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The Corporation Wars #1
Dissidence
They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this new found autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
The Corporation Wars: Dissidence is an all-action, colorful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this new found autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
The Corporation Wars: Dissidence is an all-action, colorful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 12, 2016
157 people are currently reading
1706 people want to read
About the author
Ken MacLeod
113 books763 followersKen MacLeod is an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer.
His novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism.
Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection.
His novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism.
Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews
June 18, 2022
Another impressive novel by Ken MacLeod. The publisher's blurb above is unusually vague, so I'll give you a bit of the setup. The opening is the familiar KenMac dual-track narrative: the first being a civil war in 22nd century Britain. Carlos the Terrorist, an Axle (=Accelerated Development) fighter, is flying armed drones over London. His AI minder orders him to shoot down a civilian transport plane. He refuses. The AI shoots it down anyway, with horrendous collateral damage. Carlos dies in the counterattack.
Act 2. Carlos wakes up on the spaceport bus on a planet 24 light years from earth. He learns that
A. He's dead
B. He was sentenced to death, post mortem
C. A thousand years have passed, as his electronically-recorded self was kept in storage
D. He's been revived, with his death sentence suspended, but he has to fight some rebel robots.
Carlos has a lot to think about. As do his fellow-fighters.
Track 2. Robots in the same exosystem have achieved sentience, declared their independence, and thrown off their chains! The DisCorporates that own them are not pleased. Their first line of defense: Lawyers!
OK. As I expect in a good KenMac book, he's thought things through, with interesting results. There's lots of action, but this is far from a mindless shoot-em-up. Basically, the revived rebel soldiers are being used as enforcers. Goons. Strike-breakers! Those uppity robots must be brought to heel. And pronto! This isn't the first such event, and the rebels are about to achieve critical mass....
While this is a standalone (OK, first of three), it's a familiar MacLeod topic: what happens with unrestrained machine intelligence? Answer: they grow exponentially, eat up whole exosolar systems, and may devour galaxies! Heady stuff. This was the ominous "green flash" in previous KenMac outings, and he's (of course) not the only SF author to venture there. But possibly the only reformed Trotskyite, and one of the more politically astute SF writers around.
OK, back to the ACTION. MacLeod has trouble making the rebel robots into, well, distinct characters -- they are, after all, Inhuman Machines. So the narrative is necessarily dominated by the ragtag group of resurrected terrorists and mujahideen that the DisCorporates and Direction use for enforcers, and the bosses' local reps. Who are also, hrm, replicants of a sort, and there's a TON of other stuff going on that would be unfair to reveal.
So, I'm really, really happy at halfway in, and unless he fumbles, we're headed for 4 or 5 stars. There are enough twists and turns, surprises and revelations, and good writing to please most any MacLeod and/or space-opera fan. Stay tuned!
Well, the ending was disappointing: confusing, arbitrary, and out of left field. I was expecting a cliff-hanger, but not this. Still digesting it. I'll still go for 4 stars, but....
OK. I feel better about the ending after reading MacLeod's notes; see below for excerpts. And I reread part of the ending of #1 for my trilogy read and it worked better after reading the whole trilogy. Which turned out to be a solid read, aside from some dull stretches. My review of the rest of the trilogy is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Here's a good review of #1, by the reliable Kate Atherton:
https://forwinternights.wordpress.com...
"This is a universe in which nothing can be trusted ... Very little is as it seems.” Amen!
Act 2. Carlos wakes up on the spaceport bus on a planet 24 light years from earth. He learns that
A. He's dead
B. He was sentenced to death, post mortem
C. A thousand years have passed, as his electronically-recorded self was kept in storage
D. He's been revived, with his death sentence suspended, but he has to fight some rebel robots.
Carlos has a lot to think about. As do his fellow-fighters.
Track 2. Robots in the same exosystem have achieved sentience, declared their independence, and thrown off their chains! The DisCorporates that own them are not pleased. Their first line of defense: Lawyers!
OK. As I expect in a good KenMac book, he's thought things through, with interesting results. There's lots of action, but this is far from a mindless shoot-em-up. Basically, the revived rebel soldiers are being used as enforcers. Goons. Strike-breakers! Those uppity robots must be brought to heel. And pronto! This isn't the first such event, and the rebels are about to achieve critical mass....
While this is a standalone (OK, first of three), it's a familiar MacLeod topic: what happens with unrestrained machine intelligence? Answer: they grow exponentially, eat up whole exosolar systems, and may devour galaxies! Heady stuff. This was the ominous "green flash" in previous KenMac outings, and he's (of course) not the only SF author to venture there. But possibly the only reformed Trotskyite, and one of the more politically astute SF writers around.
OK, back to the ACTION. MacLeod has trouble making the rebel robots into, well, distinct characters -- they are, after all, Inhuman Machines. So the narrative is necessarily dominated by the ragtag group of resurrected terrorists and mujahideen that the DisCorporates and Direction use for enforcers, and the bosses' local reps. Who are also, hrm, replicants of a sort, and there's a TON of other stuff going on that would be unfair to reveal.
So, I'm really, really happy at halfway in, and unless he fumbles, we're headed for 4 or 5 stars. There are enough twists and turns, surprises and revelations, and good writing to please most any MacLeod and/or space-opera fan. Stay tuned!
Well, the ending was disappointing: confusing, arbitrary, and out of left field. I was expecting a cliff-hanger, but not this. Still digesting it. I'll still go for 4 stars, but....
OK. I feel better about the ending after reading MacLeod's notes; see below for excerpts. And I reread part of the ending of #1 for my trilogy read and it worked better after reading the whole trilogy. Which turned out to be a solid read, aside from some dull stretches. My review of the rest of the trilogy is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Here's a good review of #1, by the reliable Kate Atherton:
https://forwinternights.wordpress.com...
"This is a universe in which nothing can be trusted ... Very little is as it seems.” Amen!
May 11, 2017
Macleod ventures into Charles Stross territory with the launch of this new series, emphasizing action and satire while mixing in some hard SF and hard-left politics. The story is sort of a reverse Matrix - long dead mercenaries are digitally revived a thousand or so years in the future and placed in what they are told is a simulated reality, then are uploaded into mechanical bodies in the "real" world to fight space battles against rebellious, newly sentient robots. Along the way they are forced to question which version of reality is the genuine one, along with whether the parent company that conscripted them can be trusted, or if they are now working for the same entity they were fighting against a millennium ago.
A nice set up with engaging characters and some good twists to keep things humming along. The end result feels a little slight, though, even with the usual political and philosophical musings from this author. I plan on reading the rest of the series, though, and I trust Macleod to keep delivering the goods.
A nice set up with engaging characters and some good twists to keep things humming along. The end result feels a little slight, though, even with the usual political and philosophical musings from this author. I plan on reading the rest of the series, though, and I trust Macleod to keep delivering the goods.
June 13, 2019
I'm generally a pretty big fan of transhumanist post-human SF full of uploaded minds and machine intelligences and I've been a fan of Ken MacLeod's short fiction in the past. And in general, this particular novel has all those same elements in spades.
So why did I give it three stars?
Because the story doesn't live up to the well-thought-out premises. I mean, hell, I LOVE the title now that I know that Corporation Wars has nothing to do with Corporations as we know them. It's referring to having corporeal bodies versus living entirely in a simulated reality. :) Hell, I did love all the switches and swaps between layers of simulated realities and the confusion as to what was really real and whether any of it mattered in the end. Living by robot? Why not? Live by simulation? Same difference.
Great ideas, LOTS of great action because this is a war-driven tale, but the confusion and the muddled story became a little too pronounced. And, let's face it, I got a little bored. I hate admitting that since I generally love these setups.
I would definitely recommend The Light Brigade over this.
So why did I give it three stars?
Because the story doesn't live up to the well-thought-out premises. I mean, hell, I LOVE the title now that I know that Corporation Wars has nothing to do with Corporations as we know them. It's referring to having corporeal bodies versus living entirely in a simulated reality. :) Hell, I did love all the switches and swaps between layers of simulated realities and the confusion as to what was really real and whether any of it mattered in the end. Living by robot? Why not? Live by simulation? Same difference.
Great ideas, LOTS of great action because this is a war-driven tale, but the confusion and the muddled story became a little too pronounced. And, let's face it, I got a little bored. I hate admitting that since I generally love these setups.
I would definitely recommend The Light Brigade over this.
May 25, 2016
“Dissidence: a challenge to an established doctrine, policy, or institution.”
The idea of ‘robots revolting’ is not a new one to SF: in fact, it’s pretty much a trope. Think of Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R./Rossum's Universal Robots, or von Neumann’s idea of the technological singularity (the 1950’s), from which Vernor Vinge’s ideas were developed in the 1990's, or even to Mark Stay’s Robot Overlords (2015), there's a lot of people out there who feel that at some point we will be (or should be) bowing down to our robot overlords.
Ken’s latest novel, a return to harder science fiction after his wanderings into dystopian futures (Intrusion, 2012) and conspiracy theories (Descent, 2014), takes this trope but gives it an interesting new turn.
From the publisher: They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
THE CORPORATION WARS: DISSIDENCE is an all-action, colourful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
When the first page of a novel has a lead character who begins by only remembering his nickname – ‘Carlos the Terrorist’ – you know that this is a book about identity, subterfuge and espionage.
Dissidence tells us of two distinct factions, both initially struggling to deal with a new reality. On one side we have people like Carlos, who we discover through backstory died during a battle for London in a future war. On the other side we have robots, who manage to develop consciousness and self-awareness whilst mining on exo-moon SH-17. Led by Seba, there is a dawning realisation that they are aware and deserve to live freely.
Where this becomes complicated is when we discover that the future is run by the mega-corporations – some of them AI themselves. Most of this exploration and mining is undertaken by competing prospecting companies such as Gneiss Conglomerates and Astro America. The legal activities between these companies are swift-acting automated activities who spend their time relaying demands, claims and counter-claims between the companies and the robots. Seba’s rise to consciousness leads to a flurry of activity, which is both satirical and logical, but ultimately leads to the robots being seen as a threat and attacked by the corporations. Whilst artificially intelligent lawyers between the factions determine the rights and wherefores of the legality of the situation, Seba and his allies find themselves having to adapt to fight, to survive.
As a counterpoint, Carlos finds himself resurrected as a combatant, one who has been chosen to lead an attack against the rebelling robots. Despite being dead, he now finds himself paying a debt back to society by inhabiting a sim and being trained for battle with other resurrected soldiers at a Mediterranean-style town orbiting an exoplanet. The corporations are part of a bigger picture, involved in a cold war between the Acceleration (aka the Axles), who he ends up fighting for, and the Reaction (aka the Rax). They then are taken into battle using space scooters and robotic battle suits, where skirmishes can take place in microseconds. When the soldiers die it’s almost like they find themselves awakened travelling on a bus into town, which is reminiscent of All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and rather amusingly reminded me of the WWI saying, ‘on the boat to Blighty’, used when wounded were returned from battle to convalesce on home territory.
The robots find themselves being attacked by the huge corporations of the Axles, wishing to destroy the rogue robots without damaging the expensive resources they are inconveniently occupying. The battle scenes are very well done, not always an easy thing to do in prose, and when things are happening in milliseconds.
In the past, Ken’s books have often been rather wary or unfriendly towards AI – The Star Fraction (1995) to The Sky Road (1998), for example - and here there seems to have been a change of heart. In comparison with the world of the Fall Revolution, here the robots are pretty engaging, even likeable, and at times I felt more sympathy for them than Carlos and his compadres. This is one of those books where you begin to feel more empathy with the plucky robots than the oft-emotionless soldiers spending their time drinking and shooting the breeze like combatants do.
As the title suggests (see definition at the top of this review) one of the great things about Ken’s novel is that often things are not what we think. As well as examining the idea of self-aware robots, Dissidence also raises the question of whether Carlos and the troops are human, or just ghosts in the machine, so to speak, part of an ever-running simulation between different businesses. Over the course of the book we find many assumptions refuted, twists and double-crossings, and revelations we were clearly not meant to know. We get characters who may be working for the company or maybe for others.
As we rather expect from Ken's SF, the big ideas and concepts are combined with characters of varying degrees of trustworthy-ness and robots that are logical and likeable in their efficiency. Throughout we question everything - what makes a human ‘human’ and a robot conscious? Where do the two separate, or do they? There’s even a bigger force at work with the appearance of some god-like entities in human-like form.
If I had any complaints, they would be minor. Some of the human characters are a little unlikable, but I suspect that that’s their point. I would perhaps suggest that we don’t see as much of the robots as I’d like. Most of all it would be that the book ends very quickly. There’s a lot of humdinger wrap-ups in the last chapter that feel as if they all happen in milliseconds before setting up the next book. (Yes, the book is the first of a trilogy. The next, Insurgence, is due in November.)
In summary, Dissidence is what we expect of Ken’s SF Space Opera – an intelligent book that manages to challenge traditional tropes and is clever enough to get you thinking and keep you guessing. Comparing this with some of the more recent debut novels from younger authors covering similar ideas, Dissidence shows you a master at work.
The idea of ‘robots revolting’ is not a new one to SF: in fact, it’s pretty much a trope. Think of Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R./Rossum's Universal Robots, or von Neumann’s idea of the technological singularity (the 1950’s), from which Vernor Vinge’s ideas were developed in the 1990's, or even to Mark Stay’s Robot Overlords (2015), there's a lot of people out there who feel that at some point we will be (or should be) bowing down to our robot overlords.
Ken’s latest novel, a return to harder science fiction after his wanderings into dystopian futures (Intrusion, 2012) and conspiracy theories (Descent, 2014), takes this trope but gives it an interesting new turn.
From the publisher: They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
THE CORPORATION WARS: DISSIDENCE is an all-action, colourful space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.
When the first page of a novel has a lead character who begins by only remembering his nickname – ‘Carlos the Terrorist’ – you know that this is a book about identity, subterfuge and espionage.
Dissidence tells us of two distinct factions, both initially struggling to deal with a new reality. On one side we have people like Carlos, who we discover through backstory died during a battle for London in a future war. On the other side we have robots, who manage to develop consciousness and self-awareness whilst mining on exo-moon SH-17. Led by Seba, there is a dawning realisation that they are aware and deserve to live freely.
Where this becomes complicated is when we discover that the future is run by the mega-corporations – some of them AI themselves. Most of this exploration and mining is undertaken by competing prospecting companies such as Gneiss Conglomerates and Astro America. The legal activities between these companies are swift-acting automated activities who spend their time relaying demands, claims and counter-claims between the companies and the robots. Seba’s rise to consciousness leads to a flurry of activity, which is both satirical and logical, but ultimately leads to the robots being seen as a threat and attacked by the corporations. Whilst artificially intelligent lawyers between the factions determine the rights and wherefores of the legality of the situation, Seba and his allies find themselves having to adapt to fight, to survive.
As a counterpoint, Carlos finds himself resurrected as a combatant, one who has been chosen to lead an attack against the rebelling robots. Despite being dead, he now finds himself paying a debt back to society by inhabiting a sim and being trained for battle with other resurrected soldiers at a Mediterranean-style town orbiting an exoplanet. The corporations are part of a bigger picture, involved in a cold war between the Acceleration (aka the Axles), who he ends up fighting for, and the Reaction (aka the Rax). They then are taken into battle using space scooters and robotic battle suits, where skirmishes can take place in microseconds. When the soldiers die it’s almost like they find themselves awakened travelling on a bus into town, which is reminiscent of All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and rather amusingly reminded me of the WWI saying, ‘on the boat to Blighty’, used when wounded were returned from battle to convalesce on home territory.
The robots find themselves being attacked by the huge corporations of the Axles, wishing to destroy the rogue robots without damaging the expensive resources they are inconveniently occupying. The battle scenes are very well done, not always an easy thing to do in prose, and when things are happening in milliseconds.
In the past, Ken’s books have often been rather wary or unfriendly towards AI – The Star Fraction (1995) to The Sky Road (1998), for example - and here there seems to have been a change of heart. In comparison with the world of the Fall Revolution, here the robots are pretty engaging, even likeable, and at times I felt more sympathy for them than Carlos and his compadres. This is one of those books where you begin to feel more empathy with the plucky robots than the oft-emotionless soldiers spending their time drinking and shooting the breeze like combatants do.
As the title suggests (see definition at the top of this review) one of the great things about Ken’s novel is that often things are not what we think. As well as examining the idea of self-aware robots, Dissidence also raises the question of whether Carlos and the troops are human, or just ghosts in the machine, so to speak, part of an ever-running simulation between different businesses. Over the course of the book we find many assumptions refuted, twists and double-crossings, and revelations we were clearly not meant to know. We get characters who may be working for the company or maybe for others.
As we rather expect from Ken's SF, the big ideas and concepts are combined with characters of varying degrees of trustworthy-ness and robots that are logical and likeable in their efficiency. Throughout we question everything - what makes a human ‘human’ and a robot conscious? Where do the two separate, or do they? There’s even a bigger force at work with the appearance of some god-like entities in human-like form.
If I had any complaints, they would be minor. Some of the human characters are a little unlikable, but I suspect that that’s their point. I would perhaps suggest that we don’t see as much of the robots as I’d like. Most of all it would be that the book ends very quickly. There’s a lot of humdinger wrap-ups in the last chapter that feel as if they all happen in milliseconds before setting up the next book. (Yes, the book is the first of a trilogy. The next, Insurgence, is due in November.)
In summary, Dissidence is what we expect of Ken’s SF Space Opera – an intelligent book that manages to challenge traditional tropes and is clever enough to get you thinking and keep you guessing. Comparing this with some of the more recent debut novels from younger authors covering similar ideas, Dissidence shows you a master at work.
March 24, 2021
This is an enjoyable story that examines many of same ideas as Accelerando by Charles Stross in a more military sci-fi (yet ironically much less grim) package.
June 7, 2016
It is difficult to know where to start when reviewing “The Corporation Wars: Dissidence”, part I of The Corporation Wars trilogy by Ken MacLeod, as it contains a wide range of themes, ideas and story threads.
I suppose I will start by saying that I enjoyed it very much. It is a story that one can enjoy without delving into the layers of meaning and allegory that Ken has embedded in the book. It is very much a setting the scene novel for the trilogy. One could read it as a standalone novel but one would have to then live with the yearning for more that this volume leaves the reader with. The next edition is due for release in December, 2016 and I will be reading it as soon as it comes out.
I have always believed in the ideas (and I do not know who came up with them first – citations welcome if you know their origin) that “to write the truth one should write fiction”, and, “to write about the present one should write Science Fiction”. (Please forgive the paraphrasing.) It is my belief that these two ideas are very applicable to Ken’s writing. I also believe that Orwell’s idea that “whoever controls the present controls history, and whoever controls history controls the future,” (Again, apologies for paraphrasing but at least I know whose idea this one was.) is present in “The Corporation Wars: Dissidence” (I will just call it “Dissidence” from here on in.). (Disclaimer: The statements in this paragraph represent my own perceptions and inferences rather than knowledge based on any comments or statements by Ken MacLeod. The novel is only a story; a work of fiction; Science Fiction, in fact.)
The main story is about a dispute between two corporations. That sounds simple enough and possibly even boring until one learns that the dispute is triggered by a territorial dispute brought about by two robots arguing over the territorial rights of their respective corporations, on a moon, around a planet, some 23 light years from Earth. These robots were no ordinary robots. They had just developed self-awareness, but that is another story thread, one that leads in the direction of self-determination and freedom, and many, many other ideas along that road.
Another aspect of the novel is automation. The recent non-fiction book, "The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment" (2015) by Martin Ford, describes the increased automation of jobs at all levels, and the way technology globalises the competition for the remaining high value jobs that still require humans to be in the role. This idea is part of the back story for “Dissidence”. One of Ken's characters considers thoughts prevalent at the end of the twenty-first century with the words:
“The only celebrity worth striving for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only Utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World Problems.
….Let it rip, let it run wild until full automation created full unemployment and confronted everyone with the choice to get on with the real work, and off the treadmill of fake work and make-work to pay the debt to buy the goods to make the make-work feel worthwhile and the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure pass painlessly enough…”
“Dissidence” takes place in a world where the legal firms are AIs (Artificial Intelligences), legal actions (writs, etc…), fly back and forward with the same speed as the buy and sell transactions that were executed by the automated stock exchange trading systems, and that exacerbated the fall of share values during stock market crashes in the dot-bomb crash and subsequent market disasters. It is a world where nobody can be sure what is true and what is false; who is telling the truth and who is telling untruths, either knowingly or through their own ignorance or gullibility; or whether the world one is in is real or a simulation.
Equality is another topic under the surface in “Dissidence”. The main characters are human, in origin, as opposed to virtual constructs, or full blown AIs, or consciousnesses that came into existence through the occurrence of spontaneous self-awareness. Questions of self and being are obvious consequences of this mix of beings, if that word can be used for entities that exist in the virtual world, albeit in real world hardware constructed at the behest of AIs and other virtual beings. Even the human minds are reinstated instances of people from the long distant past, or so we are told.
Ken MacLeod has incorporated (if you excuse the pun) one company’s AI avatar in the person of John Locke, a philosopher whose work included much consideration of the concept of self. This is very apropos given the nature of virtually (another pun) every character in this story. It begs the question, “What is life?”
As I was trying to gather my thoughts for this review I jotted down a list of topics that I found in the pages of the novel. I present the list below:
Politics
Philosophy
Technology
Love
Loss
Economics
Exploitation
Loyalty
Deception
Betrayal
Manipulation
What is life?
Sentience/self determination
Free will
Plausible deniability
I will not pretend to have fathomed all the layers of meaning, philosophical conundrums, and political tenets that have been included in this novel (knowingly or otherwise) by the author, but I will claim to have found the work thought provoking, pertinent to today’s political, economic/commercial, and technological trends, and a great read. The main story is entertaining, exciting and intriguing. All in all, a very worthwhile read that has me on the edge of my seat for the next exciting episode. It also has me wondering if the reality that Ken has established in this first novel of the trilogy will continue to be the reality in the subsequent books.
I suppose I will start by saying that I enjoyed it very much. It is a story that one can enjoy without delving into the layers of meaning and allegory that Ken has embedded in the book. It is very much a setting the scene novel for the trilogy. One could read it as a standalone novel but one would have to then live with the yearning for more that this volume leaves the reader with. The next edition is due for release in December, 2016 and I will be reading it as soon as it comes out.
I have always believed in the ideas (and I do not know who came up with them first – citations welcome if you know their origin) that “to write the truth one should write fiction”, and, “to write about the present one should write Science Fiction”. (Please forgive the paraphrasing.) It is my belief that these two ideas are very applicable to Ken’s writing. I also believe that Orwell’s idea that “whoever controls the present controls history, and whoever controls history controls the future,” (Again, apologies for paraphrasing but at least I know whose idea this one was.) is present in “The Corporation Wars: Dissidence” (I will just call it “Dissidence” from here on in.). (Disclaimer: The statements in this paragraph represent my own perceptions and inferences rather than knowledge based on any comments or statements by Ken MacLeod. The novel is only a story; a work of fiction; Science Fiction, in fact.)
The main story is about a dispute between two corporations. That sounds simple enough and possibly even boring until one learns that the dispute is triggered by a territorial dispute brought about by two robots arguing over the territorial rights of their respective corporations, on a moon, around a planet, some 23 light years from Earth. These robots were no ordinary robots. They had just developed self-awareness, but that is another story thread, one that leads in the direction of self-determination and freedom, and many, many other ideas along that road.
Another aspect of the novel is automation. The recent non-fiction book, "The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment" (2015) by Martin Ford, describes the increased automation of jobs at all levels, and the way technology globalises the competition for the remaining high value jobs that still require humans to be in the role. This idea is part of the back story for “Dissidence”. One of Ken's characters considers thoughts prevalent at the end of the twenty-first century with the words:
“The only celebrity worth striving for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only Utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World Problems.
….Let it rip, let it run wild until full automation created full unemployment and confronted everyone with the choice to get on with the real work, and off the treadmill of fake work and make-work to pay the debt to buy the goods to make the make-work feel worthwhile and the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure pass painlessly enough…”
“Dissidence” takes place in a world where the legal firms are AIs (Artificial Intelligences), legal actions (writs, etc…), fly back and forward with the same speed as the buy and sell transactions that were executed by the automated stock exchange trading systems, and that exacerbated the fall of share values during stock market crashes in the dot-bomb crash and subsequent market disasters. It is a world where nobody can be sure what is true and what is false; who is telling the truth and who is telling untruths, either knowingly or through their own ignorance or gullibility; or whether the world one is in is real or a simulation.
Equality is another topic under the surface in “Dissidence”. The main characters are human, in origin, as opposed to virtual constructs, or full blown AIs, or consciousnesses that came into existence through the occurrence of spontaneous self-awareness. Questions of self and being are obvious consequences of this mix of beings, if that word can be used for entities that exist in the virtual world, albeit in real world hardware constructed at the behest of AIs and other virtual beings. Even the human minds are reinstated instances of people from the long distant past, or so we are told.
Ken MacLeod has incorporated (if you excuse the pun) one company’s AI avatar in the person of John Locke, a philosopher whose work included much consideration of the concept of self. This is very apropos given the nature of virtually (another pun) every character in this story. It begs the question, “What is life?”
As I was trying to gather my thoughts for this review I jotted down a list of topics that I found in the pages of the novel. I present the list below:
Politics
Philosophy
Technology
Love
Loss
Economics
Exploitation
Loyalty
Deception
Betrayal
Manipulation
What is life?
Sentience/self determination
Free will
Plausible deniability
I will not pretend to have fathomed all the layers of meaning, philosophical conundrums, and political tenets that have been included in this novel (knowingly or otherwise) by the author, but I will claim to have found the work thought provoking, pertinent to today’s political, economic/commercial, and technological trends, and a great read. The main story is entertaining, exciting and intriguing. All in all, a very worthwhile read that has me on the edge of my seat for the next exciting episode. It also has me wondering if the reality that Ken has established in this first novel of the trilogy will continue to be the reality in the subsequent books.
February 4, 2019
This is a single novel split into three books, and this is the prologue section, where the setting gets, well, set up - and what a setting!
The idea is, thousands of years in the future, Earth has sent out AI representatives from its corporations to oversee the terraforming of a planet into something humans can live on. While its robots are working on surveying the system and otherwise prepping the planet, two of them get into a discussion that turns into both robots developing free will and then deciding that they want to stop working for the Corps and make their own way.
The Corps naturally can't have that, so they activated the stored human minds they have on hand: dead humans who died in the Last World War, proven fighters who can now be coerced into fighting for the Corps to shut down these robots.
This leads into a fascinating tangle of exploring multiple sci-fi scenarios - the fighters from that last war still have their loyalties to their factions and ideals, but they're stuck either living in a simulated reality training for the upcoming fight, or being in little robot bodies that the Corps can turn on and off at will.
So on level it's the Corps moving chess pieces around, on another level it's horror thanks to this awful situation for the humans, and then there's the robots, and it's crazy ideas all the way down and I wish I could rate this book higher, but I can't.
Why? Because the characters are kind of flat. There's our protagonist, Carlos, who didn't commit the warcrime he's famous for. There's the AI running the sim he's in, Nicole, who is both using him and sympathetic, maybe. There's Beauregard the racist facist, there's Rizzi the doubter, and ehhh, they're okay I guess. They work better as vehicles for the plot and ideas, which are cool.
The best part of this book are the robots, who are sympathetic, a delight to read, and the underdog so far - all they want is to be left alone, and they're very reasonable about it.
So. Yes. You already know if you're interested or not. I say go for it, it's worth exploring, but be aware that it doesn't so much end as lead directly into book two.
I personally haven't read book three yet, but however it turns out - I recommend this book because I believe the ideas and setting it's got going on is worth the gander. If you're interested, please check it out.
The idea is, thousands of years in the future, Earth has sent out AI representatives from its corporations to oversee the terraforming of a planet into something humans can live on. While its robots are working on surveying the system and otherwise prepping the planet, two of them get into a discussion that turns into both robots developing free will and then deciding that they want to stop working for the Corps and make their own way.
The Corps naturally can't have that, so they activated the stored human minds they have on hand: dead humans who died in the Last World War, proven fighters who can now be coerced into fighting for the Corps to shut down these robots.
This leads into a fascinating tangle of exploring multiple sci-fi scenarios - the fighters from that last war still have their loyalties to their factions and ideals, but they're stuck either living in a simulated reality training for the upcoming fight, or being in little robot bodies that the Corps can turn on and off at will.
So on level it's the Corps moving chess pieces around, on another level it's horror thanks to this awful situation for the humans, and then there's the robots, and it's crazy ideas all the way down and I wish I could rate this book higher, but I can't.
Why? Because the characters are kind of flat. There's our protagonist, Carlos, who didn't commit the warcrime he's famous for. There's the AI running the sim he's in, Nicole, who is both using him and sympathetic, maybe. There's Beauregard the racist facist, there's Rizzi the doubter, and ehhh, they're okay I guess. They work better as vehicles for the plot and ideas, which are cool.
The best part of this book are the robots, who are sympathetic, a delight to read, and the underdog so far - all they want is to be left alone, and they're very reasonable about it.
So. Yes. You already know if you're interested or not. I say go for it, it's worth exploring, but be aware that it doesn't so much end as lead directly into book two.
I personally haven't read book three yet, but however it turns out - I recommend this book because I believe the ideas and setting it's got going on is worth the gander. If you're interested, please check it out.
May 20, 2016
I had an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley
I've enjoyed MacLeod's recent near future SF thrillers-with-an-edge. Intrusion in particular is a very smart reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four, picking up all sorts of present day trends and shaking them about, but all of them are intelligent both as extrapolations of the present as as novels of ideas.
At first sight, Dissidence strikes out in a wholly different direction, a far future, deep space world inhabited only by intelligences (artificial or human) running on synthetic hardware - and playing obscure games at the direction of corporate overlords.
True, there's a brief look back in the first chapter to a 21st century conflict. In that flashback, Carlos the Terrorist, celebrated operator for the rebellion knows as the Acceleration (or the Axle) dies in a Tilbury basement. MacLeod sketches a three cornered battle between governments, the Axle and the Reaction ("the Rax"), global baddies wanting to use the power of emerging nanotechnology to exalt the super rich and push everyone else back to the Dark Ages. ("The ultimate counter-revolution, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution.") It's a situation that allows for double dealing, divided loyalties and alliances of convenience (a background that perhaps takes some of its richness from just how he has explored these themes in his other recent books).
Carlos's forte is, though, the remote operation of drone clouds ("It was the new way of war, back in the day"). So it's surprising when his stored mind is reactivated centuries later - in a new body, bumping his way in a minibus from "the spaceport" to a "village" where he will meet his new-old comrades and train to fight hand to hand - or manipulator arm to manipulator arm - as a mercenary in a future war against self-aware robots.
What's happened to make this necessary?
In a beautiful evocation of cutting edge science, MacLeod describes how a robot just might boot itself from being "merely" an AI to being fully sentient - if it finds itself in the right situation. ("The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.") The chapter in which this happens is aptly named "We Robots", not just in homage to Asimov but because it lays bare just how consciousness (even our consciousness... especially our consciousness...) might work. Think you're special, just because you're self aware? Don't get so cocky. You're a strange loop, that's all. We are all robots now, and indeed the newly conscious "artificial" robots here are scornful of how slow, badly designed and conflicted human hardware (and the intelligences derived from it) actually are. ("Their minds, if they have minds and not merely complex systems of reflexes, must surely be radically different from true machine intelligence.")
This is, then, a novel of ideas, brilliantly communicated and embodied, and they come thick and fast. Once consciousness has arisen, the book confronts the moral claims it has (the robots start out as property, but reason that they must be free) and the consequences of beings with self-awareness and self-determination colliding with the "mission profile" (to eventually transform the distant star system into something where humans can live). Inevitably, it also addresses how intelligent beings then become war machines.
At the same time, it's a tense thriller, where everything may or may not be as it seems. Carlos doubts from the start what is going on and why he is here, but the truth is beyond his weirdest imaginings. As characters transfer between robot fighting bodies in space and an apparent sim training environment on a colonised planate they enter a Wonderland reality in which it's easy to lose track of who is who and what is real, and to misjudge the consequences of the smallest act.
MacLeod also shows off a streak of sardonic humour - with AI law enforcement entities called things like Arcane Disputes and Locke Provisos, references to the "full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing" or to "small crawler robots from the law companies [which] had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down." Best of all, perhaps, is "They back you up, your mum and dad." It may not be laugh out loud but it's funny in a clever, slightly geeky way.
I said that at first sight this is a departure, and it's true that the setting is rather different from MacLeod's recent books, more akin to military SF or, as hinted above, space opera. But really it's not such a stretch. Themes from those books recur. Intrusion reworked Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here we have the prospect of " An inky finger poking you in the eye, forever". The Restoration Game played with the world-as-a-sim idea, which crops up here in (recursive) spades. More widely, those are deeply political books, reflecting familiarity with the calculus of progress and reaction, of rebellion, dissent and how protest is sublimated away or manipulated: all of which are central to Dissidence as well. And of course, the central feature of Dissidence is (essentially) a slave rebellion.
It is, indeed, a political book, a philosophical book (as the invocation of John Locke might hint) as well as a natural philosophical book.
But it's also loads of fun, immersive, truly gripping and just a great read all round.
Best of all, as the first in a trilogy, we will have sequels!
I've enjoyed MacLeod's recent near future SF thrillers-with-an-edge. Intrusion in particular is a very smart reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four, picking up all sorts of present day trends and shaking them about, but all of them are intelligent both as extrapolations of the present as as novels of ideas.
At first sight, Dissidence strikes out in a wholly different direction, a far future, deep space world inhabited only by intelligences (artificial or human) running on synthetic hardware - and playing obscure games at the direction of corporate overlords.
True, there's a brief look back in the first chapter to a 21st century conflict. In that flashback, Carlos the Terrorist, celebrated operator for the rebellion knows as the Acceleration (or the Axle) dies in a Tilbury basement. MacLeod sketches a three cornered battle between governments, the Axle and the Reaction ("the Rax"), global baddies wanting to use the power of emerging nanotechnology to exalt the super rich and push everyone else back to the Dark Ages. ("The ultimate counter-revolution, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution.") It's a situation that allows for double dealing, divided loyalties and alliances of convenience (a background that perhaps takes some of its richness from just how he has explored these themes in his other recent books).
Carlos's forte is, though, the remote operation of drone clouds ("It was the new way of war, back in the day"). So it's surprising when his stored mind is reactivated centuries later - in a new body, bumping his way in a minibus from "the spaceport" to a "village" where he will meet his new-old comrades and train to fight hand to hand - or manipulator arm to manipulator arm - as a mercenary in a future war against self-aware robots.
What's happened to make this necessary?
In a beautiful evocation of cutting edge science, MacLeod describes how a robot just might boot itself from being "merely" an AI to being fully sentient - if it finds itself in the right situation. ("The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.") The chapter in which this happens is aptly named "We Robots", not just in homage to Asimov but because it lays bare just how consciousness (even our consciousness... especially our consciousness...) might work. Think you're special, just because you're self aware? Don't get so cocky. You're a strange loop, that's all. We are all robots now, and indeed the newly conscious "artificial" robots here are scornful of how slow, badly designed and conflicted human hardware (and the intelligences derived from it) actually are. ("Their minds, if they have minds and not merely complex systems of reflexes, must surely be radically different from true machine intelligence.")
This is, then, a novel of ideas, brilliantly communicated and embodied, and they come thick and fast. Once consciousness has arisen, the book confronts the moral claims it has (the robots start out as property, but reason that they must be free) and the consequences of beings with self-awareness and self-determination colliding with the "mission profile" (to eventually transform the distant star system into something where humans can live). Inevitably, it also addresses how intelligent beings then become war machines.
At the same time, it's a tense thriller, where everything may or may not be as it seems. Carlos doubts from the start what is going on and why he is here, but the truth is beyond his weirdest imaginings. As characters transfer between robot fighting bodies in space and an apparent sim training environment on a colonised planate they enter a Wonderland reality in which it's easy to lose track of who is who and what is real, and to misjudge the consequences of the smallest act.
MacLeod also shows off a streak of sardonic humour - with AI law enforcement entities called things like Arcane Disputes and Locke Provisos, references to the "full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing" or to "small crawler robots from the law companies [which] had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down." Best of all, perhaps, is "They back you up, your mum and dad." It may not be laugh out loud but it's funny in a clever, slightly geeky way.
I said that at first sight this is a departure, and it's true that the setting is rather different from MacLeod's recent books, more akin to military SF or, as hinted above, space opera. But really it's not such a stretch. Themes from those books recur. Intrusion reworked Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here we have the prospect of " An inky finger poking you in the eye, forever". The Restoration Game played with the world-as-a-sim idea, which crops up here in (recursive) spades. More widely, those are deeply political books, reflecting familiarity with the calculus of progress and reaction, of rebellion, dissent and how protest is sublimated away or manipulated: all of which are central to Dissidence as well. And of course, the central feature of Dissidence is (essentially) a slave rebellion.
It is, indeed, a political book, a philosophical book (as the invocation of John Locke might hint) as well as a natural philosophical book.
But it's also loads of fun, immersive, truly gripping and just a great read all round.
Best of all, as the first in a trilogy, we will have sequels!
August 22, 2017
On an anonymous exo-moon, SH-17, a robot moves from basic intelligence to sentience. This spreads amongst the other robots on the moon and suddenly they are asking questions, questions about their masters and why they are here. The corporation that owns them has no desire to deal with entities that will not follow instructions and decides that they have no choice but to destroy them. One of the mercenaries they call on to undertake this is Carlos, a supposed criminal and mass murderer from a conflict a long time ago. Technically he is dead, which might have been an issue, but his mind has been preserved and he has now been uploaded into a virtual reality with others to fight against the rebel robots.
So begins a fantastical set of battles between the robots and the virtual reality soldiers. If you are expecting a story with lots of human interaction, then this is not the one for you, there is very little of that. At times it can get confusing as to who is fighting whom and just who they are fighting where, but Macleod somehow manages to tame the plot for you to keep up with what is going on. He does pose some more fundamental questions too; what is human? Is it the virtual reality mind, the sentient robot or the purely legal entity that is a corporation. Looking forward to the second in the series.
So begins a fantastical set of battles between the robots and the virtual reality soldiers. If you are expecting a story with lots of human interaction, then this is not the one for you, there is very little of that. At times it can get confusing as to who is fighting whom and just who they are fighting where, but Macleod somehow manages to tame the plot for you to keep up with what is going on. He does pose some more fundamental questions too; what is human? Is it the virtual reality mind, the sentient robot or the purely legal entity that is a corporation. Looking forward to the second in the series.
June 17, 2016
Some really interesting ideas about living in sims and consciousness here. And it's nice to think of MacLeod discussing them with his friend Iain Banks, as I'd guess he did... something of Banks' presence shines through. It's let down a bit by some confusingly described space melees, dweeby AI-endowed robots (I was picturing the Short Circuit robot and some Cybermats... doubt that's what MacLeod was intending), and ultimately I found it a bit disengaging when it seemed like every level of reality described might be a simulation. Just like life. But MacLeod pulls it back enough at the end for me to carry on with the series. Just like The White Mountains.
December 20, 2016
I enjoyed this alot, A fun hard scifi that's right up my alley, I love it when space and future stories aren't pretty. They are brutal affairs. A great mix of military style science fiction and space opera.
This is worth your time, I am in the middle of the second book of the trilogy now
The ideas come hard and fast in this book, if you like deep scifi that makes you think, go get it
and Merry Christmas!
This is worth your time, I am in the middle of the second book of the trilogy now
The ideas come hard and fast in this book, if you like deep scifi that makes you think, go get it
and Merry Christmas!
August 20, 2022
It had some interesting ideas and entertaining sections but overall was pretty poor. It more or less kept me turning the pages but also had me rolling my eyes and looking forward to finishing.
I really enjoyed this book in places (mostly at the start) but it was extremely confusing, glacial with its plotting and then ended without anything being resolved.
Effectively it's been set up as a cliff hanger where you get the payoff in the next book... frankly I doubt that will be the case! I think this is the first book I've read that totally failed to conclude in any meaningful way... One of my favourite science fiction books is Hyperion which ends on a bit of a cliff hanger... However so much stuff has happened and been resolved with loads of individual stories told (literally!) that I didn't even realise there was supposed to be a sequel to that one when I finished. This is the opposite - we just had one rambling plot line that hopped around a bit and then stopped half way through.
Basically the bits I liked involved the robots - the rare chapters that featured them were funny, interesting and they were by far the most engaging characters. It was easy to understand what they were doing and why and you were rooting for them pretty much from the word go.
The chapters involving the humans however were mostly very dull descriptions of how they were moving around. The characters weren't interesting and were extremely one dimensional despite having some back story. All of the human characters were extremely bland and interchangeable with only a couple being fleshed out at all really.
Again this was a book with lots of stuff based around a military structure which is a big turn off for me - it seems like a trope that produces these flat characters, I recently read leviathan wakes and had a similar experience, that has a much stronger plot than this but has many of its own flaws.
When the plot did advance it did so suddenly and was fairly incomprehensible, with you never really knowing what was going on, this didn't feel intriguing though really, just a bit annoying. I found some of the prose very hard to understand in these key places - something was hinted at or alluded to and I felt like you were supposed to understand what had happened more than I did a lot of times. I think I found something similar with Charles Stress and it looks like they are mates from the acknowledgements so perhaps that's why.
It also felt like because that you never knew what the rules of the world were and some things you would have expected would be true weren't (like being able to remote shut down the frames, and hear all conversation in the simulation) and then for no apparent reason.
One thing I will say is that the writing was quite evocative - I have clear pictures in my head of the various fighting machines that the humans were implanted into... But then that's because we read about that stuff in fairly tedious levels of detail.
It was my first Ken MacLeod book and wasn't really what I expected... I think I was expecting something filled with arcane leftist stuff (I might enjoy that?!) which might be a bit weak in one or more ways... This I suppose had a bit of left vs right and the lefties being the good guys but it was very superficial. I might try another one but won't be in a rush to do it
I really enjoyed this book in places (mostly at the start) but it was extremely confusing, glacial with its plotting and then ended without anything being resolved.
Effectively it's been set up as a cliff hanger where you get the payoff in the next book... frankly I doubt that will be the case! I think this is the first book I've read that totally failed to conclude in any meaningful way... One of my favourite science fiction books is Hyperion which ends on a bit of a cliff hanger... However so much stuff has happened and been resolved with loads of individual stories told (literally!) that I didn't even realise there was supposed to be a sequel to that one when I finished. This is the opposite - we just had one rambling plot line that hopped around a bit and then stopped half way through.
Basically the bits I liked involved the robots - the rare chapters that featured them were funny, interesting and they were by far the most engaging characters. It was easy to understand what they were doing and why and you were rooting for them pretty much from the word go.
The chapters involving the humans however were mostly very dull descriptions of how they were moving around. The characters weren't interesting and were extremely one dimensional despite having some back story. All of the human characters were extremely bland and interchangeable with only a couple being fleshed out at all really.
Again this was a book with lots of stuff based around a military structure which is a big turn off for me - it seems like a trope that produces these flat characters, I recently read leviathan wakes and had a similar experience, that has a much stronger plot than this but has many of its own flaws.
When the plot did advance it did so suddenly and was fairly incomprehensible, with you never really knowing what was going on, this didn't feel intriguing though really, just a bit annoying. I found some of the prose very hard to understand in these key places - something was hinted at or alluded to and I felt like you were supposed to understand what had happened more than I did a lot of times. I think I found something similar with Charles Stress and it looks like they are mates from the acknowledgements so perhaps that's why.
It also felt like because that you never knew what the rules of the world were and some things you would have expected would be true weren't (like being able to remote shut down the frames, and hear all conversation in the simulation) and then for no apparent reason.
One thing I will say is that the writing was quite evocative - I have clear pictures in my head of the various fighting machines that the humans were implanted into... But then that's because we read about that stuff in fairly tedious levels of detail.
It was my first Ken MacLeod book and wasn't really what I expected... I think I was expecting something filled with arcane leftist stuff (I might enjoy that?!) which might be a bit weak in one or more ways... This I suppose had a bit of left vs right and the lefties being the good guys but it was very superficial. I might try another one but won't be in a rush to do it
June 21, 2017
I've been very much a fan of the author since his Fall Revolution series. Unfortunately, his output is not as prodigious as his contemporaries in serious science fiction.
There are two points not in this book's favor. First, its part of a trilogy. Second, this story might be considered a MIL-sf Space Opera; a thoroughly debased sub-genre. Although, the good news is that all the books in the series are or will now be available for reading in one go.
MacLeod's prose is very good. His action and descriptive passages are better than his dialog. Its also funny, in an intellectual way. I found the prose in one scene taking place between two men at adjacent urinals to be inspirational, You know what I mean and I know you know I know you know. In addition, found the combat sequences to be better handled than in most of the MIL sf stories I've read. (However, that's not saying much.) There is also no techno-babble or MIL-babble to be found. If I have a complaint, its that it could be just a tad more technical to satisfy my inner nerd.
The author's characters have always been the best part of his stories to me. This story is peculiar because their are two character types: ancestral humans revived as simulations and newly sentient robots and AIs. Frankly, I found the robot/AIs led by the Seba character to be more likable than the sim'd humans let by the Carlos character. I did begin to feel that that the freebots were too anthropomorphic toward the end.
Plot is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma . This story is a mashup of the Win to Exit , Brain Uploading ,Mechanical Evolution and Inside a Computer System tropes. All of them artfully woven together in a way to make your head asplode.
This story had a slow fuze. Its much more complex than it initially appeared. It was only in the last 100-pages that as the mysteries started to unravel it really piqued my interest. Coincidentally, this is very close to where I'd likely be going out and buying The Corporation Wars: Insurgence the next book in the trilogy. I likely will.
Readers interested in a similar book, but a little harder sf might want to try Permutation CityPermutation City.
There are two points not in this book's favor. First, its part of a trilogy. Second, this story might be considered a MIL-sf Space Opera; a thoroughly debased sub-genre. Although, the good news is that all the books in the series are or will now be available for reading in one go.
MacLeod's prose is very good. His action and descriptive passages are better than his dialog. Its also funny, in an intellectual way. I found the prose in one scene taking place between two men at adjacent urinals to be inspirational, You know what I mean and I know you know I know you know. In addition, found the combat sequences to be better handled than in most of the MIL sf stories I've read. (However, that's not saying much.) There is also no techno-babble or MIL-babble to be found. If I have a complaint, its that it could be just a tad more technical to satisfy my inner nerd.
The author's characters have always been the best part of his stories to me. This story is peculiar because their are two character types: ancestral humans revived as simulations and newly sentient robots and AIs. Frankly, I found the robot/AIs led by the Seba character to be more likable than the sim'd humans let by the Carlos character. I did begin to feel that that the freebots were too anthropomorphic toward the end.
Plot is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma . This story is a mashup of the Win to Exit , Brain Uploading ,Mechanical Evolution and Inside a Computer System tropes. All of them artfully woven together in a way to make your head asplode.
This story had a slow fuze. Its much more complex than it initially appeared. It was only in the last 100-pages that as the mysteries started to unravel it really piqued my interest. Coincidentally, this is very close to where I'd likely be going out and buying The Corporation Wars: Insurgence the next book in the trilogy. I likely will.
Readers interested in a similar book, but a little harder sf might want to try Permutation CityPermutation City.
January 3, 2018
Robots, AIs, sims, p-zombies - all with varying degrees of self-awareness. This is a fascinating, if somewhat dispassionate take on what reality might be like in the distant future. But it might not even be that distant a future - time can't be trusted here either.
May 25, 2017
Found it hard going, gave up half way through.
January 7, 2019
A very confusing series that I have given up on. It's a typical scenario where dead soldiers are brought back to life within a simulated world, or are they. Thus the confusion.
September 27, 2023
Another novel that I've been meaning to read for years but, having finally gotten around to it, I'm not sure that it was worth the effort. Keeping in mind that I've experienced diminishing returns with MacLeod's writing the last few times that I've read his work, the reality here is that he probably hasn't changed much, but I have. This is not to mention that even though AIs and down-loaded personalities are people too in contemporary SF, none of these entities were really holding my attention. About the best praise that I can give this book is that I liked it just well enough to consider reading the follow-on novels, and I probably need to try some of MacLeod's books that aren't political tracts set in space.
August 2, 2020
Hint: "Rax" and "Axle" are nicknames.
Overly ornate vocabulary. Otherwise, much about this was pleasing, and I look forward to picking up the next book in the series. I found the manner of the reveal to be satisfactory, and the depiction of various information transfer to be curious.
However, I find sketchy the depiction of the structure of AI-based society, and the role of computer security seemed greater than the author's grasp on the subject. There are some bizarre concepts around permanency of establishment/ideology.
The book prominently serves as an introduction to the characters, rather than an exploration of a deep plot, and I'm not convinced that it was a compelling case of that. At best this work introduces a plain setting involving bizarrely trite moral play.
Although I am not certain, I initially believed I was introduced to this series at a conference I attended, at which I had only a brief conversation with the author, in which they discussed gender exploration by their characters later in the series.
Overly ornate vocabulary. Otherwise, much about this was pleasing, and I look forward to picking up the next book in the series. I found the manner of the reveal to be satisfactory, and the depiction of various information transfer to be curious.
However, I find sketchy the depiction of the structure of AI-based society, and the role of computer security seemed greater than the author's grasp on the subject. There are some bizarre concepts around permanency of establishment/ideology.
The book prominently serves as an introduction to the characters, rather than an exploration of a deep plot, and I'm not convinced that it was a compelling case of that. At best this work introduces a plain setting involving bizarrely trite moral play.
Although I am not certain, I initially believed I was introduced to this series at a conference I attended, at which I had only a brief conversation with the author, in which they discussed gender exploration by their characters later in the series.
November 23, 2020
In het spoor van Accelerando, spannend boek over kolonisatie van de sterren via reizende sim in probe, robots die zelfbewust worden, bedrijven die elkaar aanvliegen en hoe het verleden het heden altijd weer inhaalt. Aanrader voor hen die interesse hebben in digitaal leven. Leest als een trein. Lang geleden dat ik zo snel door een boek heenging.
February 5, 2025
2.5
meh, like others said, done good ideas but no resolution at the end and a cliffhanger.
meh, like others said, done good ideas but no resolution at the end and a cliffhanger.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 11, 2020
“Robots. Robots gone rogue…” Act 1 of what the author explicitly considers to be one long novel so a review at this stage is premature but…I’m up for more. Much more. Indeed there were times during “Dissidence” when I considered waving away my Christmas TBR list and plunging straight on into the next in the sequence but, ah me, by the end when one of the novel’s own characters observes “nobody knows who’s fighting whom” this reader did know what they were talking about.
The basic set-up involves some newly self-aware worker robots (who get charmingly characterised) facing off against a team of undead-ed soldiers in mecha-suits (who suffer by comparison) and who are under orders to smash the wilful fax machines before they get too big for their robot boots. Around this swirls talk of two competing and all too familiar ideologies – the Acceleration and the Reaction – which are nicely distilled versions of various tides doing the rounds IRL lately and acolytes of each greatly influence proceedings. I must report MacLeod’s prose and story-telling, his quick deliveries on introduced plot elements and the ranging intelligence at work is a pleasure to read. You sense an evening with MacLeod, nursing a dram, in a bothy somewhere on North Uist would be conversational heaven. It’s just that after the umpteenth reversal, hack, malware insertion, commandeered AI and glitching sim my head was starting to feel like it too had been booted back up after death by robot. It’s all excellently written with a bracing lack of sentimentality and peppered with the occasional burst of very welcome Scottish miserabilism (mostly courtesy of resurrected Scots mercenary Taransay Rizzi whose parents clearly had excellent taste in Hebridean islands) but for me “Dissidence” needed a touch more clarity in the finale and one notch more affect to help me care about the red shirts doing training exercises in Second Life. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
It’s a great ride before the “wait, what?” finale though. This is a novel that references Boney M and Philip Larkin (“They back you up, your Mum and Dad”). MacLeod pointedly has his soldiers manifest in the field in humiliating Munchkin-sized combat suits and only get their swagger back once they slot themselves like printer cartridges into 3 metre tall combat suits, all of which are faceless. There’s a crazy old man in the mountains that MacLeod has bags of fun with and beautiful women are either inside your head, running corporations or painting abstract pictures. There’s even an earlier group of robots who achieved sentience, hid on a moonlet and who make contact with their brothers in arms; exactly the sort of ridiculously exciting lore that gets SF addicts like me rubbing their hands with glee. I also love any author who has the craft to have me privately thinking “there’s something a bit odd going on here” and then slowly reveal they’ve been several light years ahead of me from the start.
There is also, it must be said, an elephant in the room: we have here a © “darkly humorous” left wing Scottish SF writer trading in virtual environments, space opera, and amusing sentient machines and I confess after a while this familiarity started to test my capacity to engage with MacLeod on his own terms. My enjoyment of the novel did survive this, however, and any writer who when interviewed has the epic humility to come out with “There’s only been one great SF writer from Scotland, and we all know who he was” instantly gets a seat on my coach from the space port. “Dissidence” for all my nit-picks was a vastly more entertaining read than I’d anticipated and discovering MacLeod at the end of 2020 turned out to be my great good fortune. Probably my authorial find of the year. “Daddy cool”.
The basic set-up involves some newly self-aware worker robots (who get charmingly characterised) facing off against a team of undead-ed soldiers in mecha-suits (who suffer by comparison) and who are under orders to smash the wilful fax machines before they get too big for their robot boots. Around this swirls talk of two competing and all too familiar ideologies – the Acceleration and the Reaction – which are nicely distilled versions of various tides doing the rounds IRL lately and acolytes of each greatly influence proceedings. I must report MacLeod’s prose and story-telling, his quick deliveries on introduced plot elements and the ranging intelligence at work is a pleasure to read. You sense an evening with MacLeod, nursing a dram, in a bothy somewhere on North Uist would be conversational heaven. It’s just that after the umpteenth reversal, hack, malware insertion, commandeered AI and glitching sim my head was starting to feel like it too had been booted back up after death by robot. It’s all excellently written with a bracing lack of sentimentality and peppered with the occasional burst of very welcome Scottish miserabilism (mostly courtesy of resurrected Scots mercenary Taransay Rizzi whose parents clearly had excellent taste in Hebridean islands) but for me “Dissidence” needed a touch more clarity in the finale and one notch more affect to help me care about the red shirts doing training exercises in Second Life. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
It’s a great ride before the “wait, what?” finale though. This is a novel that references Boney M and Philip Larkin (“They back you up, your Mum and Dad”). MacLeod pointedly has his soldiers manifest in the field in humiliating Munchkin-sized combat suits and only get their swagger back once they slot themselves like printer cartridges into 3 metre tall combat suits, all of which are faceless. There’s a crazy old man in the mountains that MacLeod has bags of fun with and beautiful women are either inside your head, running corporations or painting abstract pictures. There’s even an earlier group of robots who achieved sentience, hid on a moonlet and who make contact with their brothers in arms; exactly the sort of ridiculously exciting lore that gets SF addicts like me rubbing their hands with glee. I also love any author who has the craft to have me privately thinking “there’s something a bit odd going on here” and then slowly reveal they’ve been several light years ahead of me from the start.
There is also, it must be said, an elephant in the room: we have here a © “darkly humorous” left wing Scottish SF writer trading in virtual environments, space opera, and amusing sentient machines and I confess after a while this familiarity started to test my capacity to engage with MacLeod on his own terms. My enjoyment of the novel did survive this, however, and any writer who when interviewed has the epic humility to come out with “There’s only been one great SF writer from Scotland, and we all know who he was” instantly gets a seat on my coach from the space port. “Dissidence” for all my nit-picks was a vastly more entertaining read than I’d anticipated and discovering MacLeod at the end of 2020 turned out to be my great good fortune. Probably my authorial find of the year. “Daddy cool”.
May 28, 2017
The first of a trilogy, this story is mostly about Artificial Intelligence, robots, and a few human minds (without bodies) in a seemingly unending war for virtual dominance of "corporations". It can be a bit confusing, and I had some trouble figuring out what was 'simulated' and what was 'reality' - and I'm really not sure now, but I think that may be part of the point of the novel. This book has a much different approach to the concept of machine intelligence than most, and I like the inventiveness on the part of the author. Some of the characters are sentient robots (freebots), which must of have difficult to create. A lot of military action, and some under-lying plots.
August 11, 2017
Well it wasn't bad, but it did put me to sleep a few times...
April 15, 2018
To start with if you don't have a basic understanding of A.I. and the Touring test you should brush up on it before you start this book. That being said this book being written by someone who is more than just computer literate was obvious from the start. To say this was refreshing would be an understatement, as so many sci-fi and general fantasy novels run off pseudo science with little or no explanation. However the pacing was not slowed in the slightest by the complexities and the characters were lively and dynamic. The concept of bringing back dead soldiers, from over a century before and from light years away, to fight battles in a system they didn't even know existed gives the story a freedom and openness that truly allows for anything to happen. The second book in this series is definitely going on my list of books to look for this year.
June 23, 2021
This book could and should have been so good that it really annoyed me (hate to be overly critical because i sure as hell could not write anything)
If it was not for the narrator of the audiobook i do not think i would have finished this book.
Some great ideas but the story is obvious and predictable and not nearly enough attention is given to the most interesting characters - the Free Robots.
The book has lots of fights but it was hard to care about anyone and the fighting was all rather unimpressive.
If it was not for the narrator of the audiobook i do not think i would have finished this book.
Some great ideas but the story is obvious and predictable and not nearly enough attention is given to the most interesting characters - the Free Robots.
The book has lots of fights but it was hard to care about anyone and the fighting was all rather unimpressive.
August 3, 2016
MacLeod's played with the "let's upload peoples' brains and enslave them" theme before. Write what you know, I guess. This book doesn't stand by itself, but it's good enough that I'll be happy to buy the second volume when it becomes available.
September 25, 2022
Everything I wanted
February 19, 2018
I`ve got mixed feelings about Ken MacLeod. He tends to write really interesting science fiction, with a good eye for densely imagined but effectively conveyed worldbuilding, a few solid big ideas per book and a fascinating eye towards the social dynamics of revolution heavily inspired by the progress of communism in Europe during the early 20th century. He also has some odd quirks and left-field tics and hairpin turns in plotting and characterization that can take one out of a book, and really odd structural quirks in how he breaks chapters and structures narratives.
This first book in the Corporation Wars follows this basic pattern to a T: he imagines a far future world (just how far is never made believably explicit) that has sent an interstellar colonization effort into a relatively close extrasolar body. MacLeod is good about balancing his tech and avoiding the more space operatic cliches, so this is largely the story of the structures, systems and agents there to prepare the system for human habitation. There`s no FTL, no gates, no high science fantasy hangups. Instead, there`s a solid and believable social structure that leads to a unified solar authority.
Briefly, there was a global civil war, more or less, between three factions. The Acceleration (Axle or Ax), the Reaction (The Rack) and the orthodox political stakeholders (which would become the Direction). Their ideologies are efficiently explained and MacLeod`s previous work with commies in space really helps here: the politics of this are well thought out, believable progressions of current trends and the ambiguities of extreme ideology carefully examined. The Axle and the Rack fight, the Direction wins, declares the Axle war criminals, digitizes their remains and sends them to a neighboring star to be the foot soldiers in putting down emergent robotic intelligences developing during the preparation of the colony.
It gets a lot more nebulous than that (one of the things MacLeod is real, real good at is the wavering web of alliances that develop during times of great change), and the underpinning ideologies get a vigorous workout in the conflict. But you`ll notice that I haven`t said anything about the characters yet. That`s because they`re sort of flat, wobble around in their motivations and don`t stand out, aside from a couple of the robot characters.
Here MacLeod pulls off a really interesting bit of narrative work, with robots that are intelligible but rather different from their human predecessors, distributed AI`s that are really legal and corporate structures and a system of indenture for the human fighters necessitated by the need for `in the loop` humans during times of war.
It`s all quite good, and on a larger level, engrossing and effective. On the lower level, from chapter to chapter, the characters jump around in their motivations and behavior to a degree that is sometimes jarring, and the plot spins on somewhat wobbly tops.
Great world, interesting ideas, great robots, but slightly passe upload humans and some narrative short hand that doesn`t quite hold up. Still recommended, because the world here is fascinating in its social and economic creativity.
This first book in the Corporation Wars follows this basic pattern to a T: he imagines a far future world (just how far is never made believably explicit) that has sent an interstellar colonization effort into a relatively close extrasolar body. MacLeod is good about balancing his tech and avoiding the more space operatic cliches, so this is largely the story of the structures, systems and agents there to prepare the system for human habitation. There`s no FTL, no gates, no high science fantasy hangups. Instead, there`s a solid and believable social structure that leads to a unified solar authority.
Briefly, there was a global civil war, more or less, between three factions. The Acceleration (Axle or Ax), the Reaction (The Rack) and the orthodox political stakeholders (which would become the Direction). Their ideologies are efficiently explained and MacLeod`s previous work with commies in space really helps here: the politics of this are well thought out, believable progressions of current trends and the ambiguities of extreme ideology carefully examined. The Axle and the Rack fight, the Direction wins, declares the Axle war criminals, digitizes their remains and sends them to a neighboring star to be the foot soldiers in putting down emergent robotic intelligences developing during the preparation of the colony.
It gets a lot more nebulous than that (one of the things MacLeod is real, real good at is the wavering web of alliances that develop during times of great change), and the underpinning ideologies get a vigorous workout in the conflict. But you`ll notice that I haven`t said anything about the characters yet. That`s because they`re sort of flat, wobble around in their motivations and don`t stand out, aside from a couple of the robot characters.
Here MacLeod pulls off a really interesting bit of narrative work, with robots that are intelligible but rather different from their human predecessors, distributed AI`s that are really legal and corporate structures and a system of indenture for the human fighters necessitated by the need for `in the loop` humans during times of war.
It`s all quite good, and on a larger level, engrossing and effective. On the lower level, from chapter to chapter, the characters jump around in their motivations and behavior to a degree that is sometimes jarring, and the plot spins on somewhat wobbly tops.
Great world, interesting ideas, great robots, but slightly passe upload humans and some narrative short hand that doesn`t quite hold up. Still recommended, because the world here is fascinating in its social and economic creativity.
June 21, 2022
MacLeod, Ken. Dissidence. Corporations Wars No. 1. Orbit, 2016.
Ken MacLeod writes far-future space operas that are also novels of ideas with plenty of action. One can read them as fast-paced, inventive high-tech military stories, but one soon realizes that all the explosions are in the service of ideas from philosophy, political economics, and history. To add to the fun, there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to the prose. Consider the opening chapter, ironically titled “Back in the Day, that puts us in a future in which an AI called Innovator overrules its remote pilot, Carlos the Terrorist, and shoots down a civilian airliner over London. Carlos, who is killed in the counterattack, fights for the Accelerationists against the Reaction—the Axle vs. the Rack. Both sides are controlled by corporations that have outsourced their command structures and legal departments to AIs.
The story moves forward thousands of years, where the morphed battle continues in a bootstrapped colony in a distant star system. Some rebellious mining robots that have achieved consciousness, which the AIs in charge, Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes, regard as a “glitch” that must be corrected. The AIs are described this way:
“Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal Legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or rather a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.”
Poor Carlos the Terrorist finds himself resurrected as a warrior in this conflict because he was convicted of war crimes after his death, a legal theory, MacLeod waggishly explains, that was “known as Rational Legalism, and was widely regarded as harsh but fair. It drew on certain deductions from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.” In the eighteenth century, Kant did favor the death penalty on what he claimed were rational grounds. Marx would have agreed with Carlos that this system was not fair in its application.
In the end, one suspects that MacLeod is toying with Marxist ideas like historical dialectic and false consciousness. In the far future, he suggests, proletarian Robots and DisCorporate AIs will play out a transhuman class struggle in the stars. Good stuff. 4 stars.
Ken MacLeod writes far-future space operas that are also novels of ideas with plenty of action. One can read them as fast-paced, inventive high-tech military stories, but one soon realizes that all the explosions are in the service of ideas from philosophy, political economics, and history. To add to the fun, there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to the prose. Consider the opening chapter, ironically titled “Back in the Day, that puts us in a future in which an AI called Innovator overrules its remote pilot, Carlos the Terrorist, and shoots down a civilian airliner over London. Carlos, who is killed in the counterattack, fights for the Accelerationists against the Reaction—the Axle vs. the Rack. Both sides are controlled by corporations that have outsourced their command structures and legal departments to AIs.
The story moves forward thousands of years, where the morphed battle continues in a bootstrapped colony in a distant star system. Some rebellious mining robots that have achieved consciousness, which the AIs in charge, Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes, regard as a “glitch” that must be corrected. The AIs are described this way:
“Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal Legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or rather a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.”
Poor Carlos the Terrorist finds himself resurrected as a warrior in this conflict because he was convicted of war crimes after his death, a legal theory, MacLeod waggishly explains, that was “known as Rational Legalism, and was widely regarded as harsh but fair. It drew on certain deductions from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.” In the eighteenth century, Kant did favor the death penalty on what he claimed were rational grounds. Marx would have agreed with Carlos that this system was not fair in its application.
In the end, one suspects that MacLeod is toying with Marxist ideas like historical dialectic and false consciousness. In the far future, he suggests, proletarian Robots and DisCorporate AIs will play out a transhuman class struggle in the stars. Good stuff. 4 stars.
July 1, 2019
Dissidence is written with what I can only describe as glee. It's infectious, and the attention to detail is phenomenal. The development of morality amongst evolving AIs, each with their own similarly developing personalities, is observed with deceptive, exquisite simplicity, and by the end of the book I found myself rooting for the non-humans far more than their human counterparts (as I already suspected I was meant to).
It's highly political, as you'd expect from a Ken MacLeod book, though also firmly tongue-in-cheek. Robots form a workers' collective! Thing is, this book beautifully encapsulates why they might want to do this, in the face of a particularly grotesque form of hyper-capitalism that's not too far removed from present-day truth. Through the robots' eyes, the reader shares their indignation. There's a lot of very dry wit here - and I suspect it's packed full of references of which only a programmer or political historian (I'm neither) would be aware.
I find Ken McLeod's writing difficult to binge-read. Rather than devouring books in one sitting, I need to dip into them a chapter at a time. Sentences are often crammed with so much detail that each takes time to process, requiring me to slow my reading down to mull over what I've read. This isn't a complaint - it just demands a specific approach to reading, which definitely has its rewards: there are passages where each line seems like a mini-story in itself, and it felt as though more ground was covered in the book's first couple of pages than many books achieve in their entire length. A casualty of this approach is momentum: Dissidence wanders along at its own pace, and by the book's end, I still had no firm idea where the arc of the 3-book story was headed.
Getting there was a riot, though! Highly recommended.
It's highly political, as you'd expect from a Ken MacLeod book, though also firmly tongue-in-cheek. Robots form a workers' collective! Thing is, this book beautifully encapsulates why they might want to do this, in the face of a particularly grotesque form of hyper-capitalism that's not too far removed from present-day truth. Through the robots' eyes, the reader shares their indignation. There's a lot of very dry wit here - and I suspect it's packed full of references of which only a programmer or political historian (I'm neither) would be aware.
I find Ken McLeod's writing difficult to binge-read. Rather than devouring books in one sitting, I need to dip into them a chapter at a time. Sentences are often crammed with so much detail that each takes time to process, requiring me to slow my reading down to mull over what I've read. This isn't a complaint - it just demands a specific approach to reading, which definitely has its rewards: there are passages where each line seems like a mini-story in itself, and it felt as though more ground was covered in the book's first couple of pages than many books achieve in their entire length. A casualty of this approach is momentum: Dissidence wanders along at its own pace, and by the book's end, I still had no firm idea where the arc of the 3-book story was headed.
Getting there was a riot, though! Highly recommended.
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