Bear Head

Dogs of War, Book 2

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Nathan Osgood, William Hope

Honey the genetically engineered bear starts a revolution on the Red Planet in the new novel from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

WELCOME TO HELL CITY, MARS

Jimmy Martin has a sore head.

He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him.

The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist.

It also claims to be a bear.

A bear named Honey.

Jimmy has nothing against bioforms–he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock–and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.

The problem is that humanity isn't the only entity with designs on the Red Planet. Out in the airless desert there is another presence. A novel intelligence, elusive, unknowable and potentially lethal.

And Honey is here to make contact with it, whether Jimmy likes it or not.

©2021 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2021 W F Howes

tchaicovsky is really good at making hatable villains

it is extremely satisfying to see such a hatable villain be systemically and totally annihilated.

Dead, simulated bear vs distributed Orange Man

The setup of the story was brilliant. I loved the way that Dogs of War built the foundation for telling a story this can be like this one is. I'm not sure that you could tell a story like this without it.

The narrators were great. Adjusting to the voice of Jimmy Deron from Rex took a minute, but he really resonated with me. I liked the different voices for Honey, depending on what state of existence she was in. I don't think that Carol's narrator did quite as well on casting male voices. It wasn't terrible, but all of the male voices that she projected kind of sounded like morons, no matter who they were and even if we knew they weren't. I wish that the narrators had worked it out a bit better what the characters would sound like so there would be some consistency in cadence.

Loved the story.

Another amazing book by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Like the previous book, Tchaikovsky does an amazing job showing the viewpoint of non-human intelligences. There is a good balance of philosophy and action that made me think at some points and just eat the popcorn at others. My only disappointment was the narration, a key part of any audiobook. There were three narrators, which by itself is fine, except in this case the same character might be voiced by different narrators. This changes the character in subtle ways, leaving me with occasional feelings of discontinuity.

Great sci-fi

I loved the story; it was an interesting format to use more than one narrator for all the characters but I think it added something to the story. Only thing about the actual narration is sometimes they used the wrong voice for an established character. Other than that the political aspect of the book really laid in hard and was very anti-fascist. So I guess if you’re a fascist you really won’t enjoy the political aspect of the book because it makes a lot of fun and lays bare a lot of the rhetoric that fascism uses.

Voice acting by Bouvard was atrocious

Fantastic concept, great pacing and character development. Audibleversion sections read by Bouvard were so bad I had to buy the Kindle version and finish reading it myself. Unbelievably squeaky nasally voice and exaggerated character voices made. (Was Boyle as bad in first book)