Category: Reviews (Page 1 of 5)

This is my second finalist round review for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for SPSFC#5. I’ve already reviewed two of the finalists in earlier rounds, and my team has reviewed all of the finalists. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Artificial Selection by Marianne Pickles. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

HIGH TECH, HIGH WATER, AND THE HEAD OF AWKWARD QUESTIONS

A cozy sci-fi mystery from the winner of the Green Stories Prize!

The year is 2101, and half of England is underwater.

But society is recovering from the Melt, thanks to ArkTech, whose eco-friendly headquarters sit serenely above the newly formed Fenland Sea.

As ArkTech’s Head of Awkward Questions, Charlotte Vance is dedicated to helping Ben, the company’s quirky AI. Ben has a fondness for dad jokes, a knack for spotting anomalies, and happens to be Charlotte’s best friend.

Naturally, when Ben notices a geneticist vandalising pre-Melt books and a librarian looking the other way, he sends Charlotte to investigate.

What starts as a curious case of stolen blank pages and clandestine book clubs soon leaves Charlotte caught between the black-market operation she thought she’d left behind and the company she’s always trusted.

Set in a near future that is neither utopia nor wasteland, Artificial Selection is ideal for readers who enjoy character-driven whydunnits, or charming sci-fi with humour and heart – perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells, and Becky Chambers.

My Review

This is a fun mystery adventure story set in a near-future utopian (or is it dystopian?) society created after a huge climate crisis raised sea level by 70 meters. There is a wide array of colorful characters, and the future world is interesting and rich, with plenty of cool social structure, subcultures, and future history to go around. This is a great addition and worthy member of the six finalists in this year’s competition.

Plot and Characters

We spend our entire time in this book, mostly in real time but occasionally with some flashbacks, with Charlotte Vance, a twenty-something woman who’s got a few strong relationships but who is otherwise a bit of a loner and a misfit in her rigorously structured society. Charlotte has the unique position of Head of Awkward Questions. Her society, which is a corporate-run climate-refuge utopia, is largely administered by a benevolent AI named Ben, and while Ben is good-natured, honest, and sincerely dedicated to his role, he has a tendency to get caught up pondering issues he doesn’t understand. If he gets too distracted, he will lose focus, turn to looping, and the systems he’s supposed to be running start to fail. Charlotte’s job, one Ben demanded be created but which is not much respected by her government, is to help him work his way through these distractions by researching and explaining them. This is a fun premise, one that provides both a ready hook for mysteries, of which we run into several spanning many different societal layers, and which also provides some narrative tension, because if Charlotte fails to placate Ben’s curiosity, her whole society could grind to a halt.

Charlotte and Ben are a fun team, and their banter is fresh and fun. Charlotte has a strong moral compass but one that doesn’t always line up with the laws of her society, which makes her a fun person to follow and to cheer for. Ben loves jokes, and his ever-present and omniscient nature are managed and limited well to avoid (for the most part) just having the know-it-all computer solve everything.

There are a bunch of other interesting and varied characters we encounter as Charlotte dives ever deeper into her assigned task, which starts out mundane but eventually reveals a surprising number of layers and connections to other parts of Charlotte’s life, and through which we learn about the history, dynamics, culture, and setting of this future world.

My Thoughts

If you like imaginative future stories that focus on mysteries and star plucky and damaged heroines (and who doesn’t?) then you’re in for a treat with this one. Charlotte’s voice and temperament make her a really engaging narrator, and her mutually-supportive and (platonic) loving relationship with Ben gave this book a buddy dynamic I wasn’t expecting but enjoyed a great deal. The mystery is well-devised – a crime nobody should really care about, with possibly innocent, possibly shady actors all around who only reveal a fraction of their motivations and secrets, and one which grows into a web of intrigue and crime, drawing in pieces of Charlotte’s past that she’d rather be rid of. Having all of that set against the backdrop of an interesting society and future (and future history) that are fun to discover and understand makes the book even more engaging.

The relatively narrow focus of the story sometimes means that we don’t see too many details of that society, and I was left with some questions about how it all works – how big it is, what most people do, and how the interesting class dynamics play out. Sometimes, we learn more of that stuff with some brief sections of exposition, where Pickles hits us with a couple paragraphs of details that are outside the main narrative but nonetheless interesting. It’s hard not to do that, and I’m sympathetic – one can only show-don’t-tell so far before it gets ridiculous. I think I might have preferred a lead character who was a little more skeptical about and realistic about the flaws in her society, but she accepts most of them as the way things have to be and supports the corporation, warts and all, sometimes even in the face of bad actors. Not that I don’t like a little idealism, and not that she doesn’t see what’s wrong, but I think it would be more realistic to chafe a bit more against it, even though she’s mostly happy with her life. I certainly wanted a certain supercilious twerp to get much more comeuppance than he did, and that may be most of my dissatisfaction here. If I’m allowed another nitpick, I think a couple of the side characters were painted with the more vibrant colors and emotions suitable for comics, with their over-the-top depictions, rather than realistic humans struggling to make things work in a society with a lot of drudgery.

Charlotte has a complicated backstory, and we learn more of that as we go, with some pretty cool twists sometimes revealed in flashback. They help explain how she got where she is now, and they provide a necessary and tasty depth to her that I’m glad was added. Both Ben and Charlotte use more present-day language and slang and make more 20th-century references, often in service of puns, than I think they might do in 2073, but that’s just a nitpick. Ben’s love of jokes and insistence on literally and frequently explaining his non-human nature is mostly cute and fun, but there are times where I found it a little too much. But Ben is mostly a solid companion to Charlotte, one who (perhaps surprisingly for an AI) grows and develops as the book goes on, and who is much more than just a simple administrative algorithm. I’d love to have had his development and new perspectives taken just a few steps further – the opportunities and dangers are big, and recognized by Charlotte, but Ben’s growth and evolution has more potential than payoff, at least in this book. There may be more of this in the sequel, and I hope there is.

Summation

This was a fun book, very successful at what it set out to do, and I really enjoyed my time with it. The writing and world-building are solid and engaging, and the characters and banter are a lot of fun. The mystery is interesting, complex, and well-crafted, and its gradual reveal feels natural and compelling, especially when accompanied by strong character work as the two leads, Charlotte and Ben, figure themselves out and strengthen their bond. Nicely done, and I recommend it highly.

This is my first finalist round review for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for SPSFC#5. I’ve already reviewed two of the finalists in earlier rounds, and my team has reviewed all of the finalists. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Our Simulated Selves by Nikki Null. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Black Mirror meets The Matrix in Our Simulated Selves, a mind-bending queer sci-fi novel about two people in an inexplicably cozy apocalypse, unaware of the disgruntled programmer controlling their world.

When the pastel punk programmer Jeanne told her coworker she wouldn’t date him if he were the last man on Earth, she hadn’t intended it as a challenge. But he uploaded his brain into a supercomputer to find out if that was true.

The simulated Ren, unknowingly inserted into that ill-conceived dating simulation by his real world counterpart, has unspecified issues he thinks only a brainscanner can diagnose.He conspires with Jeanne to steal a brainscanner from her former employer, but before he can use it, everyone in the world, save for Ren and Jeanne, is abruptly deleted.

In the newly empty world, Ren and Jeanne must work together to survive and to unravel the truth about their baffling new reality. But in order to defy the Controller’s plans for them, Ren must outsmart that alternate self by finally confronting fundamental truths that even the all-powerful Controller could not compute…

My Review

This is a fascinating book with a complex, engaging plot and tremendously interesting characters you grow to care a great deal about. I saw some of the twists coming, but they were still highly rewarding, and there were further developments beyond those that were both absolutely necessary and completely surprising. This book absolutely deserves to be a finalist, and at this point, it is tied for first in my personal ranking of the finalists.

Plot and Characters

There are two main characters we spend a lot of time with in the book – a flawed, unhappy man named Ren, who serves as the POV character nearly all the way through, and a free-spirit punk programmer, Jeanne, who befriends Ren and assists him in his subterfuge. The subterfuge is self-serving but noble; Ren knows there is something deeply wrong with him, but he’s been unable to identify or fix it through traditional treatments. He wants to borrow time on the quantum supercomputer where he works to do a brainscan and run some highly complex simulations to see if he can figure out how to set himself right. Jeanne helps him steal the hardware he needs, and in turn, he gets her a job, bringing them ever more into each other’s life. This scares Ren a little, but he’s also fascinated by Jeanne and develops an awkward crush on her, one that she doesn’t reciprocate, although she seems more than happy to have him as a friend and companion.

From this point, which is established in the early going, things get progressively weirder and more complex. There’s a hidden narrator commenting on the story as it goes, and Ren gradually puts some important pieces together as he navigates the world he’s thrust into. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but the book does a very good job navigating its complexity in believable ways, withholding very little information but still maintaining lots of mystery to unravel.

My Thoughts

This is a book about finding yourself, something Ren desperately wants to do but can’t seem to accomplish. It’s also a bit of love story that plays out in a delightful and unexpected way. It’s also a kick-ass near-future cyberpunkish story of technologies, layers, and realities both real and virtual. And finally, and maybe most importantly, it’s a glorious window on a a voyage of human experience, woven into a journey of self-discovery, with heartbreak, community, damage, loss, and inspiration. I have not read many books like this, but I loved this one, and I probably should read more. It is clear the topics and the characters are pulled from the vibrant heart of the author’s lived experience, and I can only describe this story as a profound and moving gift she gives us, no doubt at significant personal cost. That it comes in the framework of a complicated, sassy, ultra-cool sci fi story only makes it all the more remarkable.

It’s hard to talk about the best parts of the story without spoiling them, so I think I’ll leave those for readers to discover on their own. I will say I got a little confused at times, particularly towards the end of the story, as to how it all worked and fit together, but I was happy enough to let that go and just enjoy the ride.

Summation

This is a great book. The writing style is fresh and fun, the characters damaged and sometimes cringey but hugely entertaining, always believable, and utterly sympathetic. The world created here is familiar but with some interesting speculative departures from our reality. And the mystery (because the book really is an unconventional mystery at heart) is ably and carefully revealed, with each detail painted with a full palette and with love.

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill. The book is available from Amazon (and, as of this writing, on sale for $0.99).

Blurb

“Don’t mistake my silence for weakness. No one plans a murder out loud.”

Veteran Marine Mint only worries about one thing—herself. But after being ordered back to the front lines, she has a decision to make—stand up and do the right thing, or finally get what she always wanted.

Fifteen-year-old Frida lives in deep space on a pirate vessel. Her father is a dissident warrior who fights the corporations running the system. When a corporation battle cruiser catches up to the ageing pirate vessel, death appears to be the only escape.

A gripping tale of war, survival, and corporate exploitation in the depths of space. Filled with bone-crunching action and unexpected twists, ‘Cold Blooded’ will keep you on the edge of your seat until the bloody end. Melding the best of ‘The Expanse’ style deep-space battles and corporate greed with the class struggle of ‘Red Rising’, fans will love this riveting sci-fi adventure. Grab your copy now.

My Review

This is a lean, action-packed military sci-fi book with bigger-than-life characters who jump off the page. Plenty of action, mayhem, gore, and surprises throughout. A space marine story with plenty of battlesuit combat, there’s also a goodly chunk of politics and worldbuilding as well.

Plot and Characters

There are two main POV characters with a bunch of others who get varying amounts of play. The main one is a grizzled, sarcastic space marine, Mint, who’s a long way past believing in anything. She’s my favorite, and definitely the most realistic and the most nuanced. The other main POV character is almost more of a superhuman comic-book hero guy, although he has a little more internal complexity at first. By the end, he’s mostly just muscles, without as much introspection, although with ever more ass-kicking. We also spend some time with Bjorn’s daughter, Frida, is another interesting take, an enigma of sorts, but also by far the easiest character to cheer for – headstrong, capable, caring, and fun.

I found most of the characters painted in bright colors, many of them with extreme quirks or big personalities. There are precious few normal folks in the Cold, which gives the book a comic-book or anime feel at times. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does strain credulity a little bit to have everybody live their emotions this large and loud and have such extreme proclivities and personalities. I suspect your response to this book will hinge on your comfort with this part of how it is written.

My Thoughts

If you’re looking for a gritty, action-packed, often hyperviolent and gory joyride through a chaotic future replete with mech suit combat, evil corps, and shadowy figures (and really, who isn’t?) you’ll find it here. The book does have some quiet moments, and they’re well-written and fun and sometimes even really moving, but the point here is humans riding tons of metal screaming across the outer solar system and blowing each other to bits.

The book is novella length, so easily digestible, and there is another book in the series and I think another one on the way. There’s enough world-building to give you a framework for the action, although not all of it seems realistic, especially the bloody televised contests between armed mechs sponsored by corporations who have a sporting-event-like battle to take over new asteroids that enter the allowed mining zones. But the point of that setup is to allow there to be cool battles, so you have to spot the author that bit of setup – a book with fierce space marines will always win out over a book with mild space real estate contract attorneys.

The main character, Mint, is really well done and far less cartoony (again, not in a bad way) than Bjorn and the ancillary characters. You feel the weight of her trauma, her situation, her frustrations, and her bad decisions, and she’s relatable as she tries to adapt to bad situations turning worse. She has a moral core, but it’s a flexible, patchy one, and she’ll often do things that surprise you. Other than a bit of a cheat at the close of the first chapter, I found her sections uniformly the strongest of the book, and I cared about her and what she was going through. Likewise, Frida had similar depth and evoked a similar response, although we got to spend less time with her.

I enjoyed my time with the book, and while I personally would have preferred a different direction with the plot than the book took towards the end, one that allowed the delicious tension and uncertainty of the second half to continue, it’s not my book, and I can understand the narrative choices O’Duill made.

One special note – the tactics in the battles (both mech suit and hand-to-hand) were fun, and that always gets me going – I love understanding what people are up against in the moment, what they’re thinking, and why they’re trying the strategies they choose. I really think this is one where if you like the genre (and I do) you’ll like the book, because it’s doing the genre well, but if you’re not a fan of the genre, you might struggle a little. Also, if you get squeamish, the book moves deeper and deeper into gore as it goes, so be warned.

Summation

This is a strong entry in its genre, complete with cool jargon, big heroes, well-paced action and fights, and a big heart. It seems from O’Duill’s recent social posts that the book is doing well, and I’m glad to hear it. I enjoyed my time in the Cold, and I’m glad I got to meet the funky bunch of heroes and villains who live there.

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Time Traitors by Eli Donovan. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Jurassic Park meets Romancing the Stone

Dr. Grace Carson is one of the lucky few scientists cleared for time travel. Years ago, her husband nearly destroyed her career by poaching dinosaurs. Grace turned him in, divorced the deadbeat, and two years later she’s ready to return to the work she loves: studying dinosaurs in their natural habitat. She has no interest in the new time agent, Ben Nakamura, assigned to her research station. No matter how charming or clever he is.

Unfortunately, her team isn’t alone. Poachers are trapping dinosaurs for the black market again. Another scandal like this could kill her research if it comes out, and Grace’s boss wants her to look the other way until the thieves are gone. But Grace can’t bring herself to let the criminals get away.

When the poachers discover Grace’s plans to blow the whistle, they attack her research station. Nakamura and Grace flee into the forest with her time machine, but it’s broken in the process. Nakamura knows a secret cache where they can hopefully fix the time machine, but it means a perilous trek through the wilderness.

Braving prehistoric dangers together shows Grace she can trust Nakamura with her life, but she’s still not sure she can ever trust him with her heart.

My Review

This is a fun romp, full of romance, time travel, action, betrayal, secrets, quickening heartbeats, and even some kissing. You don’t have to work very hard to get me interested in a humans-in-the-Campanian story, and this delivered on the premise and played really well with the concept and the space it provides.

Plot and Characters

There are two POV characters who mostly alternate between chapters but sometimes alternate within chapters. One is Grace, a paleontologist (and technically field biologist, which paleontologists usually don’t get the chance to be), who’s working herself back from a previous betrayal and disgrace to get to run a second research mission into the Late Cretaceous. Her disgrace was at the hands of her (now ex) husband, who went with her on the time travel research trip and ended up poaching materials and dinosaurs to sell to shadowy present-day figures, something expressly forbidden by the Time Guard, a law enforcement agency who controls time travel with a less tight fist than it first appears.

The second POV character is Julia, another paleontologist, but she’s turned poacher, helping a team of baddies operating in the same timeframe as the research group. It’s Mesozoic madness! There was a detail with Julia I should have picked up on much, much sooner than I did, i.e. before it was revealed, and I may have to turn in my plot perception card now in shame.

The research team comes with a gaggle of scientists and Time Guards, and the baddies come with a gaggle of thugs and criminals, so there’s a big cast of time travelers to keep track of. The plot centers around these two groups operating independently and at cross purposes, eventually moving more and more into each others’ spaces. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s a satisfying story with the two perspectives and the different motivations and conflicts pulled off well.

My Thoughts

So, this book is about a lot of things, and it does almost all of them well. For example, this is a book about paleontology and field research, and it nails the species names, the concerns that scientists might have in this weird situation, the wonder they would feel at having this unique opportunity, and the nuts and bolts of research. It’s really remarkable for a book like this to be this good with that stuff, and I applaud Donovan for what must have been a lot of research and a commitment to portraying made-up impossible research in as realistic a way as possible, complete with imagining how technological shortcomings in the distant past might impact research methods.

This is also a book about time travel, and it handles that really well too, and with increasing complexity as the book goes on. With any such book, you need to have a method to violate the laws of the universe, and here we have “time tubes,” which have limitations but are wisely not explained much – they’re the magic you need to make the book work, and that’s fine. The political structure that’s grown up around managing time travel is interesting and seems realistic, and the attitudes toward paradox and changing the past seem reasonable. The story discusses paradox early on and plays with it more as it goes on, as any time travel story absolutely should, and it’s done in a satisfying way, making a fun set of choices as to how the rules might apply. I particularly like the idea that time and destiny have momentum, and that it’s hard to alter the history we’ve come to know. The concern about leaving behind artifacts and bodies seemed maybe a little over-the-top at times, since such things have almost no chance of surviving in identifiable form to the present day, and since such concerns seemed to be ignored by the Time Guard itself at times, leaving shuttered research stations around to decay, but that was a minor quibble.

This is also an action story, including some elements of horror (the big-animal-wants-to-eat-us kind) and some of sci-fi shoot-em-up. Once we shift more into action mode, it’s very exciting, and the challenges keep coming for both groups we’re following in unpredictable and harrowing ways. The one thing I’ll say here is that there are some head-scratcher decisions that I had a hard time accepting, such as the semi-complacency of one group upon learning there was a traitor in their group, which was explored but then kind of stalled out, leading to an entirely predictable outcome. The attempts to throw suspicion around to different parties seemed a little too much to me, too, and I found myself thinking, well, it can’t be that person because they’re pointing too hard at them. There was also one groaner moment for me when one party incapacitated a guy who’d been hell-bent on murdering them, including stating his homicidal intentions and acting on them convincingly, and then the aforementioned party DIDN’T SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD or even tie him up. I hate that, as does Scott from Austin Powers.

The stupid impetuousness of some parties also seemed a little forced, and it often caused predictable bad results. I can’t speak to poacher rings, but I have to think that, just like with high-stakes space missions, Antarctic research, and other small-group scientific work, that there’d be a good deal of psychological profiling to avoid having conflict-laden hotheads join the scientific team. You also don’t meet your grad students for the first time in the Campanian – you recruit them and you work with them for a while before you take them on a huge undertaking like this. But those are nitpicks.

This is also a romance, although that’s only one of the book’s many flavors. I don’t read a ton of romance, although I’ve now written one with a friend (see Best,), so I may not be the audience for or the most knowledgeable reviewer about such things. The longing and the lust-slash-romance elements here work and seem to hit the beats and tropes that such stories demand, and you feel for the people going through it and cheer for them as they go. The primary romance on the science side is particularly satisfying and interesting because of its connection to time travel. One thing I tend to find a little frustrating in romance novels is that characters tend to go around in a high emotional state all the time, triggered by all kinds of stimuli, which leads to lots of conflict, bickering, impetuousness, yelling, and swooning, which sometimes seems unrealistic to me, who lives life with the emotion dial set much lower. Nothing wrong with that, though, and who am I to question a $1.4 billion romance novel industry?

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

Sorry to have to issue a IPW for the second straight review, but my tendency toward pedantry cannot be denied, and this is the second book in a row that’s at least partly about paleontology, which I’ve taught many times in my geology professor career. Although the paleontology portrayed was pretty darn good, I did take issue with one aspect of of it. That was that the paleontologists had a family-level and often genus-level name ready for every dinosaur they found, almost all of them matching dinosaurs that are currently known from the fossil record. However, the fossil record is super-duper incomplete, because fossilization after death and survival of the fossils for 70 million years is unlikely as hell. Some estimates suggest we only know of maybe 5% of dinosaur genera from the fossil record, while other estimates are higher, but none I’ve seen more than maybe 25% or 30%. That means that even the absolute best paleontologist who knew everything there was to know would be completely surprised by anywhere by 70% to 95% of the species they see around the Campanian, and that would even higher for fragile or rare organisms that don’t make it into the fossil record, like forest dwellers. Therefore, there should have been many more “wow, I have no idea what that thing is, but it’s very neat” moments than there were, and in fact a good deal more of those moments than there were proper identifications. You could explain some of this away by them having visited the past before and identified some of the newbies (although then the taxonomic names would generally then be new rather than ones we currently know in the real world). But the various dinosaur spottings also allow our favorites to have cameos in the story, and that’s definitely a noble cause.

OK, rant over. Sorry.☺

Summation

This is a fun book, one that feels lighter weight at first but which still has a lot of complexity, both human and sci-fi, and explores that with gusto and with thoughtfulness. Definitely worthy of a semifinal spot, and we’ll see how it does making it into the finals – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the final ten. I enjoyed my time with it, and if you’re up for some mildly spicy dinosaur scientist action/romance (and who isn’t?) this is a great choice.

This is my first review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is ab initio by Jacob Terracina. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Raza Mugabi, a biologist turned software engineer, is not sure why this particular tech startup hired him. His track record is far from stellar. In fact, he’s not certain what the company ultimately even does. Sometimes it’s better to keep your head down and your mouth shut, he figures. At least, until his curiosity gets the better of him.

Eight years later, Raza finds himself as a defendant and key technical witness in a high-profile court case. A world-class prosecutor and a woefully inexperienced defense attorney go head-to-head against each other, their clients, and their consciences in an effort to answer the question on everyone’s mind:
Is the startup’s invention, legally speaking, human?

The arguments leap between the technical, political, ethical, and philosophical consequences of the decision, and as the trial progresses, the many, many secrets of the startup are laid bare in this hilarious cross-genre thrill-ride.

My Review

This is a great, great book, all the more impressive as a debut novel. At its heart is a common trope in sci fi, the personhood of artificial beings, but the book soars far, far beyond that foundation, with courtroom drama, an interesting back-and-forth narrative structure, imaginative tech, a future semi-dystopian society, and the best part by far, a bunch of richly imagined and delightful characters.

Plot and Characters

The book centers around a company, jinwha (lower-case j sic) that has found a unique way to develop an artificial human brain, through a recapitulation of the evolution of humans on Earth. I’m talking a full recapitulation, too, from the earliest single-celled organisms to modern humans. The plot has two threads that it swaps between as the story unfolds. One thread is a present-day courtroom showdown between a prosecutor backed by a shadowy luddite non-profit who is pushing to categorize this new kind of parahuman as artificial, not deserving of any rights or protections. On the other side is a legendary Icelandic defense attorney and his adopted daughter and partner, working to defend jinwha and its creation, and to establish a precedent that this particular kind of artificial human is deserving of the rights and protections of law and of personhood.

The second thread is a series of progressive flashbacks, showing Raza, a biologist turned coder, from his very first days at jinwha through his deeper engagement with the project as it proceeds. Raza’s jangling, perceptive, funny, neurospicy voice is a delight – at times, he is a genius, at other times, a fool, and his passion for the work despite barely hanging on most of the time gives the book a richness and a tension I’ve seldom seen anywhere.

We see the story through three main characters. Each is different, deep, and well-drawn, with a unique voice and perspective, and each is a delight. I’ve already mentioned Raza, from whose perspective we see nearly all of the flashback plot, although there are occasional forays into other very cool characters’ heads. The other two are Javinta Puri, the prosecuting attorney, who is ice cold and professional but also aware that there’s more going on in the case than there seems at first glance, and Sovhi Egilsdottir, who is there to assist her brilliant foster parent but who ends up taking on far more of the defense than intended.

My Thoughts

What a ride. In a book that alternates plotlines, you run the risk of one plot being less interesting than the other, or of cutting away when a reader might rather read more. I never felt that way here – I was always excited to see how the other plot was doing, and I enjoyed the characters so much it was always a joy to return to them and see what they were up to in the other storyline. Raza, especially, has this comic, tortured, idiosyncratic, unsure journey through the world, and seeing him bumble, then react, then self-critique, all with wisdom and humor, is a treat. His coworkers, including a friendship-turned-love interest that’s handled with so much care, subtlety and realism, and a hard-driving boss, and an only partially sane tech guy, are absolutely terrific. The sci fi here is interesting and thought-provoking, but it’s really the characters that make the story, and you care about all of them.

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

As a guy with a Ph.D. in geology who’s taught paleontology a lot of times, I will admit to being a little confused/bemused by the impossibly unlikely premise of trying to recapitulate all of evolution in a model in order to reproduce each exact step and branch on the way to perfectly simulated humans. This is a conceit, for sure, and Terracina wisely doesn’t go too deep in trying to make it make absolute technical sense, instead leaving it to some fun discussions, a little bit of computational arm-waving, and some fundamental principles which, despite not making a ton of sense, provide a reasonable framework for where the book wants to go. Real evolution is full of randomness, of course. One of Stephen Jay Gould’s favorite words, serendipity, governs a lot of evolution, so any model trying to reproduce it would be full of luck and random chance, not something that a computer could easily model, and not something that would lead to the same result that we happened to arrive at in the real world. jinwha’s model is very highly deterministic, with an exact copy of human intelligence as the goal, which is not at all how biological evolution actually worked, and which falls prey to the common fallacy that humans are somehow special and somehow the end-state of all evolutionary processes, neither of which is true, at all. Still, if I can let that go, surely most everybody else will be able to, and it didn’t really hinder my very great enjoyment of the story.

Despite my nitpicking, the mechanism of the evolution scheme and the technology weren’t that important. Buy into them, and you’ve got a great story to follow. I had a little bit of an issue with the court proceeding also, which seemed to have no real rules of evidence and some questionable strategies on both sides, strategies that seemed more geared to increasing narrative tension than to winning the case, but the story is so damn good you just let that stuff go. The high-stakes ending is perfect, and I found my breath literally catching in my throat as the final courtroom scenes played out. Just wonderful writing, and a perfect payoff for everything you’ve invested in the story.

Summation

This is a great book. I still have quite a few semifinalists and finalists to read, and I know the books get better the farther you go in one of these competitions, but this is the book to beat for me so far. I really loved my time with it, and I would gladly follow wherever Terracina goes next. Wherever that is, it’s sure to be populated by amazing characters that you won’t want to let go of when you’re done.