This is a slim volume from TorDotCom, surely a novella rather than a novel, only just squeaking its way past a hundred pages, so maybe even a novelette. It's science fiction, of course, and it has a lot of interesting ideas to bring to bear, what with its lead character being an AI, and one of the few in this future to be legally emancipated. However, it tries to be a mystery as well and it doesn't work anywhere near as successfully on that front. Sure, it's for fans of Murderbot, but it doesn't really do the same things, even if it has an ostensibly similar protagonist. And it's not as good.

The AI is Scorn, who's probably emancipated because she has two mothers, each the CEO of a huge Earth-based multinational. Mum runs CometCorp. Maman runs Austral Systems. What they do we don't really know and it doesn't really matter. They do a lot. They're big and important. They have a great deal of political clout. That matters. They probably make everything. Including Scorn; who has chosen her name, ditching the original name of Hopper that she was given. She's also chosen her pronouns too, and I should point out that I'm only using "her" and "she" at this point because that's how she felt like to me, as indeed did Murderbot. I'll now switch to her preferred ze/zir/zem.

Ze has even found a vocation and has become an investigative reporter, zir latest case taking zir to the moon, where ze must have been on the trail of something serious because ze then wakes up in Alberta, Canada back on Earth, with a week of lost data. We're left wondering whether whodunit sincerely meant to kill zir or to warn zir to back off. The former is certainly not quite as easy to do with an AI, whose consciousness can download into another chassis pretty much just like that, as it would be for a human being with a single toggle switch of on/off. Once off, never back on again. If Scorn gets hit by a surf tram on the moon, as of course ze did, it's not necessarily game-over.

Scorn, of course, has no intention of backing off and immediately gets back onto zir case and starts trying to figure out what was in that week of lost data. And because ze can, ze moves between new chassis reasonably often. We learn that ze can print one out wherever ze happens to be and move into that or see what might be rentable on the other side of the planet and zip over there to take possession of that. So to a black box bar, cut off from everything, to ask questions and introduce us to the AI that runs the place, who's Scorn's kinda-sorta girlfriend. So to Italy. So back to the moon.

What's quickly notable here is that the science fiction trumps the mystery every day and twice on Sunday. I found Scorn interesting, if not so much as Murderbot, and I appreciated the thought that went into zir creation. The pronouns may seem offputting to some, but they're zirs and they serve as a reminder that ze is not like the rest of us. AIs are getting bad press right now because they're generating art quicker than we can, but, like any impact of new tech on existing culture, that just means that a conversation can be had. Writing an AI as your lead character is one way to connect with that conversation.

Unlike Murderbot, I found Scorn more interesting because of what ze does and how ze does it far more than because of who ze is. I was on zir side from the outset, but that didn't mean that I was particularly sympathetic to zir, beyond automatically having sympathy for anyone who got hit by a surf tram on the moon to stop their investigation into whatever. That's a great setup and it brings me on board. However, Scorn, surprisingly for an emancipated AI, seems a lot more defined by zir relationships to her mothers than zir actual self. If ze's supposed to be a fictional avatar for some marginalised demographic or other, that doesn't help much.

However, while I wanted Scorn to get back on the bus and solve the mystery at hand, I didn't care a lot as ze was doing it. There simply aren't enough pages to warrant much in the way of supporting characters, plot complexities or even red herrings. Ze just follows the trail and it's only ever going to end up in one of two places. Sure enough it did and it was the one I was expecting, so I can't say much about the mystery. This works much better as science fiction, because of its ideas, but again they aren't explored as far as they could be because there's only a skimpy page count.

I have no problem with novellas if the stories they tell are novella length. Some stories only need a page or three to be told and that's fine. It's what they are. This seems to me to be a novel that got published too soon. If Aimee Ogden had been given three hundred pages to work with instead of a third of that, maybe she could have fleshed out her protagonist so that we actually cared, turned the other characters into more substantial support, explored the excellent ideas touched on here in more depth and even put some mystery into the mystery. It's not a bad novella, but it contains the bones of a much better novel. ~~ Hal C F Astell