Didn't really work for me, there's slightly odd writing style especially at the beginning which takes a bit of getting used to, and then there's a weird mix of heavy handed social commentary (which in the right manner is what SF is about) and light/trivial characterisation which doesn't sit well. I've certainly read much worse, and it's possible this just something that hasn't aged well, but i'm not inclined to continue the series or explore the author's other works.

Sam used to work for a company specialising in enhanced bio-materials, but left when her ethics clashed with the direction the company was going. She'd been one of the eminent technologists in her field, and so far ahs been enjoying a quite life away from it all. (this is already unbelievable no scientist of calibre likes not working in the labs). She finds an overtly attractive man washed up amid the storm debris on her local beach. He slowly regains consciousness and discovers he is mostly android something she'd thought nowhere near capable of being produced. He'd been fleeing a master-criminal bent on enslaving all AI controlled bodies, so she calls one of her former colleagues to arrange a safe house, but they are kidnapped on route.

What follows are several more escapes and captures by the various sides all bent on using the new discoveries.- often somewhat too complicated with obscure motivations of AIs only partially present and only able to influence some people and some technology. It's not at all clear why Sam wouldn't have known how advanced AIs has become, or why the various factions hadn't already developed themselves. It all seems to boil down to how well Turner can control/edit/constrain his own processes/desires and we're not given any insight into his head to observe this, so it comes across as a bit arbitrary.

The basic premise of how human can/should a sentient AI be is interesting but not answered, the somewhat abrupt and creepy romance of Sam by Turner is trivial and not enlightening. It would have been a better book if the AI had understood courting from it's human beginnings as this over-rode and ignored the otherwise possibly insightful points raised.

A tricky concept with good imagination but not quite well enough executed. ( )

I don't care what everyone else says-I enjoyed this book.

Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro

I picked this e-book up in the kindle version- probably from the publisher-I don't see it on Amazon. I'm familiar with Catherine Asaro and had not yet read any of her novels.

This novel reminded me of some of Heinlein's middle years - you know after the juvenile and after stranger in a strange and before the really wild stuff he wrote near the end. This is more on par with Friday.Except that the female character in Sunrise Alley has more depth.

Samantha Bryton is a rich intelligent woman who, after having suffered the loss of her father and her husband, has become a bit of a recluse. In the year 2033 where everyone is connected by what they refer to as the local mesh, Sam is trying to shed most of technology. This is a difficult thing for her since she's a leading figure in the development of EI Intelligence and EI Psychology. To say nothing of the basement lab she has in her seclude home.

We find Sam on a secluded beach near her home after a storm jogging and checking out storm damage while remaining as disconnected as she can from the mesh. She discovers first a shipwreck and then the man who calls himself Turner. It takes Sam a while and much conversation before she discovers that Turner is and EI - sentient machine that's been hybrid into a deceased human.

One quibble right away might be that this story early on takes the shape of a slightly contrived plot.

Here we have Turner an EI who, though he died and someone named Charon has altered his brain with an EI, claims he is still Turner Pascal the human.

Since Sam has been a staunch supporter of the notion that EI intelligent machines are sentient and should be accorded the same rights as people this seems all too convenient.

But the contrived nature of this story is also a plot point so it works as it is.

There are a number of twists and turns in the plot and plenty of thrills and danger to match many Hitchcock suspense films. There are some places where are hero's get into tight spots and squeak out of them rather conveniently - again a plot device and that becomes clear soon enough. What isn't clear is the why and that keeps the story going.

The evil character of Charon is shrouded in mystery and there are some twists and turns here but there are plenty of clues about this to make any final reveals work well.

It was an easy read for me-one sitting- and anyone who enjoys science fiction, suspense and even romance will find plenty to keep them involved.

J.L. Dobias
( )

Sunrise Alley is a near future cyberpunkish romance featuring cybernetics expert Samantha "Sam" Bryton and recently dead human-machine hybrid Turner Pascal as the focal couple. The story follows two broad and mostly intertwined plots, the first involving Turner's flight from and conflict with the shadowy villain Charon, and the second involving Sam and Turner's budding romance which is complicated by the fact that Turner may not be human, and at many turns clearly does not behave like a human, points that are clearly difficult ones for Sam to overcome. Connecting the two plots is the question of whether Turner is a human or a machine - is he merely property, as Charon regards him, or is he a sentient and free-willed individual with the right to be treated as such, as Turner himself insists.

The story starts with Bryton living in semi-isolation in her cabin and its beach front property, having given up a high paying job as a developer of AIs and EIs ("Artificial Intelligences" which are capable of independent thought, but are not sentient, and "Emerging Intelligences", which are independent and at least plausibly sentient) over ethical concerns. While she is walking on her beach, a half-dead unconscious man washes by, who she promptly rescues. She quickly learns his name is Turner Pascal, and he was not merely half-dead, but he had recently recovered from being wholly dead. And then she learns that he was reconstructed as a cyborg human-machine hybrid by an insane and cruel genius Pascal can only identiy as Charon, and that Turner intentionally sought Sam out after escaping from his imprisonment because she had been publicly sympathetic to the rights of EIs in the past.

But Turner insists that he is neither an AI or an EI, and is not a human-form android, or, in the vernacular of the story, a "forma", but is rather a human and fully entitled to all of the rights of a human. After some negotiating, Sam agrees to try to get Turner to safety and first contacts an academic friend of hers with expertise in EIs as well as an Air Force General who has been a kind of surrogate father to her after her own father's death and who happens to be in a command of the Air Force that is tasked with dealing with issues related to artificial intelligence. But no sooner than they leave to travel to the airport in Sam's souped up car, but they find themselves pursued by unknown forces, presumably working at the behest of Charon, who Turner is convinced can track the entire world "mesh" (a sort of advanced form of internet that permeates the daily lives of just about everyone on the planet) and thus was able to locate him as soon as Sam began making calls about him. Much of the tension in the book is driven by the unknown nature of Charon - neither Turner nor Sam know who Charon is (in fact, Sam has never heard of him, which surprises those she comes into contact with, and becomes a minor, although not very convincing plot point later in the book), and neither know exactly how long his reach is. Because of this, Sam and Turner never know who to trust, as anyone they try to seek aid from could be the nefarious Charon, even those that Sam thinks are her closest friends.

Though Charon is a background menace for much of the book, lurking in the shadows and operating through others, it is his relationship with Turner, contrasted with the developing relationship between Turner and Sam that drives the interesting question of the book. Turner is legally dead. Much of his body has been replaced by cybernetics. His vastly increased power needs are satisfied with an implanted microfusion reactor. His brain has been replaced by a distributed network of neural circuitry. In short, just about the only parts of Turner that remain "Turner" from before his death are his memories. So the obvious dilemma is how much of a man can be replaced before he is no longer a person? Charon seems to consider Turner to be property, whereas Sam in interacting with Turner comes to regard him as not merely a person, but as a potential partner. The only real weakness in this storyline is that Sam's infatuation with Turner seems somewhat less than convincing - other than the fact that Sam thinks Turner is pretty, and he makes for a fascinating science project for her, there seems to be little connection on a romantic level between the two characters.

And in a world in which we can already implant devices to keep our hearts going, and replace lost limbs with electronic ones responsive to nerve impulses these sorts of questions are likely to loom large. I have no idea if we will ever be able to replace a human brain with a copy that has been placed into some sort of computer driven memory, but it is not entirely implausible. And then those who believe in qualia or other theories of transcendent consciousness will have the dilemma of whether someone whose claim to identity rests upon the stored memories of a person is still that person, or whether something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from biological machine to electronic machine. And of course, that's exactly the situation Turner is in Sunrise Alley. Complicating matters is the fact that in the transformation Turner has acquired some decidedly non-human characteristics: he is able to transform himself, and goes so far as to reform his hand into an eight-fingered metal interface early in the book. But this change is only the outward manifestation of what is a more significant change - Turner chose to reform his hand into an eight digit member because he was more comfortable thinking in hexidecimal. Over and over again the change in Turner is highlighted, and throughout Turner insists that he is still himself despite these changes.

The story draws the reader along, exposing the changes in Turner step by step, peeling back each layer of the differences between Turner and a natural human progressively. And each step of the way Asaro reveals just enough to allow Bryton (and thus the reader) to become comfortable with the idea that despite his changed nature Turner is still human. Eventually, Turner and Bryton seek refuge with "Sunrise Alley", a mythic organization of escaped and "free" EIs, bringing them into an environment made by machines for machines, with no reference to any human concerns, extending the question of what constitutes a person to its furthest possible point. But even this refuge is fraught with danger, both because it is possible that it exists merely as a front for the evil Charon, and because even if it is not, a paranoid inhuman intelligence afraid of being discovered may not be kindly disposed to the human Bryton and the presumed human Turner. But at the same time, the story makes the case for even this possibly malignant, completely machine driven intelligence, being a sentient being that should be treated as a person.

The story progresses towards its multiple resolutions - Charon is confronted, Sam and Turner's nascent relationship develops, the question of Turner's status is brought to the fore, as is the status of the now-revealed Sunrise Alley. And each of these elements intertwines with the other, some in interesting ways: Charon's claims to ownership of Turner are somewhat ironic given the revelations of Charon's own nature that come to light. And Turner's claims to autonomy and personhood form a stark contrast to Charon's - while Turner shows he can at least manifest the appearance of empathy and love, Charon seems to be incapable of either, raising the obvious question of which one is more human. But even after the thriller portion of the plot is resolved, the characters don't ride off into the sunset to a happy ending - Asaro then brings the very real questions concerning the legal status of the characters into focus.

Sunrise Alley is an interesting look at the nature of what makes someone human. Exactly how much of a person can be replaced and have the result still be regarded as that person? With the exception of the somewhat weak nature of the romantic storyline and a wholly unconvincing and mostly extraneous memory-loss subplot that crops up late in the book, the book is well-executed, with a strong story full of intrigue, dramatic tension, and a fascinating exploration of what counts as human, or more broadly, what counts as a person.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. ( )

Asaro has written a book that takes place in the not too distant future where she explores an interesting idea: How should humans treat self-aware AI's? What about androids? What's the difference between a human with many artificial parts and an android? Is there a point when he is no longer human?

Here a researcher meets a being that she first sees as human but then discovers that he has an artificial brain into which the mind of a man has been uploaded. Soon they are on the run from all the people who want Tucker back. This worked as an exploration of what makes a being human but somehow the romance part of the story didn't seem to work for me.

Thus I am a bit ambivalent about recommending the book to others.

When a half-naked shipwrecked man washes up on her beach, scientist Samantha Bryton has no idea what sort of rabbit hole she's about to plunge down - international conspiracies, transforming biomechs, military secrets, and an insane computer program bent on possession. Hang on tight, it's a wild ride.

Scary and entertaining! ( )