Wake, Wary, Worrier to Warrior? Dustin (Dusty) Gordon likes to keep to himself, as a perpetual outsider. Born on Mars he has a low gravity physique and can’t measure up to the blue-collar guilders born on Earth – let alone his famous parents. Although he does have a kind-of-home at The Stardust, where he has three kind-of-friends who are outcasts like him: Tommy, Ellen and Ilia. Mars is at the brink of civil war. Chief Operating Officer (COO), Randall Skinner has installed an illegal Multimodal Artificial General Intelligence Quantum computer (MAGIQ), and has instigated a program of upgraded brain implants to allow MAGIQ to control the workers. The soon-to-be jobless guildmembers are outraged that they are expected to rain their own MAGIQ-controled replacements before being shipped back to Earth. The most militant of the guilds is the Miners and Tunnelers (M&T), who have embarked on a program of sabotage – the other guilds might prefer to strike, but their contracts forbid it – and M&T doesn’t like any talk of compromise or negotiation. Then Dusty comes across M&T enforcers in the process of evicting Tommy through an airlock — locking is their solution for dealing with those they see as taking management’s side. As Dusty comments: “It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s a matter of being right or dead.” Soon Dusty is the one lying comatose, hypothermic and hypoxic. But the neuroimplant surgeon tries some experimental surgery with five times the nanites used for the implants – and they get more than he bargained for. Somehow his brain links with MAGIQ’s and both the M&Ts and the COO see him as a threat… The backdrop to the story is a pretty familiar mining-the-solar-system theme, with tensions between Earth and Mars, as well as between the guilds and with management. The emergent cybernetic mind reminds me of Robert J Sawyer’s Wake, Watch, Wonder trilogy. Author, Brian H Roberts shows that he’s done plenty of research – and reveals it appropriately without too much infodump, and with accurate terminology rather than scifi technobabble. I wish I’d thought of the MAGIQ acronym – it’s perfect! Overall this a great bit of near future hard scifi, without being too hard to read. There is plenty of action, and some troublesome romance. The book is a solid contribution to the solar system mining subgenre, as well as being a provoking setup for the exploration of man-AGI symbiosis. Solidly recommended to those who like their scifi close to home, realistic, with a message about who we are as humans, and what we might become. I'll look forward to the sequels!

How would you react if you woke up from a tragic accident and suddenly began hearing a voice inside your head responding to your vocal questions? What if suddenly you could solve intense calculus equations when math was always a difficult subject in school? In Wetware: Of Two Minds by Brian H. Roberts, Dusty Gordon manages to take this in stride and learn how to move forward with his life from here on out. As Ep City, a colony of workers on Mars, is in unrest, Dusty utilizes his newfound connection to try to help his fellow blue-collar workers keep their jobs and their lives. Will the AI take over? Or will it actually be helpful? How will everyone else react to this “new” Dusty? AI has become a big topic of discussion in the past year. However, it has always been something talked about in science fiction novels in some way or another. Most novelists write about all the ways AI is evil and will one day take over. To be completely honest, I am one of those who see only bad potential in AI, as I am big on human interaction. In Wetware, however, Roberts takes a different approach. While I will not go into too much detail, as I do not want to spoil it, one thing that is very obvious from both the synopsis and early on in the book is that the AI, MAGIQ, in this book, is not sentient until it is attached to a human brain. This creates a very unique and different take on the way that an AI may interact with humans and the world around it. The city we are in is set in a crater on Mars. They are there to mine for different types of materials that can be sent back to Earth. I really loved the description of Ep City and how it slowly expanded. Its description fits that of a place built specifically for the purpose of housing workers. While there are “watering holes” and such for the workers to frequent after hours, they all have small apartments with just the basics that they need. Even the color schemes of the place are done in a way that is very utilitarian. I appreciated this because it was easy to picture, but it also just made sense. When it came to character interaction, Roberts did a good job of giving explanations for people’s different reactions to things. While I do wish we could have had a bit more bonding between some of the friendships, there was still enough information to be able to infer the depth of them. There was a bit of romance, but it was not fully dived into, as the main focus seemed to be more on Dusty and MAGIQ. Wetware by Brian H. Roberts is an excellent addition to the science fiction world! I always love reading new and unique ideas, and he definitely managed that in this book. As far as content, there is some cursing, a closed-door bedroom scene, and some mentions of violence (not super descriptive). I would definitely recommend this to any science fiction fans, especially those who appreciate a good AI novel!