2016 science fiction, stand-alone sequel to The Long Way to a Small,
Angry Planet. A new AI in an illegal human-shaped body, and the human
who's getting it out of a bad situation, work together to build new
lives.
The human is Pepper, who was something of a secondary character
in the previous book; and the story is principally about building
families and finding, or making, a place in which one can unfold one's
life and see who one really is and wants to be. Where Long Way had a
huge cast and wide-ranging backdrops, this happens mostly on one
planet (with a secondary narrative happening mostly on another) and
deals primarily with two people, secondarily with three others.
The first book sometimes felt a little facile, as people had their
character-defining Pivotal Moments; this does a better job, because it
recognises that making one big decision is very rarely sufficient of
itself to sort out your problems. People make mistakes here, and have
wrong assumptions, or impossible desires; then they try to deal with
the consequences, and carry on.
We do start with an Awful Warning about the human body kit that the AI
is inhabiting (AIs in this world are property, and if caught in the
guise of a sapient creature they are casually destroyed), which never
seems to come to much… except that it's always lurking in the
background and becomes a secret to be shared with as few people as
possible. When it is shared, the consequences aren't as horrible as
one might have expected. So much so moralistic, but it never descends
to moral_ising_.
The tech is still weak (the body kit apparently generates the power it
needs to keep operating from, um, its own movement) but since we're
planet-bound this time it's rather less important.
I never found the pace slow, but the ending is perhaps a little
sudden: though things have been building up to a certain event for a
while, once it's done (and, I'm very glad to say, one of my least
favourite AI clichés handily avoided) the book jumps forward to a
short epilogue. I could have done with more of these people outside
crisis times, when they're basically happy in their lives.
This is definitely not more of the same as found in the first book,
but it clearly comes from a similar mental place. A third book is in
the offing, and I plan to read it.
(This work was nominated for the 2017 Hugo Awards.)
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