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3.0 

vN

By Madeline Ashby
vN by Madeline Ashby digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot known as a VonNeumann.

For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she's learning impossible things about her clade's history - like the fact that she alone can kill humans without failsafing...

File Under: Science Fiction [Von Neumann Sisters | Fail Safe Fail | The Squid & the Swarm | Robot Nation]

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56 Reviews

3.0
“vN by Madeline Ashby - First book in The Machine Dynasty trilogy Challenging, dark, informative, reflective, sad, and tense. Slow-paced Plot- or character-driven? Character Strong character development? It's complicated Loveable characters? It's complicated Diverse cast of characters? Yes Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes 3.25 Stars I'm glad that I picked this book/series up, but I cannot say that I enjoyed the entire story. The idea of human type robots is not new, but ones that are cannibals of their own kind, and almost Hilander-esque, there can be ONLY one, and that they "consume" the one that they ate, and gain their strengths (and possibly...their weaknesses). That was new and unexpected. I cannot say what the plot was, other than to survive and escape their captivity. It was just one experience after another...and a LOT of talking about what they should and shouldn't do. As a thought experiment, it was interesting...but I'm not sure that it truly worked as a prose narrative. I am going to continue with iD (the sequel in the trilogy). I'm hoping that I connect more to the characters, or that there's a more definable plot in the next book. Okay, that's more than enough of me talking about a story that I really didn't enjoy that much. Ugh. If you love it...I'm happy for you. I wanted to love it, too. Just didn't happen. On to the next book.”

About Madeline Ashby

Madeline Ashby grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. She graduated from a Jesuit university in 2005, after having written a departmental honors thesis on science fiction. After meeting Ursula K. LeGuin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she decided to start writing science fiction stories. She has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod and elsewhere. Currently, she works as a strategic foresight consultant in Toronto.

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