kittenscribble's review against another edition
3.0
An android comes to a premier AI expert and pleads for her help. Her acceptance sends her on a dangerous adventure filled with intelligent robots, obsessively evil rivals, and disbelieving bureaucracy. Fast-moving and philosophical; covers the tired old ground of "what happens when robots go sentient?" in a fresh new way.
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1111506.html[return][return]Didn't take long to read (300 pages, many of them blank, large print); not as awful as some of the other Asaro books I have read, but not specially outstanding either. It's a near-future story of artificial intelligence, including a robot so cute that our heroine falls straight in love with him. I found the portrayal of the military securocrats who get in the way pretty unbelievable, and likewise the psychology of the romance, but the questions raised about humanity and intelligence are valid enough.
useriv's review
2.0
I wanted to like this one. I once met Catherine and liked her a lot, but I cannot say the same of this book. The plot doesn't seem to have been thought through, just written as it came to her mind. There's a lot of chasing and escaping at the beginning in the book that don't make sense, convey no feeling of danger and doesn't help getting the reader to care for the characters. For me, at least. Maybe if I was an older woman, falling for a potential sex toy... at least some of the creepiness of it helped me see how women see books with the genders reversed.
The heroine doesn't DO much, in the end, except being the center of the fixation of several male characters, from paternal feelings, to romantic love, to obsessive-stalker behavior.
There are end-of chapter reveals too glaringly intended to keep one reading, only to be defused at the beginning of the next chapter by a qualifyng "not really".
It gets a bit better by Chapter 10 or 11, but I wished all the time for a deeper exploration on the issue of what it means to be a human running on a different substrate. Or wishing to have more adventures with the cool stuff the androids can do.
Eh.
The heroine doesn't DO much, in the end, except being the center of the fixation of several male characters, from paternal feelings, to romantic love, to obsessive-stalker behavior.
There are end-of chapter reveals too glaringly intended to keep one reading, only to be defused at the beginning of the next chapter by a qualifyng "not really".
It gets a bit better by Chapter 10 or 11, but I wished all the time for a deeper exploration on the issue of what it means to be a human running on a different substrate. Or wishing to have more adventures with the cool stuff the androids can do.
Eh.
ruru's review
3.0
Not bad, but not as gripping as Primary Inversion, which is the only other book I've read by this author. This one is about androids and humans, and the ways they converge and diverge, which is an interesting theme. However, the main character is not particularly well-developed, and I dislike the marysue-ish 'I don't feel I'm attractive but everyone else in the book falls for me' bit. The secondary main character had a more intriguing personality but was filtered through the first character, who I was irritated by. So an interesting premise, and decent but not particularly novel development of ideas.
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