The disparate timelines are confusing for a while, when we discover that the sim planet has been running for a thousand years but at a different rate and the fighters are transferred between the two and it may not be real anyway or maybe none of it is real. This is the same barren planet that Seba is working on and Carlos soon learns that he and other similar fighters have been brought back in order to combat the menace of the rogue robots. Both characters and their settings are written in contrasting styles, the precise language and thoughtful development of Seba’s world compared with the raucous, chaotic and slang-filled world of Carlos.Ī thousand years after his death, Carlos is brought back as a virtual download inhabiting a sim on a colony planet as it might look after terraforming. Seba is a mining robot in a far distant star system who attains consciousness and quickly discovers that the powers that be are keen to quash any such self-awareness.

Carlos is a reactionary/computer-hacker/terrorist in the midst of a war over London, controlling drones and weapons and swiftly meeting a violent end.

The companies would rather see them dead.The first volume in Ken MacLeod’s new ‘Corporation Wars’ series, ‘Dissidence’, takes us straight into the action as we learn the back stories of the two main characters. With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce.

Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners – the competing mining corporations of Earth. Now they must fight to live for themselves. They’ve died for the companies more times than they can remember. INSURGENCE will follow at the end of 2016, with the final instalment in the trilogy, EMERGENCE, released Spring 2017. One of SFX magazine’s Top Ten Most Anticipated Books for 2016, DISSIDENCE will be released in May this year ( UK| ANZ| US). Today we’re delighted to launch the cover, by the very talented Bekki Guyatt at Little, Brown Book Group UK. Clarke Award-nominated science fiction author Ken MacLeod. The first instalment in the Corporation Wars trilogy, DISSIDENCE is a space opera giving a robot’s eye view of a robot revolt, from Arthur C.

Dissidence by Ken MacLeod