The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez - Book review #321

Mac Megaton is a robot taxi driver just trying to earn his citizenship.  

One day his neighbours are abducted, the circumstances are suspect, but the police are not motivated, so Mac decides to do something about it.

This book is a wonderful mashup of detective fiction, a Jetson's vision of the future, all set in a city filled with talking gorillas and mutants.  

Narrated by our protagonist robot, I was reminded of Robert B Parker's Spenser series.  Empire City is a strange place populated by even stranger citizens which brought to my mind George R R Martin's Wild Cards books.  

The story itself moved along quickly and was peppered with terrific side characters.

If you're looking for some light-hearted, escapist fun, in this crazy pandemic world, this book will fit the bill.  It will help you to forget our reality for a while.

I am glad I read it.

Recommended. 

Brisk Money by Adam Christopher - A Short Story Review

51/100

I love detective stories.  Science fiction detective stories are a special treat.

This one was quite clever; it's 1962 and our hero is a robot with a limited amount of data storage.  He must return to his office every night to have his memories downloaded to the mainframe.  Her name is Ada by the way.

Things start to get interesting when our robot PI's tapes are not wiped perfectly.  He has fragments of memories still on the tapes.  This is enough for him to become suspicious about the work he does so he investigates what he can.

I thought the premise and the story itself were just terrific.

There is a novel out with these very characters that I'm dying to read.

Recommended.

You can read the story here:   http://www.tor.com/2014/07/23/brisk-money-adam-christopher/

The author's website is here:  http://www.adamchristopher.co.uk/

Adam Christopher