The Life Engineered by JF Dubeau

How would artificial beings lead their lives without humans still around? Sounds like a great idea for a book 😃 And it mostly is! The story takes place about 3000 years in the future. With humanity gone artificial life-forms (so-called Capeks, after Karel Capek who coined the term Robot) have created their own society. Everything is at piece and appears to be quite a utopia when Dagir is born and finds herself in a galaxy full of nearly immortal AIs.

Sadly, that paradise doesn’t last that long for Dagir as right after her birth a meteor shower destroys the facility that birthed her. While still coming to grips with your new life she takes it upon herself to find out what happened and fix things.

As with nearly all characters in the book, Dagir’s name comes from one of Earth’s mythologies (Norse in her case). Given that all characters are basically god-like compared to humans, having all of them being named after gods is a really nice tough. The level of technology isn’t mythological, though, and the author takes great care to make things appear logical. There is even a large glossary at the end of the book that explains all the different kinds of capeks and technolgies seen throughout the story.

The book keeps also enough questions unanswered to make for a nice start into a whole series in that universe. Personally, I can’t wait for it! Since I don’t have any book inside the Commonwealth universe to read anymore, I can’t wait to read more far-future/hard-scifi stories, esp. when they are as charming as this one.

The only things I didn’t like here was that the story sometimes jumped a bit too quickly from place to place, losing me for a paragraph or so. Other than that, if you like SciFi, read this!

As a bonus, this book was originally released on inkshares.com where you can also get an ePub version!