Bear Head

Dogs of War, Book 2

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Nathan Osgood, William Hope

Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Another Fantastic Story by Tchaikovsky

I absolutely love this series so far and this was a great sequel to dogs of war. I hope the series continues.

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.

Bees and Honey go to Mars

This is a satisfying sequel to the first book as it explores the characters from the first book that I'd grown to care about. In classic Adrian Tchaikovsky style, a novel type of intelligence is explored who is, without giving too much away, trans-species.

Uneven narration quality, paper thin plot, and characters I don't care about

I'll preface this with saying I'm a big fan of the author's work and with Book 1, Dogs of War. Rex, Dragon, Honey, and Bees were solid and likeable characters, with unique voices/perspectives that I had never experienced before. The side characters, villain, and plot were also all very engaging.

Bear Head started with a cool premise and set up, but really lost me on the journey; filled with unlikable or uninteresting characters (save for the assistant with a human collar, Carol), a meandering and uninteresting plot that really disappointed given the interesting set up and elements, and a rushed and very anticlimactic ending.

The narration is very mixed as well. On one hand the original actors from the first book are back and they're mostly delivering good performances, but the actress in particular reallllllly took me out of it anytime she did voices that were not her narration voice (which I thought was stellar in Dogs of War).

It was also very jarring to hear totally different character inflections and accents when the same characters were performed very differently by each actor.

I really wanted to like this book, but for the reasons above I just found it a slog to finish.

Loved it!

I would recommend this sequel. Character development is amazing. Story is excellent. Performance is great.

lackluster sequel

The first book had the benefit of presenting a bunch of new ideas. Not so many in this book. Also much of the plot was predictable. Nice to have Bees, Honey, and HumOS around again, but otherwise pretty flat.

Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Looking forward to book three. I love The author's development of characters. I'm hoping book 3 meets up with the Children of Time characters.

Further developed, in unexpected directions.

Warp3
There are a lot of ways thd second book could have gone, but this Martian/western/vampire movie sure wasn't on my bingo card. I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway.

Amazing sequel

Went in a totally unexpected but wonderful direction. Loved the depth of the characters and the keen insight that the author brought to them.

The Path to Dystopia

Cyberpunk has become quite the prolific genre in the modern-to-postmodern landscape. PKDs dreaming androids, Gibson’s console cowboys, and Stephenson’s couriers/pizza delivery guys all paved the way for the development of the cybernetic augmentation and corporate control of the present metaverse. One thing that these trailblazing works lack however is the prologue to their respective dystopias. How did these worlds become so? Enter Tchaikovsky and his bioforms. This near-future novel answers this question of how a cyberpunk world could come to be and poses something even more compelling; If this were happening in reality, would we even notice? The sequel to Dogs of War is even more intriguing and insightful as it paints an all too realistic picture of how humanity may handle our own terrible creations.