Human scale wars fought by god scale AIs

Burning Eagle | Navin Weeraratne | military science fiction

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Navin Weeraratne has a winner here. 693 pages of action packed high tech military sci fi. The best word for what I did with the book is probably 'inhaled'. I was reading 5 pages every morning before my eyes were fully unglued. 

It has 3D printers, railguns, FTL, alien invasions, von Neumann catastrophes, nanotech, personal backup and posthumans. What more do you want? Characterisation, plotting, good editing, mystery and closure, intelligent economics, a hint of a sequel? Fussy, aren't you. You don't want romance and humour while you're at it? Ooh, aren't you the lucky thing?

The only thing that made me go nuh uh was manufacturing antimatter for fuel en route on a generation ship. Thermodynamics doesn't work like that, sorry. On the other hand, Arabs are Asians, bingo. I really liked that people in the book come from diverse ethnicites, without much more than a name to indicate it; no stereotypes, no token characters. 

I'll think of some more negatives when I come down from the high I'm on right now. Like the motivations of Sarasvati and what happened to her. But those are minor. 

Am I going to go hunt down The Hundred Gram Mission? Tautology.

And what you should be doing is going to your favourite online bookstore and buying this one right away.