Jason Sanford

This book was a really mixed bag, but I quite liked it. Most sff stories are more clearly scifi or fantasy; not this one. I'm pretty much a hard science fiction fan. Got this book in a bundle from the publisher and of course decided I might as well read it. What a surprise! Is there such a thing as hard fantasy? I guess there is now. Characters and action all interesting and kept me reading. What I had trouble with was that most of the actual reveals of what was going on kept coming out as characters being released from suppressed memories of the (sometimes very remote) past. I guess it's part of a series, as there were loose ends.… (more)

At some time in the future humanity had almost managed to breed itself out of existence - everyone is a gene-mix with animal genes spliced and the pure human genome had been eradicated. Add AIs in the mix and humanity was not what one would think of when saying the word today. The problem with all that splicing of course is that together with the wanted elements, unwanted ones sneaked in and humanity starting devolving. Some more time passed, a few wars followed and about 10,000 years ago an agreement was finally reached: humans who want to regain their humanity leave the cities and live in villages, overseen, helped and essentially controlled by AIs, the ones who rather be free join the Hunt and live in tribes in the wild areas (and give in to their animal natures occasionally) and human-AI hybrids, called plague birds, serve as judge, jury and executioner for humanity - always working alone, always having the last word. The goal of the three-fold system (as this was called) was to allow the remaining humans to regain their humanity back but 10 millennia later things had not changed from where the started. Except that now there is a weirdly powerful organization called the Veil - and they seem to be trying to exterminate the plague birds.

This is where the story starts. The beginning of the novel can be a bit confusing in places because until you get the framework, it can go in a lot of different directions. But let's meet our protagonist - Crista, a wolf-human hybrid (there are not real humans left anywhere so everyone is a hybrid of one sort or another), minding her own business in her village. Until a plague bird dies (injured by a Veil assassin) anyway - and the AI that used to be bonded with her ends up in Crista. And just like that our wolf-girl becomes a wolf-human-AI girl and off she goes into the world, chasing the Veil.

The AI that ends up part of her is called Red Day and unlike the wolf genes which are just part of what Crista is, he is an individual entity that just lives in her blood - and can read her mind and emotions. In some ways he is more of a parasite than a symbiont but either word applies really. Once he is in Crista, he starts updating her on the world - holding a lot of the information for when she is ready. Which annoys Crista most of the time so the two of them end up in something of a stalemate often (although as she is the living organism, she controls Red Day in most things which gets him as annoyed at her as she is at him - he is really not prepared to deal with a teenage girl). On their hunt they find all kinds of weird things - from a monastery which keeps all knowledge (and whose monks are cannibalistic monsters) to other AIs; from a monster who eats people (there is a lot of people eating in the novel...) to a sentient city and a girl that is anything but. And in the process Crista not only learns a lot about her own world but also about herself (both in expected ways and unexpected ones - because she was never just a wolf-girl).

It is a very gory novel, technically a science fiction one but leaning very heavily into horror (in some ways it is as much a hybrid as Crista is a wolf-human one). Some of it seemed to be there just for the sake of being there - but then I am not much of a fan of gory horror anyway. My bigger issue with the novel though is that it there are too many overpowered AIs in the mix and in order for the story to work, they had to either end up doing something weird or for a weakness to manifest. Which worked a few times but by the end of the novel it started feeling like a cheap way out (although the very end does tie things together nicely for most of the story threads - except for one which probably was left there to allow a sequel one day if one is desired). While this kind of story can work in the shorter lengths, in a full blown novel this inability to predict what the next weakness will be ends up being a bit of a distraction - it always ends up being what it is needed to be for the story to progress and that feels very Silver Age of comics kind of writing. Which is fun on its own but is not what the rest of the story called for...

This novel is actually an extension of a short story from 2010 (which I had not read) and I suspect that at least part of these issues do not exist there. I need to find that story but based on the description in an audio version I found of it, it seems to be just the turning of Crista into a plague bird (which is the start of the novel).

At the end, it is not a bad novel and I can see why it got its Philip K. Dick Award nomination. But it did not really hold completely together for me (even if I could not stop reading it - I wanted to know what happened next but I could have lived without some of the gory details and with less of the AIs playing coy and getting suddenly vulnerable). I've read 4 of the other nominees before I read this one (the only one I had not read yet is the winner) and this one is the weakest of them all.… (more)

Plague Birds is such a wild ride. I was torn between wanting to read it as fast as possible to find out what would happen and wanting to make it last. This book is worthwhile for the worldbuilding alone--the far-flung future setting populated by AI, automatons, and gene-spliced animal-human hybrids living in quasi-medieval villages feels truly unique and wholly engrossing--but it has so very much more than worldbuilding alone to offer.

While the immensely creative setting and all its details were particular highlights for me, I also very much liked most of those novel's characters. I appreciated the complexity of their relationships, and the space Sanford makes for multiple things to be true at once. The lack of straightforward answers available to most of the characters as they navigate the mysteries of right, wrong, and existence itself keeps things tense and gripping, and the grace the most sympathetic of the central characters afford one another as they learn to deal with impossible circumstances as best they can is portrayed in such a lovely and gentle manner.

Plague Birds is really just a fantastic book, and I'm so glad I got to read it. I'll be thinking about this one for ages, and I'll be looking forward to seeing what Sanford writes next.

I received a free e-ARC of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my review.… (more)