Dr. Brookllyn Jens is an EMT in the Synarche’s ambulance spaceship I Race To Seek the Living. Elizabeth Bear’s soon-to-be-released second space opera novel in her White Space universe, is not a sequel to her 2019 Ancestral Night, but another story in the same universe. It opens on a rescue mission into the newly re-discovered generation ship Big Rock Candy Mountain, launched some centuries ago, before the advent of faster-than-light travel and before humanity entered the galactic civilization known as the Synarche. The ship names are cute, but the plot is more serious than that might indicate. Even so, Bear maintains an element of sarcasm in the thoughts and words of her first-person narrator Jens.

This concept of a galactic hospital and medical service pays obvious homage to James White’s Sector General novels, but I haven’t read those, so will leave others to comment. Less obvious homage is to C. J. Cherryh’s universe, with its diversity of non-human sentience, some species bizarre, and machine intelligences. To this mix, Bear adds rightminding, a systematic and intentional alteration of human (and alien) motivation and behavior.

Rightminding is ostensibly rooted in the principles of Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Speech. In practice, it consists of self-administered drugs/treatments for purposes of emotion control (in Jen’s case, also pain control). At one point, a pre-Synarche human is brought out of cryogenic storage, and he struggles to control his emotions naturally. Jen looks on this as sad and is a little bewildered that he works so hard to repress his feelings. However, to me, it seems that drug-administered emotion control is also repression of feelings. The judgement of when and how to self-medicate is exactly what is impaired in some forms of mental illness. And so, while AI’s are equally persons, they are also given the ability to impose emotion control on those they have responsibility over. Everyone is so balanced, that “hierarchical” forms of governance are also no longer necessary. Democracy is a rough mechanism that has been rendered obsolete by personal homeostasis of all members of society. I can easily imagine this concept played as a dystopia, rather than the utopia Jens views it as.

The plotting grows complex as a viral disruption infects the minds of the organic beings and AIs, and Jens tries to unravel it all, while questioning her own motivation, role, and dependence on her semi-conscious prosthetic exoskeleton. Actions moves from physical realm to virtual and back fluidly. It is a well-crafted space opera, but not hard-sf and not literary. Solid entertainment!

I received an ebook advance reader copy from Saga Press (Simon & Schuster) through netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The book release has been announced for October 6, 2020. I have previously read Ancestral Night, and a few other Elizabeth Bear novels.

A space opera the incorporates aliens, the Marie Celeste, hospital drama, disability, sabotage, and jumping through space--Machine has it all. Bear brings disability and physical otherness to the fore with her openly disabled protagonist, Dr. Jens, and the many different other forms of sapient life aboard the ambulance and hospital where they work in space. All of the various threads and themes of the novel are beautifully woven together, and the result is a thriller that is a blast to read.

"Machine" is set in the same world as Bear's "Ancestral Night" but is not directly a sequel. I enjoyed the book quite as much as I enjoyed "Ancestral Night". It is also a convoluted mystery set in space and overall proved to be a very satisfying read. The pacing of the book was a little off for me, but overall I quite enjoyed it. I will have a full review closer to the publication date (Oct. 6th 2020)

Wow, this one ticked all the boxes for me. From first page to last I was hooked.

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a doctor working from an ambulance ship going to the rescue of those in distress in space. She and the crew of the Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living have located the ship sending the distress call, Big Rock Candy Mountain, a ship that left Terra about six hundred years previously, and Llyn and her team must make the jump from her ship onto Big Rock Candy Mountain to ascertain the situation that required the distress signal. Reading the names of those space ships you may think this is a book with lots of comedy at it's core, which is what I was thinking for a while, but that's not what you will get at all. Finding out what the situation is aboard the vessel in distress is the first step in getting any survivors back to Core General, the largest hospital in the galaxy.

This was so, so good for me with a high percentage of interactions with various AI systems. Plots featuring those are some of my favorite science fiction reads. This book features a female lead who is old enough to have a grown daughter, not a situation I've encountered before, and Llyn tends to rely much more on her intellect to manage situations and solve problems than physical abilities. I do tend to get rather tired of the oftentimes standard spunky/feisty female lead. The hospital is under a terrorist attack but there don't seem to be any clues about who could be causing the chaos.

Elizabeth Bear also writes wonderful alien characters. And the augmentations that have been perfected in this future were so easy for me to become accustomed to. I liked the way the human and alien species worked together and the complexity of the problems they had to solve. Altogether this was a marvelous reading experience for me and I'm chomping at the bite for the next book in this series to be released. I also have plans to begin reading the first book in the White Space series. Happy dance, happy dance!

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books/Saga Press for an e-galley of this novel.

Machine, a White Space novel by Elizabeth Bear, is the second in her series about deep space travel using the white space drive, a technology that goes faster than the speed of light. The main protagonist is Dr Jens, a specialist in deep space medicine. Her job is to jump out of Sally, her sentient ambulance spaceship, to save lives both human and alien.

The story starts with Dr Jens jumping onto an ancient and derelict spaceship from old earth that is found an impossible distance from where it could plausibly be. The ship appears devoid of life, artificial or biological. A modern spaceship from a civilization incompatible with oxygen breathing life is found crashed onto the hull. It, too, appears lifeless. The crews of each ship are found in cryonic suspension. It is unclear if any of the crew from the older ship can survive being thawed from their primitive cryonic units.

Among the very rich cast of characters:

Sally, a fully sentient AI spaceship and close friend of the protagonist.

Cheeirilaq, the Goodlaw, and Rilriltok, a doctor, both members of an insectoid species like enormous mantises. A Goodlaw is a senior law enforcement officer.

Starlight an enormous treelike alien who is the administrator of the enormous hospital which is in orbit around the huge black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Helen, a sexy golden peripheral of the mystery ship. Helen suffers from a mysterious deficit requiring cyber-psychiatric therapy.

Calliope is the first of the crew members from the derelict spaceship to be successfully thawed.

The Synarche, a collection of space-going species called systers of whom all the characters belong except for those from the ancient spaceship.

Endlessly replicating tinkertoy-like elements in the derelict ship under Helen's control.

A huge war robot on the hull of the ship.

Dr Jens is called upon to solve a very complex mystery about these ships and the enormous space hospital that is her employer. Dr Jens suffers from a mysterious pain syndrome requiring her to wear a smart exoskeleton with whom she has developed a personal relationship.

The alien creatures are described in great and fascinating detail. I was also much taken with descriptions of various novel technologies such as surgically implanted memory asset in every citizen with the capacity to adjust endocrine levels to ensure “rightminding” and having a measure of machine autonomy. Each spaceship is an autonomous intelligence with a full suite of emotions in addition to the expected super fast and competent intelligence.

The book is flawed by an overabundance of themes and interesting characters. The emphasis on Dr Jens’ personal trials and issues isn’t well integrated with the 'who done it' aspect of the novel. I enjoyed reading this novel quite a bit, relishing its richness as I tried to navigate its tortuous plot. One might quibble with the frequent deus ex machina elements but such are the bread and butter of space opera of which this is an enjoyable example.

A very entertaining sci-fi novel, Machine is so immersive that it was hard to come back to Earth after reading. Llyn Jens is a rescue specialist in a space ambulance. She and her team find two different ships in distress. Both are very different, but their issues seem vaguely similar. Dr. Jens takes them to a space hospital and things start to go wrong. The characters are impressive. It’s not easy to make a human care about creatures so alien that they should be impossible to relate to, and yet, I was actually worried about giant bugs, impossible cetaceans and talking trees. Their backstories are fascinating, and very inventive. Even the AI characters end up being relatable, hard to believe since they… well, don’t really have a body. This future society is so advanced that it seems almost perfect. It’s no spoiler to reveal that… it’s not, but the fact that such a Utopia would still have problems is heartrending. The mystery is compelling and the plot works. A space opera with a heart.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Berkley Publishing Group!

Set in the same universe as Ancestral Night, Machine is in no sense a sequel. It doesn't even have the same characters. But it has a sense of familiarity to those who experienced Ancestral Night. This time, our characters don't get entangled with space pirates and refugees. Our main character is a doctor assigned to a medical rescue team en route to answering a distress call. And when they get there it's nothing like they could have imagined. One ship is a giant from the dawn of human memory with a most unusual cargo. The other makes no sense docked there.

Bear explores in this book the concept of who belongs to an intergalactic federation made up of all kinds of species. It explores what qualifies as a person with rights under this galactic federation. And yes, that includes artificial intelligence such as shipminds.

The story basically falls into two broad parts. First, the mystery of the ship's sending the distress signals and exploring those ships. This was probably the best part of the story. The second part explores what happens when the artifacts from these ships are brought back to the medical headquarters and where intelligent existence goes from there. At times, this section dragged a little.

Overall, a fascinating exploration like everything Bear puts out.

When I started this book I was greatly looking forward to an escape from the day to day worries of coronavirus. By the time I was halfway through I was looking for any reason to stop reading ----- even if that meant reading dismal news reports of pandemic. I recognize that Ms Bear is a successful author and I am sure that many people enjoy her books. For me, however, while the story started out fine it was simply too much. Too many unpronounceable names, too much scifi jargon, slang, too much quasicultural references-----you get the point --- simply too much. I felt like I lost the narrative with all of this and this prevented the very escape I was hoping for on page 1. Now, again, many readers may enjoy this style and for them I imagine that they will enjoy "Machine".I greatly appreciate Netgally sharing a copy of this book with me,

I will not be reading and reviewing this book based off of the allegations against Elizabeth Bear in terms of grooming and abuse. While this may not be something that other people agree with, I want nothing to do with this controversy one way or another.

Machine by Elizabeth Bear- This is an intense hard space opera that keeps coming up with new plot twists and strange happenings. The story begins with a rescue ship answering a distress call in deep space. Okay, this is the third book with this premise that I've read in the last three months. Must be a new branch of Science Fiction- "the rescue party and the unresponsive ship, that leads to bad things happening." The narrator is a rescue specialist with some physical problems, just like in another recent book, so you can see where I might be getting frustrated. Elizabeth Bear is a great writer though and is able to make this her story to the point where you forget the others. It's exciting, scary, and well thought out. I'd take a chance with this one!

This second novel in Bear’s White Space science fiction series is the best science fiction that Bear has ever written. . Dr. Jens is an adrenaline junky who only feels happy when she is rescuing people and performing emergency medicine during a catastrophe. Fortunately, disasters aboard a derelict starship and on a hospital space station provide her (and the reader) with constant thrills. Jens investigates mysterious sabotage, tries to counter a vicious computer virus, uncovers conspiracies, and suffers surprising betrayals. Jens relies on an exoskeleton due to constant and untreatable pain, yet refuses to let her disability prevent her from saving as many lives as possible. The aliens in this multi-species civilization are wonderfully imaginative. I hope the next in the series is as complex and entertaining.

This is the first science fiction book I've read in a long time, although it used to be one of my favorite genres. I've read several books before by Elizabeth Bear so I was excited to get this one.

Machine. The very title is mysterious. This is a hard book to review because if you give away too much about the progression of the story, it will ruin it for the reader - and it's a book well worth reading. There is a place in the story where the focus of the book changes dramatically. It disappointed me at the time as it seemed to me that the book I was reading abruptly changed focus. There were numerous clues along the way, but I didn't see their significance at the time. The revelations experienced by the main character, Dr. Jens, and her decisions changed her life and more. By the end of the book, I was blown away with both the overall outcome and the one for the main character, Dr. Jens. I never saw it coming.

Much of the book takes place on a huge rotating space station called Core General, which is a hospital for many species and also staffed by many species. Many of its functions are run by artificial intelligences, who are also citizens. So many diverse entities are able to work together due in part to a way of thinking called rightminding, which was one of the most interesting parts of the book to me. Rightminding appeared to be incorporated by every sentient, both artificial and born. For flesh species, rightminding was achieved by being mindful of their state of mind, and consciously adjusting their brain chemicals to achieve clarity. Today, we might take a long walk, meditate, or take medication.

I wish very much that this was real because I would have loved to have lived and worked on one of those stations. One of my favorite characters was the administrator of the whole huge hospital. He was a really really big tree growing out of the station itself and referred to fondly as the Administree. Two of my other favorite characters seem to be described as similar to praying mantises, only with more legs and eyes. The female was easily six feet long and the much smaller male on the station was terrified of her and usually ducked behind someone when she was around. He also offered food to almost everyone he spent time with - a holdover from when females of their kind would eat the male after mating if they were hungry.

This book is not only entertaining, it makes the reader think about possibilities. I highly recommend it.

I had mixed feelings about this book. I love the world building. Its nice to have characters that aren't humoid based. I enjoyed the premise of the machine. The idea of right-minding makes me think. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I really have mixed feeling about brookllynn. Sometimes I really like her and other times I can't stand her. Any book that makes me think this much about it gets a decent star rating from me.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

This is in the same universe as Ancestral Night, and some of the major characters of the are minor characters here. I actually howled, “Mantis COOOOOOOOP!” at one crucial point. (Mantis cop. Mantis cop.) But also there’s a whole slate of new characters to enjoy including Mantis cop’s timid compatriot omg this species okay I am fine now. I’m fine.

But really though: I have not had enough fun science fiction where humans and aliens have established friendships and working relationships, lately. It is a subgenre I like so much, and I basically never have enough of it. And this one has hospital drama! And faster-than-light travel drama! And people doing their best to get their heads together!

There is also some serious consideration of community, and of how to handle breaches of trust, both individual and community. The questions of how to be a functioning adult that come up in Ancestral Night are foundational, but this one expands on them further. With multiple-atmosphere hospital drama and mantis cop. I really really like this, okay? You’re going to want one. It’s a prime example of Bear continuing to grow as a writer–and I liked the stuff she started with.

While reading through Machine, I never knew this was a sequel to the Ancestral Night, which I never read. Thats one of the reason I felt that some characters were jumpy!! Nevertheless, the story is futuristic, imaginative and has a good mystery intertwined with it. Our protagonist, Dr.Jens finds a cure to save space Aliens, but her works reveals mystery/conspiracy!! Then follows a story that is purely driven by curiosity, suspense and scientific stuffs. Overall a good read, but I really couldn’t feel the impact that I usually have while reading a SciFi novel!!
3.5/5 🌟
Thank you Netgalley, Gallery Books and Elizabeth Bear for the ARC. This review is my own and is not influenced in any way!

This is the sequel to *Ancestral Night*, but there will be no spoilers. This is a "takes place in the same universe" kind of sequel, where we get some recurring characters rather than a continuation of the same story.

The bad news is that this book does not feature space cats (though Bear assured me on Twitter that she has plans for further books featuring space cats). The good news is that we get more mantis cop.

This book takes place about 5 ~~years~~ ans after the events of *Ancestral Night*. The main character is Llyn Jens, a trauma doctor at Core General. She and her team have been dispatched aboard the Synarche Medical Vessel *I Race to Seek the Living*, better known as Sally (the name of the shipboard AI). They've picked up a distress call from the centuries-old Terran generation ship *Big Rock Candy Mountain*, launched before humanity got it's collective shit together, discovered FTL, and joined the galactic community at large. When they get there they find a few thousand humans frozen in cryo, a primitive AI suffering from memory loss and doing it's best to care for them, another Synarche ship docked with the *Rock* but the crew and shipboard AI in some kind of stasis, a weird tinker-toy like machine filling many corridors of the ship, assiduously pulling away from Dr. Jens and reforming behind her, and assorted other mysteries.

But those mysteries can wait, because there's a few thousand lives to save. Llyn is a dedicated (if extraordinarily cynical) professional, and the Synarche in general and Core General in particular considers any cost worth it to save sentient lives, so they roll up their sleeves (metaphorically, cause the vacuum of space and all) and get to work.

And naturally the aforementioned mysteries don't wait, and Llyn finds herself wishing that all she had to do was successfully thaw out a few thousand culturally backwards corpsicles and see about getting them integrated into society.

Despite Jens’ cynicism, this is a wonderfully optimistic book. Those who have read *Ancestral Night* will be familiar with the Synarche, a United Federation of Planets-like galactic government where all sentient beings are valued and treated with respect, whether they’re human, giant praying-mantis thing, sentient tree, or any other flavor of life under the many, many suns.

A major part of *Ancestral Night* was “rightminding,” the idea that humanity (and indeed most species) are able to rise above crude evolutionary survival instincts and achieve true civilization through deliberate control of brain chemistry. The ability to literally turn off emotions that aren’t socially helpful is an interesting idea, and a troubling one. It’s not as central an issue here as it was in *Ancestral Night*, but it’s still present.

Overall this was a great read. It started out a bit slow, but really picked up speed around the middle to the point where I stopped being a functional human being for several hours and could only communicate in grunts because I couldn’t put it down. Jens is a wonderful character to spend time with, and her assorted multispecies friends make for great company.

The pun-lover in me particularly appreciates that Starlight, the sentient tree that runs the hospital admin, is referred to by the Terrans aboard Core General as “the administree.” Bravo on that one Bear.

As I said, this was wonderful. I give it a solid 5 stars, though if “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is still stuck in my head in 48 hours I might have to drop it down to 4.

A highly entertaining storyline that was engaging and immersive enough that it pulled me right in from the start. I enjoyed how this world was peopled with such diverse characters, these human, alien, and AI characters really brought the story to life. All in all a great addition to the sci-fi genre.

*I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book provided by NetGalley*

This author has been around a long time and is quite prolific. She's a pretty solid writer but never seems to knock it out of the park. This is no different, and is quite good but not great. The book is imaginative, fun, and sophisticated in some ways. It also contains some mystery. A good scifi read.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Most of us have worked with someone like Dr. Brookllyn Jens, the protagonist of Machine, an upcoming novel by Elizabeth Bear. The doctor is great at her job and can hold her own among her workmates, whether trading sarcastic comments or discussing any number of subjects. But then you find out she’s married, or divorced, or has a kid (maybe all three), and suddenly realize just how little you truly know about someone you’ve worked with for months or years.

This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley for that purpose. The book is scheduled to be available on October 6, 2020.

Dr. Jens has lived quite a life up to the point where we meet her, standing in an airlock door, waiting to jump from her space ship to an ancient vessel that may or may not have passengers in need of her services as a medical rescue specialist. We’ll learn about that life and her pain, real and figurative, when that jump to the old-Earth generation ship lands her in the middle of a mystery that results in some unsettling questions. Maintaining emotional distance may have been her idea, but Dr. Jens will realize a lot of important information is missed when keeping one’s head down.

Machine’s storyline moves at a measured pace but that’s not to say it drags. Discoveries are hard earned and the stakes steadily raised as Dr. Jens probes events on the generation ship and hospital space station which may or may not be related. There are some well-detailed action scenes and a healthy dose of realism about the myriad challenges humans would face living and working in deep space, as well as a bit of big-picture politics involving the multi-species Synarche. The Synarche appears to be a utopian ideal where everyone is equal and provided for, but as they say, looks are deceiving.

Unlike the anodyne bi-pedal creatures that populate so much of sci-fi, there are some memorable and truly imaginative non-human characters in Machine, including sentient AIs and aliens with unique physical and environmental requirements. My personal favorites are Rilriltok and Cheerilaq, male and female (respectively) Rashaqin. He’s a doctor and she’s the hospital’s law enforcer and their relationship, or lack thereof, is … complicated. Should the author opt to write a story about either of them in particular or their species in general, I’d love to read it.

I also love the way the author had some fun with ship names in Machine. For example, the name of the ancient generation ship, crewed by people who had given up on the Earth as a viable home (small spoiler: they were wrong), is “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The fast rescue ship Dr. Jens is a part of is named “I Race To Seek The Living” and perhaps the greatest of all is the law enforcement vessel called “I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense.”

Intelligently plotted and executed with flair, Machine made for more than few enjoyable hours of reading.

Ancestral Night was a mixed bag, with some things I loved and some things I didn’t. I loved the diversity, the worldbuilding, and the book’s themes: friendship, space travel, utopian societies. But I wasn’t a fan of Elizabeth Bear’s tendency to go off on frequent, long, complicated tangents, and the protagonist, Haimey, took a while to grow on me. Ancestral Night started off on a low note, and though I ended up enjoying it by the end, it didn’t feel right to rate it higher than three stars based on how rough the beginning was.

Machine was the opposite. It started out great! It kept all the things I liked about Ancestral Night and, at least at first, toned down the things that annoyed me. It had an amazingly diverse cast of characters (now with even more aliens!). It had layers and layers of rich, complex worldbuilding. It had friendship, it had space travel, and it had a utopian society. I was so ready to give this one four stars (because it still wasn’t quite perfect enough for five).

Our new protagonist, Dr. Brookllyn Jens, still went off on tangents, but they were shorter, simpler, and slightly less frequent, so they didn’t bother me as much as Haimey’s did. Probably as a direct result of this, I warmed to Llyn much faster than I did to Haimey. Her experience with chronic pain was enlightening and added realism and texture to the story. But then, in the last quarter of the story, she got really angsty, and her tangents cane more frequently and were longer and more complex.

Like Ancestral Night, the plot of Machine centers around a complicated mystery. I was able to guess some aspects of the reveal, but definitely not the whole thing. I didn’t always know exactly what was going on, but this happens to me with a lot of science fiction because I just don’t know that much about science. I found the reveal anticlimactic, which, combined with Llyn’s turn for the worse toward the end – reverse character development? – took me down to three stars.

Even though I, once again, don’t feel like I can rate this one higher than three stars, I still definitely enjoyed it. It kept me engaged through some otherwise very boring days. And I do hope Bear continues the White Space series. This world that she’s created is too compelling to leave behind. Just… cool it with the tangents.