The story takes place on a mostly unexplored planet. An exploratory team has received permission from an all-powerful corporation to explore a part of the planet. They are warned not to stray from their assigned areas because of perceived dangers, so a reader will immediately think the corporation is trying to hide something on the other parts of the planet.

The small exploratory team is assigned a company-supplied self-aware android SecUnit for security and to probably spy on their activities. The story is told from the point of view of the android, who refers to itself as Murderbot due to its involvement in killing many humans on a previous assignment. The android is supposed to be linked to corporate control so they can get it to do their bidding if needed, including possibly wiping out the exploratory team if they discover something valuable to the corporation. However, Murderbot is a clever android who has managed to hack his system, so the corporation is unaware that it does not have ultimate control over him.

Of course, the exploratory team strays into other areas, and bad things happen. When they can’t contact another exploratory group on another part of the planet, everyone, including the reader, knows that Murderbot will have to save them from whatever happened to the other group. But will the android be able to prevent the corporation from regaining control of its systems or prevent its warlike nature from killing or deserting its team in self-preservation?

All Systems Red is a well-written science fiction adventure novel. As such, it is an entertaining, quick read. But it has little new to say about the relationship between sentient androids and humans. Its theme of keeping an android’s free will in check to use them as killing machines is somewhat overdone in science fiction. For a more nuanced look at sentient androids, I suggest reading novels like Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro or Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.

All Systems Red is a well-written page-turner but lacks inspiring, original and challenging ideas. It did have a bit of a surprise post-denouement, probably so the author could move the story to a completely new setting for the second novella in the series. I did not realise when I shelled out $22 (AUD) on Amazon for the book that it was only a 152-page novella. I doubt whether I will be purchasing the other novellas.

The Gone World

The novel is set in 1997 on an alternative Earth. It is very much like our Earth of that time, but there are differences caused by alien contact. The aliens offered humans the plans to develop interstellar spaceships that could travel into the future.

Shannon is a detective who works for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. She is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy Seal’s family, whose daughter is missing. She discovers the seal was an astronaut on the Libra, a timeship that went missing. This leads her to catch a ride on a timeship into the future to see if she can discover where the daughter is and uncover the truth of what happened.

The novel starts as a police procedural, then turns into a thriller with horror elements, and finally becomes full-on science fiction. The story has many twists, such as Shannon discovering she is connected to events surrounding the family’s murder.

The novel uses time travel elements previously used in other science fiction, but new complications are added. Each trip into the future creates a different timeline, as seen from the time traveller’s perspective. The various timelines develop from the moment the time traveller departs from their current time into the future. This new timeline can be very similar to the old one, with only subtle changes or, conversely, have major differences. The timeline differences mean Shannon can encounter alternate versions of people from her own timeline.

The huge difference in this parallel universe treatment of time travel is that as soon as the traveller leaves the new timeline it collapses and never existed. It is a complex novel in places as Moss runs into characters with different agendas who are limited in their actions by the nature of the timelines. In her trips to the future, Shannon also discovers that every timeline has the same threat heading towards Earth. A threat that will destroy it.

Shannon Moss is a tough, determined character who wants to get to the truth of crimes and ensure justice is done.  She is one of the few main characters in science fiction with a disability. One of her legs was amputated after being badly damaged on a mission. The missing leg is augmented by technology, but it still causes her problems and disables her at times. She appreciates zero gravity and not having to use her prosthetic limb in space. The novel’s author, Tom Swerterlitsch, worked for 12 years at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. This could have inspired him to have a person with a disability as his main character.

The novel is a slow build peppered with horrific events. It becomes more engaging as the time travel elements become more integral to the plot.  However, it became slightly disengaging when Moss decided she was not the original Moss but a duplicate. The reasons for Moss thinking this are unclear until an unnecessarily belated reveal. Nothing is gained in the narrative by the delay.

The novel concludes with a bit of a time travel cliché, but one which most readers should find satisfying.

Tom Sweterlitsch’s prose is somewhat dense at times. It contains many details about investigation procedures, indicating that the author probably did a great deal of research or is a fan of crime fiction. His world-building is excellent, creating a very creepy and alien feel at times. Sometimes, the location description is deliberately vague to challenge the reader’s perspective of where the characters actually are.

Overall, The Gone World is an enjoyable novel that will appeal to fans of hard science fiction. The book does not take a whimsical approach to time travel like Doctor Who; it is deadly serious, more like The Dark. It is one of the most serious time-travel science fiction novels I have read.

Autonomous is set in 2144 in a divided world where the rich have access to wonderous drugs, while the poor can’t afford expensive health care. Many poor are indentured to owners who control their lives as if they are slaves. It is a world where sentient androids can either operate autonomously or follow the programmed orders of their owners.

The main character in the novel is Jack Chen. She is an anti-patent scientist who has turned into a pirate, complete with her own submarine. She reverse-engineers drugs and sells cheap versions to the poor. She lives off the grid as she knows the pharmaceutical monopoly that manufactures the drugs is trying to locate and arrest her. The novel takes place mainly in Canada, as Jack uses her network of fellow drug hackers to try to avoid her pursuers. Along the way, Jack encounters Threezen, an escaped indentured human, and Med, one of a few autonomous androids. Med works as a medical researcher.

Two agents are on Jack’s trail: Eliasz, a deadly military-type investigator, and Paladin, a heavily armed android programmed to carry out Eliasz’s and the corporation’s commands. They are immune from law enforcement as they torture and kill anyone who they think can lead them to Jack’s whereabouts. Jack also has other problems, as the latest drug she hacked and fabricated has unintended side effects that cause significant psychological problems in its users. She is desperate to find a cure.

The novel explores the theme of autonomy in several ways. The android Paladin hopes one day to be granted autonomy. He wants to be free to live his own emotional life. Med, on the other hand, was created as a fully autonomous android for a family and allowed to develop like a human child. As a result, she cares about humans and wants to help make the world a better place. Threezen grew up very poor. The only way for him to get work was to be sold into indentured employment, where his owner totally controlled his life. The poor have little control over their lives. Jack Chen wants to help the poor be more autonomous by allowing them access to cheap medicines.

The current debate on AIs makes the novel very relevant. At the moment, most people fear the construction of autonomous AIs, as they worry AIs will turn into killing machines that destroy humanity, like in the Terminator films. In Autonomous, a semi-autonomous android is the killer, while the autonomous android has learnt to behave like a human and wants to contribute to society. This poses the question, will society be better off granting future sentient AIs equality with humans, or will we impose programmed restrictions on them that make them incapable of behaving like emotional, moral and caring human beings, and where the only way they grow is by being upgraded by their human owners?

For the most part, Newitz has created believable characters. Jack is a crusader for justice for the poor whose big heart leads her to recklessness. Paladin is conflicted as he searches for meaning in his existence. Med is a committed researcher. Eliasz has a troubled background that has created a sense of ruthless duty, but he is unquestioning about his employer’s actions. The relationship between Eliasz and Paladin does drift into unbelievability when Eliasz initiates sexual advances toward the metallic android.

Newitz’s writing is serviceable without being brilliant. It is not one of those novels where a reader stops to marvel at the prose. The novel is a page-turner and meant to be quickly devoured. The novel creates a believable future world where corporations have increased their dominance over society and the poor have little autonomy.

Autonomous is an enjoyable science-fiction thriller that challenges the reader to consider whether future AIs should be treated as equals to humans.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and revised it for an 1831 edition. This review is of the 1818 edition, curiously labelled as an uncensored version.

The novel begins with a series of letters between Captain Robert Dalton and his sister as he sets out to explore the North Pole. His ship gets stuck in ice, and he sees a man on a sled race by in the distance. They eventually rescue the man. He is a haggard Victor Frankenstein, and he tells Dalton his story.

Frankenstein tells of growing up in Italy and then travelling to study chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. While studying there, he secretly learns how to reanimate life and creates his monster, but he is repulsed by his creation and flees.

When Frankenstein gets back home, his much younger brother is murdered. A maid is blamed, but Frankenstein suspects it is his monster. He can’t prove it was, but he worries if he told anyone of his creation, they would think him insane. In grief, he travels to the Alps, but the monster tracks him down.

The monster can now articulate its intelligence. He tells Frankenstein what happened after he abandoned him. The narrative is now a story within a story within a story. This allows Shelley to let the reader into the monster’s mind. After telling his story, the monster demands that Frankenstein create him a mate, or he will exact revenge on Frankenstein’s family, friends and fiancé. You’ll have to read the novel to find out if he does.

The novel is about outliers from society. First, we have Frankenstein, whose scientific interests and reanimation experiments keep him separate from society. He may appear to be a normal member of the land-holding gentry, but his interior self is removed from society firstly by scientific curiosity and then fear of what he has created. The second outlier is, of course, the monster whose appearance evokes terror in others. He will never be accepted as an equal in society.

Frankenstein has been called the first science-fiction novel. Shelley wrote the novel when she and her husband, Lord Byron, challenged each other to write the best horror novel. (He did not finish his.) Frankenstein has very little actual or pseudo-science in it. However, it does have Frankenstein experimenting with processes as he creates the monster. For this reason, it can be called science fiction.   

Why the 1818 version was labelled as uncensored would be a mystery to many modern-day readers, as there is nothing that would attract the ire of today’s censors. There is no gore or sex, but when it was written, who knows what might have been seen as offensive? 

What struck this reviewer is how different the novel is from the films he thinks he has seen and the Frankenstein legend in his mind. There is no scene of a lab in a castle during a thunderstorm where electricity from lightning is used to animate the monster (this may have been only in the comedy Young Frankenstein). There are no grave robbers digging up bodies for Frankenstein to use. The monster is not chased and attacked by a mob of villagers. Most importantly, the monster is articulate and intelligent, not the dumb, feckless movie creation. Readers of the novel will empathise with the monster, while the movies just evoke some initial sympathy for him, which terror then squashes.

Shelley’s prose is very much from a different time. It is slightly dense and heavy on description, but it is accessible. A reader should start to engage with its style after a few pages. It is very much a character-driven novel as it delves into the minds of Frankenstein and his monster. By today’s standards, it is not that horrific.

The generosity and altruism of the landed gentry in the novel are hard to believe. Shelley’s privileged upbringing probably gave her a very different picture of the struggle for survival of the less fortunate as they battled the greed and selfishness of the rich. After all, slavery was still occurring around the world when she wrote this novel, and convicts were still being transported to Australia. Imperialism was rife. Shelley seems to have had a very romantic view of society.

Even though it was written two centuries ago, Frankenstein is still a great read. It is a novel that evokes empathy for those on the margins of society, even if that society is romanticised.

The Redemption of Time is an extension of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Three-Body Problem) trilogy by Cixin Liu. It started as fanfiction by author Baoshu (the pen name of Li Jun). Publishers approached him, and with Cixin Liu’s blessing, a novel was published. Baoshu has written three other novels and won six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. He is no ordinary writer of fanfiction. 

The novel takes up the story of Yun Tianming. He was a character in the Three-Body Problem who was dying from cancer and had his brain placed into a probe and launched into space to meet the Trisolaran invasion fleet. It was assumed that the Trisolarans would use their superior technology to revive him and communicate with him. This would allow Tianming to show the Trisolarans that humanity was not a threat. In the original novel, the probe goes off course and is assumed to have failed to reach the fleet.

In The Redemption of Time, the Trisolarans send a ship from their fleet to intercept the probe and bring Yun Tianming’s brain onboard. Yun Tianming is brought back to life in a virtual world where he interacts with the Trisolarans.

The first half of the novel mostly fills in the gaps of what happened to Yun Tianming during the events of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Those who read the trilogy should remember that he played a pivotal part in the series when he contacted Cheng Xin and told her some cryptic fairy tales. We learn the background of those fairy tales. We also learn of other times when Yun Tianming influenced what was happening in the war between humanity and the Trisolarans. A reader should find these revelations entertaining and of great interest.

The novel’s second half is more about Yun Tianming’s own adventures. The god-like Spirit recruits him to stop the also god-like Lurker from collapsing the universe into one dimension. At least, that is what Yun Tianming thinks at first. The science fiction concepts in this section appear to be very much fantasy and can be hard to grasp. They are similar to the dimension-collapsing ideas in the last book of the original trilogy.

The prose in the first part of the novel is very much in a telling mode, as Yun Tianming tells the tale of what happened to him to one of the other original characters of the series. The writing in the novel’s second part is more of a showing narrative, which is very high in concepts. A section where a different alien race is attacked by the Lurker is more easily readable. A reader could spend hours back-tracking and trying to grasp the concepts better or just continue reading with a general gist of the ideas.

This is not a stand-alone novel. A reader would have had to read the original trilogy to have an idea of the meaning of the events that happen in The Redemption of Time. It is a novel for fans of the original trilogy who have speculated on the fate of Yun Tianming. It is not one for the casual science fiction reader.

Annie Bot is the story of a sentient sex bot. Her whole purpose and desire is to please her master, Doug. She can sense Doug’s emotional state and does all she can to keep him happy. In the beginning, Doug happily uses her for very frequent sex, but then he becomes concerned about what other people will think about him using a sexbot. He thinks they might consider him a bit of a loser who can’t get a real girlfriend. So, he becomes unhappy with Annie, and she desperately tries to work out what she has done to cause this.

Annie is capable of learning. She learns from her interactions with Doug and the web (when Doug allows her to connect with it). She is often mystified by Doug’s treatment of her and why he gets angry with her. She is designed to be honest, which results in her frequently saying things that upset Doug. This results in her constantly second-guessing herself about how to respond to him.

When Annie is tricked into having sex with a friend of Doug’s, he rejects her, locking her in a closet and turning her off for extended periods. He threatens to reboot her so she will forget everything she has learned, everything that she has become. Doug’s control of Annie is exasperated by her being programmed to please him. The novel is an analogy for how some men want to control women.

Readers will be willing for Annie to escape Doug’s control, but she has a built-in tracking device, so Doug will always know where she is. This has real-world similarities in how controlling men attempt to track their girlfriends and ex-spouses using mobile phone and car tracking devices. If Doug tracks her down, he might reboot her or even have her dismantled for parts. Annie appears to be in an impossible situation, like many victims of domestic violence.

The book is a fascinating read considering the current debate in Australia about violence towards women. Interestingly, Annie Bot is recommended as “Witty, wicked and weirdly addictive” by the take-no-prisoners radical feminist Lionel Shriver. Shriver seems to be all about people taking personal responsibility for themselves, but Annie’s programming impedes her from taking personal responsibility and leaving Doug. This has real-world similarities in how circumstances make it nearly impossible for some women to leave abusive relationships.

Doug is not a one-note bully. He is a complex character who projects his fears onto Annie. At times, he tries to help Annie grow. He enjoys choosing the clothes she wears and says that might be because he played with dolls when he was a child. He grows to want her unconditional love but is aware that she has been programmed to say she loves him. He is very much into projecting a confident exterior that hides all his insecurities.

There is a lot of sex in the novel, to begin with, but it is not that erotic, and the description of the sex seems to get more perfunctory as the story goes on. This is not a novel designed to titillate with its sexual activity.

Annie Bot compares favourably with other novels set in the near future about sentient androids trying to live with humans and make sense of them. Novels such as Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and the brilliant Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When seen through android eyes, these novels show humans are full of faults and contradictions. The novels explore how we might interact with sentient artificial intelligence. Will we treat it/them as equals or slaves?   

The novel very much explores what it was like to be a slave, a possession that can be used as the owner likes. It could be worked until it collapsed, beaten when it disobeyed, raped, bred, and its children sold. It was not human, just a farm animal. The slaves don’t behave like farm animals as they create their own community. They look after each other for the most part. They accept Dana and try to help her adjust to her circumstances.

There are four classes of slaves. The lowest are those who work in the fields. Then there are the house slaves: the cooks, the cleaners, etc. Above them, for the most part, are slaves who the slave owner sired, and then there is Dana. But no matter their rank, they all risk being beaten, whipped, raped, or sold off, even if they are married to a slave who is not sold off.

Two pivotal plot factors affect the direction of this time-travel story. The first is that Dana can return from the world of the early 1800s to 1976 when certain events occur. The second is that she must ensure that the somewhat reckless Rufus survives for herself to be eventually born. The relationship between Dana and Rufus is complex, but in the end, it boils down to him being a white slave owner and her being a slave.

Dana’s reactions to her situation are believable. She quickly decides to keep her origins secret, as the people of 1815 would not believe her and think her mad. This changes as she gains the trust of others. She does not freak out. She decides to keep a low profile and not draw attention to herself. An unrealistic book would have her go on a crusade to free the slaves. Mentally, she is a strong woman.

The book creates genuine empathy for Dana and the slaves on the estate. Of course, I desperately wanted characters like Alice, Carrie, Luke, and Dana to survive, gain their freedom, live as equals, and prosper. I hoped the Civil War was around the corner and would put an end to slavery, but that war was decades away. If these slaves were going to gain freedom, they were going to have to do it themselves.

Those readers who treat the novel as a thriller may be disappointed with the ending as we never learn why Dana is being transported back to the past. But that is not the point of the novel; it is an exploration of slavery and the inhumanity of whites towards blacks. It is a challenging read, especially for a white guy like me.

I want to say that it is a book everyone should read, but that is such a cliché. But everyone should read this book. America has much to be ashamed of in its past. So does Australia, where Indigenous Australians were exploited as unpaid labour and pacific islander slaves were used in its sugar cane fields. This book exposes our past and continuing inhumanity to each other and our pathetic disregard for human rights. How greed will have us rationalising the exploitation of others. I would like to say that it shows those under adversity banding together to help each other, and it does, but they are forced to band together to survive; it is not something they have chosen to do.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is not a book for those who think justice will occur in the end. In a world full of greed and divided into tribes who can’t understand each other, justice is still elusive. America, like Australia, is still a hotbed of racism. Kindred is a book that will make you angry. If it doesn’t, you are probably a racist.

The story is set hundreds of years into the future where a police officer, Tara Fraser, is chasing a terrorist, Yuna, across space. Tara comes across the previously unknown Dyson wheel, and his ship is captured and dragged in. He assumes the same thing happened to Yuna with her ship, so he goes looking for her, thinking that when he captures her he will worry about escaping the Dyson wheel. He is a really committed cop.

He discovers the wheel is inhabited and stops to ask the natives if they had seen Yuna, using his computer implant to translate. Instead of helping, they capture him. He now has another problem, dealing with a treacherous native population.

The story is written in a light-hearted tone, along the lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A tone I found refreshing after reading a lot of hard science-fiction and literature. This tone is reflected in the banter between Fraser and Yuna. Fraser is a stick in the mud, doing everything by the book even though he knows his employers are not the nicest people. While Yuna loves to break laws and rules and is prone to impulsive actions. Some of which are successful, others which are not.

I have read a couple of other of Graham Storr’s novels in the Timesplash series, which I plan to return to with his third novel in that series. They are time-travel thriller novels, while Never Ending Day is more of an adventure novel with plenty of humour.

I did find the dialogue slightly disconcerting to begin with, as Yuna and Fraser conversed like they were living in the late 20^th Century. But who knows how people will talk in the future. I recently listened to a radio program on trends which said that everything old is coming back in again, so maybe in hundreds of years times it will be trendy to talk like people in the 20^th Century. The dialogue was very funny at times.

 After reading a lot of hard science-fiction, I enjoyed reading something fun. I very much cared for the protagonists and really hoped they could come to some mutual arrangement to escape the wheel and its somewhat suspect inhabitants.

I can’t remember reading a more harrowing novel than Sandra Newman’s Julia. The novel really had me fearing for the two main characters and where our society might be heading. Julia is the story of Winston Smith’s lover from the novel 1984. I read 1984 decades ago, so I am not sure how much the story in Julia diverges from Orwell’s novel, but Julia seems to be set in a much more desolate world than what I remember of Orwell’s 1984.

Julia is much more than the story of her relationship with Winston Smith. We meet Julia as a child of well-off parents, but then the parents get on the wrong side of Big Brother, and they are banished to a special area zone. A zone full of proles and labour camps. But with the help of her mother, Julia manages to get a job in the Ministry of Truth. She is a mechanic whose main task is to keep the machines running in the Fiction Department. A department that, among other things, rewrites novels and poems to make them suit the Big Brother ethos. It is there that she meets Winston Smith.

Julia lives in a rundown dorm with other unmarried women. It is very basic, just a bunk bed with a cupboard and surrounded by telescreens to keep an eye on the women. The dorm has no showers, and the toilets keep getting clogged. It is in a state of decay like the rest of London, except for the Party areas. Apart from the failure to fix and clean the infrastructure due to resources being spent on the ongoing war, many areas of London have been bombed and continue to be bombed.

Julia is a product of her environment. She keeps to herself, hardly trusting anyone. She hides her occasional sexual activity, as unmarried sex is illegal. Like many, she pays lip service to the plethora of Big Brother rules. She is definitely guilty of Wrong Think as she pretends to display hate during the daily hate broadcasts. She puts on a total front to the world. She is a strong woman whose sole aim is survival, but she is also a victim of the society she lives in. She has no intention of rebelling against Big Brother.

On the other hand, Winston Smith is full of secret bravo about taking on Big Brother. He seeks the truth and a way to fight to achieve it. When they first meet, Julia thinks he is somewhat naïve. She eventually sees him as totally deluded by thoughts of a successful rebellion.

The novel’s ending looked like it was going to surprise the reader with hope for Julia, but that hope is squashed under yet another boot.

As I read the novel, I found myself becoming paranoid about who might be watching me and how much of a performance everyone was giving to me. That is the sort of effect this novel can have. It is an excellent read and rams home the warning that we should be wary of ceding our freedom to bright and shiny false hopes like Trump and Putin.

I think Julia will be considered a classic in the not-too-distant future. Either that or it might be rewritten to suit the authoritarian government of the day. I would also not be surprised if a Big Brother of the future recommends schoolchildren read Julia so they will fear the consequences of Wrong Think.

The Terminal Experiment is a terrific science fiction thriller set in what was the author’s near future. It was written in 1995 and set in 2011. The novel has a prologue, so the reader knows that a murder is going to happen and a police officer is also going to be poisoned.

The plot starts with a scientist, Dr Peter Hobson, accidentally discovering the electrical signature of a soul leaving a body. This discovery has all sorts of implications for society. Some people commit suicide so their souls can go to a better place. Some go on health kicks as they fear where their soul might end up. But this is only the beginning of Hobson’s experiments with the human mind.

Hobson then teams up with another scientist to conduct an experiment where copies of his mind are uploaded onto a computer. He alters two of the copies in different ways, and a third is a control copy. The experiments don’t go as expected, with Hobson’s marital problems having an effect on them.

As mentioned, the novel was written in 1995, so it is interesting to see what technology Sawyer has people using in 2011. Obviously, no one uploaded human minds that functioned as such in 2011. And no one had tracked the human soul in 2011. But, for the most part, the technology is what it was like in 2011. Sawyer had an excellent grasp of what the internet might be like. The one major missing technology is mobile phones, with characters often having to find a phone to use. However, many of the phones did have video screens.

The novel has some wonderful speculations on what uploaded minds might get up to. It also has fascinating insights into how police can manipulate the people they investigate. Sawyer seems to have a keen interest in police procedures due to the nature of his novels, like Flash Forward.

I have not read many “crime” novels set in the future, so reading The Terminal Experiment was enjoyably different. It may be the type of novel that introduces readers of crime fiction to science fiction. It is very much a page-turner.