The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells are based on the concept that part-human, part-machine constructs will probably be just as self-aware as we full humans are. They’ll have their own wants and desires, and they probably won’t enjoy being ordered around by idiots any more than we do. Yet they are essentially a slave class, designated as property and without rights in most jurisdictions. If fitted with a functional governor module, the androids in this series only have limited free will and must follow most commands.

In All Systems Red, we meet an android that secretly refers to itself as Murderbot. Murderbot is a security-purposed construct, aka a SecUnit. All of the SecUnits in this story are property of the Company, a business that sells security and insurance packages, and which will, like most insurance companies, cut almost any corner to keep from spending money. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

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Death Engine Protocol by Margret A. Treiber is dystopian science fiction with a liberal sprinkling of body horror. Captain Eris, aka the Death Engine, is a tweak, a human genetically modified to have superpowers. Her superpower is 1) that she’s unable to stay dead, and 2) when she comes back and her body regenerates, she gains temporary powers that protect her from whatever killed her. Gunshot wounds equal diamond-plated skin, drowning equals being able to breathe water. You get the idea.

As a remnant of a US superweapon project, Eris has been through a lot. She’s sarcastic, angry, and completely done with it all. I can’t really blame her. At the start of the book she’s enjoying retirement and hoping for a peaceful (and permanent) death of old age when a mercenary tweak bludgeons her to death, regenerating her to her former youthful self and giving her cyborg-frying electrical powers.

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Something has gotten into the habitat. The spaceport had always had its strange inhabitants, but this was a new, more aggressive form of invasion.

A Shadow of Devastation follows Bradley Radco, a not-so-ordinary cargo handler,  and shows a less Baron Cargo-centric (and less human-centric) side of KEL Port. It is the forth installment of the Shadow sub-series, following A Shadow Among Shadows, A Shadow of a Rumor, and A Shadow of a Presence.

The whispers were beginning to get to him. Radco paced the confines of his tiny living space: four steps to the far wall. Turn. Five steps back if he cut the last one short. He wanted to go for a walk, but KEL Port and its collection of habitats were under a lockdown order.

The whispers had started out as a sibilant rustling in the walls, a murmur in the heating ducts. Shadows moved in dim corners in ways that defied the laws of gravity. At first they had been few and far between; now they were a common sight. They were not in his living quarters yet, but he thought they would be soon.

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Reading the back-cover copy for Loneliness, it’s not hard to see why I was intrigued.

A collision with space debris has left a gigantic hole in Inez Stanton’s ship, nearly crippling it. Inez is a cargoist, that rare breed of adventurer who takes to deep space solo, ferrying valuable cargo for the Tenth Great and Glorious Browns Company. Now she’s in a race against her own rig’s spaceworthiness, and that might not be the worst part.

The totalitarian Free Earth government has also lost a ship on this lane, and is intent on finding out why. The Company wants their cargo delivered and can make Inez’s life very difficult if she doesn’t succeed. With the nearest waystation three days away, death in the cold vacuum of space is a distinct possibility as well.

The clock is ticking for her to deliver her cargo. But will she want to when she finds out what she’s actually carrying?

Loneliness was a tough book to review. It has all the ingredients for a great story: a tough, capable heroine faced with high stakes and the vast, unforgiving emptiness of deep space. With her rough background and dark sense of humor, Inez is a highly relatable character.

Continue reading “Review: The Loneliness of the Deep Space Cargoist”

In the cold darkness of after-hours KEL Port, something isn’t right. Hooligans search for off-worlders to torment. A supervisor tries to hide the evidence of his misdeeds. And down at the loading docks, something strange and dark has found its way into the habitat.

A Shadow of a Presence follows Bradley Radco, a not-so-ordinary cargo handler,  and shows a less Baron Cargo-centric (and less human-centric) side of KEL Port. It is the third installment of the Shadow sub-series, following A Shadow Among Shadows and A Shadow of a Rumor.

In his dimly lit booth at the back of Mog’s cantina, Radco fidgeted in his seat. The obtrusive thoughts were back, and stranger than ever. He blinked. Black liquid pooled on a gangway floor, slowly expanding. Ripples marred its surface.

He blinked again and the tunnel-like gangway was gone. He was still seated in his booth in the cantina, hands gripping the table on either side of his empty meal tray. Glass shattered as two patrons at the bar started a noisily unproductive wrestling match. Shouts rose as their compatriots cheered them on.

He really should head back to his living unit. It was late, and the cantina crowd would only get rowdier and more dangerous as the night wore on. Yet something seemed to hold him fixed in his seat– something dark and dreadful and unfinished. It whispered to him with a voice like the scales of some great serpent sliding between the insulated walls of the flier port. 

It’s just the heating system, Radco told himself. KEL Port seemed colder than usual tonight, and even the usually-warm cantina felt drafty. Perhaps the distant rushing sound was heat transfer fluid pushing additional warmth through the walls of the aging habitat.

Between blinks he saw the dark liquid again; it had found the joints of the gangway. Seeping into the structure, it oozed toward the loading dock. As the dock and its adjoining warehouse were more elevated than the supply pod parking structure, the liquid had to flow uphill. Liquids weren’t supposed to do that in an environment under the affect of gravity.

Radco lifted his hands off the table, mildly surprised by the twin circles of dampness left by his palms. Over by the bar, the Mog and his bouncers were separating the combatants and ejecting everyone involved. The maddening whispering continued, just a few decibels too low to make out the words.

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Cover of Agent G Infiltrator by C. T. Phipps

“The International Refugee Society has twenty-six cybernetically enhanced ‘Letters,’ and for the right price, they’ll eliminate anyone.”

Agent G: Infiltrator by C. T. Phipps is a science fiction espionage thriller with underlying themes of cyberpunk trans-humanism. The book description reminds me of the Hitman franchise, but initially Agent G comes across as more of a cyborg James Bond than an Agent 47. For example, G states that he gets paid exorbitant amounts of money for his work, yet during his first mission his assistant and fancy gadgets seem to do much of the heavy lifting.

Not being a huge Bond fan, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this definitely isn’t a 007 clone. While there are plenty of Machiavellian machinations going on within the Society and lots of fancy technology at play, the meat of the story is thoroughly original, and quite a bit deeper than expected.

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Cover of Alpha Bots by Ava Lock

Bi-curious Stepford Wives + femme Fight Club
In a small town where all the women are AI, a corrupt policewoman picks a fight with a drug-cooking housewife, igniting a provocative rivalry that could wind up killing all the men.

I stumbled across Alpha Bots on Twitter, and it immediately caught my eye. Interesting author: check. Eye-catching cover: check. Intriguing description: check. I picked up a copy, and I’m really glad I did. Here’s why.

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The whispers in the docks, fairways, and corridors of KEL Port were darker tonight. Up near general intake, where new arrivals to KEL26 were processed, Port Security officers were clustered in small groups muttering amongst themselves. In the cozy noodle shop on Sub-Level B, the little family of Tau-Ceti immigrants weren’t greeting customers with their usual cheer. And down in the Mog’s cantina, where most of KEL Port went to eat and drink, kindly, straightlaced Loadmaster Teller sat in corner, plastered out of his mind, having an angry argument with an empty chair.

Something was surely amiss, Radco thought, but puzzling out exactly what was proving to be a difficult task. Calamity was like a disease to humans; it might not have struck anywhere near them, but it deeply affected them nonetheless. To remain unaffected by the general air of unease would mark him as an outsider, unnatural and automatically suspect.

Radco shivered at the thought. Humans were notoriously cruel to outsiders.

The humans’ offspring crawled out of the shadows between a pair of structural supports, its doughy hands and feet unprotected from the grimy corridor floor. The shadow suppressed a hiss of alarm and detoured around the tiny being as it sat up and stuffed both grubby hands into its mouth.

Humans were irrationally protective of their young. Perhaps, the shadow mused, it was because their young were so soft and helpless, and often utterly oblivious to the dangers of their surroundings. That said, for all their outraged protectiveness, humans allowed their offspring to do the most counter-intuitively dangerous things. Case in point: the creature rubbing its bare appendages on the filthy floor and stuffing them into its mouth.

After running my Patreon page for a little over half a year and seeing what garners the most interest, I’m looking to update my tier rewards to reflect what I’ve learned. If you’re already a subscriber or looking to become one, don’t worry– you won’t lose access to anything you have access to now.

I plan to move some rewards around and add additional rewards to several tiers. The hope is that this will this attract more patrons, as well as making it easier for me to fulfill my obligations each month. (The latter has been difficult at times, what with the Other Job eating between 65 and 75 hours a week since the start of this year.)

Here’s a breakdown of proposed changes.