vN / Madeline Ashby
“Ashby’s debut is a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly
philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race.
It is often profound, and it is never boring.” – Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
“Picks up where Blade Runner left off and maps territories Ridley Scott barely
even glimpsed. vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI
since Asimov kicked it all off with the Three Laws.” – Peter Watts
“VN fuses cyberpunk with urban fantasy to produce something wholly new.
There’s a heavy kicker in every chapter. Zombie robots, vampire robots,
robots as strange and gnarly as human beings. A page-turning treat.”
- Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware Tetralogy
One of IO9.com’s 10 Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2012
About the Book:
Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot.
For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.
Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she’s learning impossible things about her clade’s history – like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed… Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.
File Under: Science Fiction [Von Neumann Sisters | Fail Safe Fail | The Squid & the Swarm | Robot Nation]
vN (Book I of The Machine Dynasty)
Science Fiction
Cover: Martin Bland
Praise and Reviews:
“Will AIs be objects, or people? Caught between the category of human and everything else, we can’t think about the very real entities that inhabit — and will inhabit — the excluded middle. Madeline Ashby’s done more than just think about that territory; she’s made it her home. Person; object; we need new words for things that are neither — and in vN, Ashby provides them.”
– Karl Schroeder
“In Ashby’s expert hands vN cuts a painful incision into the emotional complexity of oppression in our society, and the way love can feed the worst kinds of hate. vN is a powerful novel and a fine exemplar of exactly the perspectives chauvinist SF so often stifles.”
- Damien G. Walter Women Authors in Hard SF, The Guardian
“VN is a clever book with a wonderful ending by a writer who is well versed in AI technology, who can evoke sympathy with a few well-turned phrases and tells a satisfyingly complex story.”
- Eric Brown, The Guardian
“vN is a strikingly fresh work of mind-expanding science fiction.”
- Charlie Jane Anders, IO9.com
“What’s really fascinating about vN is the way it portrays a fairly complex future almost exclusively from the limited perspective of an immature and confused non-human character. There’s a future history hidden in these pages, but you have to glimpse it through eyes that can’t just can’t process all of it yet. You experience Amy’s growth while she learns the true nature of the world she somehow ended up in.”
- Stefan Raets Tor.com
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