Where do our warriors go, when the war is finally over?

The alien invaders have won. By using the serotonin paths in the brain, they are able to read our thoughts and kept one step ahead of our best military personnel. There seemed to be no way to win, as the 'human population' counter slowly ticked towards zero.

Where traditional arms have failed, a genius geneticist steps in. By radically changing the structure of both the brain and the body, she is able to create the perfect warrior for the fight against the Luyten. Fifteen feet tall. Tripedal for added speed and strength. Genius-level IQs, trained from birth on military strategy, and completely without empathy for the enemy, or each other.

They are Defenders.

Within a matter of months, the Luyten threat is neutralized. Humanity's Doomsday Clock finally stops ticking down, and there is some hope on the horizon. But now that the outside threat is gone, there's a new problem to deal with.

The problem is the Defenders. Humanity has burdened itself with a race of sociopaths who are bigger, stronger and faster than humans. Now that the war is over, they don't have anything to do.

And idle hands are the Devil's playground.

Told from many points of view - from a 'traitor' who helps a Luyten survive in the rubble of a city, to one of the scientists working in the labs that created the Defenders - this is a story of an ongoing apocalypse. Just as one threat to humanity is defeated, another emerges. Humanity will have to make alliances it never thought possible and betray its own creation in order to survive.

Will McIntosh shows his deep understanding of the human psyche, both the thoughts of the individual and those of the masses. Any book with telepathic main characters would be a challenge, but with the fractured minds of the Defenders added to the mix, the book becomes a minefield. McIntosh masterfully creates both a race that is interdependent on the emotions of its group, and a race who has no concept of these feelings at all. The contrast throughout is fascinating and addictive.

Defenders is a can't-miss for fans of near-future science fiction as well as the growing fan bas base of post-apocalyptic tales.

Highs: The way that each Defender is eerily similar, yet has separate personalities, is striking.

Lows: There were mistakes made by the world governments, over and over, that made me want to scream at the book.

Verdict: A masterful piece of science fiction that should have wide appeal.

Further Reading: A Hymn Before Battle, Fortune's Pawn, Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Volume 1, Robopocalypse

Is a different view of the world wrong?

One of the fastest-moving areas of science is psychiatry. Therapies performed as recently as the 1970s, such as lobotomies, are considered barbaric by current standards. Medications to treat mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have allowed patients who would have been institutionalized to be mainstreamed and live relatively normal lives. Advances in cognitive behavioral therapy let people with psychological disorders and traumatic brain injury gain the ability to live independently and even hold down jobs when before they would have been dependent on family or the state.

The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon, is a near-future look at autism. If Lou Arrendale had been born a generation earlier, he would likely be nonverbal, lost in his own mind, amid a world too overwhelming to be a part of. If he were born a generation later, the flaws that cause autism, either in-utero or in the first few years of life, would have been identified and able to be fixed, and he would never have been 'truly' autistic in the first place.

But Lou was born when he was, and nothing can change that. As autism was being understood better and better, psychiatrists were able to create therapies that teach the afflicted how to interpret the world. Computer programs are able to slow down speech sounds to a rate that an autistic child can understand, and then slowly speed them up to normal speech. Because 'autists' have a hard time picking up on social cues, therapists know to teach appropriate responses to common situations, and show the patient how to extrapolate what might be the correct response in new situations as well. The training is hardly perfect; stressful situations such as the security screening areas of an airport can still cause the person to freeze up, but for day-to-day activities, Lou's final generation of autists is now able to enjoy independent lives.

Lou has a very full, fulfilling life. He lives independently, in an apartment near his work. He enjoys weekly fencing lessons at a friend's house, and has feelings for one of the women that attends as well. He works for a pharmaceutical company, in a department staffed completely with autists, discovering patterns in research that neither computers nor neurotypical employees are able to find. He understands that the way he thinks is still different from 'normal' people, but it's the only way he's ever known.

Life never holds still, though, as much as one might want it to. A new member of upper-management wants to remove the special facilities that allow the autistic department to keep their focus and ability to do their work so efficiently. One of the women at the Center, where many of the autists spend their free time, has begun confronting Lou about his 'normal' friends. A jealous would-be suitor at fencing club may be even more unstable than the rest of the people Lou associates with.

And then Lou is faced with a decision: continue on with the only life he's ever known, or volunteer for an experimental treatment that may reverse his autism.

Elizabeth Moon creates a near-future world that is completely believable. All of the technological advancements posited are completely believable, given the current state of science. As the mother of an autistic son, Moon had eighteen years of research into autism to draw from, as well as countless hours of interviews with patients and doctors alike. The result is the most comprehensive, true-to-life work about autism written. With characters that the reader grows more and more emotionally connected to, a corporate conspiracy, and a vandal becoming dangerous, The Speed of Dark is a masterful work of fiction that needs more exposure.

Highs: Lou's direct supervisor is a more sympathetic character than I first expected.

Lows: Rather than trying to wrap up the book in just a chapter and an epilogue, I wish that Moon had ended this book with Chapter 20, and then written a second book that picks up there and more fully develops the 'what happens next.'

Verdict: An amazing, captivating read that, even with a flawed ending is well worth the read.

Further Reading: With the Light, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Machine Man

Sometimes, information needs to stay buried

Rachel Bach creates the rollicking SF/Romance that she had wanted to read herself in the first book of her Paradox series, Fortune's Pawn.

Deviana Morris isn't just any armored fighter, she's a gal with a plan. Having risen as far as she can in her armored company without being forced into a desk job, she spontaneously leaves her position with the Blackbirds and starts looking for the next step in her Plan.

Devi wants to be a Devastator. The best of the best of the King's Own fighting force, Devi knows that she'll have to make a name for herself before the recruiters even look her way. So when one of her closest friends suggests she take a post as security on a freighter, she's pretty suspicious. Walking in circles in her battle armor on the deck of a ship isn't generally what the Devastators are looking for on a CV. But after checking out the history of the the Glorious Fool, and realizing just how much trouble the ships gets herself into, she caves and signs up.

What she finds on board is...peculiar. Her fellow security guard Cotter is pretty much the meathead she expected when she first saw his overcompensating armor, and her roommate Novascape Starchild is a predictably spacey, but genuinely a good person.

The ship's doctor, however, is a xith'cal, a sentient lizard race better known for eating humans than patching them up. 

And their pilot is literally a giant bird, an aeon, from a violently xenophobic race whose claim to fame is being the best pilots in the known universe.

And their cook has far more charisma than any one human has a right to.

But it's the captain, Brian Caldswell who is the biggest enigma of them all. Seemingly just another captain of a trade freighter, the more Devi travels with him, the more she realizes that something's up. And as the missions get more bizarre, and more dangerous, none of what she's being told adds up. Perhaps a good merc would simply let things go unquestioned, but that's just not her style. 

Some secrets, though, are more dangerous when they come to light.

Rachel Bach has already proven her writing chops as Rachel Aaron in her Legend of Eli Monpress series, and fans of that quintet will find lots to love here as well. Seamlessly mixing humor and adventure into her science fiction, along with a hearty helping of romance, creates a perfect storm of emotions by the end. Never have I wanted to throw my reader across the room more than when I realized that the book was over, and it would be months before the next one comes out. Bach has an amazing universe created here, and in the first volume has her readers emotionally invested in the characters and eagerly anticipating the rest of the story.

Highs: Every character is so complex and multi-dimensional that their interactions are absolutely fascinating.

Lows: The unexplained strange kid character is becoming more and more common, to the point where I nearly rolled my eyes when she appeared.

Verdict: Bach specializes in the 'hook,' and keeping her readers' interest from page one, and she's done a fantastic job.

Further Reading: Honor's Knight, The Legend of Eli Monpress, The Android's Dream

If the human body is inefficient and messy, why not replace parts?

Engineers tend to be a funny breed. Oftentimes identifying with their science better than the other humans they work with, they see the world from a much more analytical and logical viewpoint than people whose focus is on the arts, or even the 'softer' sciences.

Therefore, the premise of Max Barry's Machine Man makes a certain twisted sense. An engineer like Dr. Charles Neumann is exactly the type of person to be fixated on misplacing his cell phone to the exclusion of everything else. Including putting on pants before going outside to check his car (although one would think he would have a tracker app on it...). It's this single-minded intensity that leads him through his lab and into the Clamp.

It's also this tunnel vision that lands him in the hospital, sans one leg.

The prosthetic legs that the Lola Shanks brings to fit him with vary. The cheapest, little more than a bucket on a stick, is an insult. There are more aesthetically pleasing options, but Charles has never been one for trading function for form. But that last one, the Exegesis Archion with the microprocessor in the knee...that's something he can work with.

Because engineers fiddle. They simply can't leave well enough alone, especially where technology is concerned. So it's not long before Charles has completely taken apart his new leg. As always, it takes a little longer to get it back together again, but he ends up making some pretty sound improvements to it. And since he works with other engineers, they're nothing but encouraging regarding his new side project. There's just one problem: his flesh-and-bone leg can't keep up. It's obsolete, so to speak. But that can be taken care of.

While the end result of this process may be a bit predictable, the path that the story takes to get there is quite fun. The situation, both with Dr. Neumann and his company as a whole, escalates to a degree that is almost incredulous. And yet, given the characters that Barry has introduced us to, it is in keeping with their personalities perfectly. 

Throughout the novel, a dark humor peeks out. This is not a book that takes itself too seriously. Many of the characters are fairly one-dimensional caricatures of positions such as 'HR Lady,' 'Over-Enthusiastic Engineer' and 'Superfluous Middle-Manager.' This lack of characterization doesn't detract from the story; rather, using known tropes helps to move along the plot without bogging it down introducing the reader to a whole company of employees.

Max Barry has created a hugely funny, dark comedy look at where technological advancements could lead when factors such as an irrational attachment to the physical body is replaced with a seemingly logical desire for efficiency and advancement. Neumann is the logical extension of the classic science-focused, asocial engineer, and people with friends or coworkers like him will be smiling throughout as the recognize some of the traits.

Highs: The contrast between Dr. Neumann's response to the addition of the 'enhancements' and another characters' response really shows how far off the deep end Charles gets.

Lows: It's almost a certainty that some people will be upset at what they see as a mockery of the less socially-apt 'geek' character, but to me it seems like it's all in good-natured fun.

Verdict: This is hardly great literature, or an in-depth examination of the use of technology to enhance the human form, but it's not trying to be.

Further Reading: 'The Perfect Match', The Mad Scientist's Daughter

One of the space program's pioneers gets one last chance to fly

“Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.”

L Frank Baum used this line to start his most famous work, The Wizard of Oz. Now, Mary Robinette Kowal uses this same line to start a whole new story, 'The Lady Astronaut of Mars.'

Here, the space program played out a little bit differently. Instead of simply being content with reaching the Moon, humanity kept pushing out into space. While computers were still in the punch-card phase, man reached Mars and eventually colonized it, beneath bio-domes to keep in the air.

Elma York was the face of the Mars program. With the mind of a scientist, the heart of an explorer and the looks of a starlet, she was the perfect choice to be the face of the colonization program, along with her computer-science husband.

Fast-forward several decades and their lives have become the same as any couple in their later years. Elma keeps in shape for her NASA-compliance physicals, and also to help take care of her husband. While his mind is as sharp as ever, his body has begun to betray him. The tremors have gotten so bad, and his muscle mass has gotten so low, that he is transitioning into 'it's a matter of time' territory.

But how much time? Because NASA has a new project in the works. They need a person to make a one-way trip to the nearest star system, to set up an array to facilitate travel. Does Elma live out her marriage with her slowly dying husband, or take her last chance to fly among the stars?

Mary Robinette Kowal's talent lies in finding the humanity in her characters. Whether they be a clockwork toy, an IT girl on a generational ship, or a woman living on Mars, Kowal makes the reader wonder what they'd do in their place. This is the real joy of Kowal's stories, and what keeps readers coming back time and again.

Highs: It's a amazing what a little girl from the Kansas countryside remembers years later.

Lows: I might resent the narrator using her looks in this way, but then again it was the 1960s.

Verdict: Very much worth the read, for free, on Mary Robinette Kowal's site here.

Further Reading: 'Paper Tiger', Shades ofMilk and Honey

An AI to make HAL look like a kitten

Technology is becoming more and more of part of our everyday lives. Surgeons can preform complex operations halfway across the world using mechanical arms and video feeds. Factories automate many of the production lines run by humans just a few decades ago. Google Cars have driven over a million miles, in traffic, without intervention by humans. Drones, some piloted by humans well away from the front lines and others controlled by sophisticated programming, have the ability to identify persons of interest and buildings, both for surveillance and for military action.

All of these are controlled by computer programming. All are connected to some form of network. And anything connect to a network can be compromised.

In Daniel Wilson's near-future novel Robopocalypse, even more aspects of our lives is influenced by computers and automatons. Many households and businesses are aided by domestic robots, as well as the military version that can help with everything from routine patrol of war zones to active combat situations. Vehicles come with automatic driving programs. Even buildings have their electrical grids and other systems tied into these omnipresent computer systems.

Dr. Nicholas Wasserman has been working on a truly conscious AI program. He took every precaution when he brought Archos into being. He enclosed the system in a Faraday cage; no signals should have been able to enter or leave. He only gave Archos limited information about the human race, to help control the views that the program had of humans. He did everything he could to keep his creation from escaping. But humans are sloppy. A laptop left on, with an IR port, was all it took for Archos to slip into the rest of the world. And like any other living creature, its goal is to survive. By any means necessary.

It began slowly. A domestic seemingly on a frozen yogurt run malfunctions and attacks the clerk. A child's toy scares it's young owner with too much knowledge about the family. A phone phreak notices something a bit strange. But nothing to make a coherent picture of what is to come.

And then...Zero hour. 

Written as a series of short stories taking place around the world, Robopocalypse is a terrifying look into a seemingly possible future. Even without an AI to instigate it, humans' reliance on technology and lack of attention to security is already manifesting. From reprogramming insulin pumps to lethal shocks from hacked pacemakers, the general public seems completely unaware of the creativity and ruthlessness of hackers. If the computers themselves were to turn on humans, the results would be catastrophic.

Written as something like a series of short stories, many revolving around a core set of half a dozen humans, Robopocalypse is an amazing novel. As the crisis unfolds and the resistance takes form, Wilson creates a believable world that seems just a few steps away.

Highs: Mr. Nomura and his factory in Japan almost deserves a companion novel all of its own.

Lows: Like many authors, Wilson doesn't quite succeed in writing for our youngest protagonist.

Verdict: A thoroughly creepy book, I would suggest against reading this in a dark room with a computer's standby light blinking.

Further Reading: 'The Perfect Match', 'For Want of a Nail'

Even alien judges can be found on the golf course

When last we saw Judge Nugan Bufan Sn, he was perhaps the happiest Judge in the Common Confederation. In a universe thousands of years old, most case law has been hashed out centuries ago. All judges get to do, especially in a backwater such as Earth, is apply the same statutes over and over again. Simply put, there's not much new under the suns. 

But as backwater is humans are, we can still be surprising. And by a strange twist of circumstance, Judge Sn actually got to create new law in The Android's Dream.

Here, in 'Judge Sn Goes Golfing,' we get to see the person behind the robe.

It turns out, Judge Sn isn't the nicest person off the bench, either. After his landmark case, he's still stuck on the provincial planet of Earth. In fact, now that his ruling has been accepted case law, he will forever be tied to the planet. 

Well, at least Earth has some decent golf courses on it. He'd know; he's been permanently banned from almost all of them. All he has left in the vicinity is a course that's so terribly planned, so badly maintained, and so badly managed that even the outcasts of the golf circuit can still get on the course. Poor golfing skills, combined with a bad temper has gotten him exiled to this disaster of a course.

But even the worst golfers occasionally get an amazing round. And he'll be damned if he lets a few assassins get in the way of the game of his life.

'Judge Sn Goes Golfing' doesn't add all that much to the universe of The Android's Dream. Rather, it feels like an unnecessary scene cut from an already full book. That doesn't make it any less fun to read, though, and fans of Scalzi's other works should enjoy this foray into the universe as well.

Highs: Such introspection in one simple round of golf...

Lows: I've seen what the rich and powerful can get away with, and it's a bit hard to believe that EVERY course has kicked Sn out, especially after the ruling.

Verdict: A perfect ebook purchase

Further Reading: Divine Misfortune, The High Castle

A girl grows up in a unique situation, and eventually learns where she belongs

The introduction of sentient androids to the general population will be fraught with legal and ethical questions. What defines sentience? Can it be tested for? Does self-awareness come with rights that would supersede the ownership rights of its creator?

These dilemmas are part of the backdrop of Cassandra Rose Clarke's The Mad Scientist's Daughter. We meet Caterina Novak as a child. The daughter of a brilliant roboticist, she's had a carefree but isolated life. most of what she's learned so far has been overheard watching her father work in the laboratory downstairs. 

But one day, the family receives a new member. His name is Finn, and at first Cat doesn't know what to make of him. Tasked with being Cat's tutor along with his duties as her father's assistant, he is the first person Cat could truly call a friend.

Cat's mother, however, is less than thrilled with how her daughter is being raised. She feels that Cat is growing altogether too attached to this...construct...and insists that she be enrolled in the town high school. For better or worse, at least Cat gets out among more normal people. But when ever she can, she still gravitates to her first companion.

In fact, all throughout her life, Cat seems to loop back to her childhood friend. When an adolescent house party turns ugly, it is Finn she calls to rescue her. At her wedding, it is during her dance with Finn that she feels most contented. And later, back at her childhood home, it is Finn's room that holds the most memories.

Can a girl, growing up with a robot for companionship, learn to have real relationships with messy, imperfect humans? Does an AI have the same right to the pursuit of happiness that a human has? Where did Finn, light-years more advanced than any other robot Cat's ever seen, come from? 

Clarke does a superb job pacing the novel, keeping the reader from becoming bored with the starving-artist-ennui that Cat faces in her 20s, and keeping the story centered on the growth of both Cat and Finn throughout their lives. Looking back at the book from the end, the subtitle on the cover - 'A Tale of Love, Loss and Robots' - is perhaps the most perfect description possible. Cat loses a lot throughout this book, but in the end, she gains perhaps the only life a mad scientist's daughter could live.

Highs: Without giving too much away, the final scene in the book perfectly echoes the first scene, bringing a very satisfying conclusion to the story.

Lows: Cat makes a lot of bad choices, for years, trying to find herself and it makes the reader want to slap her on more than one occasion.

Verdict: As a science geek, I continually wanted more of the bioethics and robot rights subplot, but that would have been a different story altogether. This story, of a slightly misfit young woman struggling to find her place in the world, is beautifully crafted as it is.

Further Reading: Pluto, The Android's Dream

All this over a closed butcher's shop...

The fate of a cult-like religion, an alien race's noble class, and interstellar stability in general all hinge on finding a particular sheep in John Scalzi's The Android's Dream.

It started with flatulence. Admittedly, it was carefully scented flatulence emitted by a technologically-enhanced rectum, but the principle is the same. A traitorous official emitted a grave scent-based insult to the senior-most trade delegate of Earth's greatest ally, the Nidu. After both parties end up dead on the floor (though perhaps not as one would expect), the Nidu offer the government of Earth one chance to head off an interstellar incident: bring them a sheep. To successfully complete their coronation ceremony, they need a genetically-modified, 'Android's Dream' sheep.

But someone's been killing off these sheep. Rather efficiently, in fact. All the specimens the Nidu have were wiped out by a virus, and a band of sheep-assassins have been cleaning up the remaining hybrids on Earth.

Harry Creek is a veteran of one of the most brutal slaughters in the history of Earth's interstellar military. He now has a rather unenviable job for the government, but he's good at it and doesn't mind it terribly much. One of his old military buddies calls him in to find one last creature with the Android's Dream DNA. But beyond her unruly curly hair, she doesn't have all that much in common with her mother.

There's a lot going on in this book, but the best part is turning the pages to see what comes next. To keep from ruining any of the surprises, I'll simply say that the story involves a ghost in the machine (or two...), two religions spun off of the same hoax, and an alien on a spiritual journey which seems to involve eating quite a few people.

Best known for his 'Old Man's War' series, John Scalzi has combined humor, satire and science fiction in a way that most people fail miserably at. With laugh out loud absurdity reminiscent of Douglas Adams at his finest, The Android's Dream is a modern science fiction classic.

Highs: The portrayal of Judge Sn at the tribunal is spot-on for many lower-level members of the bar out there.

Lows:The reader is hit with so many ideas so fast that whiplash is a definite possibility.

Verdict: In the genre of science fiction humor, this belongs in the top tier.

Further Reading: Divine Misfortune, Judge Sn Goes Golfing

As people slowly disappear, does anyone else notice?

Standalone short stories can be difficult to read.  Oftentimes, just as a story begins to pick up and engage the reader, the story comes to a quick, and sometimes abrupt conclusion.

'The Day They Came' by Kali Wallace does an admirable job at avoiding this downfall, and nearly succeeds.  The story begins after an occupation by some group of extraterrestrials.  They appear the same day that his father dies of old age and a protracted illness.  Beyond this, the day was perfectly normal.  He went to work at the grocery store, just a bit late in arriving.  He eats his lunch.  A family with many children came in and they misplaced one of the younger children.

After they came, life seems to be put on hold.  The man on the TV admonishes everyone to stay in their five mile radius, tells of the ration distribution centers, reminds them of the new rules.

But people keep disappearing.  First the narrator's closest neighbor.  Each week, another child from the large family at the grocery store fails to show up for rations.  Eventually, the last house light visible from his porch fails to come on at dusk.

The kids who come to the ration distribution talk of things that are different now.  The creeks have near-invisible snakes that are impossible to catch.  Patches of the forest are dying out.  There are shadows, slinking along the ground, just out of view.  The water tastes slimy and off.  The other adults don't mention this, though, if they even notice it.

The stoy is told in the 2nd person, which at times makes the story awkward to read.  The characters, including the narrator, never do quite what would make sense in the situation.  Enough of the occupation is left out that the story flirts with the line between mysterious and being frustrating.

But all that aside, Wallace does an admirable job setting up the town and its inhabitants for the story.  Enough care is put into the descriptions of their lives and the town that I truly want to know what kind of invasion they're facing and what has been happening to the people as they vanish.

Available for free on the Lightspeed Magazine website, 'The Day They Came' is a well-crafted story that simply leaves the reader with too many unanswered questions.

Highs:  The imagery of waiting for that last light to turn on

Lows:  An ending that meant for the reader to wonder what happened, but just frustrates instead

Verdict:  More of a setup than a story, but a well crafted piece of work besides that

Further Reading:  For Want of a Nail, Spirit in the Wires

A broken port turns into so much more

A hardware failure shows a deeper web of deception in Mary Robinette Kowal's 'For Want of a Nail.'

Of course Rava would be excited.  Appointed the wrangler for her generational ship's AI, and at such a young age, she's in charge of the ship's most valuable passenger.  Cordelia does more than just run communications and inventory and the like.  Contained in her memory banks is the entire history of the family.  Every birth, death, marriage and other event in the history of each passenger has been documented by Cordelia, through the VR glasses that every family wears.

So when Rava brings Cordelia's case to a party being held on the ship, and the case that Cordelia inhabits is dropped, a rather important port ends up being broken.  This port is what allows Cordelia to access her long-term storage, both for retrieval and storage of data.  She has about two weeks worth of storage onboard, before she would have to start deleting bits of herself.  So Rava, and her brother Ludoviko set off to find a new i/o port, or at least a new cable to hardwire her into ship's systems with.

In the process, though, Rava goes to her uncle Georgo for guidance.  Uncle Georgo was Cordelia's wrangler before Rava took over the job.  He's mostly been keeping in touch by commlink recently, and he seems very out-of-sorts now.  He demands to know where Cordelia is, and doesn't seem to remember that Rava took over his job months ago.  

Members of the family who are no longer productive members to the whole are recycled.  How as prominent a member of the community as Georgo could hide this for so long calls all sorts of people - and AIs - into question.  

While the main storyline revolves around Cordelia, Rava and Georgo, plenty of other ideas are hinted at as well.  Rava's brother Ludoviko is on the waiting list to be allowed to have a child, because in an enclosed environment such as this ship, resources for things such as child rearing would be limited.  This privilege would be reserved for the most worthy.  The idea that family members would be 'recycled' as soon as they are no longer productive is a plan that certainly wouldn't work in today's society either.  But both of these concessions would be necessary on a ship with limited resources and space such as this.

This, like many of Kowal's short stories is available from her website here.  It's quite a nice story, with more depth than might be expected from an AI housed in a Victorian writing desk.

Highs:  Every character acts as one would expect, from the jealous older sibling to the old man losing his faculties.

Lows:  Some of the lack of redundancies within Cordelia, as well as in the ship as a whole, are frustrating.

Verdict:  A masterfully crafted work in a small package.

Further Reading:  Shades of Milk and Honey, The Risen Empire

Immortality gives ruling for life a completely different meaning

Before Scott Westerfeld made himself famous writing about teenagers who don't fit in and airships, he wrote a science fiction duology that brought up some fascinating ideas about immortality and evolution.  That would be Secession, beginning with The Risen Empire.

Humanity has not only conquered the stars, it has conquered death as well.  But even in this, there is conflict.  The Imperials have beaten mortality by biological means, and everlasting lfe is granted to those who can work their way up the social and political ladders.  The Emperor discovered the secret to eternal life while trying to cure his sister, known as 'The Reason.  As he is the one who has bestowed upon the Empire the gift of life after death, he is both the emperor and also the leader of a personality cult surrounding him.  And as the first 'Risen,' he will conceivably rule forever.


The Rix, on the other hand, have gone another route to immortality.  They have embraced technology, creating a race of women-machine cyborgs who exist to further the spread of their religion.  Planetary computer systems have evolved to the point where they can develop their own AI mind.  The Rix see it as their duty to help seed these minds on already-developed worlds by inserting a virus-like piece of coding into the planet's telecommunications system.  Given just a bit of time to move undetected, this nacient consciousness can insert itself into every piece of technology in the system.  It's not a malicious entity, per se, but it is persistent, and the Risen Empire has declared the Rix to be an illegal cult.


We start the tale with Laurent Zai, a fierce Emperialist and captain of the Imperial Frigate Lynx.  He has been sent to the Legis system and when we join him, he is in the middle of the worst hostage crisis the Risen Empire has ever faced.  Somehow, the Rix have gotten ahold of 'The Reason' and are holding her and her retinue while they seed a new collective mind on the planet. 


Nara Oxford is a senator in the Risen Empire, though very unlike the others who share her title.  For one, she is a member of a sect that has renounced eternal life, instead opting to live out her 200 or so natural, subjective years  and then move on to make way for the new generation.  This is especially odd among Senators, who are granted a symbiote and eternal life as a matter of course.  


She also had a fairly rare bad reaction to the syneasthia augmentation that most citizens get as children.  This allows the user to commandeer the sensory processing power of the brain to layer different feeds over one's field of vision, letting Nara see news feeds, proposed legislation and other Senators' approval ratings all at once, in front of what is actually going on in front of her.  Side effects do happen, and along with this new processing ability, Nara received a very strong, very debilitating degree of empathy.  Rendered mad as a youngster, she uses a sort of apathy drug that she controls through a device on her wrist to let her have some peace around other people.


What follows is a fascinating combination of a thought exercise, a political thriller and a space opera, with a few love stories thrown into the mix as well.


Laurent and Nara meet at a political function, where Nara is the newest Senator and Zai is the youngest person ever made Captain of a starship.  A romantic relationship begins, and they decide to pursue it, even though they both know that the Time Thief of relativistic travel and the cryogenic sleep that Senators engage in between sessions will cause problems.


To choose Laurent Zai and Nora Oxford as the 'main characters' does a grave disservice to the other points-of-view that we enjoy throughout the story.  We see the world and the events unfolding through a dozen eyes, from the Empress herself, to a Rix warrioress during the incursion, and beyond, to the slightly too intelligent AI that runs Nora's household.  Even if we only inhabit the person's mind for a few pages, to have all the different points of view shown broadens the world Westerfeld crates immeasurably.


The problem with reviewing the plot itself is that the book jumps between points in time and between characters so well that to give any more information would be to ruin parts of the book, which would be a shame.  I'll simply mention that the book touches on such topics as where the lines between honor and love lies, what qualifies as life, and whether a civilization can truly advance when the old guard need never step down.


It's a shame that Westerfeld gained his fame writing books about teenage ennui when he obviously has so much talent in writing adult fiction.  The world thankfully gets revisited in another Secession book, The Killing of Worlds, and hopefully he'll come back to adult science fiction someday soon.


Highs:  Rarely have I seen a novel examine so many facets of future life, without long information dumps, but Westerfeld manages to give us all the information we need through the narrative itself.


Lows:  Fair warning: there is a very cruel cliffhanger ending here.  Have the next book on hand.


Verdict:  Perhaps not for the typical Westerfeld fan, though they might be the ones to benefit most from it, this is a book that will leave you thinking about the questions it raises for days.


Further Reading:  The Killing of Worlds, Embassytown

Manga Monday: Do self-aware robots deserve human rights?

It’s a scary thing when a new author gets his hands on a venerated series. So much can go wrong when another author tries to follow the vision of another.  Sometimes, the author interprets the series and characters differently than most of the fans, and takes the series in a completely different direction ‘to make it his own.’  Others simply don’t have the writing and plot skills to live up to the original author’s quality.  Readers always want more stories from worlds gone by, though, so the reader can’t help but be excited and hope that the source material is respected.

So far, all that and more have been done in Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Volume 1.

This isn’t a child’s book. The series is nominally a sequel to Astro Boy, but it is absolutely intended for adults who grew up watching Astro Boy as children.  Topics such as human rights, the death penalty and the emotional and psychological effects of war are addressed in just the first volume of this series.  It’s a much darker series than Astro Boy ever was, but it’s so far from the main storyline of Astro Boy that it still works.

The story focuses on Europol robot detective Gesicht, a detective robot, and one of the 7 most advanced robots in the world. They all fought in the same war as Astro Boy (or Atom, as he was known in Japan and is referred to here) and each has come out of the military different.

The story starts with the murder of Mont Blanc, a beloved robot. Det. Gesicht is put on the case to find his killer. Along the way, we meet North No.2, a robot with a passion for music who never wants to again, Brando, a Turkish robot wrestler who raises a family of little robots off prize money he wins as a fighter, and the wife of a police robot who was destroyed/killed in the line of duty.

We also meet a Hannibal Lecter type robot, the only one to have killed a human.  He’s being housed in the basement of the building in which he was captured, that has now been turned into the one and only prison for robots.

There’s a lot going on in this book, and not much of it is happy. Robot rights is a new concept, and hasn’t pervaded the public mindset yet. This story blurs the lines between humans and robot and what it means to be each.

Highs: Well paced, well plotted and unforgettable characters

Lows: Minimalist artwork at times help drive emotional impact, but at others can be ambiguous

Verdict: A must read for fans of literary manga

Further Reading: Ghost in the Shell, Black Jack Volume 1