Providence by Max Berry

 

After reading something by this author and thinking it was better than I would have expected, I saw this in the library and figured I'd give it a shot. There's some wonky science at work in this novel, but once you get past that, it plays out well enough as like a space-opera kinda turned inside-out. The human characters have all sorts of virtues, but most of what they do doesn't really matter; the AI does basically everything. I have to believe that's kinda Barry's point, here, that unnecessary--maybe even pointless--isn't the same as meaningless. The prose is pretty solid, the pacing and characters all good, a decently written--if kinda dark--novel.