It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti-a Valkyrie class warship with a sentient AI brain-on her own; wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space. On the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside. Then a scavenger ship arrives to pick Serengeti's bones clean. Her engines dead, her guns long silenced, Serengeti and her last two robots must find a way to fight the scavengers off and save the crew trapped inside her. [1]
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This book was introduced to me as a book I'd enjoy if I liked Wall-E (you can read about it here), I do like Wall-E and I have always had a soft spot for Sci-Fi books. I was in my element.
Reading this book was a welcome break from all the Fantasy books I've been reading left and right. I might have expected Serengeti to actually be like Wall-E but as I started reading I found out she was much more than a drone.
The first part of the book was a little intense right off the bat because there was a battle going on in the galaxy far, far away and we meet Serengti along with her sisters, AIs in ships called Valkyries Class (sounds like ship models). Serengeti and her human crews original mandate was to retrieve ships that were sent off in a corner of the universe where the scouts were last seen. It ended up becoming a battle they didn't anticipate.
Heavily damaged and her human crew almost all dead, Serengeti was not about to give up. She put the humans in cryo chambers and embarked on a different adventure for the next 30 odd years to save those human lives that she could. And in the process creating new AI to help her. I guess that's where the Wall-E part comes in.
I know Serengeti is AI but she identifies as female and has been aware for so long that I forgive her the human nuances that she has already acquired. Although there are still parts of her that are calculating and logical, I actually loved the parts where she was saying how much she loved the stars or her motherly banter with Tig her sidekick. The next 60-70% of the book mostly revolved around what Serengeti was thinking while she was awake and even while she was asleep (conserving energy).
It was a hear warming book packaged in science fiction and space battles. I would say a must read for any reader, not just the Sci-fi fans like me.
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