Wednesday, 18 December 2024

And now for a break in the routine....

 By reading some straight SF, not space opera!  Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton takes place in the United States of America in 2065, as a genocidal war breaks out between Humanists and the Federals.  

Humanists are ordinary people who are violently opposed to the existence of cyborgs:  humans with  neurological implants, embedded enhancements to their musculature, live contact with infospace, nanobots running through their bloodstreams to repair physical damage, etc. etc.  The Federals are the same-old, same-old folks who may or may not be enhanced (depending on their personal financial circumstances or their military enlistment status), who live in or run everyday society of 2065.  

Our hero Mal is an independent AI who inadvertently wanders into the conflict between the two types of monkey when he downloads himself into the neurological implant of a recently deceased Federal soldier to see what it's like to live in meatspace -- and gets trapped when his link to infospace goes down.

The cover calls this book "darkly comic", which pretty much covers Mal's adventures incompetently pretending to be human as he first collects a posse of misfits, and then tries to escape with them across Humanist lines back to Federal infospace while Bad Things happen all around.  Well-written, funny, gripping and thought-provoking, even if I refuse to believe that a game of Guess the Cube Root of the Square of the Output of the Random Number Generator would be any more fun than the base game of Guess the Output of the Random Number Generator for a bored AI trapped in the head of a sleeping host human.




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