Provenance: I sat with the author on a panel at NorWesCon, and was impressed with what he had to say. His book was a nominee for the Phillip K, Dick award, awarded at that convention. So after the panel I went down and purchased a copy from a booth that was selling all the PKD nominees. So this is the writer's version of a three-cushion bank shot as far as selling your book.
Review: Tova Lir is a courier, running private messages and packages through the solar system. As a side gig, she adopts baby bots - AIs which need a physical housing for the first year or so to establish a sense of self. She's independent (one of her moms runs the moon), and not an achiever. She and her latest baby bot encounters another courier's ship, the courier within it dead. The bot is badly damaged. And now she's a target of assassins as she attempts to get her adopted 'bot repaired at the same time as robots as suspected of being responsible for a terrorist action on the moon. Yes, its a lot for a relatively slender book, but it moves along at a brisk clip.
One thing I like about the book is the "whys" - the worldbuilding that is underneath it. Newly-fashioned bots are housed in physical bodies because their intellects can be swept away by the huge amount of data out there (the allegory is to swimming too far out from shore). Couriers are used because all information over the net is public. Civilization is outside Earth because earth's climate is one of continual storms due to climate change. And a cult of humans sends their dead into the sun in great graveyard armadas. It is a weird future, but a well-reasoned one.
It surprises me is that, while SF has a huge number of subgenres, there is nothing for this type of adventure - the Earth off-limits for some reason, and humanity survives in space. John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist wars, Charles Stross's Accelerando with its Vile Offspring. All of them moved the center of humanity out, not to stars, but to the further planets. I don't know what to call it - Post-Terran SF? Solarpunk? Human Diaspora? Somebody probably has a better name.
Alexander's language is clear and straight-forward in this weird world. The author comes out of writing books for young people, and it shows in his plotting and presentation. Tova Lit is an engaging, motivated hero who is putting the band back together (in the form of her former adopted 'bots) to save one of their own.
It's a good story, and no, it didn't win the PKD Award. Still worth checking out.
More later,
