I wasn't sure where this was going at first, but I ended up really enjoying it. I actually wish it could have been a bit longer!

If you are looking for; complicated families, artificial intelligence, a mystery to solve, this is for you!

I just reviewed Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden. #NetGalley

When a science fiction novel features an AI protagonist, comparisons to Martha Wells' excellent Murderbot series are inevitable. But while Wells' Murderbot is a cynical, world-weary Secbot with more than a touch of cybernetic PTSD, Odgen's Scorn is a rebellious young reporter who wants to prove zem/zerself to (you get use to the the AI pronouns fairly quickly) zem/zer's family and the world. Scorn is following a hotter-than-hot story that has already lead to a few murder attempts, by both physical and cyber means. Thanks to the latest attempt on Scorn's life, there are big chunks of memory gone. Scorn has to recreate zim's research, all while dodging both computer viruses and grenades, and dealing with one of zer's mothers (programmers/engineers/creators) seemingly well meant interference.

The future in this book is dystopic. Run away climate change has made Antarctica and northern Scandinavia the refuge of the rich and connected, while the rest of humanity sweats away in crumbling cities. Mega corporations who answer to no one are in charge; the InterGov agency is a toothless entity that is limited to sending memos of protest, that corporations can ignore as they will.

After the author gets the basic background out of the way, the action and pace build as Scorn chases after the elusive story. Danger and conspiracies lurk everywhere, and ends in unforeseen betrayal and loss. I was surprised by my reaction to that loss. The character only appears briefly, a few pages at most, but I felt very connected to the character and mourned the loss along with Scorn.

I think fans of the Murderbot series will enjoy this title. I hope the author decides to write another volume of Scorn's adventures.

Artificial intelligence can achieve a lot in the world of this story where sentient machines inhabit different chassis depending on their needs and financial circumstances. This book has it all-robots, love, complicated sibling dynamics, and parental disappointment. The world was accessible and distinct despite the short length of the novella. I look forward to more from this author.

This had so much promise, but ultimately it didn't deliver. I couldn't bring myself to care for Scorn, and the prose was dry in many areas, resulting in a disconnect between me and the story. While I believe Emergent Properties will have a loyal readership, I am (unfortunately) not among that group. The style was interesting, but I didn't care for the references to programming that didn't actually make sense. I did not finish this read, walking away from it around the 60% mark.

Despite being more plot-driven than my usual tastes, I was absolutely engrossed in Emergent Properties. There's some brilliant world-building - the type which, no matter how satisfying the ending, left me wanting more. The world presented is so intriguing. I perhaps would have liked more emotional engagement, but the writing flows beautifully, and I found the plot to be captivating. I would love to read more of Scorn's journalistic adventures.

I will start with the comment that I am very happy that the Murderbot comparison has been removed from the blurb. That did this book a disservice and may have driven its early low reviews. This book has its own strengths and issues, but it should be judged on its own merit. It is about an AI (non-human) in a human dominated sci-fi landscape heading out to investigate a story about corrupt corporations on its own. The blurb says it’s about “brewing corporate warfare,” which is correct and something I did not pick up on until most of the book was over. This book was hard to follow past the concrete level. I knew what happened to Scorn (amnesia) and the goal to get to the moon and issues of funds and autonomy versus parents. There was a romance with a non-corporal AI sort-of, but mostly it happened before the amnesia so I, as a reader, got no details and really, I had no idea why they care about each other. This may be a personal issue with amnesia tropes. A lot happened before the amnesia, and so, I was following Scorn and retracking zir’s footsteps, but the plot happened from retracing and not from analyzing. In that way, the antagonist at the end telling Scorn everything was quite a surprise to me, as I did not feel I had followed Scorn to that point. Surprises can be good though; I might reread at a latter point (though I don’t usually reread 3-star books; too many books, too little time). Other things that threw me was the relationship with Scorn and the climate refugees and with zir’s parents. The ending seemed to throw off the whole anti-corporation message and avoided recognizing Scorn’s own privileged background, even if complicated. This has become a longer review than I usually do so I will wrap it up with a summary; Emergent Properties is an interesting story that needed more space to grow, and I am not sure the use of amnesia served it well.

I would like to start by thanking Tordotcom and Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

I really enjoyed the idea of Emergent properties. AI reporter following corporate warfare? Interesting concept and sounds like an action packed novella, and it did deliver on both of these parts to an extent. The book starts off with Scorn restoring themselves from an old backup and finding that roughly 10 days of their “life” are missing and they immediately try to figure out where these days went. We start off with a very promising premise and it seems like the story is going to keep going. The only problem is that Ogden spends a decent amount of the novella building the world that it takes place in and getting the reader in the setting of that world. That wouldn’t be a problem if the book was more than 120 pages. If I have a novella that is that short, I would prefer the writer to spend more time with the actually plot than describe where things take place.

Once the story did get back on track and went away from describing the world that things were taking place in, we found ourselves with quite a nice plot, with a couple of twists in such a short time. I really feel like this story would’ve been better suited as part of a Space Opera, something on a more grand scale than a novella. Ogden clearly has a lot of talent in world building and setting the ambience for the story, but those talents were a bit wasted on a story this short.

I have posted this review to both goodreads and storygraph

This novella addresses the complicated narrative task of seating the reader in the POV of an AI. It explores what it means to be sapient, how an AI might interpret being "emancipated," how an AI might navigate the disparate perspectives of sensation and spatial awareness and sense of physical-self as that AI changes corporeal chassis. It raises questions of humanity, and what an artificial construct might find of value in humanity--and what it might reject.

Unavoidably, a barrier to reading (and likely readership) is the POV character's neopronoun use. Scorn, an "emancipated" AI investigative reporter tells us the story, and identifies with the ze/zir neopronoun set. To those who are not fluent in neopronouns it is impossible to say that their use does not create a friction to the language. In some respects, it is an authorial choice that is likely to make a non-insignificant portion of the general SFF readership aware of the language, rather than simply immersed in the story. That's not to say that there isn't a good authorial reason for choosing these neopronouns (so often their use is tied to a desire to be not-human, which is a theme explored in the text). However, there are those who find certain types of storytelling less approachable (for example, I tend to shy away from 2nd person narration out of personal preference), and I suspect this book will find clusters of people who love it and emphatically do not love it based in no small part on the neopronoun use.

Ultimately, it is a work that demands the attention of the reader, raises many questions of identity, self, and what it means to be sapient, and it rewards readers who choose to rise to that challenge,

Fantastic. I was super pumped that Scorn wasn't just a human in robot clothes; ze was just as at home in a hand-sized multilegged body as in a humanoid one. Zir maybe-girlfriend is a bar. I love it.

I had a little trouble following the plot - the players weren't fleshed out enough for me to really get what corporation was doing what for who. I never really got what "herd" meant. And the denouement was literally just the villain explaining their plan. BUT it was incredibly fun the whole time. I love the way Scorn experiences the world, and the unique kinds of attacks a hostile could make against an artificial sentience. Also, practice reading and being comfortable with neopronouns is always welcome.

I really hope there's more to come for Scorn and zir family.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

Emergent properties by Aimee Ogden is a lovely combination of mystery, science fiction, speculative fiction, and adventure, all in one short novella. The hints at the world were sprinkled in such a way that were easy to absorb as they came, not front or backloaded. I especially enjoyed some of the smaller details, like Amazon Corp and the Russian Orthodox Corp being two of the major powers in the world (and beyond!), as well as the mention of ecofascism refugees. None of those details are really expanded on, but they make for a world that exists beyond our main character's sphere of experience.

Scorn, the aforementioned main character, is an investigative journalist AI, who wakes up at the start of the novella in the data cloud and realizes zir backups are missing ten days of memory—a very unusual occurrence for zem—and goes on a journey to find out what happened. Scorn had such an enjoyable inner dialogue when talking zemself through solving the mystery. It felt like such a human way of talking to oneself. Zem saying "fact fact bo bact banana fana fo fact" in a moment of stress and then scolding zemself back into a problem solving mindset was very fun and relatable.

This novella focuses a lot on the concept of family, and how we'd imagine family in a world where AI bots co-exist and move through space alongside humans. That exploration was really intriguing to me, from siblings to parents and navigating a messy divorce.

Even though this novella is short, it took me a surprising number of days to finish. This is the type of story I usually eat up in a single day or even a single sitting. It could have been my current life circumstances but I kept finding my attention pulled away and a lack of urge to rush back to the story.

Thank you to TOR/Forge publishers and NetGalley for access to an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

2/5 stars! This is a queer science fiction novel by Aimee Ogden. I feel like there was too much story trying to fit into a novella format. Scorn was hard to connect with and I felt like I connected better with zir world-building that character. The writing style was good, but the book needs to be stretched out to fit this world.

I received an advance review copy for free through NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily

Thank you TorDotCom and Netgalley for the ARC.
If Murderbot was the child of messy lesbian divorce. While this novella was such a unique take on navigating complicated family dynamics and self identity, I think it would have done better as a novel. It felt like it tried to take on too many great concepts with so few pages.
The relationship between Scorn and zir brother emotionally obliterated me.

In a future where AI has long since been created, Scorn, an AI developed to be a data gatherer, has become a journalist that has stumbled upon a major story on the Moon. But after being attacked, the being is back on Earth trying to recall what happened to it, and what secrets it may have uncovered. The way the story played out reminded me a lot of the works of Philip K. Dick, just with advances in technology that were far beyond what could ever have been imagined in his time. Told completely from the perspective of Scorn, it took a while to get into the story and mostly comprehend what was going on, mainly because of the difficulty of comprehending a sentient AI's way of thinking about itself and the world around it. The constant use of "pronouns" for itself, like "ze" and "zir" with no context of what exactly they translate to, as well as the many other facets of the futuristic world made it a challenging read. Maybe a glossary explaining the terms would have helped. Not a bad story, just a difficult one to comprehend at times.

I really wanted to love this book, it's got a lot of great bits, but for me it really just fell flat. In part, I think it's because it's billed as being similar to Murderbot, which it really isn't, while Scorn is an independent AI in a society where that's not common or even accepted, there's not a lot of crossover between the two and they shouldn't be compared as it's unfair to do so. Scorn is an interesting character, an AI created with a purpose (data collection I think?) who then decides that no, they're going to do their own thing and settle on being an investigative reporter. This is a fascinating setup, but I felt that it wasn't handled well, as I completely forgot Scorn was a reporter until it was brought up again later in the book. The narrative was hard to follow and while I get why, with Scorn having to rebuild lost memories, it made it really hard to follow what was happening. There were other mother stylistic choices, such as including code in some sections and having Scorn reply to untranslated French, that I found jarring and not integrated well. There was also a whole thing with Scorn's mothers that turned out to be super relevant, and their connections were very interesting, but once again, I feel like the narrative failed to make these ideas have any sort of real impact.

We picked up Emergent Properties because it was billed as Murderbot-adjacent. It certainly has a lot of the same things: the protagonist, Scorn, is a snarky human-created sentience who definitely does NOT want to be "more human"; the surrounding world is a corporation-controlled dystopian version of the future; and Scorn's paranoia certainly doesn't mean that nothing's out to get zem. There's a lot less action, though.

The book opens as Scorn realizes that ze has forgotten the last 10 days. Ze retraces zir steps, and we follow along, from Rome to New York to the Moon. Along the way, Scorn puts up with prejudice from the outside world and the non-support of zir family. Ze doesn't just want to figure out what happened to zem; ze wants to prove to zir mothers that zir chosen profession (investigative journalist) is viable.

The first half of the book is slow-moving, as Scorn gathers information about what ze was doing. The second half is more action-heavy, as the plot against Scorn (and possibly the world) unfolds. For a novella, the writing is dense, but the eventual payoff is worth it. Now that we've been introduced to Scorn, we're excited to see where ze goes next.

This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novella.

Genre: science fiction

Scorn (ze/zir/zem) is an Artificial Intelligence construct, a well developed and sentient entity. Ze has zir own ideas about determining truth. Using zir resources, ze will stop at nothing to understand data that indicates something is very wrong in the corporate-political landscape.

Emergent Properties is a novella of ideas. The plot doesn’t start until about 50% into the book, but the slow pace of the setup gives a solid impression of the world of the AIs, and how much more developed Scorn may be from other AIs and bots. Scorn has developed zemself and picked zir own neopronouns, fitting zir personality - astonishing autonomy for an AI. I loved the choice of the neopronouns, giving zem more sentience than it/its or they/theirs, but combined with the computer code style Scorn uses to interact with other bots, it does pace the beginning a lot more slowly. The plot picks up about halfway through, but serves more as a vehicle for the ideas rather than a driving factor itself.

One of my favorite features of Emergent Properties is that Scorn and the other AIs interact in code and hashtags … and emojis. I love a good emoji-only communication, and felt that Scorn is an evolution of how we communicate on the internet today.

Pick up Emergent Properties if you’re looking for a novella that reminds you of favorite AI science fiction tropes, explores ideas, and has a little bit of plot.

This books said in the synopsis would be perfect for people who needed their Murderbot fix, and I believe I set my hopes a bit high, because although I tried to like this book, it was barely anything like the series it compared itself to, and it took out everything that makes the Murderbot novels fun, and just left us with an AI protagonist (who isn’t a relatable kind of lazy sympathetic character like i had hoped but just kind of a spoiled brat child). Although the novella pretty feebly tries to criticize corporations, it’s a bit difficult to take the criticism secretly when the main character is literally completely fine with having both zer “parents” owning the two largest corporations, and the character is still sympathetic towards those parents.
Overall, this novella was really disappointing, and I had high hopes for it that were unfortunately crushed.

An interesting story full of twists, turns, fun characters and overall a book I would consider reading time and time again.

I DNF this book. The stream of consciousness (if AI thoughts meet this criteria) and world building was scattered and did not connect with me. I love the Murderbot series—I would not compare this book to those novellas, as they are very different. I thank Net Galley for the book for review.

This is a 2.5 star read for me. I always round half stars down.

I usually enjoy Aimee Ogden's work, so I was really sad that I didn't like this book. I also hate writing "it's me, not the book" reviews because I feel like those aren't very useful to people who aren't me, but here goes.
There was a lot going on with the setting to the point where the plot, or, more specifically, information I needed to understand the plot got gobbled up in world building and I had to reread to figure out what was going on. There's so much written into such a short narrative that the story feels almost cramped to me. I wish the plot and its implications had a little more space to breathe.
I also had a hard time connecting with Scorn. This is maybe a "me" problem, but I didn't find Scorn's arc to be particularly satisfying. The ending to zir story, which was about trying to do zir own thing without parental help or validation, felt kind of contrary to that. It also didn't feel very cathartic to me as Scorn and the character ze meet at the end had very limited interaction in the earlier parts of the book. I like narratives about characters that defy their parents' expectations, so I was excited about this book, but I don't feel like the execution did the premise justice.
The final thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the use of marginalized people as background details. This might be a combination of "it's me, not the book" and unfortunate timing of publication, but with the recent emergence of commercially viable chatbots and Chat GPT trying to make several entry level jobs obsolete, a book that has an AI protagonist, makes several references to AIs replacing humans in the workforce, and then turns around and acts like climate refugees who have been refused jobs in the name of profit margins are horrible people for being prejudiced about AI doesn't sit right with me. This is compounded by the fact that Scorn was developed by very powerful people who are in some way responsible for this inequality, yet Scorn doesn't seem to acknowledge the advantages ze has because of this.
To conclude, my complaints are pretty subjective and I feel like some people would enjoy this book, as it isn't badly written. The blurb recommends this book to Murderbot fans and while I'll stick with Murderbot, I think other people might enjoy this book too.