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.

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.

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.

Loved it!

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

excellent follow-up

I really love the directions series is taking. This was overwhelmingly worth the purchase, but I do have a few critiques compared to the first book. It didn't feel like the characters on Mars went on a long enough journey, their side of the story felt stretched out about without them going on a long enough adventure together, which is odd considering this book is longer than the first one and I wanted to hear more about their excursions. I also don't think that the multiple narrators helped this story. their performance itself was fantastic, but hearing the same characters voiced differently really took the tension out of some of the more exciting parts of the story. still don't regret going on this adventure and I look forward to wherever the series goes next

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.

Jimmy Carries the Story

I didn’t like this one nearly as much as Dogs of War. I still really enjoyed the themes and ideas, but I found Thompson to be a pretty underwhelming villain, which I guess is where the majority of my gripes come from.

4.5 of 5

Good story, though not as engrossing as Dogs of War. The listener is forced to spend far toouch time listening to Honey, whose motto appears to be, "Why get to the point when I can drop a novella on you instead?" This is exacerbated by the strange cadence of Laurence Bouvard. Her motto appears to be, "Why voice a single sentence when I can throw a weird pause in and end up with two or even three sentences?" Honey's soliloquies are bad enough by themselves (they are taxing even to read), but when those random pauses populate the speech I want to give up. In fact, I did give up and listened to four old favorites before I became determined to finish the last two hours of Bear Head.