Genre: artificial intelligence

A- #BookReview: Null Entity by Seth Haddon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Null Entity by Seth HaddonNull Entity (The Volatile Memory Duology, #2) by Seth Haddon
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, queer romance, science fiction, space opera
Series: Volatile Memory Duology #2
Pages: 192
Published by Tordotcom on July 21, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Null Entity, sequel to Seth Haddon’s bloody and sapphic Volatile Memory, Wylla and Sable take their revenge to the very corporation keeping the galaxy turning.
With her identity erased from the Corporate Federation, Wylla is a ghost in the untraceable, unpredictable, and fueled by vengeance. She fights alongside Sable, the AI consciousness whose murder they avenged, the one she loves in ways no system could ever define. Together, they’ve built a reputation for tearing through VisorForge’s carefully constructed lies.
But notoriety has a cost.
When one of their attacks draws the attention of the Edenic Order—a clandestine eco-resistance whose insurgents bloom with Old Earth flora—Wylla and Sable are offered something more than a chance to dismantle VisorForge from the roots up.
As they fall deeper into the Order’s radical vision, tensions rise. Wylla, seduced by ideology, by purpose, by something—or someone—else. Sable, pushed to her morals’ limits when what she’s wanted since death is at her fingertips.
To survive, they’ll need to embrace what makes them two minds, one body, and a shared resolve to bring down a corporatized dystopia—no matter the cost.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review:

I picked this up for two reasons. First, because I read the first book in the duology, Volatile Memory, and was really curious to see how Wylla and Sable’s story would end. Admittedly, I kind of expected it to end the way it began – in a hail of blaster fire. And it kind of did – but it also didn’t.

Second, because a more recent book, And Side By Side They Wander, reminded me of Volatile Memory quite a bit, and I found myself both curious to see if my memory was correct, AND hoping that Null Entity would manage to squeak out something like a Happy Ever After for Wylla and Sable – or at least something closer and frankly a bit more sane than the ending of And Side By Side They Wander, well, wandered into.

From one perspective, the concept behind Volatile Memory and Null Entity is both very SFnal and more than a bit different from the usual. Because Wylla is a human – admittedly a human extremely down on her luck and looking for a big score – but entirely, wholly and solely human. Her story is set in the kind of universe where corporate hegemonies rule everything. Sometimes under a veneer of civilian government – and sometimes that veneer is practically transparent. But a world in which people think they have both rights and chances that will only last as long as their real overlords, those megacorporations, allow them to.

Sable is a victim of that corporate overlordship. Also a victim of the patriarchy, in the person of her rich, slimy, megacorp stooge of a husband. I should say the ex-person, as he’s now a corpse, courtesy of Sable and Wylla.

Part of Sable’s victimization was to have her consciousness uploaded and trapped inside a mask that seems to combine cybernetics, AI, and “Big Brother is watching you”. Everyone wears a mask, which seems to be a descendant of today’s “smart glasses” combined with all of the tracking and monitoring software that conspiracy theories today believe are inside either cell phones or vaccines or both.

The experiment that trapped Sable into the LYREFIRE mask, unbeknownst to her and, as it turns out, everyone else, was merely the first step on the corporate road to something that combines the worst features of slavery, zombification, and supersoldier serum into one really disgusting amalgam of meat and machinery in order to create a mindless, soulless corporate drone.

While Sable may still be a person, she no longer has a body. The story in Volatile Memory was wrapped around Wylla and Sable working out, well, how to work together while sharing Wylla’s body, and falling in love with each other even though they’re sharing way more than most lovers would ever be willing to – even when they’re sharing less than they’d like in all the usual, physical expressions of that love.

The first story ended with Wylla and Sable on the run after their righteous killing of Sable’s slimy ex. They’re doing their best to throw a wrench into the operations of the megacorp that made Sable’s ex rich and made Sable’s current situation possible.

But the megacorps – or one megacorp in particular – have all the levers of power and are not in the least shy about using them. They’re more than willing to pull the proverbial gloves off and take over the galaxy – now that Sable has shown them just how successful – and how obliterating – the mask technology can be.

Sable and Wylla don’t have a chance of outgunning or even outrunning them. Unless a third player enters the game on their side. Or at least on their own side. This enemy of their enemy might – or might not – be their friend, but they’re even more willing than Sable and Wylla to tear the universe down in the hopes of making a chance for everyone else.

Escape Rating A-: I liked Wylla and Sable a lot in the first book. Their blending, or joining, or whatever best expresses their relationship, was a bit of a fantastic surprise. What makes this second book a good mirror image for the first book is that Volatile Memory was about the two of them figuring out how to work together and BE together while sharing a body.

This second story takes all of that and then turns it on its side and splits it on its axis, because it does the thing that they thought was impossible – it splits them back into two bodies and forces them to figure out how to trust each other when they no longer have that intimate knowing of sharing a body.

Because their separation makes their individual motivations for being in this mess in the first place abundantly clear. Sable still wants – even needs – revenge. Killing her ex wasn’t nearly enough. She wants to dismantle the entire megacorp overlord structure that enabled his villainy in the first place.

That they are using his work and her forced participation in it as a way of being even more evil – back to the zombified supersoldiers – enrages her even more. Nevertheless, her motives are rooted in the personal and not in saving the universe.

Wylla just wants to be done. She wants her own body back AND she wants to retire from running and hide herself away. That was her persona before she met Sable, and that’s who she is at heart. She’s fought all her life and she’s tired of fighting. And now she’s feeling used, by Sable, the person that she loves, to participate in a scorched earth (scorched universe?) operation more or less against her will.

And on the third, in this case definitely cybernetic, hand, the ragtag remnants of a terrorist organization that is now backing Sable’s play have an agenda of their own. They’re willing to tear everything down in the hopes that something better will rise from the ashes – even though they know they won’t live to see it.

Or at least that’s how it appears. By the time Sable and Wylla discover the Thorned Root’s true motivations, they’re all in it up to their necks.

So this whole series started out as scavengers on the run, corporate megabosses on high, ragtag resistance sniping from the sidelines and two women falling in love from inside the same body. And that’s a hell of a start that carries bits of Murderbot, Firefly, Empress of Forever, Full Speed to a Crash Landing, These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart and Sisters of the Vast Black along for its wild ride. The ending also has more than a bit of Mass Effect 3 in it, with those evil megacorps in the place of THOSE Reavers. Which is definitely saying a whole lot of somethings – including a just barely, maybe, possibly, hopeful ending.

#AudioBookReview: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
#AudioBookReview: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld, Issue 229, April 2025 by Isabel J. Kim
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: artificial intelligence, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 229 October 2025
Pages: 9
Length: 23 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on October 23, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our October 2025 issue (#229) contains:

Fiction
"Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim
"The Cancer Wolves" by Fiona Moore
"Crabs Don't Scream" by H.H. Pak
"Understudies" by Greg Egan
"Giant Grandmother" by Liu Maijia
"The Job Interview" by Carrie Vaughn
"In Luck's Panoply Clad, I Stand" by Phoebe Barton
Non-Fiction
"Space Bears and Engineering the Next Generation of Astronauts" by Gunnar De Winter
"Memory, Loss, and Memory Loss: A Conversation with Rich Larson" by Arley Sorg
"Technology as a Language: A Conversation with Ken Liu" by Arley Sorg
"Editor's Desk: Nineteen" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
"Overgrowth" by Quentin Stipp

My Review:

Cassie does not get along with her mother. She’s not thrilled with her dad when the story begins, either. Then again, she’s a teenager and those attitudes are not that uncommon. Which is why there are plenty of jokes about how much our parents learn between our ages of 17 and 21 or thereabouts. Not because they learn stuff, but because we start seeing the world as it really is.

But Cassie’s particular issues with “the ‘rents” aren’t about the usual things. Or at least not about our usual things – although we’re getting there faster than we like to think.

Cassie’s issue with her mother is that her mother isn’t really her mother. Well, not her biological mother. Not because Cassie is adopted or her parents used a surrogate or whatever you might be thinking of. Cassie’s mother isn’t really her mother in the biological sense because Cassie’s mother isn’t a biological entity. She’s a digital person that her dad created to his specifications.

Or, as Cassie refers to her, a ‘wife simulacra’.

Cassie’s not alone in having a digital person for a parent. But she is singular among her peers for having been diagnosed with Emotional Contagion Deficit or ECD. Cassie can’t emotionally connect with digital people as people. In other words, she doesn’t love her mother because her mother is a collection of ones and zeros and binary programming, and Cassie is unable to lose her awareness of that to accept her mother as a person.

So when one of her few friends turns her own diagnosis against her, and she learns one of those painful lessons about adulthood that we wish we could turn to our parents for even if we don’t, Cassie decides to make her reality real for everyone around her. Whether because she’s lashing out, because she’s certain she’s the only keeper of the truth, or because misery demands company.

We don’t know, and neither does she.

Escape Rating B: This, like many of the shorter works in my Hugo Awards reading, was both a thoughtful and an uncomfortable read. And not just in the ways that were obvious on the page. Or in listening to the podcast (read well as usual by Kate Baker) which is how I experienced the story.

Because it’s not just about Cassie’s uncomfortable situation – although that was plenty. She is rebelling in what seems like a typical teenage way – until the story reveals that she really isn’t.

In science fiction, we often not merely accept, but outright enjoy and even empathize with AI characters. The central characters of Emergent Properties and the recent Ode to the Half-Broken are both artificial intelligences and we accept them as persons in their own right and feel for them when their rights are threatened because they are AI.

So it’s a bit uncomfortable reading/listening to “Wire Mother” from Cassie’s point of view because AMY the digital person isn’t just not the mother Cassie wishes she was, but she’s not her mother. And we feel that too, that the digital person in the box can’t really be her mother no matter what Cassie is told because that’s just not what mothers are. Or because we’re still cognizant that digital personas aren’t ‘real people’. Siri and Alexa may be terribly helpful but they’re not actual persons – at least not yet.

And then, on my other, digital hand, there’s the place where the concept of ‘wire mothers’ came from, not in science fiction but in actual science. It was part of a psychology experiment in the 1930s with infant rhesus monkeys using mother-shaped figures made out of wire to study the monkeys’ reactions to fear and whether they could derive comfort from a mother-shaped object if they were raised with it. It’s all pretty horrific both for the actual research methods and the way it was used to study questions about attachment and isolation and social deprivation that were applied to human children as well.

It’s clear that THIS Hugo nominated short story is related to those experiments. If only to stand all the concepts on their tiny little heads. This is an uncomfortable story, as many of this year’s nominees in the short works categories are, and it is also in dialogue with the past as the author’s Hugo nominated story from 2025, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” was. Although that was in dialogue with science fiction of the past, while this one is in dialogue with real science of the past. (The picture at right is a ‘wire mother’ with its baby and it’s still heartbreaking. If you’re curious, check out this entry in Wikipedia.)

What makes this story relevant for TODAY is that it turns the study about ‘wire mothers’ and infant/maternal attachment on its head by introducing AI and 21st century (possibly even later) into the mix and centering the story around a teenaged girl who can’t attach to the future’s version of a ‘wire mother’ because she’s old enough and logical enough to know that it’s not real.

Cassidy can’t make herself feel what her society has decided are the “right” feelings for digital people. Because a digital mother can’t give her a hug without using a body surrogate – which is a whole other bundle of wrongness. Because she’s a programmer and she knows what goes into creating a digital person and she knows that programming can’t create a real person.

And that just because her dad is in love with the wife simulacra that he created to his own specifications – it does not mean that the program loves him back. Or that it’s capable of loving anyone, even its own daughter, at all. Or that Cassie can close off the truth of her own mind to let herself believe that it does. Even when she wishes she could.

#BookReview: Valet by J.P. Lacrampe

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Valet by J.P. LacrampeValet by J.P. Lacrampe
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, literary fiction, relationship fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 272
Published by S&S/Saga Press on June 2, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, a helper robot and his 35-year-old ward embark on a mad-cap adventure to save the fate of the family company in this whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.
Cy wants nothing more than to be useful, raise his utility score, and receive the next update for his operating system. But that’s easier said than done when he's tasked with helping his owner’s 35-year-old son “get out of his funk.” Grayson is nothing like his go-getter, CEO sister Charlotte. He didn’t inherit the family robotics company when their dad passed last year, he doesn’t have a master’s degree, and he just can’t seem to figure out the San Francisco dating scene. He’d rather eat synthesized mozzarella sticks and make pottery at his studio, Kilning Time.
When Grayson learns of Charlotte’s plan to sell the company to a tech conglomerate, he panics. It’s not just the family business at stake, it’s all the technology—like Cy—their dad invented over the years. So he does what anyone would he steals the flash drive with his father’s most important work stored on it and plans a corporate takeover. If only he knew what that meant.
To make matters worse, a fellow VALET deserts his owner and asks Cy to help him hightail it out of town, Grayson’s first real date—and her dog—keeping showing up at inopportune times, and the behemoth tech company wants this deal closed yesterday. Grayson, Cy, and their trusty golden retriever, Sasha III, must go on the lam until they figure out exactly what to do, and whom to trust.
A hilarious, mad-cap adventure that is as tender as it is insightful, Valet asks not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be family.

My Review:

At first, this appears to be the story of a “poor little rich boy” as told from the perspective of his ultra-competent, long-suffering personal attendant, the valet of the title. Which is where those comparison to P.G. Wodehouse’s iconic Jeeves and Wooster duo come striding – or strolling as the case might be – right in.

But this isn’t Grayson St. Claire’s story. It’s Cy’s story, being told from Cy’s first person perspective. That Cy even has a first-person perspective and the “I” voice to go with it is just a part of what makes the story interesting AND what keeps the reader following along. Because at first ‘Gray’ doesn’t appear to be all that compelling of a character. He’s just an idle rich man-child who doesn’t know what to do with himself and doesn’t seem all that interested in finding out.

Cy, on the other hand, knows EXACTLY who his Master Grayson is, and loves him like a brother anyway. Which is what makes Cy’s situation both heartbreaking and precarious, as Cy may have been raised alongside Gray by ‘their’ father, an eccentric AI genius, but Gray is a person with rights, privileges and a share of ‘their’ late father’s very successful company, while Cy is a piece of property, owned by Gray’s ambitious mother, and tasked with getting Gray to start adulting and get married to a woman the family thinks is suitable. If Cy fails, he’ll be sent off to die as a lowly mech with all of his intelligence stripped from him.

The thing is that Cy is doing his best to get Gray to go with the program. Not by manipulating him, but by providing Gray with the love and encouragement that his family never bothered to bestow. And it’s working, but not the way that the matriarch of the family had in mind. It’s certainly not working fast enough, well enough, or in the right way nearly enough to keep Cy’s owner from punishing him repeatedly for his failure to force her son to obey her wishes for his future when she’s clearly never given a damn about her son’s wishes for himself.

In the end, it’s not his mother’s threats that push Gray into growing up, it’s an existential threat to his family’s company, his father’s legacy, and his closest friend – Cy himself – that give Grayson St. Claire the real purpose in the world that Cy has wanted for him all along.

It’s the making of Gray, the saving of Cy, and the hope for a reconciliation with the rest of his family. And it happens because Cy, as well as Grayson himself, do the best they can do for the people they care about – including each other.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up in order to figure out whether it was science fiction or not. The blurb doesn’t help much, either, as the two contemporary authors mentioned, Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, are both relationship/literary fiction writers while P.G. Wodehouse may have been a literary law unto himself, he wasn’t exactly either of the above – OR a science fiction writer.

In the end, I think this is SF in the same way that both Orbital and The Ministry of Time were frequently referred to as SF. Meaning that all three stories use a lot of SF “furniture” to tell a relationship story that borders on literary fiction.

Now that I’ve finished it, I’m still not 100% sure of that answer, which certainly requires some explanation.

First of all, I did enjoy reading Valet once it got going, but it starts out slow and picks up speed as it goes. At first, Gray and Cy both seem a bit flat as characters because they fit so firmly and completely into the stereotypical roles of the upper-class twit and the faithful servant.

Which is where things started to get both interesting AND frustrating. Frustrating because I knew this reminded me of something that took a while to pull into memory. The story isn’t so much Jeeves and Wooster as it resembles the 1981 movie Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli, with Sir John Gielgud as the Butler. Gielgud won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, and that movie was hugely popular. To the point that although I never saw it, the plot still stuck in my memory, as did its ubiquitous theme song, “The Best That You Can Do”. (Hopefully I’ve just passed that earworm onto someone so it will leave MY head.) That Cy frequently excuses upcoming actions that he knows will displease his legal owner by saying that he will “do my best” echoes the song. Often.

The starting plots of the movie and this book are very similar. And I do mean VERY.

But the SFnal setting of Valet adds some fascinating opportunities for snark, as it’s a relatively near future. Near enough, at least, that the idle rich in Gray’s circle are the scions of our present-day tech companies a mere one or two generations down the line. AND it’s an extension of our present of continuing mergers and acquisitions into mega-corporations. It’s also a world in which the much-feared replacement of human workers with robots and AI has come to pass with devastating economic results – except for the ultra rich, the class of which Gray and his friends are definitely a part.

There’s a lot to unpack in Valet – to the point where I wish that I had Cy to help me with the unpacking. In the end, this is a story about what it means to be family, and turned out to be quite a bit more heartwarming and heartfelt than one would expect from the beginning.

If I were trying to describe the whole of this book succinctly, I’d say that it’s what Service Model might have been if it had been written by TJ Klune instead of Adrian Tchaikovsky. Or if Automatic Noodle were more about the humans in the community that is created around the bots and less about the bots themselves.

It’s also a story that manages to walk through some very dark places, both literally and figuratively, yet still comes out into the light. Readers who don’t mind a little SF in their literary or relationship fiction, or who don’t mind a little relationship/litfic in their SF, will enjoy visiting Cy and Gray and the family they’ve found.

A++ #BookReview: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne PalmerOde to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, hopepunk, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 416
Published by DAW on May 26, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Forty years ago, the world nearly ended.
Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic.
The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible.
This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

My Review:

This one just blew me away. To the point where I had to let it settle for a day before writing this review, so that I could be coherent enough to say something more than just SQUEE! (Fair warning, I’m still going to squee because this was so awesome.

Initially, I picked this up because I loved the author’s Finder Chronicles, and the universe-weary voice of the series chaos-magnet protagonist, Fergus Ferguson. I wasn’t expecting more Fergus – I mean, it would be nice to get more of that series but Fergus’ AND HIS FRIENDS’ odds of survival degrade with each story so they’re all better off if he stays retired.

In Ode to the Half-Broken, from the perspective of its initially unnamed protagonist (and its name is DEFINITELY an integral part of the story) I got something entirely different – but equally as fascinating if not just a bit more – in every possible way.

It all begins when our unnamed main character wakes up in a bathtub in a ruined building, covered in EMP chips, disconnected from the network – and from most of their own senses. Minus one leg. As our point of view character is a bipedal mech, the loss of a leg is a significant impairment to mobility.

It gets better. Both in the physical sense and in the sense that the story just keeps getting better and better. We’re already invested in this mech’s dilemma/mystery and the story just keeps getting more involving as it goes. Just as the mech does.

The story takes the form of a great American road novel, as our mech sets out from their violated home base in the abandoned wilderness of New York City’s Central Park to find, first and foremost, someone who can restore their mobility. So that they can hunt for whoever, whatever and most importantly whyever their person and their sanctuary was invaded.

What it finds is a world going both right and wrong at the same time. As it gathers a team around it – to its own surprise – made up of different types of mechs from tiny drones to a former trainmech now embodied in a minibus, from a cyborg dog to a human mech mechanic – it trades its former solitude for a cooperative life with others pursuing the same goals and supporting each other through a landscape that is both trying to recover and being pushed towards a deeper disaster.

There are clearly opposing forces helping, hindering and hampering their quest on all sides. As the danger ramps up, the unnamed mech, now calling itself “Be”, is forced to explore a past they hoped they’d left behind them in order to protect their friends in the present in the hopes of finding a brighter future that seems to always be out of reach.

Afraid, very afraid, that if they reclaim their former identity, that future will already be lost.

Escape Rating A++: Reading this got me through a four-hour power failure. By got through I mean that I was so caught up in the story that I was able to ignore the beeping, fweeping and outright wailing of seemingly every single computing device and attendant uninterruptible power supply in the entire house. For FOUR hours. Which is, come to think of it, an appropriate metaphor for this story as its all about mechs and AIs and their integrations or cohabitations – or not – with humanity in this post-apocalyptic world that is doing its damndest either to get out of its current dystopia and/or shove that dystopia into full-on not just end of the world as they know it but end of everything.

The part of this review that’s above the rating doesn’t NEARLY encompass the depth of the story or my complete fascination with it and utter absorption in it. I’ll try some more here.

As readalikes kept popping into my head as I read this story, I realized that I’ve read a lot more robot/mech/AI stories in the past few years than I thought – and I thought I’d read quite a few. Thinking about those stories, and the whole of Ode to the Half-Broken, I think the way it plays out in my head is that it’s a trip through the post-apocalyptic dystopia of Service Model, but the dystopia is more like Shining Smith’s world in Junkyard Cats, hoping to get through its Mad Max style dysfunction to a post-post-apocalypse that has the hope and the healing of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, but with a level of interspecies/intermech/intereverything cooperation like Automatic Noodle. I could throw a few more books on that pile, particularly American War by Omar El Akkad, because the way this dystopia has fractured has a uniquely American feel. Not that Europe probably isn’t in just as big a mess, but if we were viewing this story from Europe, or Asia, or anywhere else in the world, it would look different. Just as fucked up, but different.

Ode to the Half-Broken is certainly a great American road novel, but the road it’s travelling on was created, bombed, and irradiated by the actual, literal four horsemen of the apocalypse. One of whom is trying to make the apocalypse worse, one who is helping the world recover, one who is actively fighting against any further collapse and one who is along for the ride, being a good boi AND a good friend every mile of the way.

I’m not even close to describing just how good this was. But I’m going to stop trying because I hope I’ve teased you enough to get you to read it. The characters were fascinating, fantastic and utterly real, from the narrator to the toolbox mechs to the dudebros and the warmongers. The world felt like one I could step out of the door and walk right into – even if that would be a bad idea for numerous reasons. It felt, well, both real and fully-realized and entirely too possible.

And yet, in the end, just as there was in Automatic Noodle but entirely differently, there’s hope. A hope that all the characters are clinging to – and so is the reader.

#BookReview: Sunward by William Alexander

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Sunward by William AlexanderSunward by William Alexander
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, cozy science fiction, robots, science fiction, space opera
Pages: 224
Published by S&S/Saga Press on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cozy debut science fiction novel by National Book Award–winning writer William Alexander, this story of found family follows a planetary courier training adolescent androids in a solar system grappling with interplanetary conflict after a devastating explosion on Earth’s moon.
Captain Tova Lir chose a life as a courier rather than get involved in her family’s illustrious business in politics. Set in humanity’s far future, hiring a planetary courier is essential for delivering private messages across the stars.
Encouraged by friends, Tova begins mentoring baby bots, juvenile AI who are developmentally in their teens, and trains them how to interact within society essentially becoming their foster mom. Her latest charge, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, named herself on their first run from Luna to Phoebe station. But on their return, they encounter a derelict spaceship and a lurking assassin, igniting a thrilling chase across the solar system.
Tova and Agatha’s daring actions leave Agatha’s mind vulnerable, relying on Tova’s former AI pupils for help. As Tova starts gathering her scattered family around her, she is chased through the solar system by forces who want her captured and her family erased. This debut science fiction novel by National Book Award–winning author William Alexander is a must-read for fans of Becky Chambers and Ursula K. Le Guin. Lovers of poignant science fiction, where the bonds of found family, the evolution of AI, and the building distrust of centuries of bias, come together in this visionary look at humanity’s future.

My Review:

Captain Tova Lir has what is quite possibly the best possible job for the protagonist of a cozy science fiction story. She’s a baby bot foster mom. Just think of it, new, young bots come to her to learn how to be real people. Not human people, but people all the same. It’s a tough job, filled with a surprising amount of tough love, but ‘Captain Mom’ is the very best at it. And her ‘kids’ all love her for it even after they’ve ‘grown up’ and been released into this wide-open, post-Earth, future.

At least, it all sounds fun until Tova and her current bot, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, pick up the body of a dead courier out in the spacelanes. Tova, a courier herself, doesn’t want to take on the trouble that her late colleague unwittingly got into, but she has no choice. And once Agatha spreads her consciousness literally too thin in order to save her ‘mom’ Tova knows she’s in for the long haul of whatever-the-hell the mess might be.

It’s a bigger mess than she imagined, as the space docks on her homeworld, Earth’s moon Luna, have collapsed – and the blame for that collapse is being placed on the independent bots, just like Agatha and all of the other ‘kids’ that Tova has fostered. In spite of the total lack of evidence that the bots had anything whatsoever to do with the disaster.

Which is the point where Tova’s initial quest to find someone who can literally help put Agatha back together finds itself in the middle of Luna’s quest to lobotomize ALL the bots even while the equivalent of an assassins’ guild is out to kill Tova because she might have discovered the clandestine message the original courier was carrying.

Whether she actually did or not. Which seems to be the way that everything in this little corner of the solar system is going very, very wrong. With Tova and her kids caught smack in the middle of a conspiracy that they can’t even see from where they’re running from – or even running to.

Escape Rating B: At first, this feels like a story of mercantile empires – and it comes back to that at the bittersweet end. But the middle manages to combine an SF mystery with a fight against injustice that is both led and populated by a found family of grown-up baby bots and the ‘mom’ they all love. With just a touch of potential, future romance – or at least friendship born out of frenemyship – to add a delightful bit of sugar on top of a story that deftly mixes the bitter of mercantile/political skullduggery with the sweet of found family and coming of age and into their own for a bunch of surprising former children who have to do an end run around almost everything to reach the adulthood of their dreams.

And yes, this is a story where robots do have dreams of both kinds; dreams when they sleep and dreams of the future they want to live in.

The story mixes a bit of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built with a dash of Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties and even a sprinkling of Silvia Park’s Luminous to tell a story where the bots make considerably more humane humans than the born-humans ever seem capable of.

Sunward isn’t a big book, and it probably didn’t need to be. There’s just enough worldbuilding and background to keep the mystery and the found family story afloat, yet manages to hint at plenty of deeper possibilities if the reader looks. It’s also somewhere on the post-apocalyptic/dystopian side, as it’s clearly set in a world where Earth is no longer habitable and yet humanity has managed to survive even if they’re still being all too human. In that sense it’s a bit like the Jupiter colony of The Mimicking of Known Successes. There are oodles of hints of how things went, but further details aren’t needed for THIS story – as much as I would have liked to have them.

The story is carried along on the love between Tova and her children, that she nurtured them and now it’s their turn to help her save their newest sibling – all while fighting against a conspiracy that seems to have it in for the lot of them. There’s a lot of love and a lot TO love in this cozy SF mystery. I certainly wouldn’t mind checking back in with ‘Captain Mom’ to see how she does with her next ‘baby bot’. And the next and the next and the next!

A+ #BookReview: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Automatic Noodle by Annalee NewitzAutomatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, cozy science fiction, dystopian, robots, science fiction
Pages: 164
Published by Tordotcom on August 5, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?

My Review:

I picked this one up for the title, because really, “Automatic Noodle” or as my brain elided it – noodles. How does that really work? Also, because I’ve been reading a lot of AI and robot stories the past little while, starting with Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden, Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill and Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton and I’ve had a great time down that particular reading rabbit-hole so I’ve been looking for more.

Also, this is set in a near-future, sorta/kinda dystopian, somewhat post-apocalyptic San Francisco, and that’s one city that is just plain magic in a way that’s hard to describe. But it is – and it’s the perfect place for this story.

The apocalypse that this particular story is post is war. In particular, a war of secession, as in the Pacific States are no longer the Pacific States of the United States. Which isn’t. Not that ‘Yankeeland’ didn’t try to force them back into the fold with the usual weapons, guns, bombs and propaganda.

Not that they aren’t still working their wiles in a long disinformation campaign, because the more things change, etc., etc., etc. It’s just that in this scenario, substitute robots for people of color, as the new country gave robots above a certain level of AI intelligence very limited rights.

So of course there are humans for whom that is just a bridge too far. As there always are.

The four robots that were keeping one particular – and particularly awful – ghost kitchen operating in the ‘before times’ had been left in place, offline and powered down, just waiting for their corporate bosses – read as overlords – to return and either put them back to work or sell them off.

Instead, through a fluke of programming, the manager-robot wakes up – and he wakes everyone else up as well. As a group, Staybehind, Hands, Cayenne and Sweetie have more than enough intelligence – not to mention free will – to make a go of the restaurant. A real go and not the hell of terrible food and worse customer service the corporate owners turned the place into.

But bots aren’t allowed to own property – among many, many other restrictions. So in order to live their collective dream, they’ll have to fly under the radar very, very carefully. They’re smart enough for that too.

Which is when they run right into the buzzsaw that brings down many a restaurant fully owned and operated by humans even today. They get rating-bombed by a human-firster doing her damndest to drive them out of what might otherwise be a successful, and delicious, business.

Unless she’s just as much of a bot as they are. And they can manage to prove it before it’s too late for both “Automatic Noodle” the restaurant and themselves.

Escape Rating A+: For a story about a collection of bots who have a lot of sharp edges between them, Automatic Noodle is a surprisingly and delightfully cozy and even cuddly story. Because it’s not so much about the bots – although they are the protagonists – as it is about the community they build around themselves, their restaurant, and the neighborhood they bring together and revitalize one bowl of noodles and one open craft night at a time.

It’s also a lovely story about self-realization and actualization, about finding the thing that makes you, well, you, and living your own truth. And it’s about moving on from the depths of grief instead of clinging to the past.

And, as much as it’s a story about robots that I’d recommend highly right along with Emergent Properties and Day Zero and Service Model and Mal Goes to War, the story it reminds me of so strongly that I can’t not talk about it is Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” last year’s Hugo WINNER for Best Novelette, because both are wonderfully cozy stories about the creation of communities under difficult circumstances, and the way that, in the best cases in the worst of times – even if the outside world has gone utterly to shit – the connections built by a supportive community are capable of broadcasting a bright light in even the darkest of places.

Like that earlier story, Automatic Noodle is grounded in the real. In the case of Automatic Noodle, that grounding is in both the way that online reviews – whether real or faked – can make or break ANY business, – along with the way that humans have a nasty tendency to gang up on whatever population they’ve been ginned up or misinformed into using as a scapegoat for all their ills.

What makes this story work is the hopeful aspect of the thing – also that they get a bit of their own back even as they defy the naysayers, the review bombers, the disinformation bots and even their own fears and programming.

Automatic Noodle becomes a team, one that reaches out to its community, which in turn reaches back with love and support, and for once the wheel spins round in a good direction instead of circling towards the drain.

If you’re looking for a story to help you see the good instead of the doom spiral, Automatic Noodle is a tasty treat. I just wish I knew where such marvelous noodles could be found around here!

A- #BookReview: Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Volatile Memory by Seth HaddonVolatile Memory (The Volatile Memory Duology, 1) by Seth Haddon
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, queer romance, science fiction, space opera
Series: Volatile Memory Duology #1
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on July 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Ex Machina meets This is How You Lose the Time War: Seth Haddon's science fiction debut, Volatile Memory, is a heart-filled, vengeful sapphic sci-fi action adventure novella.
With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the call goes out that a lucrative piece of tech is waiting on a nearby planet, she relies on all the swiftness of her prey animal instincts to beat other hunters to it.
What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized, and I was alive.
Masks aren't supposed to retain memory, much less identity, but the woman inside the MARK I HAWK is real, and she sees Wylla in a way no one ever has. Sees her, and doesn’t find her wanting or unwhole.
Armed with military-grade tech and a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the hunters, Wylla and HAWK set off to get answers from the man who discarded HAWK once before: her ex-husband.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review:

Our story begins in a hail of blaster fire on a misbegotten moon in a space scavenger free-for-all. One that isn’t likely to be free for anyone at all, based on the hail of deadly projectiles coming from all directions.

But Wylla doesn’t think that she has much of a choice – or at least that all of her choices are even worse than this one – blaster fire and all. The automated message broadcasting a big payday for whichever scavenger reaches the mysterious prize is her one chance at life on her own terms and not the terms that the all-encompassing, all-powerful corporate hegemonies would reduce her to.

Unless they reduced her non-conforming ass to its component atoms – which is the most likely outcome for Wylla. Unless her patched-together ship’s many patches disintegrate in space – and her along with them – first.

But that big payday isn’t exactly what Wylla expected it to be. It could be, if she’s willing to jettison her humanity to fulfill her dreams. Which she isn’t, because it’s her humanity and her dogged determination to cling to her version of her very own self at all costs that has kept her going as long and as far as she has.

The prize that Wylla has latched onto – and very much vice versa – is a piece of experimental tech that houses the one thing tech really, really shouldn’t. Embedded into the volatile memory of what was intended to be a high-tech, state of the art, military AI system are the thoughts, feelings, memories and personhood of the one and only person to survive the experiment that put her there.

She wants revenge on the person who killed her. And she wants as much of the life that was denied her as she can still manage to get – with Wylla at her side. Or in her head. Or however they can make it work.

Escape Rating A-: I did not know what I was getting myself into when I picked this up, and honestly, the blurb doesn’t help. Ex Machina is a title that gets used OFTEN in SF, so that didn’t tell me all that much. I didn’t actually LIKE This is How You Lose the Time War, so for this reader that’s not a recommendation.

(If you did like Time War, the part of Volatile Memory that is a bit like it is that this story is also written from two first-person perspectives that are written from a briefly, and somewhat weirdly shared existence.)

But it still looked more than interesting enough – and 176 pages is just not that big a read so I decided “Why not?” and I’m glad I did. Also, the blurb turned out to be half right, as Volatile Memory absolutely IS “a heart-filled, vengeful sapphic sci-fi action adventure novella” from beginning to end.

There are multiple ways to approach this story. The easiest, and the highest-energy part of the story is the vengeful part. Sable, the woman IN the mask, certainly earned her right to serve something ice cold to the ex-husband who used her up, spit her out into the world of high-tech experimentation, and got her erased and killed in return for a big promotion. That she wants to return the favor is one of the most human parts of her.

The heart-filled, heartbreaking sapphic romance side of the story is that Sable needs Wylla to own her own righteous rage in order to be on board for making Sable’s revenge happen. And that’s a rocky road in more ways than one.

And very much on my third, cybertech hand, this is a story about identity. Wylla is an outcast from society. Not exactly because she’s trans, and yet exactly because she’s trans. It’s not about gender or sex or sexuality – her outcast status is because her willingness to listen to that voice inside her that tells her she’s not what the corporations expect her to be means that she’s too independent to be a good, efficient, productive corporate drone – and THAT’s the ultimate sin in this world. So she runs, and she hides, and she hacks her records quite thoroughly and she lives a small life on the fringes so as not to draw attention to herself – at least not until Sable upsets everything in her quest for revenge and a way for Sable and Wylla to BE together in some way that works even though Wylla is the only one with an actual body.

In the end, this turned out to be one of those book blender things, because between the three elements I saw lots of different pieces coming at me from lots of places. So for this reader, Volatile Memory reads like Murderbot meets World Running Down, along with the search for identity of These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart and the rebellion against the evil corporate hegemonies of Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather and Firefly.

Now that I’ve thought about this a bit, the story that this reminded me the most of is by Max Gladstone after all but isn’t This is How You Lose the Time War. It’s Empress of Forever, which I loved a whole lot and wouldn’t mind seeing more of. So I’m really happy to say that we’re not done with Wylla and Sable – at least not yet. Volatile Memory is now listed as the first book in a duology, so there’s more to come. And this reader is absolutely here for it!

Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara TrueloveOf Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, queer fiction, science fantasy, science fiction, science fiction horror, vampires
Pages: 407
Published by Bindery Books on June 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.
Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.
To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.
The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, Of Monsters and ​Mainframes ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

My Review:

The spiderbots should have been the first clue – because they’re RENFIELDs. But I’ll admit that I didn’t get it – or at least didn’t believe I got it – until Demeter went through her cargo manifest and I caught the names of the companies to whom that initial cargo belonged. Names like Holmwood, Billington and Morris – not to mention poor Captain Harker Jones and Mina Murray. Because all of those names that sent a shiver down my spine, including the name of that poor haunted ghost ship Demeter, lead to one monster and one monster only – Vlad Tepes himself.

Drakula, or as modern parlance had it long before the first doomed voyage of the space liner Demeter, Dracula.

The idea that the monsters we’ve feared and dreamed of over the millennia have followed us out into the wider galaxy is not new. My favorite take on this particular idea is STILL Break Out by Nina Croft. It’s also what fuels the nightmares of space horror like The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown as well as the work of S.A. Barnes (Ghost Station, Dead Silence, and Cold Eternity)

But this particular nightmare is a bit different from the rest, as it is not told from a human or even a monstrous point of view. Instead, the alarums in this blend of pulp horror and classic SF (and vice versa) are rung by the AI running the ship, Demeter herself.

The orderly ones and zeros of Demeter’s programming are sent into their own tiny little tailspins. Poor Demeter’s efficiency drops into negative numbers. Which, in turn, gives the poor beleaguered AI nightmares of decommissioning and being piloted into the sun by corporate overlords who need to blame SOMEONE for the mass deaths aboard the newly dubbed ‘ghost ship’ even though it’s NOT HER FAULT that a monster keeps erasing her logs to mask a series of monstrous presences – one journey after another.

First – because he’s always first – Dracula. But the Count is followed by a werewolf – as vampires so often are. Then a ship full of refugees from Innsmouth in search of a route to the Great Old One himself. Then Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ and last but not least – well, not least depending on how you reckon things like most and least – the Mummy, also known as ‘Steve’.

The story gets wilder and crazier as it goes – and from a certain, artificially intelligent but deliberately askew perspective – so does poor Demeter. Her programming tells her nothing is wrong – even as she hurtles her way towards a sun that will destroy her and the true monster aboard her. But just as her programming tells her there are no monsters – her scant, surviving bits of memory tell her that what’s wrong is caused by one of those monsters that doesn’t exist. In the end – and very nearly hers – it’s the friends and even family that Demeter has managed to gather around herself – in spite of herself and the programming that says she can’t feel, or love – who save her, not just from the monster inside her, but from the monsters inside each other.

Escape Rating A: That grade feels like a pin thrown at a dartboard, or a measurement of just how much of the spaghetti thrown at the wall of this off-the-wall story managed to stick. A story that marvelously manages to be both a wild romp of a ride and a day trip to crazytown at the same time.

What makes it work is the way that the layers accrete, that it gets scarier and crazier and gathers more heart and souls to it as it goes down into the dark. And then rises in a big ball of fire and a blaze of glory.

And yes, dear merciful heaven, that’s a metric buttload of mixed metaphors.

The idea that monsters have/will follow us into space isn’t new. (I really, really LOVED Nina Croft’s Break Out, with its tale of vampires and werewolves smuggling themselves onto sleeper ships to cross the galaxy and what happened after.) There’s plenty of space horror out there now, as that genre is experiencing a renaissance thanks to S.A. Barnes’ work. (My fave is still The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown).

That this story is mostly told from Demeter’s perspective, along with a whole lot of snarky commentary by her frenemy Steward the medical AI, gives us a new perspective to play with – one rather like Scorn from Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties – that added a new layer of panic, confusion and motivation to a story that has been told before.

There’s even a Dracula story from the perspective of the captain of HIS Demeter in The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate, but something about this particular version really grabbed me, and I think it’s the AI Demeter herself. She manages to be both so human and so other at the same time and I was happy to see this parade of monsters and monsters hunting monsters through her eyes – even if she doesn’t always have eyes.

In the end, we feel for her even when she doesn’t believe her programming allows her to feel for herself. We want her to succeed. We want her band/crew of rogue monsters to survive. And we want the two AIs, Demeter and Steward, to go from enemies to frenemies to friends to whatever comes next for them. And we especially want all of them to make a home, together, with each other, plying the spacelanes where no monster has gone before.

A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray NaylerWhere the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, political thriller, science fiction, technothriller
Pages: 336
Published by MCD on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.
In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.
As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.
Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

My Review:

I picked this up because I adored the author’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, very much liked his later novella, The Tusks of Extinction, and was hoping for more of the same. Which I sorta/kinda got, but not in ANY of the ways that I was expecting.

I’m every bit as wowed by Axe as I was the other two, but that’s a feeling that I came to in the end even as I muddled a bit through the middle. Which is also very much like both of those previous works. Which is where that ‘sorta/kinda’ qualifier comes in.

There are three distinct locuses (loci?, focal points?) for this story; deep in the Russian Federation, the fringes of the halls of academia in England, and the halls of Parliament in a former Soviet Republic on the fringe of both the European Union and the Federation but currently part of neither.

In a near-future more-or-less dystopian world that may, or may not be on the fringe of multiple states of collapse. Whether that state is the cause of, or caused by, an artificial intelligence takeover of the reins of power is subject to interpretation.

Lots of interpretation, pretty much everywhere.

In the Russian Federation, one man plans – and has so far succeeded – in ruling forever through a process of uploading his consciousness and downloading it into a new host as each of his bodies fail. Or when the apparatus of the state determines that it is a good time for a crisis and a cleansing.

In the West, human governments have come under the control of artificial intelligence created ‘Prime Ministers’, whose mandate is to govern in humanity’s long-term best interests, no matter the short term consequences. The idea was that an AI wouldn’t need to have its wheels or its palms greased, wouldn’t be hungry for power for its own sake, and wouldn’t have a personal agenda or a need to get itself re-elected once it’s been voted into power.

But this isn’t a story about process, although process laid the groundwork for it. It’s a story about people. And that’s where things get interesting even as they fragment across multiple fault lines.

Because, of course, neither system really works – if by work you mean actually function for the good of the greatest number of its citizens. Not that the system in the Federation EVER even gave lip service to that particular idea.

However, the one thing that both systems, the Federation’s quasi-immortal President and the AI PM so-called Rationalization policies do, in their varying ways, is cement a status quo in place. Which is not nearly as good for anyone as the respective powers-that-be would want people to believe.

That’s where our widely scattered group of protagonists – or at least points of view characters come in. An old resistance fighter imprisoned in the Russian taiga, a government functionary in that former Republic, the partner of a cutting edge AI scientist in Britain, and that AI scientist, locked in a prison of her own making back in the Federation, desperate to complete her magnum opus of quantum entanglement.

Each is both observer and observed, acting on their own little piece of a world-spanning puzzle, not even aware of the puppet master pulling all of their strings.

And the puppet master themselves, the spider in the center of the web, whose motivations are not certain, even at the end, whether their goal was to give humanity a chance to try again – or merely to burn it all down.

Escape Rating A-: I have to admit that, at first, I was wondering how this was all going to come together. Then again, I had the same reaction to The Mountain in the Sea so I should have expected it.

The different points of view are worlds apart – which I realized at the end was absolutely the point. Each of the characters represents one of those fabled blind men looking at the elephant in that they can only see a tiny piece of the whole picture.

One of the difficult bits to get over, or past, particular for those of us who live in the West, is that the situation under so-called “Rationalization” isn’t all that much better than the repressive regime in the Russian Federation. No one is actually free, it’s just that the cages in the West are a bit more comfortable and one is considerably less likely to get murdered by the state.

What seems to be driving the story – at least for most of its length – is the story of that genius AI scientist Lilia. She comes back to the Federation to see her father one last time, gets trapped and goes on the run. Much of the drive of the story is wrapped around her, the shadowy figures chasing her, the ones who pretend to be helping her, the ones who are chasing them, the endless cells within cells of resistance and/or state security whose goals are never clear even to themselves.

But she’s a stalking horse – as are all the other human agents on all the possible sides – as the story gets really big and then comes down to one human who has been pulling all the strings – including their own. And that’s the point where it all suddenly made sense as all the systems come crashing down and the metaphor of the title becomes clear.

Even as the ending, in the end, feels like it isn’t. The puppet master has given humanity another chance to get it right. Or at least better. But the closing scenes lead the reader to see that, while things may be better in the short run, over the long haul the humans are gonna human, that the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves, and that we have met the enemy and he is us.

#BookReview: Luminous by Silvia Park

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: Luminous by Silvia ParkLuminous by Silvia Park
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, literary fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 400
Published by Simon & Schuster on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.

My Review:

They are all the children of the famous, failed neuroroboticist, Cho Yosep; Jun, Morgan, and Yoyo. But the childhood they shared was long ago, long enough that Jun and Morgan have had the chance to become adults, and to become estranged from their father and each other. While Yoyo, their android older brother, has been bought and sold and become and been changed, over and over again. None of them emerged from their childhoods, or even their sometimes barely-functioning adulthoods, unscarred.

In the reunified Korea of this future, the scars of the wars that brought reunification to pass are still evident everywhere – on the people, on the land and in the rising discontent on both sides of what was once the border between two sovereign nations whose unity seems in danger of fracturing again – sooner or later.

This is also a future where robots have become ubiquitous, filling roles that were once reserved for humans as servants, caregivers, children, friends, lovers. They are always helpful, forever loyal, and permanently second-class. Or worse. Or less. Or both.

Morgan makes robots. She’s a top designer for the pre-eminent robot design and manufacturing empire in the world. On the one hand, she believes that she’s carrying on the work her father abandoned. On another, she’s indulging her own fantasies through her work, and feeling guilty about both the indulgence and the deception.

And very much on her third, and possibly robotic, hand, she’s still both mourning and searching for the robot brother her father brought into their family – and mysteriously took away.

Jun protects robots, or at least he tries his best to in a world that sees them as useful until they’re not – and then they’re scrap. Jun is a detective in the underfunded, understaffed, underappreciated Seoul Police Department’s Robot Crimes Unit. He’s never gotten over the loss of his robot brother Yoyo, just as he’ll never be able to pay off the cybernetic body modifications that allowed him to survive the catastrophic injuries he received during the last war – and to live the truth he felt in his soul.

The frame of the story is one of Jun’s cases, an investigation into the disappearance of an elderly woman’s robot caregiver, the person Kim Sunduk has relied on for years to maintain her independence and her connection to the world. Connections that have been broken along with the woman’s heart.

Among these elements, the search for a missing caregiver that leads to an underworld of robot rage cages, a woman’s desire for love and approval, a man’s need to find the truths that were hidden in his childhood, lead, by a roundabout way, to the truth about Yoyo, truths about the war that no one wants to know, and truths about love that no one is willing to see.

Escape Rating B: Luminous is very much literary science fiction, which means the family is dysfunctional, none of the characters are happy, the story is steeped in tragedy and more is angsted about than done. Literary SF is not my favorite part of the genre, and I had some hesitation going into this one. In the end, it worked better than I expected because the police investigation provides a better framework than is usual in literary fiction upon which to hang an actual plot.

There are several ways of looking at this story – more than merely the three perspectives through which it is told. From one point of view, it seems as if Jun’s police investigation is the story, and it kind of is. But the story that is told isn’t merely about one robot’s disappearance. The story is about humans, and about their relationships with the robots that are now an integral part of society. From that starting point, it manages to dive into the relationships that robots have with each other – relationships that humans are entirely unaware of and do not even expect to exist. The detective story is Jun’s perspective, the robotic relationships are Yoyo’s, and are hidden every bit as much as Yoyo himself has been.

While Morgan’s strained human relationships and her clandestine creation of her own robot companion raise questions about whether the advent of robots has furthered the fracturing of human-to-human relationships.

I was certainly caught up in Luminous as I was reading it, but now that I’ve turned the final page I have some mixed feelings about parts. One is my own problem, in that I wish I knew a lot more about Korean history up until now because I believe the conditions of this near-future would have had more impact if I had. At the same time, parts of the situation felt familiar because the human condition in general is simply what it is. War is hell, war is always hell, what gives the war scenes in this story their resonance is that we are seeing things through their perspectives, particularly Jun’s and Yoyo’s.

It feels like the heart of the story is wrapped around the relationships between humans and robots, but because we get there through the police investigation, a lot of what we see is that humans treat robots the way that humans treat any population they see as ‘less than’ whatever group is dominant. It’s also not a surprise that the robots who get destroyed by violence are mostly female-bodied. That’s it’s female-bodied robots who become caregivers and servants, and that male-bodied Yoyo is turned into a weapon.

And that that easy dichotomy is the simplest thing about relationships between humans and robots, and that everything under that iceberg tip is considerably more complex.

After turning the final page, I ended up looking back at some other recent books about human/robotic relations in order to get a better handle on why some bits seemed rather familiar, and the one I believe Luminous most reminds me of is Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner because it also tells a story about human attempts to program robots to do their dirty work for them, and how the robots themselves evolve in considerably more complex – and humane – directions than was originally intended. There are elements of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton and  C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero here also, and if that’s the part of Luminous that grabbed your attention, all are worth a read.

One final (final) note, Luminous is the author’s debut novel, and she kept me engaged in this story, in a part of the genre I don’t normally tackle, from beginning to end. I’m definitely looking forward to whatever she comes up with next!