Read EMERGENT PROPERTIES by Aimee Ogden if you love climate change, the moon, speculative fiction, sentient technology, messy breakups, strained family dynamics, investigative journalism, spiders, neo pronouns, space travel & connections.

Scorn is an emancipated AI, originally created by zir’s mothers, each the CEO of their own corporations, and neither mother is particularly happy that Scorn is not doing something they think is valuable for society, like space exploration. Rather, zir is an investigative reporter, scanning through newsfeeds for information and looking for new stories.

The story begins when Scorn awakens after an accident and finds: 1) zir’s chassis (body) is destroyed, 2) it’s been 10 days since the accident, 3) zir has no memories saved anywhere of what zir was investigating prior to the accident (nothing nefarious here, just somewhat lackadaisical backup habits) and what happened during those 10 lost days.

Scorn decides to download into an older chassis, a small spiderbot, and sets out to find out who trashed their data and previous chassis, and why, and what story set off such a violent response.

Subsequently, multiple attempts are made by someone to stop Scorn, until zir eventually discovers who is behind not only the attempts, but what Scorn was investigating.

I loved this! Scorn is fantastic: zir loves hunting down stories worth investigating, has no desire to be human, and is happy with zir’s life. Zir does have a somewhat frustrating relationship with one of their mothers, and a more congenial relationship with the other. Zir also has an intriguing relationship with another AI who embodies a building.

Though the world is a dystopia with corporation-controlled resources and zones, I found I wanted to know more about this place. Scorn encounters anti-AI prejudice as zir navigates the world with verve and a snarky sense of humour. And despite zir’s parents’ frequent unhappiness with zem, Scorn wants to prove zir’s skill in their chosen profession, as any person would.

The reveal of the plot and the identity of the perpetrator wasn’t hugely surprising, but I still had a lot of fun getting there, and I really want more stories of Scorn sarcastically dealing with problems and excelling at their job.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Tor Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for my review.

I really wanted to like this one, since it's about one of my favorite subjects, which is emerging AI, but the opening kept throwing me out. I couldn't follow what was happening, and didn't really like the main character's voice. Maybe just not for me.

Scorn is an Independent AI that has lost 10 days of memory. This novella covers Scorn figuring out what has happened to them zem and zir place in the world. Scorn's determination is admirable. I really enjoyed the story and the plot twist was well executed. I would recommend this story.

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC and this is my honest review.

Scorn is an independent AI who has gone their own way as an independent journalist. Ze regains consciousness to find that ze is missing ten days of memories. Ze had been on the moon investigating… something.

What follows is an enjoyable mystery that takes place in a world of competing corporations, two of which are run by Scorn’s mothers, who can’t speak to one another without a fight.

Emergent Properties is a unique take an AI and what constitutes sentience by way of teenage rebellion that inevitably results in disappointed parents.

I enjoyed this novella and read it in one day. A young emancipated AI investigates a story, while also figuring out who ze wants to be. When it starts, ze has lost ten days of memory and someone is trying to stop the investigation by any means necessary.

I really liked the main character, and for a novella, there was a pretty well-fleshed out world. I recommend it! It comes out July 25. Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for the eARC.

2.75 stars

This is a short story. Don't know why but I was shocked at the page count when I first opened the book. I felt a bit nervous from the start because short stories and I don't always go well.

Emergent Properties follows Scorn. An AI who has chosen to become a journalist instead of a science bot. The story uses the Ze and Zem pronouns for Scorn and other AI. Through the story, you will see the internal conflict of outside opinions on Scorn. Scorn was built with a unique programing set; also she was raised to be polite. I do mean raised, even if it was only a few years instead of a normal life cycle, by the two women she considers her mothers. From this Scorn looks at the world differently.

The story focuses on Scorn trying to recover data from her last assignment. At the beginning Scorn logs back to awareness missing ten days, no backup or any information found. They know that it must have been a large story to get them wiped without backups. From here Scorn starts trying to retrace their steps from Rome to the Moon. What is uncovered could be huge for society and in their own life.

The writing itself was good. Story wise how it ended up just didn't have enough logic behind it. It was a good take on how an AI could still appreciate emotions and their importance while still being okay not being a human. I think the hate towards AI bots was a bit overdone. Sure there are the tin hat people but Scorn finding them everywhere.

I requested this book because it sounded like a fun futuristic take on the journalist-chasing-a-story plot and it certainly does what it says on the box. Our AI construct main character Scorn bounces around Earth and the moon in various "chassis" trying to find out why there's a gap in zir memory - did ze get too close to an inconvenient truth?

The story itself was not that exciting and except for a few tense moments at the end that were easily resolved, there was little to really sink my teeth into in terms of likeable characters, tension or drama.

Although it is a short read, it is not an easy one. The author's choice to use uncommon neopronouns made it a very dense text to get through at first, happily my brain adjusted but to be honest it just felt a bit gimmicky. Otherwise this is a fairly unremarkable story that lacks the spark and humour of the books it will inevitably be compared to: the Murderbot series.

Emergent Properties may be a short novella, but it certainly packs a punch! Our lead character is an A.I. named Scorn, who has defied the wishes of their creators (parents) to become an investigative journalist. After chasing the lead of a possible conspiracy on a lunar colony, Scorn’s chassis is ‘accidently’ destroyed and their memory wiped for the previous 10 days. Scorn is then faced with the choice of leaving the lead alone, or risking their life and digging deeper into the conspiracy.

The story via the internal monologue of our lead character, which I will admit I found a little jarring at first. The combination of tech-speak, the A.I’s choice of pronouns (Ze/Zem) which I’ve not encountered before, and the rapid-fire worldbuilding meant I felt I was playing catch-up for the first few chapters. I would encourage other readers to stick it out as I did, because once you get to grips with these factors, the story really comes into it’s own. Scorn is a sarcastic, darkly comic character who leads me to draw the comparisons to Martha Well’s Murderbot series.

With a small cast of core characters, I sadly didn’t find the mystery too difficult to solve. That being said, my real enjoyment from the book came from the interesting setting and characters within, so the story wasn’t much of a drawback for me. I would be very interested in reading more into the world Aimee Ogden has created, so I’ll stay tuned in case the adventures of Scorn continue!

This one was very wordy for a novella, and it felt like waaaay longer than 126 pages without accomplishing much. The actual mystery (or "story") that Scorn is tracking down is completely lost among all of zir internal monologue. There's also very little sense of danger or adventure or curiosity (mostly because we the reader can't figure out what zir goal is).

I loved the use of neopronouns, the way Scorn distanced zirself from zir parents, the way artificials formed communities in message boards, the very unique (to humans) concept of the body not equaling the self. But I honestly absorbed little to nothing in the first half of the book, which made reading this feel like a chore.

Sometimes you’re a reporter chasing down a story that someone clearly doesn’t want you to chase, what with the continual attempts to kill you. Sometimes you’re also trying to prove to your protective parents that you’re independent and can do things on your own. Sometimes you’re also an AI and your mothers are the heads of two separate corporations, are getting super divorced, and they’re maybe a bit like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. I ended up tearing through this, and love the story that Ogden ends up unfurling before us. One of my favorite reads of the summer so far; pick this up when it comes out on Tuesday!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Emergent Properties is a sci-fi novella by Aimee Ogden, about an artificial intelligence named Scorn (pronouns ze/zir). Although Scorn was designed for intelligence gathering, ze preferred journalism and would go to great lengths to chase a story. When ze wakes up without a recent memory backup, the story ze was following leads to chaos and revelations about zir own family.

I really enjoyed this novella! It was lacking some world-building and context, but I think that’s par for the course with novellas. I liked the characters and the commentary on artificial intelligence and the so-called emergent properties that come with true consciousness. I thought it had creative speculation about AI in the future, and that part definitely intrigued me. I felt that it was well-rounded, with a bit of action, introspection, and drama. Fans of the sci-fi novella should give it a try!

I was actually pretty stoked for this book before hand, considering I love fictional, unrealistic AI constructs, so I thought I'd hit the jackpot when I found this available to read on NetGalley. I really appreciate it, too, because it saved me the cost of a book I really ended up disliking.

First of all, this story is set in a very interesting world and the premise is very interesting. Our protagonist is an artificial construct using neo-pronouns, created by zir two mothers who are the divorced CEOs of competing global mega corporations. The story takes off when ze wakes up missing 10 days of memory after going after some mysterious story on the moon. So far so good.

The problem for me is in the writing. This is a short novella only a little over a hundred pages, and most of its page count is dedicated into info dumping about the world and the character. A lot of telling, not much showing. Add to that the very messy style of writing. There's also a lot of chat based discussion between robots and AI and the discussions are a part of the paragraphs without line breaks, which makes for very jarring reading.

This book almost felt more like a first draft of a book outline than an actual finished story, and with a lot of work it could have been extended into a full length novel with characters I actually cared about and and a world that the reader is introduced to organically through a compelling plot, instead of what it ended up being.

The author definitely has great ideas and she handles really interesting topics, but this novella just really didn't work for me.

Emergence Properties is, in varying degrees, about fraught familial relationships, identity, the dystopia of late-stage capitalism taken to its extreme conclusions, AI rights, humanity as something to aspire to or revile (or neither), the climate crisis, social media and an AI solving zir own murder.

It's also roughly 130 pages long.

Attempting to tackle so much in such a short space is an ambitious undertaking, and Emergence Properties might very easily have been a bloated mess. Ogden sticks the landing, and delivers something that, while not perfect, is still very good.

I really liked Scorn, the protagonist, a sentient AI that was built to perform space exploration operations too dangerous for humans, and became an investigative journalist instead. Ze wakes up missing roughly ten days worth of memories, with zir most recent body (called a chassis) destroyed. Ze has to retrace zir steps and figure out what ze was investigating and why/how zir chassis was destroyed.

Much of the novella is dedicated to Scorn's complicated relationship with zir mothers, powerful CEOs who are currently going through an extremely messy break-up, and who didn't expect their AI child to morph into someone completely different than who they had envisioned.

What suffers from the short length of the book is the mystery plot, which, while interesting, has very little room to breathe. Instead the story really shines in the parent-child relationship between Scorn and zir mothers, and in the characters in general.

I also enjoyed the worldbuilding, particularly as it pertains to the depiction of AI: the different forms they take and how unconstrained from the physical they ultimately feel, the different levels of sentience and the way Scorn (and by extension the reader) still deeply considers them all as people.

A short novella that is big on ideas but a little scant on plot, Emergent Properties is a story about not only artificial intelligence but the relationship between parents and children.

Unfortunately, this is one of those novellas that suffer from “novella syndrome” - it’s just a bit short. It feels like it’s missing something and in this case, that would be an engaging mystery. Because the story is so short, I kind of assumed the reveal from the start, as there just aren’t that many characters, and the world is too small for it to carry any sort of Agatha Christie effect. As such, it feels like the novella is a transparent vehicle for the ideas it's attempting to convey. In that regard, I’d say it’s a bit clunky.

We also aren’t given enough time to get to know Scorn, the main character, before ze starts off on zir mission, so the stakes don’t feel that high. This is too bad, because the ideas the novella brings up are really interesting and there are some very clever and entrancing aspects of the novella I did enjoy.

One of these would be the occasional bits of humour, and the other is the idea of setting most of the story in Rome - I liked the juxtaposition of an ancient city that retains its archaic aspects while being populated with futuristic technology.

The ideas raised and extrapolated on are concepts such as:
AI rights, or, even generally, the treatment of robots
the idea of robots/AI needing a way to communicate with others like them in a communal sense (in this, the assumption that they would want to because they were designed by a social species, us, who gave them this need).
Whether the creators of AI owe a duty of care to their AI “children”
The idea that an AI would, and should, be programmed to enjoy a task it has been designed to do. In this case, it’s a weather station (which, somehow I found adorable), but the idea that if we programmed an AI to like being say, a janitor robot, does that give it a sense of actualization? Do AI need actualization? Is there a worry about this, though? What if you programmed an AI to enjoy being a soldier, for example; does that mean you are programming an AI to enjoy killing humans? Or certain types of humans? Can AI’s experience love, both familial and platonic and romantic?

The novella raises all these increasingly relevant questions and more, but, unfortunately, the story that contains these isn’t on the same level. It’s not a bad story - I enjoyed it and it made sense - I just wasn’t overly excited by it. It’s possible it’s because we don’t get enough time with Scorn before the story takes off to really care about them.

But if you want an interesting little novella that has big ideas, you can give this a shot, but the mystery aspect won’t blow you away.

Took me a bit to settle into this, but it was worth the initial hurdle. At it's heart, this is a corporate espionage murder mystery. I do with that the AI rights effort was given a bit more breathing room, but that would have been very difficult within the page count on hand. Settle in for a detective story with a shell-hopping AI, and you'll be good. The world is definitely worth further exploration and expansion.

Interesting and enjoyable read! A bit of amnesia mystery theatre with a sentient AI at its center. Following Scorn’s adventure and being in on zir existential ruminations was so engaging. This sci-fi story asks one of the questions central to the genre: what does it mean to be alive? And its answers bring us to interesting places. Plus, everyone can agree that narcissistic parents are the worst.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my free copy. These opinions are my own.

Unfortunately, I DNF this novella about half the way through due to general frustration with all the characters. I could not find myself attached to anyone in this story, to the point where I couldn't bring myself to read another 60 pages of the story. The narrative also felt like it had some dubious themes and messages, however I may be mistaken in this as I didn't get to the end of the narrative to see how everything paid off.

This book had some things I really liked, but overall I was pretty "meh" about it.

I liked the use of less common pronouns, I don’t know if I’ve even read more than one or two other books using pronouns outside of he/she/them. I love the way sci-fi can showcase a more accepting future while also showing that bias will always be around. I also love that this is the second book I’ve read where an AI has familial relationship with zir creators.

I know sci-fi usually comes with a lot of words or phrases that are explained over the course of the book, but for some reason this one just did not gain clarity for me. I think that the way it depicted Scorn talked to other AIs also contributed to my difficulty. It felt like a struggle to read the entire time and I was just kind of dreading reading it every time it came to picking something to read. Even though I love sci-fi, I think this may just be a case of something that’s just not for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for making this available in exchange for an honest review!

I do not claim to have read every book in the world, but I have read a lot—and the sheer “otherness” of Emergent Properties is unlike anything I have ever encountered. It is distinct, unique, and every other paltry adjective for different one might imagine. It is also brave, enlightening, and empathetic in the most unexpected way.
In sci-fi and fantasy it is very difficult to find a non-villainized intelligent race that doesn't mostly behave like humans. Going off of my previous experiences with Ogden’s work—Sun Daughters, Sea Daughters was one of my favourite reads of last year—I knew she had a talent for writing inhuman protagonists that fit this bill, while still making them engaging and sympathetic. Emergent Properties took my expectations and went a step further by giving us a sentient AI character that is resourceful, emotional, transformative, and very much not human. However, at its core this is still a book about a child navigating the stormy waters of familial obligation, and the guilt of growing up and not being who your parents wanted you to be. That feels like an over-simplification, but anyone who has ever had a complex relationship with a parent knows how difficult it can be to articulate that connection, and that is with the benefit of humanity’s collective empathy. Ogden manages to convey this sort of inner conflict without relying on that.
Ultimately, this was a very good book that I enjoyed immensely, but I would consider it high science fiction. If only due to the way in which it alters your perceptions and requires a certain openness to the way in which technology might evolve. In essence, it is everything I could ever want out of a piece of speculative fiction, and Aimee Ogden has solidified her place on my auto-buy list.