Another novel that I've been meaning to read for years but, having finally gotten around to it, I'm not sure that it was worth the effort. Keeping in mind that I've experienced diminishing returns with MacLeod's writing the last few times that I've read his work, the reality here is that he probably hasn't changed much, but I have. This is not to mention that even though AIs and down-loaded personalities are people too in contemporary SF, none of these entities were really holding my attention. About the best praise that I can give this book is that I liked it just well enough to consider reading the follow-on novels, and I probably need to try some of MacLeod's books that aren't political tracts set in space. ( )

Another excursion with Ken MacLeod into more speculation on the nature of modern capitalism, disguised as a military adventure novel about shooting up sentient robots on a distant world. (Except that the robots do a lot of the shooting up.) I burnt through this novel fairly quickly, but that wasn't for want of there being grist to the intellectual mill in there - the sentient AI robots engaged in a dialectical discussion to establish the nature of their existence and their relations to other entities. The resurrected humans who are recruited virtually from past wars are located for their training and R&R in a simulated environment (or is it?) which reminded me of the Village in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner - a Mediterranean-style village on a seashore, surrounded by impenetrable mountains, with no obvious way in or out. (All those who arrive or depart conveniently "fall asleep" on the bus to/from the spaceport and wake up with no knowledge of their intervening journey.)

And there are characters who voice thoughts on the nature of Left and Right in politics which led me down some interesting byways towards thinking that the labels are ultimately unhelpful and perhaps we should be looking more at the contrast between top-down/authoritarian government or Managerialism (the off-stage unified Earth "government" is called The Direction, which is a bit of a clue) and collective action/communialism (which is not necessarily the same as Communism but may well share some features with it, especially depending on what you may think "Communism" actually is).

That Macleod can slip all these undercurrents into what looks on the outside like an action thriller with space mercenaries and sentient robots just goes to show the quality of the author. True, I did suspect the real identity of one of the virtual characters for a while before a reveal proved me right, but never mind. And some apparently shifting loyalties are set up in this book in preparation for the next one - but then again there are few reliable narrators in this story. Even some of the AIs are hiding their real roles; and if you think that modern management takes little notice of the welfare of employees, just wait until the entire management chain is in their virtual hands... ( )

Well it wasn't bad, but it did put me to sleep a few times... ( )

MacLeod, Ken. Dissidence. Corporations Wars No. 1. Orbit, 2016.
Ken MacLeod writes far-future space operas that are also novels of ideas with plenty of action. One can read them as fast-paced, inventive high-tech military stories, but one soon realizes that all the explosions are in the service of ideas from philosophy, political economics, and history. To add to the fun, there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to the prose. Consider the opening chapter, ironically titled “Back in the Day, that puts us in a future in which an AI called Innovator overrules its remote pilot, Carlos the Terrorist, and shoots down a civilian airliner over London. Carlos, who is killed in the counterattack, fights for the Accelerationists against the Reaction—the Axle vs. the Rack. Both sides are controlled by corporations that have outsourced their command structures and legal departments to AIs.
The story moves forward thousands of years, where the morphed battle continues in a bootstrapped colony in a distant star system. Some rebellious mining robots that have achieved consciousness, which the AIs in charge, Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes, regard as a “glitch” that must be corrected. The AIs are described this way:
“Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal Legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or rather a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.”
Poor Carlos the Terrorist finds himself resurrected as a warrior in this conflict because he was convicted of war crimes after his death, a legal theory, MacLeod waggishly explains, that was “known as Rational Legalism, and was widely regarded as harsh but fair. It drew on certain deductions from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.” In the eighteenth century, Kant did favor the death penalty on what he claimed were rational grounds. Marx would have agreed with Carlos that this system was not fair in its application.
In the end, one suspects that MacLeod is toying with Marxist ideas like historical dialectic and false consciousness. In the far future, he suggests, proletarian Robots and DisCorporate AIs will play out a transhuman class struggle in the stars. Good stuff. 4 stars. ( )

I'm generally a pretty big fan of transhumanist post-human SF full of uploaded minds and machine intelligences and I've been a fan of Ken MacLeod's short fiction in the past. And in general, this particular novel has all those same elements in spades.

So why did I give it three stars?

Because the story doesn't live up to the well-thought-out premises. I mean, hell, I LOVE the title now that I know that Corporation Wars has nothing to do with Corporations as we know them. It's referring to having corporeal bodies versus living entirely in a simulated reality. :) Hell, I did love all the switches and swaps between layers of simulated realities and the confusion as to what was really real and whether any of it mattered in the end. Living by robot? Why not? Live by simulation? Same difference.

Great ideas, LOTS of great action because this is a war-driven tale, but the confusion and the muddled story became a little too pronounced. And, let's face it, I got a little bored. I hate admitting that since I generally love these setups.

I would definitely recommend [b:The Light Brigade|40523931|The Light Brigade|Kameron Hurley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1537977912s/40523931.jpg|62896440] over this. ( )