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3.5 

Machinehood

By S.B. Divya
Machinehood by S.B. Divya digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Zero Dark Thirty meets The Social Network in this “clever…gritty” (Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings) science fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, sentience, and labor rights in a near future dominated by the gig economy—from Hugo Award nominee S.B. Divya.

Welga Ramirez, executive bodyguard and ex-special forces, is about to retire early when her client is killed in front of her. It’s, 2095 and people don’t usually die from violence. Humanity is entirely dependent on pills that not only help them stay alive but allow them to compete with artificial intelligence in an increasingly competitive gig economy. Daily doses protect against designer diseases, flow enhances focus, zips and buffs enhance physical strength and speed, and juvers speed the healing process.

All that changes when Welga’s client is killed by The Machinehood, a new and mysterious terrorist group that has simultaneously attacked several major pill funders. The Machinehood operatives seem to be part human, part machine, something the world has never seen. They issue an ultimatum: stop all pill production in one week.

Global panic ensues as pill production slows and many become ill. Thousands destroy their bots in fear of a strong AI takeover. But the US government believes the Machinehood is a cover for an old enemy. One that Welga is uniquely qualified to fight.

Welga, determined to take down the Machinehood, is pulled back into intelligence work by the government that betrayed her. But who are the Machinehood, and what do they really want?

A “fantastic, big-idea thriller” (Malka Older, Hugo Award finalist for The Centenal Cycle series) that asks: if we won’t see machines as human, will we instead see humans as machines?

104 Reviews

3.5
“I enjoyed this but prefer the authors later novels Meru and Loka.”
Thinking Face“This novel is one that falls in the "good, not great" category for me. The characters were lively and the author did a great job of building not only backstory into the main story to paint a picture of why we should want to follow along on their journey, but took adequate time to flesh them out fully as well. At the end of the novel, all had a satisfying (albeit, not necessarily the expected) conclusion to their story and the reader could certainly connect with them along the way. The concept was very high science fiction: lots of robots, sentient artificial intelligence, space, and invasive drones. At points during the story, it got a bit convoluted and it was hard to picture some of the tech and understand what the author was explaining was happening. Not to the point that I got lost, but I needed to slow my reading a bit to get all the facts and not miss something. I gave this novel 3/5 stars because even though the characters were intriguing and there was absolutely an action component to the story, it was very slow at times and the story failed to fully capture my attention.”

About S.B. Divya

S.B. Divya is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can. Divya is the Hugo and Nebula Award–nominated author of Runtime and coeditor of Escape Pod, with Mur Lafferty. Her short stories have been published at various magazines including Analog, Uncanny, and Tor. She is the author of the short collection, Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Situations, and debut novel, Machinehood. Divya holds degrees in computational neuroscience and signal processing, and she worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Find out more about her at SBDivya.com or on Twitter as @DivyasTweets.

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