Zach Fortier

Narration (**): Monotonous with little separation of character voices

I wanted to like this story. The premise is solid and it apparently has collected a lot of good reviews and awards ... I'm just not clear on how that would happen ...

The story opens with the POV of a beat cop just going about his day (so it was a slow start). We get a brief spike of interesting with first contact of alien artificial intelligence (AI) that for some reason has a default to wipe out biologics because they don't treat AIs fairly. But wait ... there must be some misunderstanding since Earth actually has an AI that was granted full citizenship by Saudi Arabia. With the extermination plans on hold at 99%, we now adjourn to put Humanity on Trial ... but this trial is less like Perry Mason and more like "Q" in Star Trek where it apparently never occurs to the Alien AI to just talk with Sophia ... the Earth AI. Instead, they take a confusing detour using the memories of the beat cop above to somehow understand humans ... but the Alien AI representative tasked with this just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to understand nonverbal communications (and yet it can look confused)? Throw in a few wise cracks with heavy handed sexual overtones (robots with batteries for the women ... really?) and I am not seeing the appeal to this story.

I was expecting a "death match" ... instead I got descriptive narration within a courtroom (or leading up to the courtroom) that just seems to drone on and on. And why would the Overseer/Alien AI that was specifically designed to prosecute the Collective's (aka The Governing Body) genocidal "planetary scrubbing" not have a more complete understanding of the court procedures than the human stooge who apparently had to explain significant parts of it? In addition, I found the decision to summarize some points and detail others puzzling and that made it difficult to connect with any of the characters, much less keep them separate in my head (and feels like sock puppetry). Of course ... the Alien AI's are completely independent of any hardware/wetware and completely open to earth hackers that can manipulate software and netware that for some reason is not so alien. Most of these, when taken by themselves are not that hard to simply suspend my disbelief and accept it; however, the rate at which they seem to accumulate eventually turns this into a theater of the absurd that is hard to ignore.

I was given this free review copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review. This title is also available through Kindle Unlimited for free.
#TheSecretAudiobookClub #Volk #MichelleShure #KindleUnlimited… (mere)

I received this book from the author via LibraryThing...

I’m glad for the opportunity to read Volk. I am a fan of books with well researched big ideas. I liked the humor in the book and all of Viktor’s geek references. The underlining ideas of the differences between a non-biologic life form and humanity were fantastic.

(Of course there is a but)

But... I wish Volk was a lot meatier. I want to know something about the history of the quantum AI, more of Viktor’s childhood. I would have liked more descriptive text. More of everything, really.… (mere)