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State Machine (Rachel Peng Book 3) by [K.B. Spangler]

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K.B. Spangler

State Machine (Rachel Peng Book 3) Kindle Edition

by K.B. Spangler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

73 ratings

Book 3 of 4: Rachel Peng

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Nearly a year has passed since the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies went public. Agent Rachel Peng has adapted to her new life as the cyborg liaison to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police, but for Peng and her team, murder is usually just the beginning. This time, the body is found in the unlikeliest of places, and the race to recover a stolen piece of antiquity will put Rachel and her team against one of the country's most powerful political figures.
____________________________________
Reviews for the Rachel Peng novels:

“And after spending the length of the novel with her, I'm eager to pick up the next one to see what's next for Rachel Peng” (io9)

“If I have any regrets about Rachel Peng, it's that we're unlikely to ever see her front and center on a multiplex screen, cracking wise before she shoots somebody's kneecaps off. And we should. Rachel Peng is a bad-ass for the digital age.” (New York Times bestselling author, Seanan McGuire)

Print length

369 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 6, 2015
File size

2751 KB
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Books In This Series (4 Books)

Complete Series

Rachel Peng

Kindle Edition

Page 1 of 1Start OverPage 1 of 1

1
Digital Divide (Rachel Peng Book 1)
K.B. Spangler

(194)

Kindle Edition

$2.19
2
Maker Space (Rachel Peng Book 2)
K.B. Spangler

(89)

Kindle Edition

$5.49
3
State Machine (Rachel Peng Book 3)
K.B. Spangler

(73)

Kindle Edition

$5.49
4
Brute Force (Rachel Peng Book 4)
K.B. Spangler

(77)

Kindle Edition

$5.49

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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00XB7ITSE
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2751 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 369 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0984737588
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #399,816 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #509 in LGBTQ+ Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #1,290 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)
- #1,875 in Technothrillers (Books)

Customer Reviews:
73 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		65%
4 star		28%
3 star		5%
2 star		2%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Michael Lynn McguireTop Contributor: Fantasy Books

Book number three of a four book mystery fantasy series

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2020

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Book number three of a four book mystery fantasy series. This series is part of the A Girl and Her Fed universe with the web comic and several books. I read the well formatted and bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback. I am now reading the fourth book in the series.

This is the continuing story of the 350 surviving humans modified by the USA government into cyborgs. There are still many issues with them, not the least in that the computers in their heads burn 1,000 to 2,000 calories per day by themselves. The public is still nervous about them since they outed themselves in the past year.

The USA Senator who started the OACET (Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies) program is now going after the agents in order to bring them back under his power. The Senator will do anything and kill anyone to regain his power.

Helpful

C. Battey

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and highly relevant

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

State Machine, the third Rachel Peng book, is the best of the series so far. Like the first two books, it blends the police-procedural and techno-thriller genres with profound questions about the intersections between law and technology, and the ethical and legal difficulties that arise when technology evolves faster than the law can adapt.

Spangler's heroine and her fellow Agents care deeply about those questions, not only out of patriotism but also as a matter of survival, and I finished the book with a new appreciation for them as well. The close third-person narration and a warm (and occasionally sarcastic) sense of humor kept me inside Rachel's head, cheering on her successes and sympathetic to her failures.

State Machine is entertaining, thought-provoking, and highly relevant to today's technological and legal issues.

3 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A very different kind of Cyborg story

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is the third part of the novelized back story for the web comic "A Girl and Her Fed" featuring Rachel Peng, a side character from the comic.

The web comic started in 2006, with a quirky, minimalistic art style and really interesting storytelling, a mildly science-fantasy flavored story about a scatterbrained but brilliant woman who has been befriended by the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, and the nearly emotionless, monolith of a federal agent assigned to watch her when her name appears on a terrorist watch list.

Spangler went through her archives and re-drew the first year or so of the story, revising the storytelling to reflect her improvement as a writer and to get rid of unnecessarily 'cute' or overly-timely bits. You can still find the older art and story under the 'flip arrow' in the corner of the comics. It's a bit of a jolt when you get to the end of the 'redrawn' part because there's about six months' worth (at slightly over one comic page per week) between the end of the redrawn part and the point where Spangler changes to her new art style.

If you want to read it, you can find it at www.agirlandherfed.com -- but be warned, it can eat up a day or two of your time, catching up. The storytelling in the comic is every bit as good as in the book, and you can see her developing as a writer.

The science fantasy element continues to develop in the books and in the web comic, and because it's been happening since 2006, there are a few minor inconsistencies and 'gotchas' that Spangler acknowledges. Further, not everything is seen from a single point-of-view, and that means that not everything is going to look the same.

Technically, Spangler is an exceptionally good writer. She has minimal misspellings, wrong-homonyms, and grammatical glitches, and avoids the trap of telling rather than showing through her story narration. This is especially important since each book contains a mystery, appropriately to Rachel Peng's job as a detective with the Washington DC Metro Police. There are very few (if any) missing threads, each character is presented as a person with multiple facets, even when they're a walk-on, and there is a strong sense of place and continuity between the events in this book and the two previous books and the web comic - there are a few 'call-outs' to insider secrets from the web comic that are not seen in these books that web comic readers will immediately recognize, but since our protagonist and her compatriots do not know those secrets, they simply don't have any effect on what the characters in the book actually see or understand.

She writes political context into her stories, without revealing an untoward inclination in any specific direction. Her dry wit strikes both conservative and liberal thought the lens of her characters. However, it's important to know that the protagonist, and the special agency she is part of, all exist as a part of a conspiracy, headed by one person who starts as a wealthy industrialist who moves into politics to further his conspiracy. The conspiracy is to create human weapons, using a computer chip and advanced science that connects into the brains of these weapons, giving them a sort of super-access to computers and machines via an energy frequency nobody quite understands yet. It's this cyborg nature that gives Rachel her special gifts and handicaps. The conspiracy used an intrusive, obnoxious interface that responded to emotions to force the agents into a state of emotional withdrawal, then abused prescription psychoactive drugs to 'treat' them and force them further down. The reason for this: to create absolutely obedient, emotionless, unquestioning weapons who would do what their controllers told them. How that failed, is not part of the three books, which deal with the aftermath: an agency of 400 people who are intimately connected as a 'family' and who now have to make sure that they cannot be abused and misused. Because these people are patriots - every one of them volunteered for the operation, though they were lied to about the outcome.

A warning about this book and the other two, and the comic: it's written for adults. Not "young adults" - if your 14 year old (or you, for that matter) can't think about sex between characters as being something that happens, that may be humorous or horrible or wonderful, or simply a thing that gets mentioned, then you won't want that person reading this, lest they encounter ideas that might make them think differently.

People die. People get shot. There's injustice that doesn't get resolved. There's moral ambiguity, and moral standard, and intelligent thought and discussion between characters about what ethics are good, what government can and should do, and what the nature of responsibility is, on a personal, corporate, business, and government level (for a variety of government agencies.) This is a peculiarly American book as well - the flaws and the strengths of our country, the topics of terrorism, conspiracy, and individual rights and responsibilities, are examined overtly and covertly.

There's also adult language, and there may be a few dirty words. There may even be creative use of new ones.

You should read this book.

2 people found this helpful

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Michael and Julie

Another tale featuring your favorite blind lesbian cyborg half-Chinese/half-Scottish crime-fighting machine

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2015

Verified Purchase

K.B. Spangler's third Rachel Peng novel is much like the others; it develops the character of Rachel Peng, the blind cyborg half-Chinese half-Scottish (or is it Irish? sorry, it's been a week or two) lesbian ex-military crime-fighting machine from OACET; it is built around a central mystery, in this case the theft of something obscure from the White House archives; and it also develops the status of the cyborgs as a group vis-a-vis the public, the political apparatus, and their creator and evil nemesis, Senator Hanlon. The novel features some tense action scenes, as when Rachel chases the woman who pulled off the theft through a crowded marketplace and engages her in hand-to-hand combat, and later when Rachel attempts to save a wounded witness by driving (yes, the blind woman drives!) crazily through the congested streets of DC while being chased by heavily armed assassins. It gets personal when Rachel's co-workers find out (some of) the truth about the five years the OACET agents spent enduring psychological torture. But the novel focuses more than anything else on the battle between the cyborgs and Hanlon -- their attempts to expose and undermine the other climaxing in a shocking and deadly crime.

In case you were wondering where the title "State Machine" fits in, it has a double meaning. It refers both to an ancient Greek computing device, the Antikythera mechanism, and to the operations of the government. The White House theft was linked to the Antikythera mechanism, which figures calendars and positions of the stars and planets. The second part has more to do with how the stars align in Congress with respect to the status of OACET and the cyborgs. Do the cyborgs need to give up some of their capabilities in order to assure Congress and the public that they are not a menace? What would have to be done to the cyborg technology to make its benefits available to the public without the (arguably) undesirable side effect of creating a much larger collective consciousness? These policy questions loom large.

Bottom line: If you've read the preceding Rachel Peng novels, this one will be quite familiar. I found it a bit repetitive and a bit draggy in parts, but it was largely enjoyable, and I appreciate Spangler's attempts to think through some of the issues associated with brain augmentation as well as the perennial "How can we tolerate the mutants among us?" issues that plague "special" people throughout the universes of comics. Recommended to veterans; newbies should begin either with the first Rachel Peng novel, "Digital Divide", or, better yet, the online comic "A Girl and Her Fed," which, though substantially sillier than the novels, provides a good deal of background you won't find elsewhere.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Kindle Customer

Another excellent story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2015

Verified Purchase

Another worthy addition to the Rachel Peng books and an excellent read. It moves at a good clip and, if you enjoyed the last two, this one will be right up your alley.

The only thing I'd say against it (and the only reason not to give 5 stars) is the number of allusions to the supernatural aspects which are prevalent in the comic and wider universe, but which KB Spangler has specifically said won't show up in the Peng books. You still don't have to know the wider universe to understand all of this book, but there are mysteries dangled that specifically can't be answered by these books and, given the word of the author, Peng herself won't get the answers to them in this series. The fact that this irks me probably says great things about the character of Rachel and the attachment I've got to her - I'm annoyed on her behalf that she's being given a puzzle with one of the pieces missing.

That small niggle aside, I'd thoroughly recommend it to fans of the comic and of the first two books alike.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Excellent story in an excellent series.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2015

Verified Purchase

Inventive, funny and thoroughly entertaining. I'm looking forward to the next in the series. My only criticism is a rather pedantic objection to the author's persistent use of the phrase "off of" instead of "from". My very precise English teacher of half a century ago drilled the latter into our heads as the preferable construction. Ms Spangle uses the former sufficiently often to irritate! :-)

alexander thompson

Yet another brilliant instalment.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

KB's third Peng book grows the characters, expands the universe and is a spectacular outing for her most fleshed out agent.

P A DEWS THOMSON

Good Light Read

Reviewed in Australia on June 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

Nice light reading. Mix of police procedural, political thriller and sci-fi, with good characterisation and fairly tight plot. Won't win the Hugo, but will keep you amused on a rainy afternoon.

April

further adventures. A possible future

Reviewed in Canada on June 3, 2015

Verified Purchase

Gotta catch 'em all..... Errr I mean you Have to read them all.

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