"vN did not disappoint. It is a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race. It is often profound, and it is never boring."
– Cory Doctorow
“If you have been missing the kind of thought-provoking-yet-exciting stories about artificial creatures that only come along once in a while, vN is well worth grabbing. It's disturbing and sometimes upsetting — but the ending is a giant insane weird thrill that makes the whole thing pay off.”
– Charlie Jane Andres for io9.com
"Picks up where Blade Runner left off and maps territories Ridley Scott barely even glimpsed. (Philip K Dick would have been at home here, but Ashby's prose is better.) vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all off with the Three Laws."
– Peter Watts, author of Blindsight
"VN fuses cyberpunk with urban fantasy to produce something wholly new. Thre's a heavy kicker in every chapter. Zombie robots, vampire robots, robots as strange and gnarly as human beings. A page-turning treat."
– Rudy Rucker, author of the WARE TETRALOGY
"Ashby's debut novel is brimming with ideas..."
-SFX Magazine
“vN is a thrilling adventure story with a well-developed cast of both humans and vNs, which challenges the meaning of being a person without ever being preachy about it.”
– Steve Jones, Terror Tree
The future is built on oil. Literally. New Arcadia is a “company town,” an independent nation state built on top of an oil rig off the coast of Canada. Like her debut novel, vN: The First Machine Dynasty, Madeline Ashby’s Company Town brings hard sci-fi sensibilities and big ideas about the fate of humanity in a technological future to a story filled […]
With the announcement of the new those-bad-sequels-never-happened Alien movie, it’s been forgivably easy to forget that Neill Blomkamp has a totally different sci-fi film coming out this week. Chappie is the story of the creation of a new form of thinking machine, and looks to be cresting a wave of new cinematic depictions of artificial intelligence. A.I. also plays a role in […]
This past weekend, Westworld began its second season, promising 10 more weeks of enigmatic plotting, biomechanical heroes and villains, corporate intrigue, player piano Radiohead covers, and the long, twisted path to consciousness. That also means 10 more weeks of waiting between episodes, a problem for which, as always, science—or science fiction anyway—ofers a solution. Here are […]
We’re back! After working from a remote igloo for a few weeks over the holiday break, we returned to the office to find our desks covered in enough packages to build a small fort (seriously, we tested it out). Let’s find out what forthcoming SFF books we found inside a few of them.