Engines of Oblivion

 

I've been excited to read Engines of Oblivion since finishing Architects of Memory a few months ago.  I've had it for a few months on my Kindle, but got caught up in the Divine Dungeon series, so put off reading this until there was a good spot to pause that series.  

Engines of Oblivion follows Natalie Chan, one of the crew members from Twenty Five.  In Architects of Memory, Natalie, a soldier by training, had managed to become a citizen of Aurora, but lost many of her memories during the battle of Tribulation.  It's a year later and she's now the Director of Aurora's research and development team.  When the board sends her janitor indentures to pilot a new rig she designed, Natalie makes the split-second decision to pilot the rig instead because it is going into an actual combat mission (and the janitor indentures are not at all combat trained).  To her horror, Natalie discovers too late that the weapon within the rig was switched out for something far more deadly.

Called to a Board meeting after the demonstration, Natalie's loyalty to Aurora is called into question.  She is informed that she will be going on a mission back to Tribulation to locate Ashlan Jackson, whose heartbeat was detected.  Accompanying her is the one woman Natalie wants nothing to do with: Reva Sharva, the doctor who was the head of the Sacrament Society, and who had been experimenting on people in a secret lab on Tribulation; Sharva is being sent because she is the only one who can save Ash from the sickness she has (and Sharva has a bomb in her head that will detonate if she deviates from the mission).

This mission calls everything Natalie believes in into question.  Will she give up her friends to the company in order to keep her citizenship, even though she knows nothing good can come of turning them in?

I will admit, I didn't really like Engines of Oblivion at first, and that was largely because I didn't really like Natalie Chan.  And her being paired up with Reva Sharman definitely didn't help.  I also found the story a bit weird once the Vai got more involved.  On the one hand, it made sense for how the story went once they were involved (and I did like learning a bit more about them and how they worked).  But at times it got really hard to follow (especially once people were basically fighting inside each others' memories and minds, that got a bit hard to follow).  But by the end, I found that I really did care what happened to everyone, and, while in some ways sad, I really enjoyed the ending.

So while, in the end I did enjoy the book, I think I liked Architects of Memory better.  I missed the quirky crew dynamic of Twenty Five.  I also think this book might be better if read closer to the first book - while I remembered people and plot well enough as the book unfolded, it definitely would have been helpful if that first book was more fresh in my mind.

Architects of Memory

I've been waiting to read Karen Osborne's Architects of Memory, the first book in the Memory War duology, for quite some time now.  I was excited to finally get my hands on it.  I started it over the weekend and would have finished it sooner but I had to put it aside for a few days while I was doing some training for work.  Once that was finished though, I immediately picked it back up and finished it. :)

Architects of Memory follows Ashlan Jackson, a salvage pilot who is terminally ill.  She lives in a world where you sell yourself to a company in order to eventually earn citizenship with that company; unfortunately some are much worse than others, charging you for every little thing (and extending indefinitely the terms of your indenture).  For someone with a terminal illness, it's much worse because if the company finds out about it, they can cancel your contract and leave you to die.  So Ash does everything in her power to hide her illness to buy her time to finish her contract and hopefully pay for treatments.

Her salvage crew is sent to clean up the wreckage of another ship from an inter-company war; while going through her routine salvage operations, Ash discovers that there was an alien weapon on board, one powerful enough to destabilize the tenuous peace among the companies.  And for some reason, she is able to handle it...

Overall I really enjoyed Architects of Memory.  Michael R. Underwood's endorsement on the back of the book said it was for fans of Firefly and I really got that.  This was a quirky crew that overall I really enjoyed hanging out with (although I admit I would have liked to have read a bit more of them just hanging out doing their things; they get separated from each other pretty quickly). 

The world of Architects of Memory was interesting, and unfortunately could very much become reality if corporations control the means of getting into space, I could see people basically going into slavery to them to get themselves into space as well. While Ash's crew didn't seem to have hard boundaries between the indentures and citizens, it was really interesting to see how that played out on some of the other ships.  I should also mention that I liked Osborne's aliens, the Vai, as well (although I admit to some confusion on how they could have come to be...)

I do think my biggest complaint was the ending though.  It didn't really feel satisfying; I honestly thought Ash would make more of an attempt to get out to the White Line, possibly dying in the process (I also admit to not really understanding what the White Line was exactly, beyond being the border the Vai retreated to).  But as I said, overall I did enjoy the book; it's a fast paced read and I would definitely like to read the second part when I get the chance! :)