Trish's Reviews > Dogs of War

I finished this late last night (has been a while since I stayed up so late to finish a book) but had to seriously ponder how to write this review.

Only recently I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and it is clear from these two books that the author has a wonderful sense of bringing the thoughts and feelings of animals (sorry, bioforms) to life. It is also clear that the author doesn't consider animals to be "just animals" but sees them on the same level as humans if not even one above. A notion with which I completely agree.

This book, then, is about Rex, a dog-like bioform engineered for war. He combines canine senses with sentience, human DNA and then also got cybernetically integrated weapons systems. He is the leader of one of the first few multi-form squads, meaning teams that consist of more than one kind of animal/bioform. It is also about what the engineers designed him to be and be capable of and what he actually is and is capable of. The same goes for the rest of his team.

The book uses multiple POVs from doctors to lawyers to all kinds of bioforms in order to explore topics such as the role of artificial intelligence in society (there is a history of robotics too), responsibility and guilt, what exactly we humans define as humanity, the ethics of conflict resolution and the manufacturing of sentient biological life. The different angles allow the author to give the reader many different perspectives with which to identify or not and allow for an objective as well as emotional exploration.
And he shows that there are never easy answers, easy solutions, and we often revert back to the old ways just because their familiarity offers comfort while new ways are often scary.

making choices is the price of being free

Nevertheless, at some point I was wondering where the author will take this because I had thought we had reached the end of the narrative. However, the author had a lot of threads that he weaved into a complex web of a lot of other important questions. Thanks to the fact that the entire book was interspersed with all kinds of wars and conflicts, it never got boring or too preachy / theoretical.

What I loved about this book was in what detail the author described each individual bioform and therefore gave them actual life and personality. We have the typical mammals but also marine bioforms, reptiles and even hive-minds (a very intriguing concept).
Rex has a lot of canine traits, while Dragon is a typical reptile, Bees' consciousness is literally buzzing all over the place, and the felines are ... well, cats (there was an enormously funny moment in the book when a character actually said
Even chipped to the eyeballs you can't get cats to do what you want them to do.
and it definitely nails their best-known character trait).
However, this realistic portrayal of the bioforms' characters was also what was very difficult to read and especially after / because of their development I cried more than once.

Last but not least, I like how thorough the author is with his exploration of a topic. It would have been easy to end this book after the events in Campeche / Retorna but we went much further because the topic is and would be complex and winning one battle does in no way mean you'll win the war.
Moreover, as far as I can tell from conversations with veterans, he's really done a great job in realistically portraying what it means to be part of something bigger, wanting to protect and having a purpose - and being stripped of it later. He teaches the reader about integrity and sacrifice.

A true gem in this book was his criticism of current social and political problems in the world:

Perhaps the idealism of the Anarchistas had decayed into the sort of backbiting rabies that such popular movements so often devolved into, not fighting for, just fighting against.

flavour-of-the-month outrage

Technology is not Good Tech or Bad Tech. It is the Master who is guilty for what it does.

Sounds like comments to very current topics to me.

To me, this is one of the most important books when it comes to considering the future of bio-tech, human engineering and the ethics that should not be forgotten but go with the territory and the author has quickly become one of my favourites simply for having a fantastic way of making the reader THINK.

Now, does anyone have the author's address so I can send him the bill for all the tissues I needed? :P

Thanks go to Netgalley and the publisher / author for giving me the opportunity to read this early.