The characters are convincingly other-than-human but clearly conscious and deserving. The style of the prose is neither overwrought nor sparse but where it really shines is the dialogue. Then this book was recommended to me and damn does it make some deep cuts. Rampant misogyny in the year 3142, anyone?) and aliens being reskinned humans, about how I saw scifi more as a reflection of the time period when it was written than a look through a scope into a potential future. Not two days ago I was complaining about scifi never being weird enough, about humans just being human no matter what their setting (particularly in older scifi - where the dated human views are particularly noticeable.
While the conceit of cyborgs, robots, consciousness debates and the rights of non-humans has all been done to death before, Dogs of War does it so well that I don't even care. Added to that the Rex sections are a bit repetitive as he struggles to work out if he is being a good or bad dog throughout.No spoilers (barring the first like two pages and the blurb of the book). If I was to pick at things that might put some off it would be that although the narration is overall of a very good standard, especially in the Rex sections, when we switch to Laurence Bouvard Rex suddenly sounds very weak, not surprisingly so hardly her fault but I found it distracting. There is a lot of action and it is brought to a very satisfying conclusion in terms of the story of Rex and his master being completed. It's another clever book though rather shorter and definitely more easily accessible than Children of Time. Just what does happen when you augment animals with tech and ask them to fight your battles? Dogs of War explores the relationship between a loyal dog and its master when that relationship is abused by it being used with bad intent. In Dogs of War he once again explores the best and worst of human behaviour with everyone's favourite target, big business, once again coming under fire. I guess it shouldn't surprise me given that Tchaikovsky had me rooting for an race of alien spiders in his previous book that in this one he got me attached to a partly robot killer dog called Rex! This is one clever author, albeit one who is jaundiced against the human race, though being often of similar persuasion I can't fault him for that.
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