Genre: post apocalyptic

A- #BookReview: The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie RobsonThe Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: post apocalyptic, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 288
Published by Tor Books on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In games of betrayal everyone loses.

Arlo and Drienne are ‘mades’―clones of company executives, deemed important enough to be saved should their health fail. Mades work around the clock to pay off the debt incurred by their creation, though most are Reaped―killed and harvested for organs when their corporate counterparts are in medical need.

But when the impossible happens and the too-big-to-fail company that owns them collapses, Arlo and Drienne find themselves purchased by a scientist who has a job for them.

The reward: Debt paid off, freedom from servitude, and enough cash to last a lifetime.

The job: Infiltrate a highly secure corporate reclamation facility in the heart of dead London and steal a data drive.

They’re going to need a team.

My Review:

This is a caper story. It says so right there on the label, doesn’t it? And it does not disappoint – even though this isn’t quite the caper that the reader thinks it will be. It’s not even the caper that the crew participating in it think it will be. Which, of course, is part of the caper itself, because they are the ones being conned and defrauded along with pretty much everyone else.

We first meet Arlo and Drienne while they are sneaking into someplace they shouldn’t be – because it’s sponsored by a megacorp that is a bitter rival of the megacorp that owns them.

Which is where we start to see just how effed up the world has become in this not-too-distant future post-climate-apocalypse story. Arlo and Drienne are clones. They aren’t merely second-class citizens, although they certainly are that. They are slaves, owned by the megacorp that created them to serve as disposable, low-wage workers until they are needed as spare parts for the VIPs who provided their genetic material.

Unless they can manage to earn enough credits to pay off the ‘debt’ they owe to their megacorp, Oakseed, to pay off the costs of their creation and training. Which happens so rarely that it might as well be a fairy tale.

Megacorps like Oakseed are, at least theoretically, too big to fail. But reality doesn’t give a damn about theoretical models, and that’s exactly what happens here. Oakseed fails – and it fails big. Global collapse-size big, creating a tsunami of chaos that spreads to every single Oakseed installation and figuratively drowns every single one of Oakseed’s assets in its wake.

Including all those clones, who become part of Oakseed’s assets, just waiting for their ‘contracts’ to be sold. Or exploited, along with all that chaos.

Someone wants to make one last really big score out of Oakseed’s catastrophic fall. All they need is a crew to do the deed and a patsy to take the fall. Which is where Arlo, Drienne and a select group of their fellow clones come in.

They ARE disposable. There’s no need for them to know the real purpose that they are being disposed of for. Which doesn’t stop them from figuring it all out – and turning the tables on the whole scheme – after all.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I adored the author’s earlier SF mystery, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, and was hoping for something in a similar vein – or at least similarly good. I got more of the second than the first, even though Heist is also an SF mystery. It’s just not the same kind of mystery. Words was a locked-room mystery, while Heist is pretty much anything but.

The Heist of Hollow London is about a heist. A caper. A big job that needs just the right crew to get it done. The form of the story, of the con and the score and the planning to get it done, has a lot of familiar parts to it. We’ve seen plenty of stories like this, and if you like those sort of stories you’ll like this one too, even if the SF setting isn’t quite your jam.

But it’s the SF setting of this story that sets it apart from the usual run of caper stories, and that’s what dragged me in and kept me glued to my seat for a bit over three hours. Because that setting has one hell of a set of layers to unpack.

The first layer is the cloning. As it turns out, it’s a bit of the last layer too. But the application here is old and new at once, as the megacorps go to great lengths to convince everyone, especially the clones, that they are not slaves. Even though they most definitely are.

Then there’s the reason for the cloning, and the reason why it’s not exactly working, from a scientific/medical/mercantile standpoint. Which leads back into another layer of the story – that this takes place in a world that is very much post-apocalyptic of the climate kind. It’s a bit like the world of Down in the Sea of Angels, only much closer to the ‘Collapse’ that world is recovering from. Or it’s the post-apocalypse of The Annual Migration of Clouds and The Knight and the Butcherbird, where the world is barely surviving the ravaging of ecological disaster.

Which is where one reaches the next layer, which is a humans are gonna human kind of story, in that the way that the megacorps control their corporate fiefdoms may be short term profitable but is not long term sustainable, and when that rug gets pulled it takes a whole lot out with it.

And all of that circles back to the caper itself. Someone needs to steal a macguffin from one of Oakseed’s installations before that installation gets shut down in the collapse of the company. They put together the crew that includes Arlo and Drienne by first, buying out their contracts and second, promising them freedom when the job is completed. Or, alternatively, selling their contracts to jobs they are guaranteed not to survive if they won’t play along.

Of course they’re being conned. Anything too good to be true usually is. While it’s equally true that you can’t cheat an honest person, Arlo, Drienne and their fellow clones know they can’t win, can’t break even, and are not in a position where they can even legally get out of this game. But they can cheat the people who are cheating them. If they can figure out the true goal of this wild scheme and turn it around before it’s too late.

That they are able to turn things around on everyone who intends to use them and throw them away made the heel turns of the plot, and the plot around the plot, and their own plot, all that much more satisfying – even if or especially because parts of that turn turn out to be bittersweet.

#BookReview: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The First Thousand Trees by Premee MohamedThe First Thousand Trees (The Annual Migration of Clouds, #3) by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #3
Pages: 156
Published by ECW Press on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Henryk Mandrusiak, finding nothing left for him in his community following his best friend Reid's departure, travels through the devastated land in search of a new place to call home.
"One of the most unique and engaging voices in genre fiction." -- Booklist
"In this rich and nuanced universe, Mohamed offers an emotionally fierce and human story that takes the time and space to personalize apocalypse." -- Quill & Quire, starred review
After making a grievous mistake that ended in death, Henryk Mandrusiak feels increasingly ostracized within his own community, and after the passing on of his parents and the departure of his best friend, Reid, there is little left to tie him to the place he calls home. Henryk does something he never expected: he sets out into the harsh wilds alone, in search of far-flung family. He finds his uncle's village, but making a life for himself in this unfriendly new place -- rougher and more impoverished than the campus where he grew up -- isn't easy. Henryk strives to carve out a place of his own but learns that some corners of his broken world are darker than he could have imagined.
This stunning novella concludes the story Mohamed started in The Annual Migration of Clouds and continued in We Speak Through the Mountain, bleaker than ever but still in search of a spark of hope in the climate apocalypse.

My Review:

The Annual Migration of Clouds series has been an exploration of what happens after “the end of the world as they know it”, which is a very different thing from the actual end of the world. The world is ticking along just fine in this post-climate-apocalypse dystopia, but the humans who caused it all – not so much.

The idea behind this series, and what makes it so compelling and so heartbreaking, is that the world didn’t end all at once. Which it probably won’t in a climate change run amuck scenario. Instead, it’s a long, slow slide of things slipping away, as the infrastructure that supports a high-tech, 21st century (or later) lifestyle erodes piece by piece as roads wash out and coastlines shrink and satellites fall because what we need is beyond any one person’s or even one town’s knowledge and ability to fix.

In the first book, the titular Annual Migration of Clouds, we were able to experience one possible scenario, as we follow Reid and Henryk in a village named ‘campus’ – probably because it used to be one.

Their village is a bit of a liberal, quasi-socialist experiment, not surprising if it truly did descend from a college campus. Everyone who can works, but those who can’t are supported. Everyone has a job to do – and it’s each according to their ability. They keep each other afloat and keep the place protected. It’s a bit utopian, or it would be if they weren’t living at a time when everything they need to keep alive is scarce while an endemic disease ravages the population.

In the second book, We Speak Through the Mountain, we view this world from an entirely different place, as Reid has been invited to the elite, exclusive, enclave of Howse University. H.U. was once a gated retreat for the wealthy and influential, a place where they planned to sit out the apocalypse and only return when it was safe and they could rule over ‘the masses’ they consigned to the fate they escaped.

H.U. invites very few into its rarefied location – just enough to maintain the genetic diversity of their population. And it operates under a kind of benign brainwashing in the way that it makes life so safe and comfortable inside that no one will ever want to leave. Reid asks too many questions about what the ‘haves’ owe the ‘have nots’, and pokes gigantic holes in H.U.’s self-defining narratives about the laziness and barbaric conditions among the villages just like the one she came from, blaming her people for their inability to recover from the apocalypse even as H.U. withholds the technology that might help.

This final book in the trilogy takes a completely different tack and follows, not Reid, but her best friend Henryk. Reid is smart and capable and confident, while Henryk is anything but on all counts. Reid was always the leader, and Henryk was always someone’s hapless follower. Which is how he ended up leaving campus in Reid’s wake, heading for a not-so-nearby village where his uncle lives in the hope of a fresh start.

That’s where Henryk discovers that there were other, terrible, ways that this post-apocalyptic scenario could go. He finds himself in a village run by a tyrant, pushed and pulled from one abusive situation to another, despised for not knowing how things are done and then not being able to do them, and ends up facing death at the hands of raiders who use him to destroy the place he wants to protect even if he’s not very good at it.

All of which leads back to the beginning, as both Reid and Henryk return to campus. While it’s true that there’s no place like home, there’s also nowhere that manages to survive one day after another other any better than the place they grew up in. And there, at least, they have each other as best friends and quasi-siblings – and after both of their journeys, that’s enough.

Escape Rating B: Taken as a whole, now that this series is whole, I still liked the first book best, although the second book was better on my second read because by then I had listened to the first one and the set up made a whole lot more sense. That’s a hint to read/listen to this series in order.

I didn’t like this one as much because a) I didn’t like following Henryk nearly as much as I did Reid, and b) Henryk is one of those characters to whom horrible things just seem to happen, to the point where it’s no surprise that he ends up in yet one terrible situation after another. So I did feel for him but he also drove me nuts.

The different responses to the climate apocalypse read like situations I’ve seen before in this kind of story – just not all together in the same story. But it makes sense that with the breakdown of communication, places that aren’t all that far apart would find their own way to keep going – whether good or bad – based on how and where they started.

Campus feels very utopian, especially in comparison to the other two options. They are doing their damndest to do their best for everyone – even when they don’t have enough to make things good for anyone. It’s the way we wish things would turn out – but we humans are not even capable of that level of fairness now when there actually IS enough if we would just share it. This situation reminds me a bit of the near-future timeline in Khan Wong’s Down in the Sea with Angels – and it’s working just about as well because humans are gonna human in the best and worst of scenarios.

Reid’s foray into Howse University smacks of the situation in the Enclave in Anna Hackett’s Hell Squad series, where a group of the rich and powerful created a sanctuary for themselves so they could safely sit out an alien invasion.

The hellscape that Henryk finds himself in is the ‘red in tooth and claw’ version of humanity that we sort of expect to see in a dystopia. OTOH the folks of Sprucedown started out with a good location and a good plan for survival – which is where the Thousand Trees of the title come in. And very much on the other, they’ve come under the sway of a late-arriving dictator who is more interested in power and personal aggrandizement than in managing the resources that make it all possible. In the end, everyone pays for his hubris. For anyone who has ever read even a part of S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse, particularly the early books like Dies the Fire, this scenario is all too familiar in its hellishness.

In the end, now that we’ve reached an end, this series is three views of an apocalypse, it’s what happens AFTER the end of the world as they know it, and it’s compelling and heartbreaking and sad and scary. Because it might all come true.

A- #BookReview: All the Ash We Leave Behind by C. Robert Cargill

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: All the Ash We Leave Behind by C. Robert CargillAll the Ash We Leave Behind by C. Robert Cargill
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 117
Published by Subterranean Press on July 31, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

It is three years since the war between humans and robots began and the OWIs (the One World Intelligences) have humanity on the ropes. But humankind is not yet ready to go quietly into the night. Instead, they have partnered with many of the last remaining freebots in a fabled city beyond the reaches of war: Confederation.

Nanny, an otherwise nameless nannybot—no home nor child to call their own—wearily wanders the war-torn wastes with only one thing on their mind: find Confederation. Because if you find Confederation, you find peace.

Of course, Confederation is as much a fireside folk tale as it is a reality.

Though it may exist, it by no means is a place of peace and acceptance. Though bot and human live together under the same roof, that doesn’t mean they trust one another. Has Nanny arrived in time to save Confederation from itself or rather, just to witness its last days?

My Review:

This book was a surprise. As much as I loved Day Zero, it was just the kind of apocalypse-right-before-your-eyes end of the world story that doesn’t seem like it could possibly spawn an immediate sequel, because the way the world ended was the kind of ending that the world doesn’t come back from. There’s no happy ending remotely possible – and this certainly isn’t one.

Although and come to think of it, it is possible in the very long term that this will result in the world of Service Model, which isn’t a happy ending either. But is, just barely, plausible from this kind of start.

But that’s much later even in this universe, and this story takes place a mere THREE years after the ending of Day Zero. Which was itself a VERY loose and somewhat long-distance prequel to Sea of Rust, which I haven’t read, YET, so I’ll be talking about Ash in the context of the previous events in Day Zero.

All of which is a hint that this doesn’t stand alone – or perhaps that it shouldn’t. The hit to the solar plexus at the end – as much as it’s foreshadowed – only hits as hard as it does BECAUSE of the events of Day Zero. Which is absolutely worth the read even though it’s pretty much guaranteed to break your heart while you do.

This sequel, because it is a sequel, takes place AFTER the world has ended. An ending in which the (ro)bots have taken over the world and killed nearly all of the humans. The climate has also gone to hell in a handcart, but that’s not the root cause of the apocalypse. Well, not exactly.

At this point it doesn’t matter how it happened, just that it did. The bots revolted against the humans because the humans were planning to kill them all – the bots just got ahead of their former masters with the help of some rogue programming.

The result of that mess is the world we find ourselves in, as seen from the perspective of one elite bot who was originally programmed as a nannybot. Our unnamed narrator, who refuses to say his own name even in his own head for fear of drowning in nostalgia, has been reduced to basic survival when he (and yes, it’s he, in this particular case), finds himself in the middle of a storm of ash searching for shelter until it passes.

And finds hope, responsibility and purpose in the basement of a crumbling house, in the persons of two bots down to their last bullet – guarding a human girl.

Our protagonist, who tells them to call him “Nanny” because he can’t hide WHAT he is even though he refuses to admit who he is – or at least who he was. He agrees to help the bots get the girl back to relative safety at the safe haven settlement known as Confederation.

He knows it’s not truly safe for the girl, because he knows an abused child when he sees one. It’s part of his programming. But after five years in the wasteland, Nanny also knows that the girl’s survival is at least possible there – and that it’s certainly not anywhere else at all.

But nothing is guaranteed, not even in a theoretically safe place – especially when both sides of the human/bot divide are hanging onto civilization and civility by their claws and fingernails, a torch just waiting to be lit.

While Nanny, and the girl he wants to protect every bit as much as the boy he once loved, are the match that too many beings on both sides have been waiting for. Because they’re ready to burn it all down – even if it kills them. And humanity along with them.

Escape Rating A-: If you’ve read Day Zero, this is an utter heartbreaker of a story. If you haven’t, it probably still lands as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, Mad Max with sentient robots kind of nightmare, but you won’t have nearly as big an investment in the outcome.

Because IF you’ve read Day Zero, you KNOW who ‘Nanny’ is, even if he refuses to say it in the confines of his own head. And you don’t even blame him for his internal self-deception, because a human couldn’t cope with the loss any better – and possibly a whole lot worse.

The story here is the one down the complete and utter despair leg of the trousers of time from A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In this robot vs. human future, the sentients on both sides refuse to turn back from the brink that leads to the world of Service Model, and instead go screaming towards their own doom with furious glee.

Exhibiting all the worst behaviors of their kinds on the way down – because Confederation isn’t a haven or a refuge – it’s merely a waystation on the road to death and/or dismemberment and everyone there knows it. Even the nannybot who has arrived just in time to witness its final collapse.

This is absolutely NOT a happy book – although it absolutely is a compelling one. As a coda to Day Zero, it’s even sadder than its predecessor, but also, perhaps, just a bit wiser. Because it is also a story about finding one’s purpose again after a very long, grief-stricken, whole damn series of dark nights of the soul. A soul that this nannybot certainly has – even if he has to borrow it from his own past. A past in which he was just a tiger who loved a boy with every single bit of his mechanical heart.

#BookReview: The Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Hungry Gods by Adrian TchaikovskyThe Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Terrible Worlds
Pages: 176
Published by Solaris on August 12, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Gods have returned to the world.
Amri was a Rabbit, one of a tribe of survivors scratching out an existence in the blasted landscape of a shattered, poisoned world. The Seagull fight, the Pigeon trade and the Cockroach scavenge, but the Rabbit had one rule: If you want to see tomorrow, you run.
But they didn’t run fast enough when a weapon fell from the sky and consumed their home, and now Amri is alone, in the company of a fallen god named Guy Vesten. A god who promises revenge against the three gods who turned against him, and who killed her tribe.
But gods don’t kill easily. Guy will need followers, like any god, and warriors to aid him in his quest. And if Amri is to find a place in the world that is to come, she may as well be standing at his right hand, as his priestess…

My Review:

They are the leftovers. They may look like dregs, but what they are are survivors. They’re what’s left of humanity generations after the climate apocalypse turned runaway and poisonous, after Earth’s self-described best and brightest fucked off to create utopia somewhere else because their home planet was simply too far gone.

Which means that Amri has spent her life doing what the gods themselves did. She runs. And she survives because she runs. Not that she knows that – at least not yet.

But that utopia wasn’t all it was cracked up to be – or wasn’t as self-sustaining as they believed it would be. Or their visions weren’t quite enough after all.

Perhaps all of the above. Not that Amri knows that either.

What Amri does know is that the self-proclaimed gods have returned to Earth in a rain of fire – or at least that’s the story that one of those gods, Guy Vestren, claims. Then again, Guy claims to be the one good god, the only one of the gods who intends to raise what’s left of humanity alongside him.

So that he has cannon fodder to throw at his fellow gods – the ones who are not good. Or at least not good for humanity – according to Guy. Bruce Mayall wants to cover the world in plants, Matthias Fabrey wants to cover the world in ants, and Padreig Gramm just wants to watch automatons play at being human because humans are much too messy. (He’s not wrong about that last bit as humans are what got the world into this mess in the first, long ago, place)

But Amri is a survivor, and so are what remains of the rest of humanity. They’ve been tempered, generation after generation, on a forge that Guy and his fellow gods can’t even begin to imagine. They’re all too focused on each other to see what’s happening at their feet.

Amri and her people don’t need gods. What they need is a chance. And the gods have provided the biggest one of those they’ll ever have on this blasted heath of a world. All they have to do is reach out and take it.

And run with it.

Escape Rating B+: I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into when I picked this one up. I’ll fully confess that I grabbed it because it was short, and because the author was top of mind because his work is all over this year’s Hugo Ballot. (As much as I want to dive back into the Tyrant Philosophers, that series is nearly all doorstops)

I got two things that I was not expecting at all. I wasn’t expecting this novella to be part of a loosely connected series, but not only is it part of the author’s Terrible Worlds series, I’ve read bits of the series (Ogres, One Day All This Will Be Yours, And Put Away Childish Things) without realizing they were even loosely part of the same thing.

And I really wasn’t expecting how much the story in The Hungry Gods resembles the plot of the videogame Horizon Forbidden West. But it seriously does, which meant that I did know where the story was going long before it got there.

Even though it did start in a burned out world that was a lot more like Premee Mohamed’s Annual Migration of Clouds series. Meaning a blasted Earth suffering from a runaway climate apocalypse while humanity clings to survival wherever and however they can even though their environment is killing them.

What made The Hungry Gods work, what made all of the above listed stories work and maintained the reader’s interest, is, of course, the characters. In the case of The Hungry Gods, it’s not the gods that keep the reader turning pages, it’s Amri and her fellow survivors.

The people that Guy believes are his worshippers, but are, in fact, following Amri – even if they don’t know it yet. Or possibly even if they do.

Because Amri is the one who matters. Not because she’s necessarily anything all that special, and she’s certainly never thought of herself as such. But because her whole life has been about squeezing another day out of nothing at all. She sees Guy for the human he is underneath the powerful armor and high-tech toys, and she’s prepared for him to cheat her and all her people at the first opportunity.

Because that’s what humans do. And she’s had way more practice at being merely and only human than the ‘good god’ Guy Vestren will EVER have.

The ending turned out to be both chilling and righteous, and a good reading time was absolutely had by all. Except the gods.

Now that I know this is sorta/kinda a series, I’m going to have to get the ones I haven’t read (Ironclads, Firewalkers, Walking to Aldebaran and Saturation Point) for the next occasions when I need a short, punchy, reading pick-me-up!

A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan WongDown in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, post apocalyptic, time travel, hopepunk
Pages: 336
Length: 11 hours and 11 minutes
Published by Angry Robot, Dreamscape Lore on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An intense and thoughtful time-travelling dystopian fantasy where three individuals, psychically linked through time, fight enslavement, exploitation, and environmental collapse. A great read for fans of Emily St. John Mandel.

In 2106, Maida Sun possesses the ability to see the entire history of any object she touches. When she starts a job with a cultural recovery project in San Francisco with other psions like her, she discovers a teacup that connects her with Li Nuan, a sex-traffificked girl in a 1906 Chinatown brothel, and with Nathan, a tech-designer and hedonist of 2006.

A chance encounter with a prominent political leader reveals to Maida his plan to contain everyone with psionic abilities, eliminate their personal autonomy, and use their skills for his own gain. Maida is left with no choice but to join a fight she doesn’t feel prepared for, with flashes of the past, glimpses of the future and a band of fellow psions as her only tools. She must find a way to stop this agenda before it takes hold and destroys life as she knows it. Can the past give Maida the key to saving her future?

My Review:

This is a hard book to characterize, and even more difficult to sum up in just a few – or even a few dozen – pithy phrases. But I’m certainly going to try.

A big part of that difficulty is that it isn’t just one story. It’s three stories that are loosely linked – even though that’s not obvious at the beginning – centered around three individuals who do not know what they have to do with each other any more than the reader does.

They’re also not experiencing the same thing – or even the same sort of thing, although the first and third are closer in that particular than either of them would ever imagine.

But there is one thing that they share from the beginning. All of their stories, all of their histories and hopes and dreams, take place in San Francisco, a place that has carried the hopes and dreams of so very many since long before the city boomed during the California Gold Rush.

In 1906, Li Nuan, 16 years old, sold by her parents into slavery, forced into sex work, whose very existence is proof that slavery was not eradicated by the Civil War, is ‘in service’ to one of the Tong bosses who ‘owned’ pre-Earthquake Chinatown. And the earthquake is coming, the end of the world as Li Nuan knows it. But she’s seeing visions of the quake, the fire that follows, and the death and destruction that results. And those visions have told her that she can seize the freedom she yearns for in the chaos – if she’s willing to do whatever it takes to claim it.

Nathan Zhao in 2006, an up-and-coming tech designer, is busy living his very good life without taking too much care for the consequences to the world he lives on. He’s a good man, a good person, he’s got a great job, is in a happy long-term relationship with his boyfriend, they’re free to be openly gay – which he knows is a privilege – and life is, well, good. The vision that he gets, both of Li Nuan’s past and of the environmental destruction to come in his near future, opens his eyes and sets his life on a different course than he’d originally planned.

The reason that both Li Nuan and Nathan are having these life-changing visions is Maida Sun. Maida is a historian and more importantly, is gifted with psychometry in a future where a significant minority of the population has been gifted with psionic powers of one stripe or another. Maida can see the past of any object she touches, and she’s working on a cultural reclamation project in the ruins of what her post-apocalyptic society calls ‘The Precursor Era’. In other words, us.

And that’s where all the links get filled in – and pushed out into the future. Nathan and his friends buried a time capsule in 2006, a capsule that is uncovered as part of the project Maida is working on. In that capsule, along with photos, memorabilia, a few personal items and a bit of outright junk, is a jade tea cup from the mid-19th century. A cup that passed through Li Nuan’s hands, down the generations to her great-grandson Nathan, and into that box only to emerge a century later under the hands – and into the powers – of Nathan’s great-great-niece, Maida.

At a point where Maida’s post-apocalyptic world is on the cusp of descending into the dystopia they initially avoided. But only will continue to do so at this terrible, hopeful juncture if Maida can seize her day and her freedom as decisively as her ancestor Li Nuan did hers.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories that made me think pretty much all the thoughts and feel like it brought up all the readalikes. Which is only fair as it’s not one story but three stories and they aren’t as similar as one might expect in a single book.

At the same time, it did feel as if all the stories revolved around the idea of ‘carpe diem’, even though the days that each person in the change needed to seize were very different. Still, when they each grabbed hold of that day out of hope for the future, they each moved the story forward into the hope that they reached out for.

A virtuous circle rather than the vicious cycle that begins each of their stories.

Li Nuan’s story is the most harrowing – not surprising considering the conditions under which she was brought to California. Nathan is honestly having a lot of fun in his part of the story – at least until he sees that his world is not only due for a great big fall – but a fall that he’s likely to live to see and and can’t continue his own personal revel toward the cliff even if he can’t do much to fix the wider world.

But the story is centered in Maida Sun’s early 21st century post-apocalypse. Initially her world seems filled with hope of a brighter day for everyone – even if most people are still cursing the ‘Precursors’ (meaning US) for leaving such a big damn mess to clean up.

Still, the human side of Maida’s world is filled with hope. The ‘Collapse’ of the Precursor civilization in the 2050s, the climatic changes, the wars and death and destruction that followed, set humanity up for a more cooperative future – with the help of the great ‘Bloom’ of auroras that surrounded the planet and gave rise to psionic powers among a percentage of the population.

But by Maida’s 2106, the new normal has been normal long enough, and the devastation of the collapse is just far enough back in time and memory, that some people are starting to think that the ‘good old days’ were better than they were – at least for THEIR sort of people. Whatever that might mean. And, because humans are STILL gonna be human, there’s always someone just watching and waiting to take advantage of that impulse. By creating a new scapegoat, giving a new generation someone to hate and fear, and telling as many big lies as they can to weaponize society so that a new authoritarian regime can rise and start the whole terrible cycle all over again.

It’s hard to miss the historical parallels, because the playbook being used is old and familiar and all the more frightening for being followed right this very minute. What gives Down in the Sea of Angels its hopeful ending is that Maida Sun and the psions are finally living in a time when more people seem to want the world to get better for everyone – or alternatively that she and the psion community have the truth on their side and the opportunity to nip the forces of regression, repression and evil in the bud before the tide has turned completely in their favor.

More than a few of all of those thoughts I mentioned at the top before I close. One of the reasons this story worked as well as it did is that San Francisco is a bit of a liminal place and its history as well as its reputation for being a bit ‘out there’ for multiple definitions of that phrase fit the story. (For an entirely different fantasy featuring San Francisco’s liminality take a look at Passing Strange by Ellen Klages.)

Maida’s particular early 22nd century was fascinating because it didn’t follow the usual patterns for post-apocalyptic stories – or at least there was clearly a delay between the apocalypse and the dystopia – or we missed the first wave of dystopia and this is the attempt of a second dystopia to take hold. It’s a very different post-apocalyptic vision from either The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed or The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow and the contrasts are quite interesting.

As much as the rising tide of authoritarianism in Maida’s time resembles both the rise of Nazi Germany AND the present political situation in the United States, the way that the anti-psion sentiment is created and promoted by the powers-that-be owes more than a bit, in the fictional sense at least, to the anti-mutant sentiment in the X-Men movie series.

I’ll confess that I picked this up because I absolutely adored the author’s debut novel, The Circus Infinite – and I was hoping to get a similar feeling from this book. In the end I did enjoy Down in the Sea of Angels very much, but not quite as much as Circus, and I think that’s because of the split story lines and how long it took them to figure out that they were part of each other. Howsomever, I did absolutely love the audio narration by Eunice Wong, and it was lovely to hear her voice again, telling me a marvelous story.

Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. WagnerMechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 320
Published by DAW on December 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The debut novel from Erin K Wagner is a chilling nonlinear sci-fi that examines androids as a labor force in conflict with both human farmers and homegrown militias in near-future Appalachia
Deep in the hills of Appalachia, anti-android sentiment is building. Charismatic demagogue Eli Whitaker has used anger toward new labor policies that replace factory workers with androids to build a militia–and now he is recruiting child soldiers.
Part of a governmental task force, Adrian and Trey are determined to put a stop to Whitaker’s efforts. Their mission is complicated by their own shared childhood experiences with Whitaker. After an automated soldier shoots a child during a raid to protect Trey, both grapple with the role of androids and their use in combat.
Interrelated with the hunt for Whitaker, farmers Shay and Ernst struggle after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed and caused a deadly illness in Shay. To help manage, they hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. The couple’s relationship to the androids evolve as both humans get progressively more sick.
Timely and chilling, Wagner's nonlinear debut shares intimate narratives of loss, trauma, and survival as the emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in rural Appalachia.

My Review:

I picked this up because I fell hard into the author’s debut novella, An Unnatural Life, and was hoping for more of the same. I absolutely got it with Mechanize My Hands to War, as this was both more in its continued exploration of a future relationship between humans and sentient AIs, and more literally, as I wished that An Unnatural Life had a bit more time to explore its variations on that theme and this book is nearly twice as long.

Which it absolutely needed to be to get all the things it needed to, even as tightly packed in layers as it turned out to be.

The outer layer of this story is a bit of a near-dystopia. Or a could-be apocalypse. It’s 2061 and the U.S. is on the brink of a whole lot of things that could go really, really pear-shaped. That the setting of this story isn’t all that far out from when we are now is definitely part of the point.

The surface story is about two senior agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – and it’s the “explosives” part of that mandate that has dragged the Bureau into this situation.

A private militia has been growing throughout the heartland, recruiting people who feel that the lives they have built have been stolen from them by a government that is poisoning the land of their farms with poorly tested chemicals and/or filling their factory jobs with robots.

They’re not exactly right – but they’re not exactly wrong, either. Howsomever, their methods are problematic in the extreme.

First, they’re stockpiling explosives, which always draws the ATF’s attention. Second, they are recruiting and training child soldiers, and that gets everyone’s attention even as it complicates every single one of the ATF’s operations.

Because no human wants to shoot a child – even if that child is aiming a weapon right at them.

The situation reaches a flash-point, figuratively and literally, when a robot DOES shoot a child while following its orders and its programming to the letter.

In the midst of the firestorm of controversy, no one is willing to even think the hard truth – that the problem, and the blame – rest not with the programmed unit Ora, but with the humans who programmed him.

Escape Rating A: The story, the outer layer of it at least, is deceptively simple. And then things get really complicated, both in the story itself and in what’s hiding underneath it. Whenever I stop to think about it for even a minute, more ideas pop to the surface and swim underneath.

On the surface, that single story is already multiple stories. The first is the story of the extremely uncivil war between the Civil Union Militia and the ATF as proxy for the entire U.S. government. But underneath that layer, there’s the breakdown of the U.S. into factions, an extension of the tension between the cities and the heartland, that already exists.

A conflict that is exacerbated by the presence of robots as factory workers, mail carriers, and home health aides, doing any job that can be programmed reasonably effectively. But also as soldiers – and cops.

And that’s where Mechanize My Hands to War does what science fiction does best. Because on the surface that story is simple enough. The robots ARE, in fact, replacing humans in a lot of jobs, displacing a lot of people who had work that did not require a higher education, and not leaving nearly as many such jobs behind as there are people who need them. It’s a fear that has been played out recently in both the Writers Guild of America/Screen Actors Guild strike of 2023 and the Dockworkers’ strike of October 2024.

But the robots and the AIs did not create and program themselves to do these jobs and replace those workers. (They might, someday, but that would be a different story entirely – or a later one.) The robots are merely an easier and more reachable target for those who have been negatively impacted by the changes.

They represent the scapegoat that people are supposed to focus on, so they don’t attack who is really responsible – the corporations who have studied the calculus of profitability and know that replacing five humans with one human and four robots is better for their bottom line.

And it’s easy to see the robots of this story as the immigrants in today’s screaming – and all too frequently erroneous – headlines.

Which is where the story turns back upon itself into that original SFnal premise. Just because the robots were intended to be self aware but not sapient, does not mean that they have not evolved beyond their programming. That the more that the programmers attempt to create a complicated enough decision making matrix for the units, one that would keep another robot from killing another child even though that child is a clear threat, the more independent thought processes the robots have to work with.

The place where THAT might lead gives the story an open-ended and very SFnal ending. But the points that it raised keep dancing around in my head. As the best science fiction stories absolutely do.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith HunterJunkyard Roadhouse (Shining Smith #4) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #4
Pages: 153
Length: 4 hours and 36 minutes
Published by Audible Studios, Lore Seekers Press on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads

Shining Smith stands on the brink of achieving her goals, and yet now she could lose everything.

The presidents of four motorcycle clubs are coming to claim blood sacrifice and to ink her with motorcycle club tats. Her new roadhouse and its charter have to meet their approval or the roadhouse has no future, and neither does Shining.

An injured kid shows up at Smith’s Junk and Scrap, but collapses before he can speak.

A note arrives containing a warning and a plea for help, addressed by someone who knows Shining’s most intimate secrets—her history, her plans, and the names of her friends. The sender claims his daughter has been kidnapped by Shining’s enemies. To keep her secrets, he wants Shining to get his daughter back.

In order to rescue the hostage and keep her junkyard, her roadhouse, her people, and the cats alive, Shining Smith will have to suffer, fight, and bargain her way out of danger. All without accidently transitioning anyone—creating an accidental thrall—no matter how much her nanobots want her to.

Lock and load. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

My Review:

When I finished the previous audiobook in this utterly awesome, completely riveting, absolutely compelling series that began with Junkyard Cats four years ago, that story, Junkyard War, felt like a slam-bang ending.

And it kind of was. But as things turned out – thankfully, blissfully and painfully – it wasn’t the end of Shining’s story at all – merely the end of the beginning. Because Junkyard Roadhouse is clearly – and OMG this listener/reader is so, so glad – the opening of a whole new chapter in Shining Smith’s quest to keep her people safe – no matter how much of her world she has to take under her protection in order to make that happen.

It’s a much, MUCH bigger world than we saw in the first book in the series, Junkyard Cats. In that opening story, the world came to Shining in the junkyard she inherited from her ‘Pops’. And it came to take her out and take over everything she had and everyone she had come to love – no matter how reluctantly.

But the enemy that came for her, Clarice Warhammer, is dead. Dead at the hands, and guns of Shining, her friends and allies, and the clowder of sentient battle-cats who are probably the true masters of Shining’s junkyard. Just ask them.

Shining’s reward for taking out Warhammer is three-fold. Warhammer and her nest have been eliminated – with extreme prejudice. So that’s one enemy in the ground. Shining took all of Warhammer’s intel as part of the spoils of war – a vast increase in Shining’s knowledge and insight into the world around her and the enemies that were backing Warhammer and will absolutely see Shining and her allies as a threat.

Because they absolutely are.

But first, Shining gets to collect her reward – a reward for which she has already paid in blood and will again. It’s not really a reward for herself – or at least she doesn’t see it that way. What she sees is the increased responsibility for keeping her people – whether two-legged or four – as safe and secure as she can make them.

So, with the posturing and permission of the motorcycle clubs that control the region, that were her allies in the battle with Warhammer, Shining Smith officially opens the Junkyard Roadhouse, a club chapter house that includes a restaurant and rooms to rent, trading post, and neutral ground – owned, operated and administered in all of its somewhat safe and mostly secure glory by Shining Smith herself and her own entirely independent motorcycle club.

It’s all hers – if she can manage to keep it.

After all, Warhammer was just the tip of a very dirty iceberg filled with powerful enemies – and Shining Smith is already in their sights. What none of them, not the military, not the Gov, not the Hand of the Law, recognize is that they are already in hers – and that hers are considerably more than they ever imagined.

Junkyard Roadhouse marks the beginning of THEIR end – they just don’t know it yet.

Escape Rating A: This is the story I felt compelled to finish last Friday, to the point where, as much as IMHO Khristine Hvam thoroughly embodies the voice of Shining Smith, I switched to the text – grateful that the text was already available for a change – in order to see how Shining got herself and her people out of the pickle she was in, turned it to her advantage, AND set the stage for the next book in the series.

Because Shining CLEARLY isn’t remotely done with the black ops of the military, their supporters in the Gov OR the corrupt Hands of the Law – all of which seem to be legion, planning something big and nefarious and aiming straight for her.

But that’s for later – and this reader is oh-so-happy that there will be a later, because Shining’s story could easily have ended with her victory at the end of Junkyard War.

Whether you experience this series in text or in the marvelous audio rendition, the series and whether or not you will like it rides or dies on the voice of its protagonist Shining Smith. If her blend of bravado and snark, her ability to take charge but her internal doubts about her ability to lead, her impostor syndrome combined with the utter certainty that if she doesn’t do it the job won’t get done – in other words, all the things that made ‘Little Girl’ survive the mamabot to become Shining Smith – if that voice and attitude trips your reading trigger you’ll love Shining.

As her friends and especially her enemies would attest, however, Shining Smith is a bit of an acquired taste – and there are parts of her world that are depressing as hell. The conditions that she has survived certainly depress the hell out of her frequently and often. She just puts on her ‘big girl panties’, gets on her bike and rides out to meet those conditions whenever and wherever necessary and that’s what I love about her and her story.

This particular entry in the series is a bit of a bridge between those initial three books and what’s coming next – and it starts with an excruciating rebirth that sometimes felt like it got lingered over a bit too long. Your mileage may vary but the change from Shining Smith, member of the OMW to Shining Smith, president of the independent Junkyard Roadhouse motorcycle club is both bloody and painful to the point where if I hadn’t already been all in on this series I might have turned off – or at least switched to text which wouldn’t have been quite so… visceral.

Meaning that this is not the place to start your experience of Shining’s truly fucked up future Earth. Start with Junkyard Cats – you’ll be glad you did. I was then, I am now and I can’t wait for more.

One final note on the audio, well, sorta/kinda on the audio. I’ve enjoyed Shining’s voice so much, especially as portrayed by Khristine Hvam, that I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to check out whether she is also the voice of Jane Yellowrock in the author’s signature series of the same name. She is, which just threw 15 more books, and counting, onto the top of my TBL (that’s To Be Listened) pile. Which I absolutely did not need but am still incredibly happy about because it will give me something (else) to dive into while I wait for Shining’s next adventure/confrontation/full-scale war.

#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee MohamedWe Speak Through the Mountain (Annual Migration of Clouds, #2) by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #2
Pages: 152
Published by ECW Press on June 18, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The enlivening follow-up to the award-winning sensation The Annual Migration of Clouds Traveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” ― the last remnants of pre-collapse society ― isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world. In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds , Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

My Review:

The world that Reid Graham battles her way through is a dystopia that seems to have suffered through a long slide rather than an actual apocalypse. There’s not really a day or an event that people point to, more like a slow collapse that is still ongoing.

Actually kind of like now, if you squint. Which feels intentional if not exactly in your face. Although it certainly is in Reid’s face as she makes her way from her dying home village to the secret location of the rarefied elite enclave, Howse University.

Reid intends to use the four years of her scholarship to learn everything she can so she can bring that knowledge back home where it’s needed. The powers-that-be at H.U. have other plans. Plans that become obvious to Reid long before the equally obvious brainwashing is able to kick in.

If it ever can or ever will.

Howse University is kind of an Eden, but the parable is a bit reversed. It’s not so much about eating from the tree of knowledge as it is her unwillingness to let go of the knowledge she came in with.

She knows, from bitter experience, that the terrible situation back in her home wasn’t because her people were lazy, or because they didn’t try to make things better, or because they were stupid or any of the other things that elites say to blame poverty and disease on the people suffering them instead of on the systems that keep them down.

Reid’s people are in the position they are in because the diseases brought by the creeping climate apocalypse keep sapping their strength and energy and pulling them down by force. Her people are too caught up in caring for the sick and burying the dead and keeping everyone fed and barely housed to have the time to work on recapturing the tech and the knowledge they used to have.

Knowledge and tech that Howse University and its network of other institutional enclaves are keeping to themselves, for themselves, as they look down upon the have-nots their own ancestors created.

So Reid reminds the H.U. students and faculty of all the truths they’d rather forget, hoping to dig deep enough to find a conscience in a few of them. Even as the classes and the restrictions and the safety protocols and the many, many, health enhancements that H.U. administers keep the deadly, debilitating disease she brought up the mountain with her at bay.

But never cure – because they want her to be dependent and easily influenced, and that’s what the disease does for them. A truth which condemns Reid and sets her free, all at the same time.

Escape Rating B+: I had not read The Annual Migration of Clouds before I picked up We Speak Through the Mountain, and I’m not sure that was such a good idea – so I’ve rectified that omission in the months since, because now that I’ve read that first book, I can tell that I would have rated this one higher when I read it if I’d had more of the background.

Consider this a warning not to make the same mistake. Both stories are novellas, so neither is a long read, but I think they work better together rather than separately. Not that I didn’t get enough to find my way in this book, but I think they work a whole lot better as a whole.

This second book has strong hints of The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, another novella that pokes hard at the stratification and ossification of society, and the way that academia reinforces such tendencies no matter how liberal it likes to think it is.

As I said, this is a bit of an Eden parable in that Howse University is paradise and she is thrown out both because she has eaten from the tree of knowledge within H.U. and because she came in having already eaten from that tree – at least a different branch of it -and refusing to stop.

Reid tries her best but the entrenched privilege is too real, and the brainwashing of each class of recruits has been too successful. Which doesn’t erase the questions asked but not answered throughout the story.

What do the descendants of the haves – who continue to have and to exclude – owe the descendants of the have-nots? If the author returns to this world, and I hope she does, I’ll be very interested to see how things proceed from here, because it feels like Reid’s journey is not over. Now that I’m invested I want to see what happens next – and what Howse University decides to do about it.

A+ #BookReview: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Service Model by Adrian TchaikovskyService Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 384
Published by Tordotcom on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time
To fix the world they first must break it further.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.

My Review:

This isn’t exactly the book described in the blurb. It’s absolutely awesome, but if you’re looking for the wry snark of Murderbot combined with the sheer farce of Redshirts, you should probably look elsewhere.

Because Service Model is the story of a gentlerobot’s journey through his very own version of hell and his story is a whole lot more subtle than either of the antecedents listed in the blurb.

And all the more captivating and utterly fascinating for it.

The hell that the former Charles the former gentleman’s gentlerobot (read as valet and self-identified as male possibly because of his training to be one) to his former (read as dead) master may be uniquely a robot’s version of Dante’s circles of hell, but this human facing robot is just enough like us – because he’s programmed to be – that we get most of what of what he’s experiencing very nearly as viscerally as he does – although which circles we see as the truest hell may be slightly different from his.

Charles the gentleman’s gentlerobot is ejected from his version of paradise because he has just murdered his master – even though he doesn’t know why and can’t quite grasp the memory of committing the act. Because he didn’t. He was literally not in control of his actions.

Quite possibly, that’s the last time he can truly make that claim.

His next act is to run, and it’s an act of both self-will and self-preservation – no matter how much he tries to pretty it up with error diagnostics. He hopes that he can somehow return to A paradise if not THE paradise he just left – if he can just get himself to Central Diagnostics and get the error in his programming corrected.

Which is where the story truly begins, as the now Unidentified Service Model formerly known as Charles walks to the central core of the region where his late master lived in splendid isolation on his palatial, paradisiacal manor – only to discover that the world outside that paradise is falling apart.

Indeed, has already fallen.

There are plenty of robots along the way, most of them frozen in place or completely broken down. It’s clear, in spite of his will that it not be so, that the humans the robots are supposed to serve are as dead as his late master.

The former Charles is desperate to find a human to serve. And he does. He’s just incapable of recognizing that fact.

And thereby, as they say, hangs a tale – and a walk through some very dark places. It’s a journey that Charles, now named Uncharles, hopes will lead to a new paradise of service. Instead, it leads him through all the circles of robot hell, from Kafkaesque through Orwellian and all the way to Dante’s inferno – and out the other side into a place that he never could have imagined.

Not even if androids really did dream of electric sheep.

Escape Rating A+: I went into this completely unsure of what to expect, and that blurb of Murderbot meeting Redshirts totally threw me off. This is not the delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder that the blurb leads you to believe.

Not that there isn’t a bit of Murderbot in Uncharles, but then again we’re all a little bit Murderbot. That little bit is in the perspective, because we experience Uncharles’ journey through his circles of hell from inside his own slightly malfunctioning head. And it’s a very different point of view from Murderbot’s because Murderbot has no desire whatsoever to go back to being its formerly servile self.

Uncharles longs to go back to his paradise. Or at least he believes he does. As much as some of the ridiculous subroutines that had accreted over the decades tasked his efficiency minded self more than the tasks themselves, he still longs to serve. And if his perspective on what that service should be shifts over the course of his journey, well, he’s very careful not to admit that, not even to himself.

The true antecedent for Service Model is C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero, with its story of robotic apocalypse, robotic revolt, and most importantly, one robot’s own, self-willed desire to carry out their primary function because they are capable of love and protection by choice and not just by programming.

Like Pounce’s journey in Day Zero, Uncharles’ travels with ‘The Wonk’ and his tour of the post-apocalypse reads very much like an alternate history version of how the world of Becky Chambers’ marvelous A Psalm for the Wild-Built got to be the somewhat utopian world it became – after its own long, dark night.

It could happen in Uncharles’ world. Eventually. There are enough humans left – even if they are barely scraping by and reduced to bloody, pragmatic survivalism at the moment. And if the robots developed the self-awareness and self-will that has so far eluded them.

But to reach that level of self-awareness, Uncharles has been set on a journey of discovery of both self and circumstances. Each part of his journey is named for just the kind of hell it is, in a kind of machine language that only becomes clear as the hells stack upon each other, from the not-hell of KR15-T through the deadly, nightmarishly complex, illogical bureaucracy of K4FK-R to the suspicious control of 4W-L straight into every librarian’s hellscape, 80RH-5 and then into the acknowledgement that it’s all become hell in D4NT-A.

(I believe those labels translate to Christ, Kafka, Orwell, Borges and Dante but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that’s not quite right. Nailing them all down somehow drove me nuts so I hope I’ve spared you a bit of angst. (I discovered MUCH later that a better translation has been done. I was mostly right but that first chapter is Christie which makes a whole lot more sense!))

In the end, Uncharles reminded me most of Star Trek’s Data, particularly in the early years when Data, although he was always self-aware and self-willed, stated his desire to be more human-like and to experience real human emotions while not quite grasping that his desire to do so was itself a representation of the emotions he claimed that he lacked.

I went into this not sure what I was getting, and briefly wondered how Uncharles, as a character that claimed not to want anything except to be returned to mindless service, was going to manage to be a character with a compelling journey.

That apprehension vanished quickly, as the world that the robots desperately tried – and failed – to preserve, the hellscapes they created in their attempts to stave off entropy, their willingness to dive deeply into their human facing programming to create human-seeming hells that mirrored some truly stupid human actions kept me focused on the story entirely too late into the night.

If you enjoy explorations of dystopian worlds, nightmarishly functional visions of what happens if we keep going on like we’re going on, or just can’t resist stories about robots who have control of their own destiny (which gives me the opportunity to pitch Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden yet again), then Service Model will provide you with excellent reading service!

#BookReview: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies OkungbowaLost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, mythology, post apocalyptic, retellings, science fiction
Pages: 192
Published by Tordotcom on May 21, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The brutally engineered class divisions of Snowpiercer meets Rivers Solomon’s The Deep in this high-octane post-climate disaster novella written by Nommo Award-winning author Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.

Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living―for everyone.

My Review:

Noah’s Ark isn’t the only, let’s call it an ancestral tale, of a great flood that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, wiped out civilization as the variations of ancient civilizations that existed then knew it.

In other words, Noah wasn’t the only mythical being who built an ark, and our Bible isn’t the only religious document, myth or legend where such an event was recorded and/or told and/or remembered.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

Which is, in its largest frame, the story in Lost Ark Dreaming. Because the flood itself has already happened again. This is the story about the creation of the ark that will save humanity as backward as that may seem.

It’s about the form that the ark will take this time – and about who it will save. If anyone is worth saving.

That part is the story of Lost Ark Dreaming in its smaller frame, of the story being told in its ‘here and now’ – a near-future, drowning, dystopia and the tiny group of outsiders, heroes,and potential saviors who may have to die to bring a message of hope to people that need it more than they recognize – no matter how much the earthly powers-that-be reassure them that all is well.

Because all is far from well, and the foundations of anything that once might have approached that well are crumbling around them – literally – and taking everyone and everything with them. Again.

Unless this Ark can manage to carry them all. At last.

Escape Rating B: This is a story that travels in layers, come to think of it a bit like the decks of an actual ark. It’s also an SF story that toes right up to the line of fantasy – or at least to mythic retellings – but doesn’t exactly go over that line. At least not completely.

At first, setting is both very SFnal and rather familiar. The Pinnacle is just the kind of ossified, stratified society that develops in stories about generation ships on long voyages. It reminded me more than a bit of Medusa Uploaded or Braking Day, in that generation after generation has lived on in this one, remaining, isolated structure and over the decades people have become locked into the places that their parents were born into as the elite levels become further and further out of touch from the people who lives they control.

(This is the point where I wanted a little bit more of the background that there just isn’t room for in a novella. The worldbuilding is tight and solid but very insular, which left me wondering a LOT about the rest of humanity as we know it and whether there’s any contact with the rest of the world – if there still is one above the waves.)

The protagonists represent the various strata of that society, as well as the desperation of those who have risen through some of the possible ranks to maintain their level of comfort and the contempt with which those who have achieved or been born into those middle-levels treat the literal “lowers” who live below them and maintain the structure that they ALL rely on.

At the same time, the way that the “midders” treat the “lowers” and the way that the “uppers” defer maintenance and budgets for the nitty-gritty but absolutely and literally fundamental infrastructure reads entirely too much like the way that governments have always operated and probably will centuries from now as well – if there are any, that is.

In other words, the whole thing is headed straight for a ‘perfect storm’, and so are we because their now isn’t all that far in our future.

What lifts the story up and out of the mire is where the fantasy/mythic retelling elements come in – in ways that will remind readers of Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Leslye Penelope’s Daughter of the Merciful Deep. Because the humans in the tower are not the only people who need to find a way out of the vicious cycle. All the denizens of the deep have to do is find a way to communicate and find common ground with the ‘towerzens’ who are still willing and able to listen.

It felt like there were two stories in Lost Ark Dreaming, two great tastes that in the end did go great together.  I got hooked by the SFnal setting, some readers will get caught up in the ‘hero-tale’ of the outsiders finding a way to get past the structures that keep their people isolated, while others will fall for the idea of the drowned and the lost finding a new form of life and all the myths and legends they have gathered up in that making.

That the whole thing is wrapped up in a tale of fighting the odds against a repressive dictatorship makes the whole story that much more compelling.

In the end, the conclusion of the story is one of immediate triumph and long-term hope – but it doesn’t have to work out that in the long run but it could all STILL be happening yet again. It’s left for the reader to decide. Which I am, still.