I'm a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky. That's not to say I've read everything he's written (the man is so prolific, it's hard to keep up with him), or that I've loved it all. But I know that he'll always have an interesting premise and be immensely readable.

Dogs Of War is no exception. At some future time, humans have created super-soldiers by mixing the genetics of animals and humans known as Bioforms. Rex is one such Bioform. An eight-foot tall dog and human hybrid who is nearly impossible to kill and who is a very Good Boy.

This book starts small and focused but soon spreads to a bigger picture taking place over many years. Not my top Tchaikovsky recommendation for a new reader but if the premise interests you, check it out. It's a fast and entertaining read.

This was a great story! Starts out like military sci fi but it is so much more. The points of view of the bioengineered dog soldier (smart as a human, thinks like a dog), and other interesting entities were very well done. Tchaikovsky is a master of these foreign POVs.

Su Tchaikovsky ci sono due enormi certezze: difficilmente riuscirò a scrivere di getto il suo nome senza ricopiarlo, e ogni suo libro sarà un viaggio emozionante e affascinante. Per lo meno per quanto riguarda la fantascienza, che è l'ambito nel quale a oggi l'ho letto.

Questa volta ci porta sì nel futuro, ma invece che nello spazio siamo sulla Terra.
Una Terra fin troppo simile a quella attuale, ma un poco più evoluta tecnologicamente.
Una Terra dove si sono costruiti robot e automi, la grande svolta nell'ambito bellico... solo per scoprire che erano più pericolosi che altro, con hack e controhack che di fatto hanno reso inutilizzabili e imprevedibili queste macchine.

E così, per paura delle macchine, si sono rivolti alla bioingegneria e novelli dottori Moreau hanno cominciato a creare ibridi animali migliorati, androidizzati.
I più comuni ovviamente sono stati i cani, per via del loro innato senso del branco e della gerarchia, oltre che per l'affinità e la fedeltà all'uomo.

Ed ecco queste allegre creature alte due metri, un po' uomini e un po' cani, con gli istinti animali, con innesti cibernetici che li collegano tra loro e ai loro padroni, con la capacità di pensare bene o male come umani, e con la gerarchia di comando marchiata a fuoco nei loro corpi: la parola del padrone è legge e bisogna ubbedirle, deludere il padrone produce malessere e sofferenza, compiacerlo provoca rilascio di endorfine.

Cani, ma anche orsi, lucertole, api, delfini, topi... non ci sono limiti all'immaginazione umana. Chiaramente tutti impiegati da subito nel settore bellico, operazioni nebulose da contractor al soldo di multinazionali senza scrupoli in zone remote del mondo, anteprima di ciò che avverrà.


Finché qualcosa non cambia.
Una donna in visita al campo militare per conto delle alte sfere; un programmatore che odia il suo lavoro; degli ibridi che sono molto più di quanto i loro padroni non possano immaginare.
E all'improvviso, per la prima volta, la libertà...


Una storia molto più interessante di quanto non pensassi inizialmente, sul libero arbitrio e sulle scelte, ma anche sull'etica di bioingegneria, singolarità, intelligenze artificiali, e l'assurdità di un mondo dove l'opinione pubblica conta più della giustizia.
E malgrado la difficoltà, trovo che l'autore sia riuscito a rendere molto, molto bene i capitoli incentrati su Rex, con i suoi istinti, i suoi dubbi, le sue pulsioni, la sua incapacità di comprendere determinate cose e la sua difficoltà nel compiere scelte, il suo rimpiangere tempi più semplici per quanto crudeli.

Excellent read. Tore through it a couple nights. Tchaikovsky doesn't disappoint. Can't wait to move on to the second book.

Interesting concept!

Did not go as I expected from the blurb, a more interesting read than I thought it would be and far more engrossing than I’d anticipated. More consistently good word from the author!

First book of a hardish, science fiction Uplift/ Artificial Intelligence/ Mind Control/ Corporate Conspiracy crossover in a cyberpunkish future series.


Who Let the Dogs Out?

My dead tree version was a moderate 346 pages. It had a 2017 UK copyright.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British author of science fiction and fantasy novels. He has published more than twenty (20) novels in several series and standalone. In addition, he’s published several novellas and many short stories. This was the first book in the author’s Dogs of War series. This was the sixth book I've read by the author. The last book being Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2) (my review).

Note I read the two books of this series out of order. Reading this book ahead of [b:Bear Head|55037555|Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2)|Adrian Tchaikovsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597927380l/55037555._SY75_.jpg|85826347] meant I started reading with a lot of spoilers already in-place.

Reading this book was also a long time coming. Back in January 2022, I read Bear Head. I liked it and thought to read the first book in the Dogs of War series. No joy finding it from the usual sources in the States. That book was published long before the author’s current popularity and with a small UK publisher in paper only. It was also out-of-print at the time. I managed to purchase a gently used copy from Amazon UK. At the time, there was only one (1) for sale on the site. However, it disappeared in the mails somewhere between the UK and my State-side COVID bunker.

I was undeterred. I reached out to a mate in the UK with a Charity Shop fetish. Within three weeks of setting her on the trail, she’d sourced me a copy in South London. The Quid Pro Quo will likely cost me dearly on my next trip back to Blighty. Yet, I now had a DHL shipping envelope containing a tattered, paperback copy with loose pages to read. From there, it only took four months for it to get to the top of my TBR. I see now that the book is being re-issued on the States in Q4 2022.

TL;DR Synopsis

Uplifted and combat augmented animals (bioforms) that think like humans are used by corporate, Private Military Contractors (PMC) to fight in third world insurgencies. Preconceived notions about different species’ behavioral quirks apply. Hardware mind control was used to make them comply with orders. However, the bioforms were as sentient as both the AIs of the rapidly approaching singularity and humans. A fire team of bioforms snap their leash. The story follows a dog-based bioform’s development of: identity, independence and ability to think critically and logically. He also comes to recognize the difference between the good and evil actions of their PMC’s orders. Eventually, his actions get bioforms recognized as sentient and that Humans Are the Real Monsters.

The Review

There are three main themes: Animal Rights, Mind Control and Agency. Briefly, Bioforms were people, Mind Control was a continuum, and agency was needed by Rex to feel in control of his life. Advanced bioforms were the victims of dehumanization, despite them being created to be human-like Bioweapon Beasts. Call the conflict, "Man's inhumanity to dog"? At one edge of Mind Control was the influence of the Honey and HumOS characters on Rex. At the other end was the advent of the hardware creating the Meat Puppets. Mind Control robbed the bioforms of any belief in their capacity to influence their own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in their ability to handle a wide range of tasks or situations beyond taking orders.

There were two (2) POVs. Rex the dog-based bioform and HumOS, a distributed, all female, human intelligence. Their interleaving was technically well-handled. Rex was the protagonist. I liked Rex, but then I’m a dog person. (Dogs were the common bioform.) Rex’s Journey to the Center of the Mind was that he was his own “Good Dog”. As a character, I thought Rex started out real well, but anthropomorphized too quickly in the later half of the story. HumOS was an escaped Hive Mind and an ally to the bioform movement. She sought to legalize AIs and distributed intelligences as having the same rights as humans. Tchaikovsky makes good use of her to expose the world building and character side of the humans in the story. A minor character is Honey, the bear bioform, genius in Rex’s fire team. In the Bear Head book, she’s the protagonist. Here, she’s the Deus ex Machina hacking her and Rex’s way out of problems. A pet peeve I have with both books, was that Hollywood Hacking was the solution to too many problems. Honey's and HumOS's abilities were almost magical.

The nominal antagonist was Murray, a riff on the Corrupt Corporate Executive mated with the PMC trope.

Spoiler

I did laugh when Tchaikovsky obliquely exposed his use of the Colonel Kurtz Copy for Murray in the narrative.

The writing was very British. In places I thought Tchaikovsky might be trying to be humorous, but didn’t completely succeed?

There was no sex, recreational drugs, or rock ‘n roll in the story. This was a disappointment. Real folks have sex, occasionally seek an altered state of mind and also seek entertainment. Books with characters that don't to any of these remove an entire dimension from a their characters.

Violence was: physical, firearms, chemical and heavy weapons. (There were wars going on.) Some bioforms had the constitution of a rhinoceros, despite being dog and bear-based. Uplifted Dragons seemed fragile in comparison. Note, torture and violence against women was implied. Gore and trauma were moderately detailed. Body count was near-genocidal.

Plotting was good, and rather straight forward compared the author’s more recent works. It was of the Two Lines, No Waiting type. Rex honchoed the A-Plot. HumOS the B-Plot. There was also a certain amount of predictability to the plotting. Tchaikovsky loves his tropes. He riffs on them well-enough to make them interesting even, to a tried and true trope-spotter. However, there were only so many ways they can end. I found his use of the Yank the Dog’s Chain trope to be very ironic.

Pacing was problematic. The story started as an adrenalized, MIL-SF action adventure, then slumped as it delved into the nature of man dog, which included a courtroom drama. Then the story seemed to end—twice. The first time with a Disney Villain Death. The second time with a Bittersweet Ending. There was more MIL-SF action adventure between the endings.

World building was an update on the Old Skool cyberpunk genre, but not to the extent of Earth being a Crapsack World. Tchaikovsky made modern embellishments, like updating on distributed intelligences, self-replicating machines, rogue AIs and contemporary biological modification tech. However, I thought the UN World Government's operation, and organization was shaky. It was too simple to be likely. Abusive mega-corps with nebulous ownership and PMC armies were likewise not very original. I thought that in the second book of the series, Bear Head, Tchaikovsky did a better job at world building. I also thought it was too large a leap to get from this book’s world building to the second one's, despite the groundwork laid.

This wasn’t a great work. I though the story had both pacing and plot problems. However, it was a somewhat preachy good work. It was interesting to contrast this story written in 2017 with the second book written four years later that I'd read first. In that book, Tchaikovsky did more things better. Although, here the author’s abilities shown through with a simpler story construction. I was disappointed this book was not as humorous as the 2nd book in the series. This was worth a read. Part of that was because Cyberpunk was a genre I teethed on, before it went the way of the film Rom-Com. I'm giving this story a bump to three stars because I have not had a decent cyberpunk read in a while.

This ended up being more than I expected it to be, and with books that is almost always a welcome surprise. It starts out as a story about biomechanical animals who are used as soldiers, but it doesn’t stop at the “AI starts developing beyond its programming“ stage (which I find fascinating enough on its own). What responsibilities do creators have when their creations develop free will and a conscience? What forms can AI take? How should we legislate in order to deal with AI? What rights should they have, if any?
Somehow Tchaikowsky manages to ask big questions while also telling a compelling story with a lot of heart. I think it’s the latter I found most unexpected - and most welcome.