Mal Goes to War

January 1, 2024

Ashton's novel Mickey7 earned an LJ starred review and is getting a film adaptation from Bong Joon Ho. His new stand-alone considers artificial intelligence and what it really means to be human as war rages between modded and unaugmented humans, and a free AI finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary. Prepub Alert.

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February 19, 2024
Ashton (Antimatter Blues) shrewdly injects satire into a dystopian thriller helmed by Mal, an AI (though he prefers to be called a Silico-American). In the near future, debate around technological human augmentations has led to civil war. The conflict began with a paranoid rumor that the NIH developed a nanobot that, after being injected into a person, transformed them into a superhuman capable of infecting others, as part of a government scheme to control the population. That belief sparked riots in Maryland, which devolved into all-out war, with so-called Humanists dumping anyone suspected of being augmented into burn pits. Amid this violent chaos, Mal, who is untethered to any system, slips inside the body of an augmented female corpse which had the necessary hardware for him to “puppeteer” it. Mal finds himself with more than he’d bargained for, however, when the dead woman, Mika, turns out to have been the protector of Kayleigh, a genetically modified 18-year-old, who insists that Mal continue to serve as her bodyguard against the Humanists. Ashton’s vision of the future feels all too plausible and his blend of action and humor keeps the pages flying. This is sure to please the author’s fans.

March 15, 2024
Ashton (Antimatter Blues, 2023) sets his latest stand-alone in a near-future world where artificial intelligences exist and humans--especially wealthy ones--technologically enhance their bodies, while a growing movement of dispossessed people opposes this use of technology. Armed conflict flares between the enhanced Federalist forces and unenhanced Humanists. But not all is as it seems, and the Humanists may not be as pure as they claim. Mal, an artificial intelligence living in the infosphere who specializes in infiltrating other systems, embeds himself in the corpse of a cyborg human to learn more about the conflict on the ground. Through a series of gruesome and darkly comic mishaps, he becomes deeply embroiled and cut off from the infosphere. This is a funny, fast-paced, fish-out-of-water tale that should satisfy Ashton's growing fan base. Exploring the nature of AI is a hot topic, and the contrast between the literalism of computers and human emotions is perennially fascinating. As we've seen in his Mickey7 series, Ashton has a talent for handling nonhuman characters. This should also appeal to fans of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series.

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