Rubicon offers the dark intensity of Starship Troopers (the book, not the campy movie) and a cunning rival like The Borg with the refreshingly non-religious and non-misogynistic scenarios best done by John Scalzi. For a sci-fi nerd like me, this was an easy five stars.

My favorite aspect of the book: You know David in Schitt's Creek? His character offers a lot of uniqueness, but never once does anyone put a label on him or offer any judgment. He is David, and that is all we need to know. Same here with Adriene, our main character. Her character may be female, but this is never treated as "a thing". Her skills, her expertise, her decisions, all of who she is is based upon her humanity and her badassness, never her gender. I can always get behind a character like that.

Adrienne takes her first breath for the 96th time. She is reassigned and given a virtual intelligence implant, Rubicon. Later her Rubicon changes from a VI to an AI, making it more sentient. Can she take on her confidential orders to help save humanity from the enemy?

The last chapter!!!! I want a second book! Oh, the potential there!
I was absolutely hooked from the beginning. With subtle tones of Altered Carbon and Edge of Tomorrow, I had to keep listening. Military Sci-Fi isn’t my typical read, but I watch a bit of sci-fi and wanted to give this book a try. I felt the author did an excellent job merging both informative detail and action. Sometimes I feel like one overshadows the other, but it was a great balance. I wanted more between Adrienne and Rubicon. They had great banter & I enjoyed their dynamic…I wanted to read more between them. Overall, I highly recommend this to sci-if fans.

It took me a short bit to get used to the narrator, but when I did, she fully immersed me. Wonderful narrating from Eunice Wong.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, & Tor Books for the audiobook ARC.

Audiobooks have a difficult job, not only does the story need to be spot on with word choice, plot, and character development, but the narrator's voice and performance need to match. Truly this is a great credit to the Sci-Fi Genre and how the narrator adds in different styles of voices is just so awesome.

I am very picky about audiobooks and do not give out 5 stars, unless deserved. This one is a rare find and I will be recommending it to everyone that loves AI & science fiction.

if you like the terminator, the borg, mass effect, Kameron Hurley Light Brigade, and the authors other works this is for you. great blend of space opera and military sci fi. great revivals of the antagonists slow rolled throughout.
awesome job by the narrator.
great lead character and her baggage with how it evolves over time. the VI / AI is a fantastic addition to the the sci fi AI canon. side characters are clichés but in the best ways. though my favorite character does not appear until later.
the existential questions it posed are raised in other stories but interrogated in this work uniquely.
this will be on my top ten of the year.
thanks to netgalley, the author, and publisher for an ARC audiobook.

Wow, I totally loved this book. A very fun, engaging and quick read. It felt so very fresh while also finding certain elements familiar. I'm putting money down that this will be seen on many "best of" year end lists. I always try to guess how a book will end, I thought I had this ending pegged, but was totally wrong, which can be fun to expect one thing and be surprised to find out it was another.

This was such an engaging new science fiction novel. I enjoyed the premise surrounding a virtual assistant aid who becomes sentient. So often, these kinds of books feel cute, but I much preferred that this story took a more serious tone. Conscious AIs are terrifying, not adorable.

I have previously read the author's debut novel, The Last Watch. I liked that one, but I found this new novel to be even stronger. This author has a talent for writing military science fiction in a way that appeals to readers, like myself, who don't necessarily love the subgenre.

This story was just the right balance between action and character development. The story started out a little slower, but once it got going, I was hooked.

I would recommend this one to readers looking for an exciting new science fiction story.

Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

This was a fantastic military sci-fi novel. There was so much commentary in here about mortality and bodies and (dis)ability and humanity. This might seem like a really random pitch, but this book is perfect for fans of the good place. The sci-fi elements were strong and fascinating but in my opinion the real triumph of the book are the existential questions it poses. I found it engaging and thought provoking and will definitely be picking up the author’s other books. The audiobook narration was also fantastic and I highly recommend!

The ending did take a turn I wasn’t expecting and left a little to be desired but not so much that it changed the way I feel about the book.

I was hooked on this book from the very first chapter despite not knowing what in the world was going on. The action was intense, brutal, and jarring. The vivid imagery made me feel like I was there in person witnessing the horrific things happening as the military op went wrong. Thankfully, the pace didn't stay quite so intense for the entire book. After the first chapter, things slowed down a bit and allowed the reader to get to know the world and the characters in a way that felt organic. Throughout the rest of the story, there was plenty of pulse-pounding action and excitement, but it was balanced very well with incredibly compelling character-focused moments.

This story had everything a science fiction fan could want. The tech was fascinating and allowed for the exploration of themes related to the morality of developing and utilizing artificial intelligence. The aliens/mechs were super cool and felt truly frightening. I also really enjoyed the world-building and thought the author used many of the sci fi tropes in unique ways that made this society and the central conflict feel both familiar and fresh.

The plot was exciting and had plenty of twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat. I loved the mystery of the alien machines and had a ton of fun following the characters as they unraveled their motivations and history. I only have one slight gripe about the story. The last several chapters were explosive, but I lost track of the villain's rationale in all of the mayhem. Some of the decisions they made at the end didn't make sense to me. That could totally be down to me being dense or missing something, but I didn't find everything to be super clear. That being said, the last chapter of this book BLEW MY MIND. I'm honestly still not sure exactly what I think about it, but it is definitely memorable and will likely be divisive.

All of the sci fi trappings were amazing, but my favorite thing about this book was the characters. Valero was incredibly compelling. I cannot even imagine the level of trauma in dying 96 times. I was so invested in her story of grappling with regaining her humanity and feeling emotions again after being numb for so long as cannon fodder for the military. Her relationships with her team, her romantic interest, and the AI embedded in her brain helped her to live again rather than just existing as a desensitized husk. The existential implications of her existence were also fascinating to ponder. Rubicon, Valero's AI, was also an incredible character with an interesting arc. As the story unfolded, Rubicon went from a virtual assistant to an actual friend of Valero, and I loved getting to see Rubicon's snarky personality develop in real time.

The audiobook was fantastic. The narrator completely nailed these characters. There was such a nuance to the voices, especially of Valero and Rubicon, that complemented their growth. I felt the increasing humanity of them both through the emotion the narrator gradually added to their voices. It was a truly spectacular performance. All in all, this is one of the best sci fi reads I've had in a while and one of my favorite books so far this year. Therefore, I rate it 4.75 out of 5 stars.

WOW! I want more Adrienne & Rubicon!! I loved these two characters. I enjoyed their sarcasm & snark!! I LOVED this book!

Adrienne’s pretty much a loner now in military service & been killed then brought back 96 times … this was reminiscent of Mickey 7 & I loved that audiobook so I kept listening. Adrienne doesn’t want a 97th life when she’s transferred to a close knit specialty unit & gets all sorts of upgraded tech plus Rubicon!! She’s a a never-give-up badass out for truth.

I want more!! I’ve had great luck with sci-fi lately!!

Thank you MacMillan Audio & NetGalley!! Added to my AMA on Book Wishlist!!

This was a pretty disappointing 2.5 star read for me, as I thought the premise had much more potential to engage me than it ended up doing. It felt a bit under-developed in a lot of ways and kind of cheesy, maybe like the usual B-movie stuff you might see on the SYFY channel. If you're in the right mood for it or tend to read more YA books or just like the cheese, this could be just what the doctor ordered, but unfortunately I was not too in the mood for a pulpy new-adult feeling military sci-fi that's mostly about one character's psychological/emotional/social life in the midst of a human-robot war. It has a lot of similarities to the book The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, which I gave the same rating, but if you loved that book then this one should be right up your alley.

I listened to it fully as an audio ARC, and kudos to the narrator Eunice Wong for doing a great job, as what engagement there was for me I think did stem from the narration. The premise is that a depressed soldier who's undergone 96 deaths and re-spawns named Adriene Valero gets brought into a new unit and implanted with a helpful and sardonic experimental AI assistant in her brain (named Rubicon) with whom she can communicate internally through thinking. This made it like a sci-fi version of Cradle, and I was all about this aspect of the story--but we got WAY TOO LITTLE of it!! Adriene's Rubicon is a fantastic character, and its relationship to Adriene is so much fun to spend time with, but why does the book insist on spending the majority of the pages with the AI in off mode?!

That was a crippling narrative decision for my enjoyment, since the rest of the time we get to spend with 2-dimensional human side characters who either feel cheesy and cliche or barely there on the page at all and interchangeable (the dialogue in particular was often so cringy). And through it all we get the endless internal monologue of Adriene, with every single thought and emotion she's feeling from second to second being spelled out for us, and after a while it just got tiring and repetitive. Her character arc in the book just didn't feel earned, and I think it may be because we didn't spend enough time with her in her previous unit before she got moved, nor did she spend enough time with Rubicon for some of her character growth to really make sense the way it supposedly plays out.

Dewes didn't provide enough description of the various settings to ever immerse me, and I also found the few action scenes to be poorly described and hard to visualize. The little worldbuilding there is gets dripped out bit by bit over the course of the book, and it never felt like enough to contextualize the war we were thrown into or what humanity's current living situation is or how we got there. On top of all that, many of the plot beats felt predictable and not particularly satisfying when they did come to pass. The sci-fi tropes around the re-spawns and the internal AI assistants are ones I love and were handled in an interesting way, but they weren't nearly as important to the narrative as I would've wished. On the plus side, the book ended with a fantastic cliffhanger that set things up for book 2 in a very cool way, but I don't think I mesh with Dewes's writing style and narrative priorities enough to continue on.

I didn't have a particularly bad time with the book and liked parts of it, but it was rather unimpactful and I fear it's going to fall into the immediately-forgettable pile when I usually want something much more out of my reads.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley.com in exchange for an honest, candid review.

This was an excellent book. It was gripping all the way through, with a strong premise and motivation and a driving plot line. The tech felt plausible and meaningfully integrated into the storyline, and the central conflict also felt reasonable, so that the stakes, twists, and resolutions were earned. There was plenty here to sink your teeth into, and I found it a very satisfying read.

Whoa! I don't think I've read a book with so much action. Kudos to JS Dewes for writing compelling action scenes!

If you're a fan of military sci-fi, then this is a must-read. You've got alien mechs vs. humanity. (It screamed Mass Effect, which I loved.) There's a snarky AI companion. (Always a plus.) There's a well-rounded team with different quirks and personality types. It also dips slightly into philosophy and the concept of death, since the practice of rezoning means that you can't technically die.

I loved that the MC, Adrienne Valero, is a fully-fleshed character that is currently dealing with trauma while being assigned to a special forces unit. As the reader, you're able to truly understand all of her facets.

While I wanted to know more about the alien mechs, this novel turned out to be more about humanity's failings and fallacies. This was actually a pleasant surprise. It turned a bit tropey with the introduction of the main villain but! I'll totally forgive the author because there were already hints earlier on in the novel that I should've caught.

The audiobook narrator though... She was great with voices but when it came to narrating the story, she sounded really robotic so it was difficult for me to pay attention at times.

Anyway, I can't wait to read the author's first novel and future ones. It's always exciting to find a new sci-fi author that's a talented storyteller.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for this audio arc.

I enjoyed Rubicon even though I did find the last quarter of the story a little frustrating. It’s a story that at its core is centered around topics of existential dread, suicidal ideation, substance abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Rubicon falls somewhere into the genres of Science Fiction, Space Opera, and Military.

The plot follows the journey of an undying soldier who wants to die permanently rather than working out their own psychological trauma and interpersonal relationship problems. It’s a classic trope some may recognize from Science Fiction classics like Armour by John Steakley. It makes for a solid and emotional story when paired with the science fiction genre.

If you have read other books by J.S. Dewes and enjoyed them, then you will undoubtedly enjoy Rubicon. Rubicon is a book I can recommend to anyone who enjoys the space marine science fiction genre.