SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Machine by Elizabeth Bear

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 6, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Machine is the latest book by prolific and renowned Scifi/Fantasy author Elizabeth Bear, and the second book in her "White Space" series, following 2018's "Ancestral Night" (which I reviewed on this blog here).  I really liked Ancestral Night a lot - it took a space opera setting and made it a fascinating exploration of who one really is in a world where emotions can be controlled on demand with chemicals.  Oh it also included space pirates, ancient precursor technology and a praying mantis space cop.  So I was really excited to get an advance copy of this book, which is a stand alone* sequel in the same universe.

*Yes Machine is perfectly stand alone, with only small references to Ancestral Night and only one major shared character, whose experiences in the prior book basically don't come into play.  You don't need to read Ancestral Night first to enjoy this book.*

And Machine is another really interesting SciFi novel, if not quite as effective as Ancestral Night.  Like its predecessor, it uses its setting and plot - a SciFi mystery/conspiracy/thriller plot centering around a galactic hospital in a socialist galaxy! - to propel a story really about a single character's development and a single theme.  In this case, the theme is about "Faith" - not in the religious sense, but in having something or someone one can believe in, and what happens when that belief is shaken.  Again, I don't mean to make this sound like some boring novel about introspection: we have aliens, multiple AIs, ancient ships with frozen people, a hospital run by a space tree, and a billion other interesting concepts to go a long with a compelling if sometimes a bit confusing scifi mystery plot around it all.  So maybe this isn't quite as fantastic as its predecessor, but it's still very good and well worth your time.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
For Dr. Brookllyn "Llyn" Jens, first there was the constant pain.  Then there was a career in the military - Judiciary Search and Rescue - which rewarded her with a military grade exoskeleton.  And then there was her career in rescue operations for Core General, the multi species Synarche hospital that stands at the pinnacle of medical excellence.  Through her whole life - dealing with the pain, her marriage, her divorce, and her careers - there has never been anyone or anything that Llyn has had complete faith or trust in.....until Core General, whose mission for treating everyone with the best possible care is the only thing Llyn can wholly believe in. 

But when Llyn's ship embarks on a rescue mission for Core General of a long lost generation ship, what she finds are two ships whose passengers have all been mysteriously frozen, with their AIs either out of commission or heavily damaged....and then the damage seems too leap to her own ship's AI.  And when they bring the survivors back to Core General for treatment, the damage leaps again....this time to the hospital AIs themselves, causing the hospital to suffer more and more serious failures, which jeopardize every patient onboard, no matter the species. 

To save the only thing Llyn has faith in, Llyn will have to discover what is truly behind the weird occurrences on the ships and the station.  But in doing so, she may discover secrets that will shake her to her very foundation.....
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Like its predecessor, Machine is a story mainly about a single character - in this case, Llyn - even as its plot covers a story that has large ramifications for everyone the entire galaxy involved.  It's mainly sort of a mystery - as things start going wrong on the generation ship and then continue to go wrong in progressively larger ways at the hospital of Core General, Llyn is asked due to her military background to figure out just what the heck is going on.  Still, as a "mystery" plot, it's not the most thrilling of mysteries: one of the culprits will be obvious to anyone with any clue from fairly early on and isn't exactly a character any reader is likely to care about, for example, and the reader will have some idea of what the mysterious secret is well before the characters as well. 

Which is not to say that this setting isn't well done, or that the book isn't really fun in its concepts.  You have a galactic hospital with sentients of all different types, with whole sections for beings that breathe different kinds of atmospheres and live in certain kinds of conditions, and doctors of many different species - whether looking like tree stumps, praying mantis, an actual tree (the hospital administrator is a tree like being who is hilariously nicknamed "The Administree") like alien, etc. You also have AIs that are their own functional beings and who are doctors for other AIs, who have their own problems like any other sentients, as demonstrated by the AI Helen that Llyn brings back o the hospital in the beginning.  You have the idea of "Ayatanas" - sets of memories from an individual being one can wear to have access to their knowledge...at the cost of disassociation, especially when those memories belong to a very different species.  There's a lot of cool scifi concepts here - I haven't even gone into the idea of computer "Fox" in everyone's brains or the ability to "rightmind" oneself by mentally commanding chemicals to be produced in response to undesirable emotional states, which was a focus of the prior book.  It adds up to a fascinating setting that works really well even if the mystery elements aren't quite that great, as it provides an adventure for Llyn and the story with high and very different stakes through it all. 

I should get to Llyn, as following her is the focus of the story.  Llyn is a character with a very different viewpoint: yeah she holds herself away from others, but it's not necessarily due to being introverted - it's because she has major trust issues.  No, not really trust, but faith, as Llyn puts it in an early chapter: she doesn't have faith in practically anything or anyone, the result of growing up with a medical condition that causes her constant pain and requires her to wear a powered Exoskeleton (her "Exo") to be able to function.  The feeling of constant pain made her unwilling to truly believe in anything when everything hurts, causing her to fall out of any long term relationships even without realizing why - as she did with her wife and daughter, who she hasn't seen in years.  She doesn't help this with her overuse of Ayatanas, which results in her feeling disassociation with her own senses due to the number of shared memories of other aliens she considers useful for her job. 

The only thing Llyn believes in is the hospital at Core General, and its mission, to help relieve everyone's - no matter who they are - pain.  It's a fundamental core concept that speaks to the only idea that Llyn can believe matters, from her own experience, especially considering what she had to do to get there and to get her own treatment.  But it's a faith in a concept that is clearly to the reader more of an ideal than necessarily a reality, and when the hospital is attacked in this book, it isn't just threatening the patients for Llyn, but the very core of what keeps her going.  And as the book moves forward, it becomes clear that the ideal is breaking for Llyn as well, and what exactly is Llyn without it, without anything to believe in?   The hospital wasn't a religion, it was something real, so how could it have been so false, and if it is what is there for Llyn to do going forwards?  The story really hammers home those themes, with climactic moments coming with Llyn stuck in her own head essentially trying to figure it out - and figuring out those answers is not something that can be done through chemical rightminding. 

It's a fascinating theme to tackle, and it works really well, as do some of the other parts of the story.  None of the other characters get major focus really, but they're all sketched out rather well and they work as a result, and a returning minor character from the last book, Goodlaw Cheerilaq, the praying mantis alien space cop, is still a joy in his appearances throughout.  If the book has a problem, it's that it can sometimes get a bit confusing as to what is exactly happening in the text/actions, particularly when it's talking about "machine"s.  The use of the word "Machine" for a number of different things in this book is clearly a deliberate choice, and I get the reasoning for it (comparisons between these different things being an important part of the story and Llyn's journey) but it can often lead to confusion in climactic moments as I try to figure out what exactly is being talked about, so I'm not sure it exactly works.  I'm also not quite clear even after having read the reveals a few times over exactly how everything in the conspiracy was supposed to fit together instead of just providing a few things for the protagonist to overcome.*  Still, it mostly works, and the action scenes can be a lot of fun.

*Spoiler in ROT13: V fgvyy pna'g dhvgr svther bhg jul gur jnyxre rkvfgf va guvf obbx bgure guna sbe n sha npgvba frdhrapr, be jung vg'f fhccbfrq gb or - vg'f V thrff fhccbfrq gb or abezny grpu va gur raq fhoiregrq ol gur zrzr ohg vg'f frrzvatyl varkcyvpnoyr rneyvre?  Jungrire, vg qbrfa'g ernyyl znggre. 

In shot Machine is an excellent SciFi book with some interesting themes as all these concepts are blended together into an intriguing plot with a fascinating main character.  If we do get another White Space book, I'll definitely be back for it.