Tom Maddox (1945–2022)

The curse of the missing half star strikes again. Calling this book a three would be a disservice, but it's not quite entertaining enough to be a full four.

A Creative Commons novel freely available at Manybooks.net as well as the authour's own site and traditional formats, it's a trippy examination of what it is to be human. Sci-Fi in the truest sense - exploratory, and mind expanding.

It's difficult to review this novel after only reading it once - For me there was both lots to like and lots to dislike. The presentation especially fell into the latter category, mainly sticking to one viewpoint but wandering away from it almost at random to other characters, and slipping from story to sermon and back. Pieces of it (the cat for instance) just never quite clicked for me. Other pieces resonated strongly.

Somehow in the end if fell short of awesome, but you should read it anyway.… (mehr)

What makes a person a person? Is death really the end of existence? What is a mind, what an individual? Questions asked a thousand times and equally often tried to answer, but I really liked this take. The difference between man and machine becomes increasingly irrelevant when one merges with the other, as it's the case in this novel.

Unfortunately, the protagonist and POV character remains bland and lifeless - perhaps that's the nature of things as he's through most of the story just an observer, sent by the multinational intelligence corporation he works for to a space station to watch and review an experiment of the local AI Aleph and a dying man who's mind is in some form to be preserved. Instead to give us Gonzales' motivation and personality, Maddox rather loses himself in description and purple prose sometimes. On the other hand, the scenes with Aleph and the Collective as well as the development of Haymex and Mr. Jones was really well done.… (mehr)