SHE WAS RUNNING FROM A RUTHLESS CRIMINAL
ACCOMPANIED BY SOMEONE MORE THAN HUMAN . . .
When the shipwrecked stranger washed up, nearly drowned, on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton's home, she was unaware that he was something more than human: an experiment conducted by Charon, a notorious criminal and practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. The man said his name was Turner Pascal—but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. Then she found that Charon was experimenting with copying the minds of humans into android brains, implanted in human bodies to escape detection, planning to make his own army of slaves that will follow his orders without question.
Samantha and Turner quickly found themselves on the run across the country, pursued by the most ruthless criminal of the twenty-first century. In desperation, Samantha decided to seek help from Sunrise Alley, an underground organization of AIs that had gone rogue. But these cybernetic outlaws were rumored to have their own hidden agenda, not necessarily congruent with humanity's welfare, and Samantha feared that her only hope would prove forlorn. . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Asaro is a Nebula Award winner for her novel The Quantum Rose, part of her popular Skolian Empire series. Her novels have three times been named the best science fiction novel of the year by Romantic Times Book Club. She has also won numerous other awards, including the Analog Readers Poll award, the Homer, and the Sapphire. She has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard, and has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and danced on both the west and east coasts. She has written eleven novels in the popular Skolian Saga, the latest being Schism: Triad, Book I (Tor, 2004), several fantasies, including The Charmed Sphere, as well as two near-future technothrillers, The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code. She currently runs Molecudyne Research and lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter.
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UnengagedToo weird for me, but that is not the worst part of this story. No, the worst part is that did not feel engaged with the main characters. I did not really care if they came out on top, or if they died. So I read and finished it more out of duty because I had bought book. Now I am glad it is over.
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Product ReviewNot a bad read, and there are some delightfully, whimsically inventive glimpses of our near future (the lonely pair of infrequently-worn blue jeans emailing their owner has already been mentioned by another reviewer). The villain is shadowy but mostly satisfying. The protagonists' relationship can feel rather abrupt, and at times seems driven by the needs of the plot rather than by the characters. It is implausibly easy to steal (and improbably difficult to locate) highly-classified, heavily-armed, suborbital military spacecraft. Bad Guys are intimidating when physically present in the room, but their menace isn't convincingly conveyed when they are at more than arm's length--ho hum, they just lobbed a swarm of remote controlled deadly flying nanobombs at our car. Finally, though the trappings are scifi, the world's underlying structure leans towards fantasy with a 'soft' magic system. Substitute 'nanotechnology' and 'software' for 'magical artifact' and 'spell book', and you have a world where the author sometimes relies too heavily on the magic/technology deus ex machina.
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Product ReviewExcept for a couple of awkward plot points, a good quasi-near-future SF story.
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Product ReviewSome interesting ideas, but the main characters just didn't 'connect' with me.
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