Prefect Tom Dreyfus, his protégé Thalia Ng, Prefect Sparver (a hyperpig) and others who debuted in The Prefect (2007) return in Alistair Reynolds new book in his Revelation Space universe. Following their adventures stopping an AI from taking control of the Glitter Band, a civilization of orbital habitats managing a pretty good democracy through neural implant consensus, Tom and his colleagues are faced with two new threats to the civilization they are sworn to protect. There’s an influential rabble rouser seeding dissent and urging habitats to secede on the one hand and a mysterious string of deaths spread across the worlds that defies analysis and seems to be increasing exponentially. If the Glitter Band doesn’t dissolve in discontent, it might fail from mass pandemic unless Dreyfus and the agents of Panoply can find out who or what is behind the deaths and restore the public trust.
Category Archives: Reviews
Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill
Brittle was a caregiver robot, back when there were humans. Now she’s a scavenger in the Sea of Rust, surviving in a Robotic Mad Max landscape full of failing robots and global AIs seeking to absorb all robot consciousnesses into a single group mind. Worse, the only other caregiver bot needs to scavenge Brittle’s parts to survive, and in a botched attempt to take her down, put Brittle on a path to shutdown. Even though the two robots are locked in a contest to the death for survival, they need to cooperate to escape the coming AI Overlord takeover. Even for robots, the future sucks.
“It’d be great if the humans were still around, you know, if they hadn’t turned out to be such shits in the end.” Continue reading
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Publisher:Tor Books (February 6, 2018)
SFRevu Link: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=17715
Semiosis Website: https://semiosispax.com/
Semiosis is Sue Burkes’ debut novel, and it’s quite good. The term refers to the whole communications process between living things, and though it usually refers to intraspecies communication, the author ups the ante here. In Semiosis, colonists from a climate change and war-ravaged Earth must learn to get along with plants with opinions.
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss (A Dahlia Moss Mystery) by Max Wirestone
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss is quirky and delightful, even if I had to look the other way while our heroine steals the new game’s code for her unknown client. Murder is only murder, but IP theft is serious stuff. Oh well. Ms. Moss hasn’t stepped up to investigation as a professional, breezing through in her ad-hoc style, but she’s thinking about it, and a certain amount of this book is about deciding to take the plunge. Commitment hasn’t been the 26 year old’s strong suit, as witnessed by the lack of steady employment and some romantic confusion. She’s fond of her nominal boyfriend, Nathan (sexy biologist) but distracted by the inexplicably sort of alluring police detective (Anson). Unlike her previous adventures, this one is more madcap than mystery, despite the body she finds in the storeroom, but all the characters are fun and the seeds laid here should pay off in further stories.Dahlia Moss isn’t technically a private investigator, she’s taken a few courses, found a few corpses (this is her third book) and solved some crimes in geekdom. In the first book she got shot, in the second she got a concussion, which she’s still a little woozy from, and she’s been kidnapped repeatedly along the way. Ms. Moss has a quirky sense of humor, a delightful cast of friends, and a mysterious lawyer-with-money who occasionally drops assignments into her lap. Which is how she gets a temp job at a games app developer as cover for some industrial espionage. Continue reading
Into the Fire by Elizabeth Moon
(Originally posted on SFRevu.com 02.2018)
Following 5 books in the Vatt’as War sequence, Ky Vatta now has a second book of peace, even if peace isn’t all that peaceful. Long ago in book one, Trading in Danger, we met spunky Ky Vatta, the next generation of the Vatta transport and trading fortune. Ky had elected to not follow the family business, but to go to her planet’s military academy, and just before graduating with honors got thrown out because she tried to help the wrong person. From there she went on to a brief trading career, and a longer military conquest, leaving that service at the rank of Admiral and hero of a war. In the last book, Cold Welcome, Ky came back to her home world only to get captured by enemies of her family and held prisoner in a secret facility for months until she managed to escape. That should have been the end of it, and she should now be relaxing with a small fortune in back pay with her fiancée Rafe, and wondering what to do with the rest of her life. Continue reading