S.B. Divya’s futuristic tale is the most creative sci-fi story I have read in years. The author wastes no time in placing us in the middle of the action, and although there are plenty of imaginative words and images that belong to the future, I found the descriptions easy to follow.

Some of the future world has evolved from things we are already used to. Online tip jars are not new, although it seems almost everyone has one. The thumbs up/thumbs down icons have morphed into a voting system that tracks the believability of whatever is posted in a percentage. To keep up with the artificial intelligence machines, humans must resort to pills that do everything from increase your brain power or reactions to aid with recovery from an injury. Ms. Divya not only builds a future world, but she takes the time to demonstrate how her characters react to this world and how it molds them and their thinking.

The plot centers around what futurists talk about now: what do we do if artificial intelligence becomes sentient? To make it more interesting, how does the world react if those sentient beings release a manifesto, declaring it is time to give all robots rights (yes, not just the awake robots, but all the helpful machines, from medical carebots to the kitchens that create the family dinner). Two characters help tell the tale: Nithya, who enables us to see the reactions of the average family when the world begins to fall apart; and her sister-in-law Welga, whose talents land her smackdab in the middle of the efforts to capture a sentient AI and discover the plans of the robot revolutionaries.

“Machinehood” keeps a steady pace, at times rocketing forward during the action scenes. The ending was quite satisfactory and managed to take me completely by surprise. The author examines some of the social issues without getting caught in a quagmire of political rhetoric. It’s hard to find good, serious sci-fi and this one is a gem. Five stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Gallery/Saga Press for a complimentary electronic copy of this book.

My favorite sub genre of science fiction is Sci-Fi thrillers, and I especially love AI characters. Those two things combined made me excited to pick this book up. Unfortunately, this book didn’t work for me. While I can’t pinpoint what I didn’t like, I can say that I was bored while reading. I started this book on the first of February, and I’m DNFing it at 65% over a month later.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book overall. The concept really made me think and I love when sci-fi can do that. The idea of AI has been around for such a long time, but nothing to this scale is even remotely feasible at the moment. If AI were real and humans had to take medication to keep up with them, I don't know how the world would look. If it is anything like this book laid out, it looks fairly bleak.

I liked the characters and the world-building. There was a lot of diversity in both character and setting, which I am always looking for regardless of genre. I was really able to visualize myself living 100 years in the future. The beginning was fantastic! It was fast paced and I couldn't put it down. About 3/4 of the way through, however, the plot slowed way down. I found myself pausing more while readying because there wasn't a lot happening. And what was happening was mostly characters thoughts and a lot of repeating concepts. I will say, the ending was worth pushing through the last bit.

Overall it was a solid sci-fi book and I can definitely see myself reading more from this author.

Ah yay, another eerily plausible future scenario that we'd all hate and also accept! Gosh I love these! Machinehood takes the current exploitations in our economic and social systems and launches them into overdrive to create a gig economy that leaves nearly everyone susceptible to sudden poverty, and a social media tie-in that invades their privacy 100% of the time, but without it, they can't survive in the aforementioned messed up gig economy. Oh yeah, and they all have to take pills to stay afloat. Now, said drugs are supposed to be "safe", but no one actually knows that, nor do they care. As long as the workers keep working, right? (You see how plausible this is? I mean, it happens now, in various forms, of course.)

Now, in the midst of all that, a group is pissed that machines don't have the same rights as humans. And they threaten to basically destroy the entire infrastructure of the world, unless their demands are met. Welga, who has been working as security for Important Rich People™ finds herself in the middle of the fight, even though she's not particularly qualified for said fight. But it seems no one knows what to do, and Welga feels that she owes this to her people, so fight she will.

Welga is a great character, and I absolutely enjoyed her. The story focuses on both Welga, and her family. Her aging father is living alone, and both Welga and her brother feel a huge responsibility to him. Welga's partner doesn't want her to be in harm's way, but is understanding when she needs to. But my other favorite character was Welga's sister-in-law Nithya, who helps Welga from India. Nithya is incredibly smart, and what begins as a quest to figure out why Welga is sick (hint, it's definitely those weird pills) develops into the two women being a sort of team in saving the world. While Welga's role is hands-on, Nithya works hard behind the scenes.

The juxtaposition between the two women shows how many societal flaws have carried over from our own times. There is still racism present, and there are certainly still severe inequalities between women and men. You kind of start to see why the Machinehood is not always a huge fan of society the way it is, frankly, though you probably won't agree with its methods.

It's a strong story that kept me engaged, though it did become a bit dense at times which was my only real complaint. Otherwise, I was definitely invested in the story, and especially in Welga and Nithya's personal stories.

Bottom Line: Another hauntingly plausible society that shows that if left unchecked, we'll continue to bring our current problems into the future.

This book started out fantastic: offering questions and a peek at a life only scifi can bring. Between a gig-centered and almost totally public lifestyle to designer drugs printed at home to human-AI interfaces running day-to-day life, we got to see a theoretically plausible near future. We also met some interesting characters and got to see some really cool sequences with flashy or effective combat - and where some people broke the pre-agreed rules of engagement. We got to see a world in turmoil (but then again, when is the world not in turmoil?)

Unfortunately, so much of this book was spent literally arguing ethics. Characters would have conversations with each other for chapters at a time hashing out the nuances of one ethical dilemma or another. By the time I made it to 60% I was so tired of the talking and just wanted movement and fighting and seeing new things. This is definitely a personal opinion, but I think a LOT of this book could have been cut in order to streamline the pacing. Instead of having those discussions verbatim on the page, pose them to the readers and then come to a decision and move on. They were interesting analyses but I was in this for a scifi conspiracy adventure not where to draw the line on violence perpetuated by practitioners of Buddhism.

If you're looking for a more introspective novel with a futuristic backdrop, this is definitely gonna be your jam. If you're looking for high stakes adventure, maybe try something else.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this book. Sometimes these futuristic, AI-heavy books can be a real slog. While Machinehood did occasionally sag in the storytelling, it was mostly a fun and fairly quick read. I love that the protagonist is named Ramirez, as a Latino last name is quite rare in the sci-fi genre. Welga Ramirez is a typical victim of that 'they pulled me in for one last job' trope in this book, where she rejoins the government that had previously betrayed her in order to help them defeat The Machinehood, a terrorist group that is hellbent on stopping production of these pills that are literally keeping humans alive. Without these pills, bad things could happen, and one of Welga's clients has already been murdered by these half-human, half-machine hybrids. I have to admit, the world that author SB Divya is building here can seem a bit convoluted at times, hence why I am giving it four stars instead of a perfect five. A few of the pitfalls of this dystopian future seem almost too futuristic, but if you go with it, you will be entertained by the story and its ending.

Machinehood by S.B. Divya | 02 Mar 2021|Gallery / Saga

When a terrorist organization starts killing the people behind the nanomachine industry that everyone depends on if they want their human performance to compete with weak AIs and Mechs, a former special forces operator finds herself drawn back into the fray despite having been burned years before. What will Welga Ramirez have to give up to stop the Machinehood from destroying the Earth’s economy and killing more?

Welga left MARSOC, the Marine’s special forces when she was burned by the government during a mission. Now she’s a Shield, a professional bodyguard in a world where it’s legal for protesters to take shots at celebs because medical science can heal almost anything. But then a new protest group, the Machinehood, springs up and they’re shooting to kill, demanding that all pill production be shut down, and leaving everyone wondering who they really are.

The government thinks they’re an old enemy come back, the sealed off al-Muwahhidun empire in North Africa, which shuns robots and AIs, now expanding to the drugs that humans have to take to compete with either. Welga thinks they’re on the wrong track, and though she’s let herself be drawn back into government games, she takes off on her own to infiltrated and bring down the Machinehood.

S.B. Divya has woven an inventive and thoughtful piece of global intrigue that crosses national and cultural boundaries with fast-paced action and an engaging cast. Machinehood is cutting edge cyber/pharma-punk and the author is well worth keeping an eye on.

“Modern society has found itself at the mercy of an oligarchy whose primary objective is to accrue power. They have done this by dividing human labor into two classes: designers and gigsters. The former are exploited for their cognitive power, while the latter rely on low-skilled, transient forms of work for hire.” —Machinehood, S.B. Divya
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Happy pub day to MACHINEHOOD, an action-packed and delightfully non-Eurocentric novel that challenges the goals & unintended consequences of technological progress under capitalism.

After leaving Marine Corps special ops, Welga Ramírez repurposed her skills as a Shield bodyguard—one of the few steady jobs available in an economy that universally runs on gigging.

At 35, retirement is in the horizon. But when an attack on a client during a milk run job ends up linked to the demands of an emergent machines’ rights group (that may or may not be helmed by sentient AI), she’s drawn into a SpecOps investigation that has ramifications for the future of humankind & social order on Earth.
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Y’all I cannot remember the last time I read scifi/spec fic that was SO on-point re: potential manifestations of our current sociopolitical & technological trajectory. Divya is not imagining a world much further into the future, which makes her considerations of things like biogenetics, surveillance, connectivity, artificial intelligences, and the dueling forces of cooperation and exploitation all the more resonant.

As many fascinating & creative details as are seeded into the story, its pace is quick, and the elaborately woven web of mystery and intrigue—ranging from a blacked out caliphate to a refugee camp to a Neo-Buddhist space station—reminded me of watching a season of Homeland.
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Snag this one if you’re in the mood for a propulsive and thought-provoking novel! Thanks to @sagasff for the dARC 🙌🏼✨

Set at the end of the 21st century, this sci-fi novel follows the stories of two sisters-in-law who will both prove pivotal in the fight against the terrorist organization known as the Machinehood.

Eighty years from now, people are heavily reliant on technology and weak artificial intelligences (known as WAIs) to perform the most mundane tasks, leading to increased joblessness as humans need to dose themselves with all manner of performance-enhancing pills, often mini-machines that work inside the body, in order to keep up with the Joneses, human or AI. American Welga Ramirez is the daughter of a bioengineer who died a painful death due to her genetic code’s incompatibility with flow, a common mind/focus enhancer: on her deathbed, she made her kids foreswear the drug, leading to Welga washing out of college. So Welga enlisted in the US Armed Forces instead, eventually retiring as a result of her disgust at a botched operation in the Maghreb. Now she works as a Shield, essentially a telegenic bodyguard for the rich capitalist class or funders, as they’re known, to differentiate them from giggers, the majority of the world labor force who must rely on the gig economy to make ends meet.

Her brother Luis is married to Nithya Balachandran and lives in Chennai with his wife and their daughter Carma. Nithya is a biogeneticist, and the first person Welga turns to when she starts to suffer from tremors, likely caused by the constant pill usage required in her line of work. But all personal issues take a back seat when a shadowy organization proclaiming the equality of humanity with AI targets the funders of several successful pharmaceutical companies simultaneously, resulting in death, destruction and mass panic as the terrorists' demands make their way to the global populace. Soon, Welga will have to question her own beliefs and boundaries as she embarks on a desperate hunt to stop the organization calling itself the Machinehood from killing again.

It might come as a surprise for me to say that in a book so shot through with ideas of future tech and sentience, my favorite parts were the ones that dealt with the romantic relationships, between Nithya and Luis, and between Welga and Connor. Their relationships get messy and uncomfortable but the way the partners negotiate their way through conflict is honestly inspiring. It’s so nice to see realistic portrayals of strong partnerships depicted in any media, much less genre fiction.

And while I appreciated how Welga stayed true to the idea that the ends do not justify the means, particularly when the cost is in human and AI lives, and while I agreed with the well-thought-out moral and scientific philosophies of this novel, a lot of the economic premises failed to convince me. In one of the earlier chapters, Welga discovers the shortcomings of a local WAI coffee vendor and opts for coffee from a human instead: the fact that this tendency of human nature to prefer human contact, and thusly to be willing to pay a marginal amount extra for it, is often overlooked in progressive sci-fi depictions of future economies continues to baffle me (I am also watching the latest season of The Expanse right now and trying to ignore the economics -- perhaps once I read the books I’ll understand it better.) I was also unenthused by Nithya’s career change: for a novel that had seemed to be critiquing capitalist stratification, it felt odd for Nithya to cap her personal journey by <spoiler>embracing being part of the exploiting</spoiler> class.

I did enjoy the dry remarks made at the expense of various world governments, as well as the clever references to previous decades subtly mirroring the just-past century. I also really liked how S. B. Divya acknowledges the importance of the very different skillsets both Welga and Nithya brought to bear in combating the Machinehood. I think more could have been done in building emotional suspense -- the Big Bad’s capitulation, as one example, felt strangely flat -- but overall, this was an entertaining, thought-provoking look at a plausible future extrapolated from some of the worst of our present-day.

Machinehood by S. B. Divya will be published tomorrow March 2, 2021 by Gallery/Saga Press and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9781982148065">Bookshop!</a> Want it now? For the Kindle version, <a href="https://amzn.to/3qZ7Ues">click here</a>.

As is often the case with cutting edge sci-fi, it takes more than a couple of pages to acclimate to the language used, but once you do, the story does take off. Through the use of words, Divya conveys a different time and place not too far from our own to be unidentifiable but distant enough to feel strange. For example, we all know what a kitchen is… the place where food is stored and cooked. In MACHINEHOOD, a kitchen is an automated unit that not only prepares food but biologicals and other things upon which humanity has come to depend.

Some books are harder to review than others. I don't think a review should retell the story; it should make you want to read the book. MACHINEHOOD is one of those books. It is through the eyes of Welga Ramirez, the kickass female protagonist, that you will learn of the dependence on AIs that prevails in this time. As the title suggests, AIs may have reached a level of sophistication that has them demanding rights on a par with humans. I'm oversimplifying what may or may not be a war for dominance of man and machine.

Overall, MACHINEHOOD is a morality play… an examination of the golden rule that states "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Good science fiction is often about possibilities. The timeframe here says our devices today are putting us on a path that could culminate, sooner rather than later, in a new civil rights movement where machines demand rights.

Are you ready?

In her debut novel, Divya sets the scene in the world of 2095. Humanity around the world is reliant on homemade and commercially manufactured pills--for health, for work focus, for managing bots, for healing, for sleep, and for transitioning between all of the above.

The economy runs on robots, partially augmented humans, and humans desperately trying to compete with artificial intelligence and survive in the gig economy.

Welga Ramirez is an elite bodyguard who is former special forces, and she's on the verge of retirement. Like almost everyone, Welga allows constant live feeds of her activity for anyone who's interested in seeing what she's doing. She manages to keep her virtual tip jar full, and her biggest challenge lately has been shifting her angle or slightly manipulating a situation during her bodyguard jobs in order to maximize tips. Then the unthinkable happens: her team's client is murdered. Violent crimes really don't happen anymore, and society is thrown into a tailspin.

A new terrorist group, The Machinehood, takes responsibility. They're attacking and killing major pill funders, and they threaten more widespread destruction if society doesn't immediately stop using pills as the basis for everyday tasks and as the foundation for the worldwide economy and offer greater rights for humans enhanced with artificial intelligence. In the midst of a global panic, Welga is drawn back into intelligence work in order to identify and fight this new enemy--an enemy that may turn out to be a new incarnation of an old nemesis.

Space! Robots! Artificial intelligence! I wished for more page time spent on everyday tasks and activities (cooking, shifting household modules, travel, and communicating), which were all carried out in Jetsons-level, fascinating, futuristic ways. But Divya is too busy crafting strong female main protagonists (complete with working mother guilt, which exists in the future too) as they: navigate ethical considerations such as pressures on workers and workload expectations; consider modifications to the body to enable faster or more strenuous work; manage the implications of a backlash against artificial enhancements; and face society's inability to extricate itself and the worldwide economy from a reliance on pills.

There are mysterious elements at play. Going off world is presented as a possible solution (for those with means) and a potential escape from the Earth's complications. The management of many large-scale issues and their side effects are shown in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, including the meaning and value of personhood; the definitions of health, autonomy, and freedom; sometimes-necessary compromises; and the promise for the future of the world.

Toward the end of the book there's significant summary, and as events move along during the late phase of the story, we see abrupt changes and shifts in thinking and plans. This works for the plot and resolutions—and none of it happens without realistic complications—but it also felt a little jarring.

I received a prepublication copy of this book courtesy of Gallery Books and NetGalley.

I mentioned this book (along with We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker and The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister) in the Bossy Bookworm Greedy Reading List Three Books I'm Reading Now, 2/24/21 Edition.

This captivating story with complex world-building and intriguing (and somewhat disturbing) premise is set about 80 years in the future. This story is fast-paced and is packed with robots, AIs, bio-hacking, and video surveillance. This book also touches on religion, pro-choice/pro-life conflicts, politics, and etc.

I enjoyed reading this novel. If you like reading thought-provoking speculative fiction focused on AI and AI's effects on society, this will be a great novel for you.

Machinehood is great visionary novel of how technology will interact with human lives in the near future. surveillance drones and social media have taken total control of our economy and how humans interact with each other. Most humans live and work in a social media dictated gig economy where only an elite few are "funders" while the rest of us are either gig workers or "Shields", a weird but not implausible combination of security workers and performance artists. Protestors and Shields play out a non-lethal combat for tips and donations over social media, enacting little if any social change. The Shields rely on protestors to create disturbances that they can put down in the most dramatic style, and the protestors rely on Shields rise to defend the Funders from their antics. The result is major donations to both causes. No actual social change is achieved, but the viewers will pour money into both sides from the comfort of their chairs at home.

The whole system is created and fueled by both the elites' and the protestors' reliance on an ever increasingly intelligent system of surveillance drones, and other "Weak Artificial Intelligence" (WAIs) to record and broadcast their messages and actions. Social conflicts are carried out in cinematic confrontations over social media, where neither side has any real interest in winning a conflict as much as soliciting donations from viewers across the world. There are no wars, and murder is almost unheard of. No one in this vision of the future is desperate enough to die, or kill for their cause. Until The Machinehood enters the picture.

The Machinehood is an organization dedicated to human rights for WAIs. Every machine that humanity relies on, from vehicles to personal assistant drones to toasters to communication devices has some form of WAI, and The Machinehood has decided that these devices are people, and deserve all the rights that humans enjoy. They are willing to fight and die and kill for these rights in a revolutionary movement that humanity hasn't seen for a hundred years.

I absolutely loved SB Divya's vision of the near-future. Everything is chillingly plausible. The tech scene, the dominance of social media, even the evolution of religion and how different religions have reacted to a new every day life dictated by new technology. Humans are taking pills, which don't actually contain pharmaceutical chemicals, but nano-machines that stimulate growth in musculature systems, immune systems, digestion, circulation, etc. People rely on machines inside and out. Giggers broadcast their entire lives on social media and rely on tips whether they're doing their jobs, visiting restaurants, making love, or fighting for a cause. Nano drones are everywhere and record and broadcast everything. The whole economic system that our characters live and work in is both plausibly fantastic and chillingly familiar. The world building and setting of this book are so good that this would be a five star read for me except for one thing...

The cause that The Machinehood is fighting for is complete and utter nonsense. I knew coming in that this novel had a lot to say about the rights of artificial intelligence, but WAIs simply aren't anything that could be confused with a sentient being. Throughout the book Divya tries to equate machine rights with animal rights, but her vision of machines in the near future doesn't resemble anything that could be confused with artificial intelligence or even animal intelligence. The climactic showdown in The Machinehood doesn't involve an action sequence, but rather a philosophical discussion about the nature of humanity and human rights. While I'm fully willing to give that conversation to an android or a machine that has learned to feel something more than the sum of it's metal parts, that entity is absent from this book. The soldiers of The Machinehood that are fighting for equal rights are not robots that want to be recognized as people, rather they already are humans who have been fully augmented with artificial intelligences. They never stopped being human and don't need to fight for their own rights, much less the rights of flying rolodexes and cell phones with personality programming. The whole premise of the main conflict just didn't ever make sense to me.

Still, the world that SB Divya imagined is so ripe for revolution and exploitation, and so plausible and familiar that I highly rated this book and whole heartedly recommend it to any near-future sci-fi fan who likes to imagine where technology is taking us.

I really liked this premise! I always find plots about AI in general to be fascinating, and I particularly enjoy exploring the ideas of rights of AI. This was an interesting, futuristic world. People are dependent on pills (and other things of that nature) to not only take care of their health, but also to increase their thinking, strength, and more! Some of this dependency comes in with competing against AI for jobs, so that was a cool idea. I also liked how people are able to print medicine in their kitchens! There's definitely some great technology here. Social media plays a large role in society where some of our characters have swarms of cameras following them at all times to live stream everything. This was an interesting development (one which I personally wouldn't want to do myself!).

I thought the beginning was quite strong, but then the story started to meander a bit. I struggled with the pacing, and I did think that the ending was a bit too convenient. In general, I had trouble really connecting to the characters. Despite initially being interested in Welga's story, I did lose some interest in following her. However, I did enjoy the sections following Welga's sister in law Nithya! I thought these sections were more personal, and I loved seeing daily life in this world. It was fun to read about the descriptions of her house and how furniture can be modified based on need.

This book does cover some heavy themes such as terrorism, religion, politics, and abortion (there are pro choice vs pro life conflicts here).

Overall, while I didn't feel as strongly about this as I hoped, I did still enjoy my time with it and would recommend it if you're interested.

I received a copy of this for review from the publisher via NetGalley - thank you! All opinions are my own.

My video review can be seen on my channel (around minutes 0:15-4:01 of this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub3DGZRkG24

Abandoned book at the 20% mark. While I liked the premise of the book I just did not get pulled into the plot whatsoever. Every chapter I just found... uninteresting.

DNF. I really liked the premise but the writing did not work for me at all. It wouldn't be fair to the book if I finished reading and gave it a low rating.

At what point are mechanical beings/machines considered to have enough intelligence and be of enough worth to receive rights like humans have? Is it when they can think outside of the tasks for which they have been created? When they can think for themselves? Or just considering that they work and do tasks at all? These difficult questions are taken on at various angles in the new novel Machinehood, by S. B. Divya. I became immersed in the dual viewpoint story of two women who are very different but come together to help each other. Welga, an augmented human who just wants to get ahead in life, has pride in her job. Because of the newest medical supplements, she is great at it. However, she begins to have health issues like those that led to the death of her mother. Her sister-in-law Nithya is a scientist who works from home for a corporation, using meds to make her brain smarter and faster. She has a family that depends on her to do well to maintain their income. Both are part of a world not so far in the future that has become heavily dependant upon robots, artificial intelligence, and the latest biological technology. The world that Divya has built in Machinehood is so advanced yet so believable. Dealing with climate change and modern rocket travel are part of this future. That is, until someone attempts to end it in order to give more credit to the machines that do so much work and without which we find this world would be lost. The great characters and world are made better by the mystery of who IS the Machinehood. Slow release of clues helps us understand where the idea came from and why it exits
“The Machinehood has corrupted your thinking so much that you’ve become the thing you once despised. You’re abusing your power to force people into a particular way of life.”
Because of Divya’s writing, being in these ladies’ day to day world is just as fun as the mystery itself. I will be anticipating her future works, as well as reading her past short stories. I absolutely loved this book.

Machinehood is a fast-paced futuristic sci-fi with intense world-building and a compelling premise surrounding the role and rights of AI and machines. The story centers around Welga, an ex-military member who now works as a bodyguard, and Nithya, a scientist, two women navigating this world with two very different paths and goals. The story takes off when a rebel group begins violently advocating and demanding that AIs and machines be treated equally to humans with the same rights and privileges. If you, like me, find AI a bit creepy and don't trust it, then this book will be one you might appreciate.

Machinehood is set in a world in which machines and AI have become ubiquitous, and because of this is has become harder and harder for humans to be able to keep up. As a result, people have begun to take pills and other "enhancers" in order to improve their own abilities (better focus, speed, etc.), and the pills are a development that has occurred after already trying to physically alter human bodies cyborg-style, which apparently had terrible consequences. This is also a world in which a magnified form of social media also dominates everyone's lives. People can essentially broadcast their lives 24/7 if they desire and also have "tip jars" in which people can regularly donate.

Along with this is the fact that drones of all sizes are just basically...everywhere. I think the thing that most took me by surprise was the fact that the drones can essentially go anywhere and watch anything, so if you want to watch a random couple having sex, you can probably just fly into their room and do so. Apparently this has just become "accepted" and is no longer a big deal because anyone can do it, but it was such a minor yet intriguing aspect of the world-building and current setting that I couldn't get it out of my head. I think it says a lot about the impact of tech in this futuristic setting and what a permanent part of society it has become.

Machinehood is told in alternative perspectives between sisters-in-law Welga and Nithya. Welga's job intertwines a lot with a militant rebel group that actively moves against the usage of pills and other enhancers and takes extreme action and terrorist attacks to demonstrate. I appreciated Welga's confidence and ability to be both extraordinarily cautious and disciplined while at the same time somewhat throw caution to the wind and make some questionable decisisions, as this allowed her to feel like a more realized and developed character. I feel like there were a lot of nuances to her job that took me a little while to understand, but nonetheless it was entertaining to follow her different jobs.

We also follow Nithya's perspective, and I think I enjoyed Nithya's narrative a bit more than Welga's. Nithya is a scientist whose work I'm not really sure I could accurately recount in this review, but I was so interested in her research and how she undertook her work. I also appreciated the more personal aspects of her life, such as some of her conflicts with her husband and her difficulties with her daughter and family. Despite my interest in these characters and their works, I never felt overly connected to either one of these characters. I don't need to feel connected to characters to enjoy a book, but in this case there was just a bit too much distance at times, especially with Welga's perspective. There was something about Welga's narrative that prevented me from being able to fully understand or predict her actions throughout the story.

I really enjoyed the different themes Machinehood explored in relation to AI, tech in general, future body-related technology, autonomy, and so on. I particularly liked Divya's exploration of these themes because she approached them from some angles I hadn't seen before that felt as though they actually brought something new to the table. There are a lot of sci-fi books out recently that tackle similar ideas of AI and futuristic tech, but it's harder to find one that present new conversations to explore, and Divya did just that. She does this not only through the actions of the AI in the book, but also through her characters' reactions to it and by showing the effects of different tech on the world itself.

Lastly, I'll touch on the pacing and ending. I found that there was a lot of heavy info-dumping in parts throughout the entire book that interrupted the fast-paced flow of the rest of the book. I don't mind getting information about a world and backstory because it helps me to better understand everything going on in the present, but in this case it just felt overwhelming at times. There is a lot of jargon throughout this book, as well as new ideas and systems that we have to quickly figure out in order to be able to follow along and actually enjoy the book. In regards to the ending of Machinehood, it felt just a little too wrapped up overall. I'm fine with some good resolution, but in this case things just felt a bit too 'out there' and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it all.

Overall, I've given Machinehood four stars! Despite the issues I had, when I look back on this book I find myself thinking about how enjoyable and interesting it was to explore. If you like sci-fi, futuristic stories, or AI, then be sure to keep this one on your radar.

Complicated and thorough world-building is Divya's strong suit in this book and the basis for my rating. It's a very interesting extrapolation of the present. The plot is fairly interesting, but I didn't feel any emotional connection to any of the characters. I also felt the book would have benefited from significant trimming. I found myself wanting to 'get on with it'. The end tidies things up quickly and a bit to well. It would also be possible for Divya to continue the story.

Humanity has cured most diseases with daily pills that are made in your in-house pill dispenser. They have created habitable space stations, they have created bots for most manual labour jobs and new "pills" that are nano-bots that help people temporarily think faster or move faster than otherwise possible to keep up with the bots. When the group called "Machinehood" issues a manifesto about machine rights and destroys large parts of the pill distribution facilities and the worldwide network infrastructure how do people react and how does it do to society.

I enjoyed the story of Wega and her story from when she is protecting a pill designer during the initial attacks by these part human, part machine operatives and what she goes through to find the truth about the Machinehood and where is it coming from. Her family and support network are strong characters own their own with their own challenging stories.