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This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just read too much queer fiction on the regular, but this [like other books by these authors] felt subjectively in the vein of "old school heterosexual science fiction" that I might have read when I was younger. Not everything has to be everything, but it was just something that stood out to me.)

I think the most interesting part for me is to analyze a little how this book positions AI compared to other books in the genre.

I don't know if this is just my own bias (and aversion to techbros), but there's something about this version of AI in this book that seems like it's meant to be an extension of LLM airquotes AI hype. It's something about the wording of "when AI began participating in creative tasks" that twigs that feeling for me. There's almost nothing here about sentience or consciousness. AI is both simultaneously a critical focus of the book while also relegated to the background.

We're told that AI has "worked magic on municipal planning and administration freeing the world of poverty" (citation needed). The book mentions one-off forensic evidence of "companies [that] were created by AI that emerged organically from global networks" but that's the last we hear of it. It also tells us that "no matter how we try to prevent it, corporations like LK are destined to become one giant AI" going further to say "we're all fated to disappear into the bowels of an AI behemoth" and this is arguably the conclusion of the book. But this is all talk.

The reader doesn't get to see any of this AI machination on page and so it's largely just an existential threat. How many AIs are there? Do they talk to each other? Even when characters are threatening to or partially merging with AI, we just hear about it, and don't learn what this means in the context of this world or for these characters. When the narrator interacts with AI, it's less about talking to a person and more like just using some tool: "external affairs AI lets me know where it thinks they're headed." That's the most detailed human computer interaction this book has to offer.

In thinking about this, here's a bunch of other books that came to mind that deal with these topics better:

Counterweight talks about the old president distributing their consciousness elsewhere, but what this means and its implications are barely touched upon, whereas that topic is a focal point for Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. The AIs in Counterweight are barely treated as tools and yet they are creating companies and merging with humans and exploring space in the epilogue, but there's no consideration of their sentience or consciousness or their rights in the same way that Ancillary Mercy does either.

Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon tells a much more nuanced story about the ways in which humans push back against machine intelligence and the messy line between human and machine responsibility.

There's a throwaway line of AI having its own sense of humor in picking music that humans don't understand, but Sue Burke's Dual Memory provides a much more nuanced and direct view of machine culture (as well more of a variety of what machine sentience and machine goals could look like).

I also think Charles Stross's Accelerando does a better job at describing the effects of powerful AIs that are so strange as to seem alien, and that have left no room for humanity.

Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in general).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

#SFFBookClub

I was hooked by the setup in this book of a group of adopted children, partially pulled out of time by a god-like Father, and each set to learn one specific branch of knowledge and ancient power. My favorite part of this book was the slow unfurling of background machinations and scheming that all paid off in the end. The characters somehow manage to be somewhat relatable even as the book continually demonstrated how extreme power alienates them from their own humanity.

Parts of this book reminded me of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series, especially around the US government attempting to "negotiate" with people who have fantastical power.

I will say also that this book goes to some very dark places, so content warning for abuse and violence and and torture and trauma. To put it one way, when somebody has enough power to read minds, bring people back from the dead, or go back in time to manipulate the past, there's very little escape from their will and manipulation.

I read this story because the conceit of mapping some other idea onto physical space itself reminded me of Lifelode; in that book, the presence of magic is mapped to how far east or west you are; in The Other Valley, time itself is mapped onto physical space. There is a sequence of towns in valleys each twenty years apart in time; travelling east will let you see the town twenty years in the future. Access to other valleys is tightly controlled for timeline safety and only allowed for reasons of grief.

This book is marginally about time travel and information from the future affecting the present, but it's all in the background of a school friend group that is broken up by a tragic death. The book follows the narrator Odile whose life is pushed off course from this death, made worse by her future knowledge that it was coming.

Stylistically, this book reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; they're both dreamy stories of childhood and adult disappointment, focusing on the dynamics of a friends group rather than on details of the world itself. This is definitely not a story that explains its world to you other than the premise, which is taken for granted and creates far more questions than answers. The stylistic choice to not have quotation marks only added to this dreamy quality for me (although I could imagine this is probably controversial for readers).

A Pirate's Life for Tea is book two in an ongoing cozy fantasy romance series. I had a lot of fun with the first book, but this one worked less well for me.

Having the perspective of the book continue to be from Reyna and Kianthe's perspective blunted the dynamic between Serena and Bobbie, especially with Reyna and Kianthe wink-winking at each other (and the audience) about their matchmaking schemes. Overall, this sequel felt a little too cozy for my tastes--nothing really had teeth in the same way that the first book did, and all of the new characters felt instantly either on side or not. Bobbie seemed like the only character who had any growth.

This sounds like I'm being quite negative, but it was fun to revisit this world and its puns and real-feeling relationships. I am looking forward to the next (final?) book as it will likely be a collision of characters who have mostly been off page, and also because it will likely come back to focus on Reyna and Kianthe again (and their wedding).

(This is also a petty side complaint, but Bobbie is a cop [sorry, a constable]; even if the book argues that you can't change things from the inside, it still ends with some "bad apple" theory that I could have done without. Mostly, there's some feeling that I could do without such direct cop analogues in my cozy fiction.)