Rex has a lot of canine traits, while Dragon is a typical reptile, Bees' consciousness is literally buzzing all over the place, and the felines are. We have the typical mammals but also marine bioforms, reptiles and even hive-minds (a very intriguing concept). What I loved about this book was in what detail the author described each individual bioform and therefore gave them actual life and personality. Thanks to the fact that the entire book was interspersed with all kinds of wars and conflicts, it never got boring or too preachy / theoretical. However, the author had a lot of threads that he weaved into a complex web of a lot of other important questions. making choices is the price of being free Nevertheless, at some point I was wondering where the author will take this because I had thought we had reached the end of the narrative. The different angles allow the author to give the reader many different perspectives with which to identify or not and allow for an objective as well as emotional exploration.Īnd he shows that there are never easy answers, easy solutions, and we often revert back to the old ways just because their familiarity offers comfort while new ways are often scary.

The book uses multiple POVs from doctors to lawyers to all kinds of bioforms in order to explore topics such as the role of artificial intelligence in society (there is a history of robotics too), responsibility and guilt, what exactly we humans define as humanity, the ethics of conflict resolution and the manufacturing of sentient biological life.

It is also about what the engineers designed him to be and be capable of and what he actually is and is capable of. He is the leader of one of the first few multi-form squads, meaning teams that consist of more than one kind of animal/bioform. He combines canine senses with sentience, human DNA and then also got cybernetically integrated weapons systems. This book, then, is about Rex, a dog-like bioform engineered for war.

It is also clear that the author doesn't consider animals to be 'just animals' but sees them on the same level as humans if not even one above. Only recently I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and it is clear from these two books that the author has a wonderful sense of bringing the thoughts and feelings of animals (sorry, bioforms) to life. I finished this late last night (has been a while since I stayed up so late to finish a book) but had to seriously ponder how to write this review.

Adrian tchaikovsky dogs of war