It took me a while to get into this one, as I didn’t immediately bond with Jimmy, the grunt labourer who is working on Mars. I also loathed Thompson, who has to be one of the most satisfyingly nasty antagonists I’ve encountered so far this year and found his poor put-upon assistant rather difficult company.

I was hoping that dear old Rex, who featured so movingly in Dogs of War, would put in an appearance. However, I don’t think I’m introducing anything of a Spoiler when I disclose that at the start of this story, Rex has long gone. Indeed, while it was enjoyable to know where some of the politics started, I think this is one a reader could pick up without having read Dogs of War and happily enjoy it without struggling overmuch as Honey and Bees are fully explained and have undergone major changes since the first story.

Once I got about a third into the story and settled down with the characters and the action and pace began to pick up, I was fully invested in the story and once more enjoying Tchaikovsky’s world. Mars was interestingly portrayed and I really liked the exploration of the scenario whereby someone’s personality can be uploaded elsewhere. Because immediately the question has to be – where? After all, who wants to spend their lives sitting in a jar, or machine? Inevitably, if you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of uploading your consciousness – you’ll want it in a body, won’t you? So whose body gets to act as passenger?

The other interesting issue Tchaikovsky explores in this book is how a narcissistic personality like Thompson manages to become such a powerful leader. In the wake of Trump’s presidency, I think this is a question that is being examined quite a lot… And Thompson definitely has some Trump-like attributes. I loved the sudden twist, whereby the action on Mars becomes gripping and very dangerous. Poor old Jimmy finds himself right at the heart of the action and I found myself reading this and thinking that it would make a cracking good mini-series on TV. Highly recommended for fans of colony adventures. While I obtained an arc of Bear Head from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10

The fragmentary ghost of a bear, stuck in the head of a resentful worker drone, stuck in a hole on a desolate planet – this certainly has the relatable protagonist box ticked. Tchaikovsky's sequel to Dogs Of War picks up a generation on, with the pendulum swinging back against the rights for genetically engineered animals for which the first book's protagonists fought. And the contested legacy of that, the divisions among a new generation of Bioforms, were for me one of the most compelling details of its further step into the future. Elsewhere, though, it felt hampered by the impedimenta of an earlier age of science fiction. So it makes perfect sense to have indentured and genetically modified labourers building a Mars colony in the Hellas crater – or, as the workforce know it, Hell City. Like too many immigrant workers here and now, the labourers are trapped and paid in company scrip, building a grand project whose benefits they'll never see, and as far as the bosses are concerned, the fact that Mars exists beyond the writ of Earth law is very much a feature rather than a bug. But set against that, there's apparently a World Senate, the sort of body which was commonplace in the more optimistic SF of the 20th century, but now feels further away than ever – and which despite occasional mutterings about corporate capture, would seem to sit at odds with a continuation of the current liberties of big corporations, which to a large extent rely on being able to play nations against each other.

Still, given all that corruption and revanchism, it's no surprise if the book's villain is a very thinly disguised version of the frontman for such tendencies in our own time. On the one hand, you have to respect Tchaikovsky for somehow finding new and insightful things to say about the prick's psychology after five years when that malign satsuma was, much to his own piggy delight, the most discussed person on Earth. On the other, you can't help but wonder about the timing, with this book released during the brief window when some people fondly believe that soon we might never have to devote headspace to the tiny-handed turd ever again. And even here, his presence seems to act as a constraint on Tchaikovsky's normally unbounded imagination. Usually, even to the genre-savvy reader, a Tchaikovsky novel will end up somewhere far, far away from where you thought it was going – certainly Dogs Of War, which would have been perfectly satisfactory even had it stuck to its We3-style elevator pitch, soon revealed itself as a far stranger and more ambitious project. But for Bear Head, the conclusion is at most a sidestep away from the obvious direction. Worse, despite occasionally paying lip service to the recent discovery that some people are functionally immune to having their misdeeds exposed, in places the plot still hinges on the idea that if a big secret about a powerful man can be exposed, that will topple him. Which...well, it's still fine for historical fiction, I suppose, or fairytales, but in a near-future story aiming for grit and any kind of relationship to our present, it feels a little less likely than having the bear Biomorphs suddenly reveal themselves as the Care Bears and save the day with their tummy-beams and the power of friendship.

Still, after the effect of recent years, it's hardly a surprise if even Tchaikovsky is finding his mental horizons a little limited by how small and hateful the world has become, that sense that we're all being shut into ever-smaller boxes. In other respects, his future is both a plausible, interesting continuation and expansion of Dogs Of War, and a horribly plausible (a phrase now verging on tautology) mirror/progression of the present. The implanted Hierarchy of the first book, in which anyone so modified literally can't refuse orders, was not vanquished as decisively as it seemed, because of course it wasn't – something that useful to the people with the power and the money never would be, not when their lawyers can find clever arguments for why it's really only fair. It's called the Collar now, though, and the new name makes some of the metaphorical intent clearer – as does the way Honey, the bear academic, finds that despite her many doctorates and wide interests, at conferences she only ever gets invited to panels about Bioforms. See also the way any pushback against equal rights is always the thin end of a wedge, and the way some people will still always manage to overlook that (I felt a little sad that the book never quite found a way to show leopard Bioforms eating faces, as per the popular online update of Niemöller). By the end, having had what felt like Martha Wells nods earlier on (all that data storage in people's heads being used for soap operas), it starts to feel a lot more like Peter Watts, before backing down into something much more humane. And above all, it does have some very good bears, caught well. Not least in the line "nothing sags quite like a bear, where their skin and its contents always have this shifting relationship, big-tall-strong one minute, pooling puddle of fat the next", which pretty much sums up my 2020s.

(Netgalley ARC)

Bear Head continues the story started in Dogs of War. This story is set a few decades later. I loved the concept of personality uploads of the human and animals to make bio-engineered hybrids. Although this idea has been done before Tchaikovsky weaves it together much better asking the reader some tough moral and ethical questions.

What Tchaikovsky does as with all of his books is write cracking characters. There’s the political Trump-like Thompson who manages to captivate his audience, way he uses people for political and personal gain.

Jimmy Martin is another great character. 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. Jimmy with this Bear personality in his head named Honey, gives Jimmy the ambition to make contact with an unknowable but lethal entity.

All this is woven together to make a genuinely fascinating read with some big questions asked. I found Bear Head to be thoughtful, emotional, also exciting and unpredictable. It also gives us a timely warning about the future dangers of messing with artificial intelligence.

An exciting read from an author writing some fantastic books across multiple genres.
My thanks to both NetGalley and Head of Zeus for providing a free ebook, all opinions are my own.

3.5 stars

CW: sexual assault

I know it says this is the second book in a series, but I was told I could read it without reading the first entry, so I did. And I could follow it perfectly because it felt like a standalone, and I don't think I could guess at the plot of the first book (given I haven't looked it up at all). The story is self-contained and the world makes sense without any prior knowledge.

I loved the voice in Jimmy's POV - the bitter, self-deprecating edge to someone living in a dystopia but realistic about his options. Sure, Mars is not great, but what was better about Earth? It was a great contrast to the clinical, driven Honey(the AI bear in his head), and it made for some really nice interactions between the two as they were forced to come to an agreement and work together.

The concept at the heart of the book is great - and unnervingly realistic. People and animals can be modified, which has led to intelligent animal hybrids who can communicate (bioforms) and AIs. There is a rise of human populism against both of them, trying to eradicate AI and make bioforms second class, subservient citizens. At the same time, there are brain implants that can control human behaviour.

It's not a new way of tackling issues about class, citizenship, and right to personal choice - but it's an effective one and makes for an engaging story. The tide of populism - and they hypocrisy of the villain in how we played everyone for his own power - feels too realistic at times. And what is sci-fi but using the future to examine the now?

This book uses sexual assault to show that the villain (a man) is a baddie, but the way it's done feels like exploiting trauma. It did not feel necessary to the book - it was not the reason the victim ends up acting as they do in the end, and all the reasons they <em>do</em> act would have been enough to show the man as the villain. If the assault was not intrinsically linked to motive, why include it?

Plus, we get the sexual assault from the perspective of the woman, and it's so horrible to read - particularly as part of the plot is trying to control people with implants, and she has an implant that makes it almost impossible to refuse him, or consider him with anything other than slavish devotion. It was just so horrible, and unnecessary - and overshadowed a lot of the book for me.

Bear Head is a sequel, of sorts, to Dogs of War, set several decades later and picking up some of the same characters but - and I'm proof of this - you absolutely don't need to have read the earlier book to enjoy Bear Head. To begin with, the situation that we confront here is new, and of itself. Tchaikovsky also gives all of the information the reader needs, without a lot of intrusive info-dumping. That said, I think readers of Dogs of War will be satisfied to see the later career of Honey, the bioengineered bear. Honey is a sentient, intelligent bear engineered as a weapon but graduated into a life as an activist, international trouble-shooter and a regular on the conference circuit (she's frustrated though that she is generally invited along to speak about the ethics of bioengineering, rather than addressing her wider competences). We see glimpses of this in flashbacks, as well as an instance of Honey uploaded to Mars.

Specifically, uploaded into the head of Jimmy Martin, a construction worker very definitely at the bottom of the heap in the giant building site known as Hell City where a crew of thousands (also bioengineered, to tolerate the thin air and intense cold - we're told that the only seasons on mars are 'Winter and Very Winter') is building a habitat for future colonists. Originally an enthusiast and a hard worker, he's now sustained by regular doses of the drug Stringer, and therefore in the hands of crime boss Sugar - so in no position to refuse when Sugar offers him cash for hoisting a dodgy download. But she doesn't know, any more than he does, what it will contain.

Or who...

I loved Jimmy as a character. He's not dim, he's not bad, but he has been done over so many times, and lives in such an extreme environment, that he's very focussed on himself. As the story gradually widens its, and his, perspective, he does grow ('I re-evaluate little Jimmy, because right now he is absolutely not thinking about finding a hole to hide in. he is thinking about what it's like for other people to go through what he went though only so much worse') and find other things that he cares about - surprising things in the end.

Jimmy's counterpart on Earth - the other main viewpoint character besides Honey - is a woman called Carole Springer. She is PA to the main baddie in this story, a monster of a man called Warner S Thompson. Thompson is easy to hate. A billionaire businessman, he is one of those sociopaths-in-a-suit we've all become familiar with over the past few years - a man with no empathy, no remorse, no scruples and a way with words. ('"You can't cut a deal with the man." Honey again. "I honestly don't think he has it in him to keep to an agreement the moment he gains anything from breaking it. I think that his personality went right into pathological liar and out the other side."') Tchaikovsky portrays Thompson at work quite, quite chillingly: the diction, all broken sentences designed to convince without saying anything that can be held against him, the harnessing of populist grievances, the general sense of life as a grift. It's deeply chilling, and indeed the book goes further, analysing Thompson and his ilk in terms of being practically a parasite species, beings gifted at seeming more human than humans while in reality being all out for themselves. (Look for the "game and metagame discussion" which is simply brilliant).

But I'm getting distracted. I was telling you about Carole. If Jimmy is the originally unwitting and totally unwilling host for Honey, then Carole is, sort of, the witting and willing host for Thompson. Not that he lives in her head, rather he commands her life. He owns her, and she can't disobey him - 'she was just the girl who couldn't ever say no'. The right to say "no" is an important theme in Bear Head, with the bioengineered animals threatened by the "collar", imposed mind control to keep them in line. Tchaikovsky explores various circumstances which support or underline that right - the economics of the company store, to which Jimmy owes his soul, different types of leverage, legal restrictions and, of course, the naked threat of force. All these are things that Thompson understands well and exploits as part of his ascent to power. Springer's role is to enable him, but also, perhaps, to witness. She has learned over years how to handle him but always in the cause of his ascent - there is literally nothing she will refuse, allowing him to abuse her body when he wishes and even accepting his violence (there are a couple of scenes I the book that some may wish to skip).

If the book documents the widening of Jimmy's sympathies in dialogue with Honey, it also examines Carole's inner struggle. Her situation is in many respects worse than his - both more constrained and more vulnerable. Arguably she's more culpable too and as we see what Thompson is willing to do escalate, that culpability only grows. Yes she suffers appalling abuse, and Tchaikovsky is damning here: 'a woman's bruises were usually invisible in the shadow of a powerful man'. Thompson is that man, the man we've all seen, able to boast about what he can get away with, knowing that for him, the music will never stop. So even if Carole's not a good person, she's not what he is (again, the book is very good on this extra level of manipulation, of calculation).

So expect moral complexity and challenge here, but also expect gut churning action and jeopardy and a story that's very much rooted in reality, driven by climate change, which the rich are busily seeking to buy themselves out of in part by riding the populist wave. A compelling and very involving (indeed, often moving) story about the best and worst of humanity (and other intelligences) which I'd strongly recommend.

So, I did it again... "Bear Head" is the follow-up to "Dogs of War" which I somehow haven't read. I was a little confused for the first few pages (down to missing out on the first book, I'm sure), but it didn't take long to get into the flow of the story (which tells you just how good this book is). I really enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing, and I loved the plot and characters in this latest offering. Despite not having read the first book, this was a very well-rounded story and I hope for many more books from this author.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

Excellent follow up to Dogs of War, set a few decades into the future and building on - and vastly expanding - the world so well realised in the first book. I imagine you could crack on without having the first book as the key points are articulated and there’s limited character cross over, but I suspect you’ll get less out of it.

Bear Head is a sci-fi thriller first and foremost, with a political core of self determination and free-will but it’s the characters that land it - Tchaikovsky doesn’t just do ideas, his books are characterised by convincing worlds populated by believable characters. Read it, and read more...

3.5 stars

Bear Head is a novel I requested on a whim, but was so pleasantly surprised, especially in the second half I really couldn’t stop turning the page to find out what happens next! We follow Jimmy, a bioengineered human working on a Mars terraforming project, when one day in order to get the money for his latest drug hit (in order to cope with the monotony of life of mars) he agrees to store some hardware in this brain, which turns out to be a conscious mind called Honey, a Bioform activist from earth.

I didn’t realise this was actually the second book in a series, but I found it very easy to follow and I think it was more of a companion book. I always think Adrian Tchaikovsky books excel on the political themes and this was no exception. One of the character POVs we follow is aide to a politician called Thompson, who is a very Donald trump esque character and the main villain of the book. It was very satisfying to watch him lose his support throughout the book and have characters stand up to him and him basically through a hissy fit. But I also think it was an interesting look at how everyone tries to please these type of people, catering to their every whim. One line hit especially hard along the lines of a woman’s bruises were always invisible in the shadow of a powerful man.

The characters really grow on you throughout the book, especially Honey and Jimmy, who have great banter between them and is such an interesting dynamic. There is also some really great humour in the book, it definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously. I also really loved Sugar who is the crime boss on mars who sells Jimmy the hardware.

The plot is fast paced and I think has some really interesting commentary on social hierarchies as well as the concept of ‘the game of life’ and how some people can just piggy back of others, never doing any of the work themselves. I also liked how Jimmy is just an average joe who sort of ends up involved in all this interplanetary conflict but is also learning to believe in something greater than himself.

In the world animal Bioforms are seen as lesser and there is a movement for them to be ‘collared’ in order to be controlled, which is where a lot of the political conflict lies. Honey is a campaigner for bioform rights, but when things go wrong a copy of her consciousness is sent to mars and events start to unravel from there.
I did find the book a little slow to get into, and I think I could have loved the character even more (for a higher rating) but it was still and really solid and enjoyable read!

Okay, I would admit that when I saw this book on NetGalley I was looking for a little light relief. The pseudo Soviet style cover, the blurb and the author's surname (Tchaikovsky? Surely not!), seemed to promise exactly what I was searching for. Well that really does serve me right for not keeping au courant with modern sci-fi literature. Fortunately by the time that I realised that my initial impression was utterly wrong, this book had already taken a big bite out of my attention.

This is not to say that Bear Head is not funny, it is very funny, but it is also deadly serious. There is humour here but no one could say it is light. Indeed the main themes of the book appear to be economic exploitation and political oppression and how near future technological advancements have been co-opted to implement them.

Fortunately, these same technological advances, especially the creation of bio forms, animals that have human or superhuman intelligence, and Distributed Intelligence, artificial intelligence that is not limited to a single site, also serve to create the agents that will undermine the would-be exploiters and oppressors: Enter Honey the Bear, HumOS (is this pun Mr Tchaikovsky? It means "smoke" in Spanish), and the mysterious, omnipresent, goddess-like, Bees. Together with good guy lawyer Aslan, hapless Jimmy Marten and Sugar the pusher (yes, I don't think all the animal names are a coincidence), they are arrayed to fight for the liberation of the beings of earth... And Mars.
This fight is crude and savage at times. In particular, there is a character who is regularly brutalised, sensitive souls should beware, and one of the most upsetting scenes screwed up my translations that morning. The feminist in me however was pretty mollified, since it was surely not a coincidence that most of the saviours were female.

Bugger, this is probably one of my books of the year, and now I will have to read the first one (it is part two of The Dogs of War series).

Thanks as always to NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC copy.

A follow-up to the also-excellent Dogs of War.

We begin on Mars, with Jimmy who is part of the crew creating Hell City - a place for people from Earth to live one day. He's modified human, so can survive if needed out on the surface for a while. He's got extra headspace too. It's like adding an extra hard drive to your brain and sometimes he smuggles illegal data in there. It's no big deal... except for this one time. This time the data starts talking to him. Like it's a person. Only it claims to be a genetically engineered bear and civil activist...

The book can stand alone (maybe?) but I think you will enjoy it much more if you read Dogs of War first. The world the characters live in is one with intelligent, bio-engineered animals, and a whole host of arguments around the ethical dilemmas in that situation. There are men who want to take advantage of them, and others who want to destroy them all. Then there are the animals themselves, some grappling with their intelligence vs their bio-engineering (which has some control over them), like Rex from Dogs of War, and others like the bear Honey, who want to contribute to making a better world, if people would only listen to her.

This book also focuses on a political character called Thompson. Everything he does is designed to advance his own personal goals. He can barely talk in full sentences, yet he manages to captivate Americans everywhere. Yes, he's rather Trump-like. He uses people, but many of them are social climbers themselves who barely notice. His assistant does, because he controls her in the same way others control the bio-form animals, but she's powerless to do anything about it. Or so she thinks.

So we have Jimmy on Mars, with a bear in his head, and Thompson on Earth, with barely anything in his head except naked ambition... This is where it starts getting really interesting.

A fascinating book and a genuinely interesting exploration of the ethical issues around modifying animals and humans. The characters are great, and I particularly liked spending time with both Jimmy and Honey. I also have a fondness for books about Mars, harking back to when I first read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series years and years ago, and Andy Weir's The Martian more recently, so I enjoyed seeing another take on how we might terraform it one day.

An excellent read.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has quickly become one of my favourite authors over the last couple of years. For someone who churns out books at an incredible rate, I'm amazed by their consistent quality and this book, thankfully, continues that pattern.

Continuing on from Dogs of War, the novel picks up the plot and themes a couple of decades later and advances it in interesting and satisfying ways. There is nothing truly original in terms of concept: personality uploads, technological upgrades to humans and animals, mind control. However, Tchaikovsky does weave it all together in a compelling plot which asks some big ethical and moral questions.

The character work is brilliant. There's Honey the academic bear, from the previous novel. There's Jimmy, a no-luck drug addict geezer-type building the city of the future on Mars. There's Thompson, a Trump-like figure who is something so much more haunting and sinister; the petulant child who has some strange incalculable influence over those around him. There's his PA, who grapples with a sense of her own identity and will which she has given up for the job.

I reckon the book is enough to stand by itself, but would definitely recommend reading Dogs of War first. Can't wait for the sequel; knowing Tchaikovsky's fate of output, it won't be long in coming.

I was excited to read the follow-up to 'Dogs of War', and Tchaikovsky did not disappoint.

One thing did surprise me, though. Apart from the author's dazzling scientific imagination, there's always been a scatter of acerbic humour in his books. But 'Bear Head' takes it to the next level - it's frickin' hilarious. The parts narrated by Jimmy, that is (as an aside, the book is a writer's masterclass in "voice"). Jimmy is not a terribly sympathetic character, but you don't care, because you're snorting too much.

Things get a lot more serious whenever we're with Honey, the Bioform bear uploaded to Jimmy's headware. Here's where we return to the grave themes of 'Dogs of War'. I'm not sure how easily a reader will follow these parts of 'Bear Head' - there's a lot of terminology and characters who don't get much of an introduction. But for returning fans, it's always a delight to see where Tchaikovsky is taking his Bioform world (particularly as a set of short stories he recently released reveal that the Earth in this series is the same Earth as in his spectacular 'Children of Time').

The one element of the book didn't interest me as much was the villain Thompson - a thinly veiled Donald Trump, the narrative seemed to spend a lot of time reiterating the same points about him. Even so, I chomped my way through this book and I can't wait to read Tchaikovsky's next work.

(With thanks to Head of Zeus and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

This novel builds up to a riveting climax. I can only say I enjoyed it a lot. Jimmy finds he has been taken over by a bear, Honey, who has been uploaded into his head. I finished the book late at night in one sitting. I would recommend the novel.

I read the Dogs of War and am not ashamed to say it brought a tear to my eye at the end and I had high hopes indeed for this book as it follows on in the same universe, perfectly paced story superbly told and very thought provoking, no tears this time but I was very satisfied with the reading and will be purchasing the audiobook as soon as it’s released