Great Bear: Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Okay, I would admit that when I saw this book on NetGalley I was looking for a little light relief. The pseudo Soviet style cover, the blurb and the author's surname (Tchaikovsky? Surely not!), seemed to promise exactly what I was searching for. Well that really does serve me right for not keeping au courant with modern sci-fi literature. Fortunately by the time that I realised that my initial impression was utterly wrong, this book had already taken a big bite out of my attention.

This is not to say that Bear Head is not funny, it is very funny, but it is also deadly serious. There is humour here but no one could say it is light. Indeed the main themes of the book appear to be economic exploitation and political oppression and how near future technological advancements have been co-opted to implement them. 

Fortunately, these same technological advances, especially the creation of bio forms, animals that have human or superhuman intelligence, and Distributed Intelligence, artificial intelligence that is not limited to a single site, also serve to create the agents that will undermine the would-be exploiters and oppressors: Enter Honey the Bear, HumOS (is this pun Mr Tchaikovsky? It means "smoke" in Spanish), and the mysterious, omnipresent, goddess-like, Bees. Together with good guy lawyer Aslan, hapless Jimmy Marten and Sugar the pusher (yes, I don't think all the animal names are a coincidence), they are arrayed to fight for the liberation of the beings of earth... And Mars.

This fight is crude and savage at times. In particular, there is a character who is regularly brutalised, sensitive souls should beware, and one of the most upsetting scenes screwed up my translations that morning. The feminist in me however was pretty mollified, since it was surely not a coincidence that most of the saviours were female.

Bugger, this is probably one of my books of the year, and now I will have to read the first one (it is part two of The Dogs of War series). 

Thanks as always to NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC copy.