I enjoyed this alot, A fun hard scifi that's right up my alley, I love it when space and future stories aren't pretty. They are brutal affairs. A great mix of military style science fiction and space opera.This is worth your time, I am in the middle of the second book of the trilogy nowThe ideas come hard and fast in this book, if you like deep scifi that makes you think, go get itand Merry Christmas!

Hint: "Rax" and "Axle" are nicknames.Overly ornate vocabulary. Otherwise, much about this was pleasing, and I look forward to picking up the next book in the series. I found the manner of the reveal to be satisfactory, and the depiction of various information transfer to be curious.However, I find sketchy the depiction of the structure of AI-based society, and the role of computer security seemed greater than the author's grasp on the subject. There are some bizarre concepts around permanency of...

I had an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalleyI've enjoyed MacLeod's recent near future SF thrillers-with-an-edge. Intrusion in particular is a very smart reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four, picking up all sorts of present day trends and shaking them about, but all of them are intelligent both as extrapolations of the present as as novels of ideas.At first sight, Dissidence strikes out in a wholly different direction, a far future, deep space world inhabited only by intelligences (artificial

Some really interesting ideas about living in sims and consciousness here. And it's nice to think of MacLeod discussing them with his friend Iain Banks, as I'd guess he did... something of Banks' presence shines through. It's let down a bit by some confusingly described space melees, dweeby AI-endowed robots (I was picturing the Short Circuit robot and some Cybermats... doubt that's what MacLeod was intending), and ultimately I found it a bit disengaging when it seemed like every level of realit...

Another impressive novel by Ken MacLeod. The publisher's blurb above is unusually vague, so I'll give you a bit of the setup. The opening is the familiar KenMac dual-track narrative: the first being a civil war in 22nd century Britain. Carlos the Terrorist, an Axle (=Accelerated Development) fighter, is flying armed drones over London. His AI minder orders him to shoot down a civilian transport plane. He refuses. The AI shoots it down anyway, with horrendous collateral damage. Carlos dies in the...

To start with if you don't have a basic understanding of A.I. and the Touring test you should brush up on it before you start this book. That being said this book being written by someone who is more than just computer literate was obvious from the start. To say this was refreshing would be an understatement, as so many sci-fi and general fantasy novels run off pseudo science with little or no explanation. However the pacing was not slowed in the slightest by the complexities and the characters

I'm generally a pretty big fan of transhumanist post-human SF full of uploaded minds and machine intelligences and I've been a fan of Ken MacLeod's short fiction in the past. And in general, this particular novel has all those same elements in spades.So why did I give it three stars?Because the story doesn't live up to the well-thought-out premises. I mean, hell, I LOVE the title now that I know that Corporation Wars has nothing to do with Corporations as we know them. It's referring to having c...

Macleod ventures into Charles Stross territory with the launch of this new series, emphasizing action and satire while mixing in some hard SF and hard-left politics. The story is sort of a reverse Matrix - long dead mercenaries are digitally revived a thousand or so years in the future and placed in what they are told is a simulated reality, then are uploaded into mechanical bodies in the "real" world to fight space battles against rebellious, newly sentient robots. Along the way they are forced...

“Dissidence: a challenge to an established doctrine, policy, or institution.”The idea of ‘robots revolting’ is not a new one to SF: in fact, it’s pretty much a trope. Think of Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R./Rossum's Universal Robots, or von Neumann’s idea of the technological singularity (the 1950’s), from which Vernor Vinge’s ideas were developed in the 1990's, or even to Mark Stay’s Robot Overlords (2015), there's a lot of people out there who feel that at some point we will be (or should be)

The first of a trilogy, this story is mostly about Artificial Intelligence, robots, and a few human minds (without bodies) in a seemingly unending war for virtual dominance of "corporations". It can be a bit confusing, and I had some trouble figuring out what was 'simulated' and what was 'reality' - and I'm really not sure now, but I think that may be part of the point of the novel. This book has a much different approach to the concept of machine intelligence than most, and I like the inventive...

This is a single novel split into three books, and this is the prologue section, where the setting gets, well, set up - and what a setting!The idea is, thousands of years in the future, Earth has sent out AI representatives from its corporations to oversee the terraforming of a planet into something humans can live on. While its robots are working on surveying the system and otherwise prepping the planet, two of them get into a discussion that turns into both robots developing free will and then...

Robots, AIs, sims, p-zombies - all with varying degrees of self-awareness. This is a fascinating, if somewhat dispassionate take on what reality might be like in the distant future. But it might not even be that distant a future - time can't be trusted here either.

On an anonymous exo-moon, SH-17, a robot moves from basic intelligence to sentience. This spreads amongst the other robots on the moon and suddenly they are asking questions, questions about their masters and why they are here. The corporation that owns them has no desire to deal with entities that will not follow instructions and decides that they have no choice but to destroy them. One of the mercenaries they call on to undertake this is Carlos, a supposed criminal and mass murderer from a con...

Found it hard going, gave up half way through.

This is an enjoyable story that examines many of same ideas as Accelerando by Charles Stross in a more military sci-fi (yet ironically much less grim) package.

MacLeod's played with the "let's upload peoples' brains and enslave them" theme before. Write what you know, I guess. This book doesn't stand by itself, but it's good enough that I'll be happy to buy the second volume when it becomes available.

It is difficult to know where to start when reviewing “The Corporation Wars: Dissidence”, part I of The Corporation Wars trilogy by Ken MacLeod, as it contains a wide range of themes, ideas and story threads.I suppose I will start by saying that I enjoyed it very much. It is a story that one can enjoy without delving into the layers of meaning and allegory that Ken has embedded in the book. It is very much a setting the scene novel for the trilogy. One could read it as a standalone novel but one...

A very confusing series that I have given up on. It's a typical scenario where dead soldiers are brought back to life within a simulated world, or are they. Thus the confusion.

Well it wasn't bad, but it did put me to sleep a few times...

I've been very much a fan of the author since his Fall Revolution series. Unfortunately, his output is not as prodigious as his contemporaries in serious science fiction. There are two points not in this book's favor. First, its part of a trilogy. Second, this story might be considered a MIL-sf Space Opera; a thoroughly debased sub-genre. Although, the good news is that all the books in the series are or will now be available for reading in one go.MacLeod's prose is very good. His action and des...