Review: A Robotic invasion has taken control of Manhattan, the United States is friendless and in tatters, Venezuelan war machines have taken over Chicago, and the list of countries not governed by AIs gets shorter every day. Hey. We saw all that coming. What we didn’t see coming was that when AIs rule the world, they’ll be just as good, bad, and ugly as the humans that went before them.

Todd McAulty’s debut novel explores a fragmented future where the world is just as divided up as ever, but AIs rule the land in very human ways. Some got themselves elected, some performed coup d’états, bloodless or otherwise, and some just bought the place out. AIs in humanoid bodies or full on war droid live side by side with humans as equals, though inevitably, some are more equal than others. Continue reading →

I just finished an eARC of Tiamat’s Wrath and gave it 5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads. I never give anything 5 stars, and maybe after I detox I’ll want to drop it back to 4 stars, but really, it was great. Writing, characters, plot, sciencey stuff, galactic politics. All really well done. Thoughtful but accessible, not a combination we often get in SF.

Also, not the place to start the series or even this three-book arc. Continue reading →

March comes in like a lion with Ancestral Night, a new space opera from Elizabeth Bear, but it doesn’t leave meekly, padding out off the page with Fluffy’s Revolution by Ted Myers and a tale of uplifted animal revolution. We also have to wait until the end of the month for the much-anticipated eighth Expanse novel,  Tiamat’s Wrath by the Arisian fusion known as James S.A. Corey. And there’s more, a lot more, in between.

It’s not like I don’t have a pile of SF already, but Every month I root through the publisher’s catalogs, review sites, and my Amazon Advanced Search to find noteworthy new science fiction, so I might as well share my research with you. It’s interesting to note which sites agree with each other on noteworthy books. Continue reading →