I’m combining my reviews for Company Town and Autonomous for a couple of reasons. 1. Both stories happen in the future 2. Both stories take place in Canada 3. Both authors have won awards for their books 4. The authors have appeared together on panels to discuss their work, where they are often likely to discuss human/robot sex, for reasons which will become clear in this review. Writing about the future is a broad topic and goes by a lot of descriptors—science fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction, speculative fiction—there are many […]
Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt
This is a noir, cyber-punk, mystery and has a lot of great ideas jammed into it, but I don’t think the execution is quite there. Ashby does play a bit with the noir tropes, reversing roles and changing the tone to be a bit more humorous and I liked that quite a bit, however there’s just so much in the novel that nothing really gets done well. There are a lot of characters, a lot of plot, and a lot of genres all fighting for […]
Do you cyborg?
Cyborgs are a common theme in SciFi, so Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke, with short stories from authors from around the world is a welcome anthology for the genre. I picked it up, specifically to read Madeline Ashby’s contribution, “Come From Away” but I was definitely invested in reading more. Unfortunately, more doesn’t begin to describe Upgraded. In all, there are 26 stories, which, might honestly be over-egging the pudding a bit. When your theme is so narrow that every story pretty much has to begin […]