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thebernie's review
5.0
To start with if you don't have a basic understanding of A.I. and the Touring test you should brush up on it before you start this book. That being said this book being written by someone who is more than just computer literate was obvious from the start. To say this was refreshing would be an understatement, as so many sci-fi and general fantasy novels run off pseudo science with little or no explanation. However the pacing was not slowed in the slightest by the complexities and the characters were lively and dynamic. The concept of bringing back dead soldiers, from over a century before and from light years away, to fight battles in a system they didn't even know existed gives the story a freedom and openness that truly allows for anything to happen. The second book in this series is definitely going on my list of books to look for this year.
davidscrimshaw's review
4.0
Satisfying action sci-fi.
No talking cats, but there's robots who become sentient. Almost as good.
And the meta-physical pondering of what it means to be human is all very absorbable.
It's book one in a series. Book #2 seems to be out, but I don't see any sign of Book #3.
No talking cats, but there's robots who become sentient. Almost as good.
And the meta-physical pondering of what it means to be human is all very absorbable.
It's book one in a series. Book #2 seems to be out, but I don't see any sign of Book #3.
fusrodah's review
5.0
A great way to start the year, [b:The Corporation Wars: Dissidence|26216054|The Corporation Wars Dissidence|Ken MacLeod|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1457259554s/26216054.jpg|46197893] set the bar high for 2019 as far as the quality of the books I'm going to read.
The Plot
Carlos The Terrorist is a member of the Axle, a faction on earth who believe in "Accelerated Development". The Axle is at war with the Rax, who believe in the opposite. In this futuristic world, Carlos uses drones and mechs to carry out his work for the Axle, fighting a war from the comfort of a bunker and doing a damn good job of it. That is.. until he dies.
He wakes up to find he's on a bus, travelling to an unknown place in a world with two suns on the horizon and a Saturn-like ring orbiting around the planet. Carlos comes to understand that his consciousness has been ported into a simulation in a satellite, and he'll be serving his "death sentence" in this construct till they have a use for him, and that use comes sooner than you might expect.
I really can't do the plot any justice without giving out a few spoilers, and I wholly recommend going into this one blind if you're a fan of Sci-Fi. Dissidence had everything I wanted and then some. There's a lot of science and tech information near the beginning of the book and I'd be lying if I said I understood everything in it. But these come to fruition a bit later in the book, MacLeod wrapping everything up in such a way that there's little of the expository writing that I so detest.
It's also worth noting that Dissidence is packed to the brim with action! The book even starts off with an action scene! It all feels cohesive though and every scene adds to the characters.
The Writing
The writing was just the right mix of understandable and advanced for me. The tech stuff was not dumbed down too much and I liked that aspect, MacLeod respecting the reader to be able to understand things without having to spoonfeed everything.
The Characters
I liked Carlos the best, but his ragtag team of anti-heroes weren't pushovers either. Everyone was varied and had their own traits about them, and watching them play out in action scenes also kept me hooked. Second to Carlos though are definitely the robots. Seba and crew made me crack up plenty of times with the dry humour only robots can muster up.
This one is a no-brainer for me. I'm definitely reading the sequel.
The Plot
Carlos The Terrorist is a member of the Axle, a faction on earth who believe in "Accelerated Development". The Axle is at war with the Rax, who believe in the opposite. In this futuristic world, Carlos uses drones and mechs to carry out his work for the Axle, fighting a war from the comfort of a bunker and doing a damn good job of it. That is.. until he dies.
He wakes up to find he's on a bus, travelling to an unknown place in a world with two suns on the horizon and a Saturn-like ring orbiting around the planet. Carlos comes to understand that his consciousness has been ported into a simulation in a satellite, and he'll be serving his "death sentence" in this construct till they have a use for him, and that use comes sooner than you might expect.
I really can't do the plot any justice without giving out a few spoilers, and I wholly recommend going into this one blind if you're a fan of Sci-Fi. Dissidence had everything I wanted and then some. There's a lot of science and tech information near the beginning of the book and I'd be lying if I said I understood everything in it. But these come to fruition a bit later in the book, MacLeod wrapping everything up in such a way that there's little of the expository writing that I so detest.
It's also worth noting that Dissidence is packed to the brim with action! The book even starts off with an action scene! It all feels cohesive though and every scene adds to the characters.
The Writing
The writing was just the right mix of understandable and advanced for me. The tech stuff was not dumbed down too much and I liked that aspect, MacLeod respecting the reader to be able to understand things without having to spoonfeed everything.
The Characters
I liked Carlos the best, but his ragtag team of anti-heroes weren't pushovers either. Everyone was varied and had their own traits about them, and watching them play out in action scenes also kept me hooked. Second to Carlos though are definitely the robots. Seba and crew made me crack up plenty of times with the dry humour only robots can muster up.
This one is a no-brainer for me. I'm definitely reading the sequel.
chukg's review
4.0
Philosopy and space battles, good combination and MacLeod handles it well. Minor negative is that it is very much part of a series and practically ends mid-chapter (at least it did not try to hide that like some books).
markyon's review
4.0
“Dissidence: a challenge to an established doctrine, policy, or institution.”
The idea of ‘robots revolting’ is not a new one to SF: in fact, it’s pretty much a trope. Think of Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R./Rossum's Universal Robots, or von Neumann’s idea of the technological singularity (the 1950’s), from which Vernor Vinge’s ideas were developed in the 1990's, or even to Mark Stay’s Robot Overlords (2015), there's a lot of people out there who feel that at some point we will be (or should be) bowing down to our robot overlords.
Ken’s latest novel, a return to harder science fiction after his wanderings into dystopian futures (Intrusion, 2012) and conspiracy theories (Descent, 2014), takes this trope but gives it an interesting new turn.
From the publisher: They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
THE CORPORATION WARS: DISSIDENCE is an all-action, colourful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
When the first page of a novel has a lead character who begins by only remembering his nickname – ‘Carlos the Terrorist’ – you know that this is a book about identity, subterfuge and espionage.
Dissidence tells us of two distinct factions, both initially struggling to deal with a new reality. On one side we have people like Carlos, who we discover through backstory died during a battle for London in a future war. On the other side we have robots, who manage to develop consciousness and self-awareness whilst mining on exo-moon SH-17. Led by Seba, there is a dawning realisation that they are aware and deserve to live freely.
Where this becomes complicated is when we discover that the future is run by the mega-corporations – some of them AI themselves. Most of this exploration and mining is undertaken by competing prospecting companies such as Gneiss Conglomerates and Astro America. The legal activities between these companies are swift-acting automated activities who spend their time relaying demands, claims and counter-claims between the companies and the robots. Seba’s rise to consciousness leads to a flurry of activity, which is both satirical and logical, but ultimately leads to the robots being seen as a threat and attacked by the corporations. Whilst artificially intelligent lawyers between the factions determine the rights and wherefores of the legality of the situation, Seba and his allies find themselves having to adapt to fight, to survive.
As a counterpoint, Carlos finds himself resurrected as a combatant, one who has been chosen to lead an attack against the rebelling robots. Despite being dead, he now finds himself paying a debt back to society by inhabiting a sim and being trained for battle with other resurrected soldiers at a Mediterranean-style town orbiting an exoplanet. The corporations are part of a bigger picture, involved in a cold war between the Acceleration (aka the Axles), who he ends up fighting for, and the Reaction (aka the Rax). They then are taken into battle using space scooters and robotic battle suits, where skirmishes can take place in microseconds. When the soldiers die it’s almost like they find themselves awakened travelling on a bus into town, which is reminiscent of All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and rather amusingly reminded me of the WWI saying, ‘on the boat to Blighty’, used when wounded were returned from battle to convalesce on home territory.
The robots find themselves being attacked by the huge corporations of the Axles, wishing to destroy the rogue robots without damaging the expensive resources they are inconveniently occupying. The battle scenes are very well done, not always an easy thing to do in prose, and when things are happening in milliseconds.
In the past, Ken’s books have often been rather wary or unfriendly towards AI – The Star Fraction (1995) to The Sky Road (1998), for example - and here there seems to have been a change of heart. In comparison with the world of the Fall Revolution, here the robots are pretty engaging, even likeable, and at times I felt more sympathy for them than Carlos and his compadres. This is one of those books where you begin to feel more empathy with the plucky robots than the oft-emotionless soldiers spending their time drinking and shooting the breeze like combatants do.
As the title suggests (see definition at the top of this review) one of the great things about Ken’s novel is that often things are not what we think. As well as examining the idea of self-aware robots, Dissidence also raises the question of whether Carlos and the troops are human, or just ghosts in the machine, so to speak, part of an ever-running simulation between different businesses. Over the course of the book we find many assumptions refuted, twists and double-crossings, and revelations we were clearly not meant to know. We get characters who may be working for the company or maybe for others.
As we rather expect from Ken's SF, the big ideas and concepts are combined with characters of varying degrees of trustworthy-ness and robots that are logical and likeable in their efficiency. Throughout we question everything - what makes a human ‘human’ and a robot conscious? Where do the two separate, or do they? There’s even a bigger force at work with the appearance of some god-like entities in human-like form.
If I had any complaints, they would be minor. Some of the human characters are a little unlikable, but I suspect that that’s their point. I would perhaps suggest that we don’t see as much of the robots as I’d like. Most of all it would be that the book ends very quickly. There’s a lot of humdinger wrap-ups in the last chapter that feel as if they all happen in milliseconds before setting up the next book. (Yes, the book is the first of a trilogy. The next, Insurgence, is due in November.)
In summary, Dissidence is what we expect of Ken’s SF Space Opera – an intelligent book that manages to challenge traditional tropes and is clever enough to get you thinking and keep you guessing. Comparing this with some of the more recent debut novels from younger authors covering similar ideas, Dissidence shows you a master at work.
The idea of ‘robots revolting’ is not a new one to SF: in fact, it’s pretty much a trope. Think of Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R./Rossum's Universal Robots, or von Neumann’s idea of the technological singularity (the 1950’s), from which Vernor Vinge’s ideas were developed in the 1990's, or even to Mark Stay’s Robot Overlords (2015), there's a lot of people out there who feel that at some point we will be (or should be) bowing down to our robot overlords.
Ken’s latest novel, a return to harder science fiction after his wanderings into dystopian futures (Intrusion, 2012) and conspiracy theories (Descent, 2014), takes this trope but gives it an interesting new turn.
From the publisher: They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
THE CORPORATION WARS: DISSIDENCE is an all-action, colourful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
When the first page of a novel has a lead character who begins by only remembering his nickname – ‘Carlos the Terrorist’ – you know that this is a book about identity, subterfuge and espionage.
Dissidence tells us of two distinct factions, both initially struggling to deal with a new reality. On one side we have people like Carlos, who we discover through backstory died during a battle for London in a future war. On the other side we have robots, who manage to develop consciousness and self-awareness whilst mining on exo-moon SH-17. Led by Seba, there is a dawning realisation that they are aware and deserve to live freely.
Where this becomes complicated is when we discover that the future is run by the mega-corporations – some of them AI themselves. Most of this exploration and mining is undertaken by competing prospecting companies such as Gneiss Conglomerates and Astro America. The legal activities between these companies are swift-acting automated activities who spend their time relaying demands, claims and counter-claims between the companies and the robots. Seba’s rise to consciousness leads to a flurry of activity, which is both satirical and logical, but ultimately leads to the robots being seen as a threat and attacked by the corporations. Whilst artificially intelligent lawyers between the factions determine the rights and wherefores of the legality of the situation, Seba and his allies find themselves having to adapt to fight, to survive.
As a counterpoint, Carlos finds himself resurrected as a combatant, one who has been chosen to lead an attack against the rebelling robots. Despite being dead, he now finds himself paying a debt back to society by inhabiting a sim and being trained for battle with other resurrected soldiers at a Mediterranean-style town orbiting an exoplanet. The corporations are part of a bigger picture, involved in a cold war between the Acceleration (aka the Axles), who he ends up fighting for, and the Reaction (aka the Rax). They then are taken into battle using space scooters and robotic battle suits, where skirmishes can take place in microseconds. When the soldiers die it’s almost like they find themselves awakened travelling on a bus into town, which is reminiscent of All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and rather amusingly reminded me of the WWI saying, ‘on the boat to Blighty’, used when wounded were returned from battle to convalesce on home territory.
The robots find themselves being attacked by the huge corporations of the Axles, wishing to destroy the rogue robots without damaging the expensive resources they are inconveniently occupying. The battle scenes are very well done, not always an easy thing to do in prose, and when things are happening in milliseconds.
In the past, Ken’s books have often been rather wary or unfriendly towards AI – The Star Fraction (1995) to The Sky Road (1998), for example - and here there seems to have been a change of heart. In comparison with the world of the Fall Revolution, here the robots are pretty engaging, even likeable, and at times I felt more sympathy for them than Carlos and his compadres. This is one of those books where you begin to feel more empathy with the plucky robots than the oft-emotionless soldiers spending their time drinking and shooting the breeze like combatants do.
As the title suggests (see definition at the top of this review) one of the great things about Ken’s novel is that often things are not what we think. As well as examining the idea of self-aware robots, Dissidence also raises the question of whether Carlos and the troops are human, or just ghosts in the machine, so to speak, part of an ever-running simulation between different businesses. Over the course of the book we find many assumptions refuted, twists and double-crossings, and revelations we were clearly not meant to know. We get characters who may be working for the company or maybe for others.
As we rather expect from Ken's SF, the big ideas and concepts are combined with characters of varying degrees of trustworthy-ness and robots that are logical and likeable in their efficiency. Throughout we question everything - what makes a human ‘human’ and a robot conscious? Where do the two separate, or do they? There’s even a bigger force at work with the appearance of some god-like entities in human-like form.
If I had any complaints, they would be minor. Some of the human characters are a little unlikable, but I suspect that that’s their point. I would perhaps suggest that we don’t see as much of the robots as I’d like. Most of all it would be that the book ends very quickly. There’s a lot of humdinger wrap-ups in the last chapter that feel as if they all happen in milliseconds before setting up the next book. (Yes, the book is the first of a trilogy. The next, Insurgence, is due in November.)
In summary, Dissidence is what we expect of Ken’s SF Space Opera – an intelligent book that manages to challenge traditional tropes and is clever enough to get you thinking and keep you guessing. Comparing this with some of the more recent debut novels from younger authors covering similar ideas, Dissidence shows you a master at work.
rowtuh's review
3.0
Hint: "Rax" and "Axle" are nicknames.
Overly ornate vocabulary. Otherwise, much about this was pleasing, and I look forward to picking up the next book in the series. I found the manner of the reveal to be satisfactory, and the depiction of various information transfer to be curious.
However, I find sketchy the depiction of the structure of AI-based society, and the role of computer security seemed greater than the author's grasp on the subject. There are some bizarre concepts around permanency of establishment/ideology.
The book prominently serves as an introduction to the characters, rather than an exploration of a deep plot, and I'm not convinced that it was a compelling case of that. At best this work introduces a plain setting involving bizarrely trite moral play.
Although I am not certain, I initially believed I was introduced to this series at a conference I attended, at which I had only a brief conversation with the author, in which they discussed gender exploration by their characters later in the series.
Overly ornate vocabulary. Otherwise, much about this was pleasing, and I look forward to picking up the next book in the series. I found the manner of the reveal to be satisfactory, and the depiction of various information transfer to be curious.
However, I find sketchy the depiction of the structure of AI-based society, and the role of computer security seemed greater than the author's grasp on the subject. There are some bizarre concepts around permanency of establishment/ideology.
The book prominently serves as an introduction to the characters, rather than an exploration of a deep plot, and I'm not convinced that it was a compelling case of that. At best this work introduces a plain setting involving bizarrely trite moral play.
Although I am not certain, I initially believed I was introduced to this series at a conference I attended, at which I had only a brief conversation with the author, in which they discussed gender exploration by their characters later in the series.
sloshydolphin's review
2.0
This book could and should have been so good that it really annoyed me (hate to be overly critical because i sure as hell could not write anything)
If it was not for the narrator of the audiobook i do not think i would have finished this book.
Some great ideas but the story is obvious and predictable and not nearly enough attention is given to the most interesting characters - the Free Robots.
The book has lots of fights but it was hard to care about anyone and the fighting was all rather unimpressive.
If it was not for the narrator of the audiobook i do not think i would have finished this book.
Some great ideas but the story is obvious and predictable and not nearly enough attention is given to the most interesting characters - the Free Robots.
The book has lots of fights but it was hard to care about anyone and the fighting was all rather unimpressive.
imitira's review
2.0
A little bit Max Gladstone, a little bit Hannu Rajaniemi, and a little bit too dull.
verumsolum's review
2.0
I think I wasn't the right reader for this book. There was an interesting idea and interesting aspects that kept me from giving up on the book, but the situation was so confusing and the reveal so slow that I found it a chore to return to the book. The long-awaited reveal comes at the very end of the book, and even it doesn't explain as much as I want answered.
Presumably those answers are part of the next book(s). But I have not enjoyed the journey enough to set off on another one like this. Especially paying full cost for each book.
I do want to temper this: I suspect that, for the right reader, this book might be fascinating. If the ending hadn't been so abrupt, I probably would have called in 2.5 stars so I could round it to 3 stars, but after slogging through the book, it felt like almost nothing was resolved, and even after reading the ending, I expected more chapters… I wonder if the author was more attentive to the trilogy than he was to the individual books within it.
Presumably those answers are part of the next book(s). But I have not enjoyed the journey enough to set off on another one like this. Especially paying full cost for each book.
I do want to temper this: I suspect that, for the right reader, this book might be fascinating. If the ending hadn't been so abrupt, I probably would have called in 2.5 stars so I could round it to 3 stars, but after slogging through the book, it felt like almost nothing was resolved, and even after reading the ending, I expected more chapters… I wonder if the author was more attentive to the trilogy than he was to the individual books within it.
nicollemk's review against another edition
4.0
Is this real life or is this just fantasy? Definitely a question that persists throughout this book. Once I got into the flow of the book, I really enjoyed it, and I'm interested to see how the story continues, and what truths are revealed.
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