Dr. Jens, a rescue specialist for a medical group composed of different species from across the galaxy, is on a mission to save the lives of thousands of humans on an ancient ship, stranded among the stars. Something has gone terribly wrong with their computer system.
In addition, there’s a strange, and dangerous looking, machine in the hold of another, far more modern ship, that is attached to the archaic ship. Could it be the genesis of everything that went wrong or something more sinister?
“There could be people alive in there. We had to proceed as if there were, until we had proven otherwise.”
Elizabeth Bear has created a fantastical, possible future in Machine where humanity has learned to manage some of our more troublesome brain chemistry through the use of sophisticated machines implanted in our heads.
I loved her imagining of what aliens (she calls them ‘systers’) may look like and how thousands of different people from worlds separated by both time and space would be able to come together and create something resembling a community.
It leads to some particularly interesting questions in this story as Dr. Jens is concerned primarily with the physical, and occasionally emotional, health of the beings, both flesh-bound and digital, whom she encounters.
“An AI couldn’t suffer a psychotic break, exactly. But they had their own varieties of sophipathology, and dissociation of their various subroutines into disparate personalities was definitely one that had been well-testified in the literature.”
I liked those aspects of the story- the exploration of a universe so far removed from my own.
Unfortunately, I felt that this exploration was bogged down by long and meandering self reflection at key moments in the story. I realize that much of the development of the plot is an emotional journey for the characters, but it’s not fun to read about and occasionally comes off as a little preachy.
“We had to learn that there were more important things than being ‘right.’ Brilliant people are sometimes terrible at being people.”
And, as I said, it slowed the story down to a painful crawl through neurosis and the perpetual struggle Dr. Jens has between allowing her emotions or handling them through her technologically advanced and chemically-altering brain tech.
All that being said, Machine was an enjoyable sci-fi adventure and mystery, and I look forward to reading more from Elizabeth Bear in the future.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free digital copy of this book for review purposes.
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