I’m going to be honest; I picked this one up based on the cover alone. And like they tell you not to do, I did sort of judge this book by its cover. Well, the cover and the first section of the book. And I thought I’d be dealing with a short set of vignettes about pulp horror monsters in space. Turns out that was a bit of a lowball there—there is actually a story arc that we follow throughout the book.
Poor Dementer, has a space-ship ever had such a hard run of things? Most ships—or really, their onboard AI pilots—only ever find themselves dealing with rowdy passengers, poor traffic and astroid snarls. Most of these events don’t result in the death of all onboard. When doing a run between Earth and Alpha Centuri Habitation 3, all of Dementer’s passengers just die. Expire. There is no longer any gas exchange occurring, no heat signatures, no sign of life. Dementer thinks is a vampire, but no one buys it.
But then astroids strike twice; or is it thrice? She’s able to save some smaller passengers from what appears to be a werewolf, only to find that the Shadow Out of Out Innsmouth has intergalactic aspirations. Dementer fears that it’s fated to be scrapped. Her on-board medical AI is exasperated, and not at all feeling cooperative. Whatever can Dementer do?
It’s hard when you’re an AI and your programming keeps on telling you ‘nothing’s wrong.’ Sadly, your training data was probably lacking in Lovecraftian horrors. No matter what your programming tells you, though, something is wrong. But perhaps help is on the way in the form of young woman who remembers you fondly.
If you’re looking for campy, silly and witty, Barbara Truelove really delivers. Some of the scenarios that play out on board Dementer are truly absurd and hilarious. There is also a lovely growing story of found family that serves as the main story arc. You wouldn’t expect it, but most of the emotional pull in Monsters and Mainframes comes from the artificial intelligences; they must be more advanced that Claude or Gemini.
But even if there is a common thread that ties all the monster-encounters-in-space together, the book does sort of drop in the middle, especially when multiple characters across multiple viewpoints all try and get introspective in close succession. In addition, while I didn’t mind the multiple narrators used for multiple characters in the audiobook, they’ve obviously not shared their notes; there is not a lot of consistency in accents or even pronunciation between different readers, which is slightly irritating.
And look, to whoever decided to have the narrators read aloud the openings of each section—written in binary, mind—you absolute troll.
I had not heard of Barbara Truelove before picking up this book, but she’s firmly on my radar now.
For cbr17bingo, this is O. For Of. Im sorry, yes it is technically the start of the title, but I felt I could have done better here.
That’s two bingos now – the middle horizontal and the righthand vertical.