SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Activation Degradation by Marina J Lostetter

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Activation Degradation by Marina J Lostetter: https://t.co/AlDNJI4tI6

Short Review: 8 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) September 23, 2021

Short Review (cont): A space opera esque tale featuring Unit 4, a construct awakened to defend a Jupiter Mining Platform, as its attempt to stop the alien attackers results in its capture and the reveal that all it knows might be wrong. Solid characters, themes and action

2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) September 23, 2021

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 September 28, 2021 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.

Activation Degradation is the latest book by author Marina J Lostetter, whose Noumenon trilogy was liked by others a lot more than myself (I don't particularly love generation ship novels, so I bailed after book 1), and whose recent epic fantasy novel, The Helm of Midnight (written as "Marina Lostetter") I liked a lot.  So I had no idea what to expect out of Activation Degradation, which returned to a Sci-Fi setting for the first time since the last Noumenon book.  

I needn't have worried - Activation Degradation is very very good, telling a tale featuring as its protagonist a Murderbot-like construct, except one who is not self-aware of what it is and finds its world thrown into disarray when the "aliens" it tries to fight off turn out to be a crew of humans.  The story has some really solid action sequences, all the while also containing some strong themes about family/community, about loyalty, about sins of the past, and about the unacceptability of systems that deliberately create harm to a few for the sake of others.  The book appears to be a stand alone, although I'd love to see more explored in this universe, and definitely is worth your time.  

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Unit 4 activates disoriented, without the proper initialization process.  But its handler tells it that there was no choice, as strange alien attackers are approaching the Jupiter mining platform responsible for generating 1/3 of the Earth's power.  With its fellow three units, who were initialized earlier, it has to mobilize to deal with the threat - and if possible, to get evidence from the enemy as to what exactly they are and what they want.  

When the attack goes awry, and Unit 4 has to euthanize its fellow Unit 2, Unit 4 finds itself desperate to achieve its mission, to take down the invaders who made it necessary.  And so Unit 4 takes its living ship and rams it into the invader, hoping that its own deactivation will mean something.....but deactivation doesn't come.  

Instead, Unit 4 finds itself onboard the alien ship - except the ship is seemingly crewed by bipdedal fleshy beings like its robot self.  To Unit 4 it seems like these robots must have been reprogrammed by the enemy, and it insists to itself that it won't let the same thing happen to it.  But these beings don't call themselves robots - they call themselves humans, have strange relations to each other, and their dialogue, and their computer information, suggests to Unit 4 that everything it knows could be wrong....
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Trying not to spoil in the above plot summary, but it's basically impossible to leave out some of the above to talk about this novel.  Activation Degradation features a being who will remind readers of Martha Wells' Murderbot - a construct made of a combination of biological and machine parts, that refers to itself as "it".  The difference here is that Unit 4, unlike Murderbot, clearly has incomplete knowledge over its own situation and believes itself to be a robot, whose only purpose is to respond to its handler's commands to fight off the intruders.  

And so Unit 4 is thrown for a loop once it gets its first taste of human conflict.  Unit 4 is highly intelligent - in fact it makes some logical leaps that readers would expect to actually be big reveals/twists well before they could come to pass - but it has little understanding of the possibility of other sentient fully biological beings, of community, of families, and most importantly, of emotions.  And so when it feels dismay and sadness when euthanizing Unit 2, it doesn't really know what to do with that, to say nothing of its feelings of the humans.  It does understand comradery and sisterhood (as it calls its fellow units "Sisters"), and so seeing that among the humans is understandable, although it doesn't quite get the idea of not being expendable, or of having differing views rather than simply following orders with a handler's voice in one's ear.

But Activation Degradation is not just the story of an artificially created being learning to become human, and is far more than just fun space opera action scenes (although there are a bunch of those too).  For as Unit 4 learns more about the "humans", it has to deal with some really complicated ethical dilemmas involving what people really deserve for their past sins, and what to do with systems that are oppressive but a required fixture in society.  For this is a story where humanity's journey to the stars was not made with the best of intentions at first....and is slowly going wrong, generations and generations later, where no one who made those decisions is anywhere near alive.  It's a story where beings like Unit 4 are created and thrown away so that what is left on Earth can live, and if the system is destroyed, it will cause havoc for so many others.  Do the humans who left Earth wrongly deserve to go back?  Do the beings left behind have the right to use what remains?  And what does it mean to have free will, to have choice, and to love?  

Activation Degradation reads really quickly and works really well as a result, being a strong space opera novel with all the above themes, and it's hard to talk about it more without spoiling (and I've already spoiled quite a bit about the setting at least).  The book doesn't take the obvious twists as you'd expect and ends in a really satisfying fashion that wraps everything up.  And well, there's more that could be done in this universe, so if Lostetter wants to return to it, I'll gladly come back.