Zer0es (Chuck Wendig)

The Zeroes are a motley group of hackers and trolls dragged to a prison compound by a mysterious government organization and put to work on various hacker-related tasks that don't seem to make much sense. They gradually figure out that there's a powerful and dangerous force that's taking over the Internet, causing death and mayhem, and they band together to escape and fight this power. I enjoyed the geeky references to tech and pop culture, but ultimately the story didn't really work for me. The characters never came alive, but remained cardboard stand-ins for stock people. The story also had two basic flaws that dragged my disbelief to the ground. One is that if a computer takes over the Internet then it can take direct control over any interconnected digital device, from the GPS in an airplane to your car's radio. The other, even more implausible, is that it is possible to throw someone down on a table, drill a hole in their skull, and shove in a cable that allows the computer to both download all their memories and upload a command program that turns them into a remote-controlled zombie. I'm sorry, but no.

Golden Fleece (Robert Sawyer)

This short novel is Sawyer's first, a murder mystery aboard a spaceship on its way to explore a distant planet. The mystery is not a whodunit, because in the first few pages we witness the murder and realize it was committed by JASON, the artificial intelligence that runs the ship. The mystery is why the computer believed this murder was necessary and whether the others would figure it out. I confess that the story didn't work for me. The main human character had a past decorated with so many separate issues and traumas, none of which were actually related to the current situation, that it felt strained and overwritten. When the reason for the murder, and the ship's other unusual behaviors, is finally revealed, I don't buy it. I've read a few of Sawyer's works and had much the same reaction to them as well.

Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson)

This is a massive, richly detailed, comprehensive science fiction story with an almost anti-SF theme. It begins on a generation ship that's almost reached its target planet, Aurora, which has enough similarities to Earth that it seems a likely place for humans to create a viable colony.. The ship is fascinating, a character in its own right, and the people living aboard are a complex set of people with a wide range of motivations and perspectives. Robinson does a great job representing the ethnic diversity of humanity in this miniature world. Of course, people face a spiraling series of cascading technological challenges before the story finally ends. The final scenes are as warm and uplifting as one could want, but the overall message is far from encouraging. This book does not flinch from the really hard challenges of life in space, and does not gloss them over with an ad astra! (to the stars!) optimism. There is also a deep and thoughtful consideration of questions relating to artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie)

Okay, a confession: I'm hopelessly focused on gender. I learned this in reading this book,in which the narrator's (fictional) native language has no gender-marking and the character himself (herself?) is oblivious to gender. In this English translation, the default pronouns are all feminine, so we read that she drove the shuttle and her voice was loud, but some of these individuals are probably male. Which ones, though? I can't tell, and it drives me crazy! Aside from this personal foible of mine, though, there's a lot here to like. There's an interstellar empire run by an immortal tyrant who has her (his?) mind loaded into armies of clones, supported by an army including vast ships run by AIs and manned by ancillaries, former people whose minds have been subsumed into the ship's mind. The narrator is one of these ancillaries, and the story shifts back and forth between the past in which the ship was part of the takeover of a new world, and the present in which the ancillary is separated from the ship and working toward a goal of vital personal importance. We don't learn what the goal is, why it is important, or what happened to the rest of she ship for much of the book. I can't say that all became clear, but enough did to be satisfying, and the mystery was intriguing.

The Automatic Detective (A. Lee Martinez)

I checked this out on impulse - I saw it while waiting in line at the library for a different book - and I'm glad I did. It is unpretentious and a lot of fun. The hero is a giant android built for war who develops the "sentience glitch" and becomes self-aware, refusing his creator's orders to kill. The society where he lives is full of sentient machines as well as drones, those who strictly follow their programming, and they grant him probation. If he can avoid any problems for a limited period of time, he'll be granted citizenship. As the story opens, though, he gets embroiled in a drama involving a neighbor family that is kidnapped, and it brings him up against the police, the government, and an extra-governmental force that doesn't have humanity's best interests at heart. Of course, all comes out well in the end, but the ride is fun. There's no great literature here, but the writing is zesty and the story engaging.