep in an Oregon forest.

Within the forest is a building, derelict and overgrown, until one day an android wanderer named Giovanni comes across it and decides to rehabilitate it for his workshop. Soon it is so stuffed with his work materials — batteries, books, wires, circuit boards — that he realizes he needs more space. So he builds additional rooms up in the treetops, a la Swiss Family Robinson.

It is a marvelous place to raise Victor, the baby boy Gio adopts. Assisting in the children-rearing duties are two robots Gio has assembled from spare parts located in the scrap yards at forest’s edge.

Nurse Ratched is a reinstated nurse registered automaton to care, heal, educate and drill. She is capable of engaging an “empathy protocol” when necessary, but her default manner leans more toward sadistic efficiency.

Rambo, who may strike readers as a chatty and somewhat neurotic cross between a Roomba and R2D2, has been assembled to perform household clean-up.

These four make a family of sorts. They keep a low profile, only emerging from the forest occasionally to scavenge through scrap yards for decommissioned materials that they might be able to repurpose.

At night they gather to listen to records or watch movies that they’ve found in the junk heaps. Sometimes Giovanni regales them with stories about what humans were like, back in the day.

They always seemed to be lonely, he tells his family. “Even surrounded by so many of their kind, they still searched for a connection. They were like gods, in a way, in the power of their creation. At first it was Hubble. Then Discovery.”

And the machines they built became increasingly complex. When Nurse Ratched questions why humans didn’t just speak to each other, Gio responds that they tried to.

“But they hated as much as they loved. They feared what they didn’t understand. Even as they built us, they pushed for more. And the further they went, the less control they had.”

In the last few months, as the learning capacities of artificial intelligence have seized headlines, Klune’s story, as probing as it is entertaining, seems brilliantly prescient.

With “In the Lives of Puppets,” it turns out that even robots hidden away in a forest are vulnerable to the repercussions of artificial intelligence. The cozy family dynamic that Gio, Vic, Nurse Ratched and Rambo fashioned for themselves is forever disrupted when one day Vic salvages an android from the scrap yards.

Labeled HAP, it appears to be somewhat intact and may still have some working capabilities. Vic restores the android to surprise his dad, but once reanimated, it exhibits surly behavior so Rambo surmises that HAP must stand for “Hysterically Angry Puppet.”

This tale contains so much, including fantasy, peril, homages to other storytellers and a fair bit of sexual innuendo. But most importantly, it makes a forceful plea for having the bravery to be compassionate — powerful stuff.

This week’s book

“In the Lives of Puppets” by TJ Klune

Tor — 432 pp — $28.99