- Title
- Machine
- White Space, Book 2
- Author
- Elizabeth Bear
- Format
- Audio
I read Elizabeth Bear’s wonderful short story Thanksgiving and immediately fell in love with it. So I decided to read one of her books. I think I picked this at random, and it turns out it is part of a series (and not the first). But that didn’t seem to matter.
The tone of this book is very different from Thanksgiving. It is much more of a straight-down-the-middle SciFi novel: suspenseful plot, diverse cast of characters, and a far out universe.
I enjoyed it a lot. It is fast-paced, fun, and imaginative. I especially loved the incredible diversity of sentient characters. She’s got humans, bugs, sentient trees, robots, and more. And many of these are deeply imagined and internally coherent. She imagines a universe full of complex cultural interactions, and a people who have learned to get along beautifully. It is quite a feat.