Dual Memory by Burke and Witch King by Wells

Wanted to share a few comments about some new science fiction and fantasy offerings from Macmillan’s Tor Publishing Group: 

DUAL MEMORY by Sue Burke revolves around sentient machines or systems and seems very timely given the recently expressed concerns about Artificial Intelligence. This well-written and suspenseful story is set on Thule, a land in the Arctic region where the inhabitants, while anti-war, resist an active opposition to those who attempt to invade. A visitor, Antonio Moro, is wounded in a rocket attack and stays behind to work as an artist. He’s given Par Augustus, a robotic executive assistant, as a gift and the adventures truly begin. Par is to follow three ancient robot laws: “Don’t hurt humans, don’t let myself get hurt, and obey human laws as appropriate.” Readers, however, will question how long that will last as Par gains more and more knowledge. Antonio, too, transforms as he experiments further with his art; they form a formidable team. DUAL MEMORY received a starred review from Booklist (“If Ursula Le Guin had written about AI machines, it would have looked a lot like this marvelous fable”).

WITCH KING by Martha Wells (Network Effect and others in the Murderbot series) is the introduction to a new world featuring the title character, a legendary demon named Kai, and his companion, Zeide, who is a witch searching for her missing wife. Politics and conflict abound. I honestly found this novel a bit difficult to follow – not only are there many characters, the rather lengthy (414 pages) book also jumps around in time between the current action and past events involving the same characters. However, Amal El-Mohtar, reviewing for The New York Times, found this temporal aspect to be a plus, writing, “timelines play off each other wonderfully: Elements introduced in a dizzying rush of world building become welcome context for the flashbacks, which in turn escalate tension in the present” and chose WITCH KING as one of just five science fiction and fantasy titles to suggest as Summer Reads. Wells’ many fans should (and will!) certainly give this book a try. WITCH KING appeared as a LibraryReads selection for May 2023 and Wells is a prolific, outstanding author in this genre – she has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and three Locus Awards.