Category Archives: Reviews

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War (2017) was a bold, powerful piece of typically smart sci-fi; its sequel Bear Head picks up some of the same characters and themes and runs with them. Life for construction worker Jimmy Marten is pretty dull, despite the fact that he lives on Mars and has all manner of interesting body modifications, right up until the digital awareness of a talking bear takes up residence in his digital headspace. Honey the bear is a bit confused about what she’s doing, but she knows that she wants to make contact with her old friend Bees, the Distributed Intelligence who laid the foundations of human life on Mars. These days Bees is something of a digital bogeyman however, and while Honey tries to put her fragmented memories into order, back on Earth the tide of political opinion continues to turn ever more extreme, led by the relentless, loathsome presence of World Senate hopeful Warner S. Thompson.

With his novel Dogs of War, prolific SFF author Adrian Tchaikovsky explores questions of ethics, free will and what it means to be human, wrapped up in an enthralling story about genetically engineered animal soldiers. Seven feet tall and capable of astonishing feats of violence, Rex is a Bioform – a biotechnical hybrid of dog and man – engineered solely for war. He leads his pack (including Honey the bear, Dragon and Bees) into combat following the orders of his Master, his obedience rewarded by his feedback chip, and all he wants is to be a Good Dog. When faced with the freedom to follow his own path and make his own decisions, however, Rex learns that being a Good Dog isn’t always easy.