Fool's War Kindle Edition

An interesting concept marred by carelessness. In the kindle edition, there was no editing or proofreading; mistakes were constant throughout the book, halting the suspension of disbelief. I didn't believe the errors: subject and verb tenses not matching; two verbs in one sentence (pick one); and if the wrong word could possibly be used it was: who's for whose, loose for lose, its for it's and vice versa -- and these were only the ordinary mistakes. By the second half of the book, I was convinced I was reading a first draft. How did this happen to an established writer? Things like this show disrespect if not contempt for the reader. And it goes on: the book, like many, flips back and forth between plot lines, but these changes aren't marked by so much as a blank line between paragraphs: very disorienting. The first third of the book could have been vastly improved by good editing and some outside technical advice, to put some science in the fiction. Shuttle rides read like you were in an airplane.
The strong writing shone through, though. It's a pity and a crime that the book was released in an unfinished state.

I enjoyed the book - it has several interesting twists and seemingly well thought out characters.

It has the usual editing errors - is it thirty-six or thirty-eight hours; lose not loose, etc.

I'm knocking it down a star because there is one glaring problem - a lack of visual clues when a scene transition occurs. Usually within a couple of lines you realize this has occurred, but the normal convention is a few blank lines or some dashes or other typographical convention. The one that really caused me to deduct the star is when E is talking to S and T shows up.

"Yes, I do know what's going on," she said quietly. "But you're going to want to sit down before I tell you."

The characters are face to face and the scene shifts and that lose end in never addressed... the book continues as if nothing was said.

It might have enjoyable if pared down by at least half. It was plodding and tedious I could not keep my interest up. I had to wrack my brain to remember what it was about and only finished it four days ago.

Dobbs is a Fool, a jester, typically contracted to starship crews for long voyages, her job being to help maintain crew sanity during the trip. She has contracted to a data packet ship for two years as the ship makes a data run from Neptune to a far colony. While at the colony, they download some software updates for a local hospital, which is where the fun begins.

Turns out that Dobbs is also a troubleshooter for the Fool's Guild, watching out for any sentient AIs that may pop up, and getting the AI into a safe environment where it can't mess up the local computer systems, ships, or ecologies. A new AI has formed at the colony, maybe because of what the ship downloaded, and Dobbs has to make a first contact and isolate the AI. Things go all to hell, of course, as the ship's crew, Dobbs, and the Fool's Guild all try to control the situation.

This is a well-done story, and should be of interest to any hard sci-fi fan or computer weenies. It's easy to get invested in most of the characters, and the book is easily one of Zettel's best efforts, with a lot of twists and turns and a number of not-so-good guys.

Finally, this book (Kindle Version) has hundreds of typos, misspellings, and grammar mistakes that should be embarrassing for any author. I many times had to go back one or more pages to figure out what was being said or why a character's name was spelled differently. Ms. Zettel needs to get on the phone to her editor and rip him or her a new one. I checked some of the errors in a paperback copy of this novel and the errors weren't there, so whomever edited the Kindle version did a really lousy job and should go back to slinging burgers.

The world known as the Farther Kingdom was founded during the Slow Burn. Many members of the Islamic faith emigrated to the Farther Kingdom to avoid a drastic fate, including some of Katmer Al Shei's ancestors. Al Shei is the Chief Engineer of a mail packet ship called the Pasadena, which she owns in partnership with Marcus Tully, her brother-in-law. The "mail" she delivers is actually digitalized data. Al Shei's wealthy uncle has hired Evelyn Dobbs to act as the ship's Fool. Al Shei has hired Jermina Yerusha as the new pilot, although prejudice against Freers like Yerusha is even stronger than prejudice against Muslims. Freers follow a quasi-religion that makes unsettling uses of Artificial Intelligences, sometimes adopting them as foster children with the hope that the AI will one day capture a soul. Al Shei, on the other hand, is old school. She refuses to allow an AI to run her ship, in part because some AIs fostered by Freers have caused mayhem.

Against that background (with, of course, several other characters who crew the Pasadena), a conspiracy-thriller plot develops as Al Shei fulfills a contract to deliver data from Earth to the Farther Kingdom. When things start to go massively haywire on the Pasadena, Al Shei suspects that Tully smuggled something on board the ship that has infected it like a virus. The Fool turns out to be no fool; she's the Pasadena's best chance of surviving the crisis. Fools have a secret and that secret eventually changes the novel's direction.

The truly imaginative aspect of this clever novel, of course, is the notion of a ship's Fool who functions as a morale officer and counselor while playing a hidden role. The precise nature of the threat to the Pasadena is also original. Other aspects of Fool's War are more familiar, particularly the direct interface between the human mind and computer software/data storage, but Sarah Zettel gives those notions a fresh context while describing the experience of riding a data stream in innovative terms. Particularly appealing is the way AIs are spontaneously and accidentally "born" and the implications of artificial life that isn't created by humans. In fact, that concept grounds the novel, and Zettel uses it to take AI fiction to an entirely new level.

Zettel also put some significant thought into the novel's political background. Freedom and its price is a recurring theme. Freedom means one thing to bankers but something quite different to inhabitants of Liberty Colonies where libertarian philosophy prevails (resulting in blood feuds fought by private armies as families resolve their differences without the benefit of a stabilizing government). The Freers believe AIs represent the ultimate in human freedom while some AIs reject humanity entirely, believing freedom means being true to their AI nature. It's commonly suggested that righteous wars are fought for freedom, but Fool's War makes the intelligent point that wars are often fought when different groups clash over the meaning of freedom.

War is, as the title suggests, another of the novel's themes. In many respects the war in the novel is different from those fought by humans against each other, but the fundamental lesson that Fool's War teaches applies to all wars: wars break out when people (or AIs) "become careless with the lives of outsiders." There's one other lesson I particularly like: "When we play the fool, how the theater expands!"

Fool's War didn't stir me emotionally as do the best science fiction novels, but it is intellectually satisfying and hugely entertaining, and the last chapters do have moments of emotional resonance. Zettel doesn't have the following of writers in the science fiction pantheon, but Fool's War is a book that deserves the attention of sf fans. I would give it 4 1/2 stars if I could.