This was quite an interesting story about a near-future world where climate change is showing its effects and AI are becoming more a part of daily life. I liked the concept, and how we popped back and forth in time to see how all parties got to the present day. The one issue I had was that while it was cool at times to see the story from multiple perspectives, it also got a little repetitive. The AI discourse seemed reasonable, and I am always game for a story of AI sentience and what that would look like in society. Of course, plenty of folks did not want AI in society, but they were already there, which of course lead to all sorts of issues. The story brings the age-old question of what makes us human and all the good stuff that comes with it. The vibe was definitely a bit melancholic, but in an incredibly realistic way that scared me, so props to the author for that, too.

Bottom Line: A very realistic feeling take on what the near future might look like, given our current trajectory. And as always, I love a good look at "what makes us human?".

With AI-androids looking and acting human, it’s often hard to tell where humanity actually lies. In this compelling future story set in 2060 Appalachia, Eli Whitaker heads up a large American human rebel group, called the Civil Union Militia, that is focused on destroying all androids, along with the factories that make them. The trouble is that Eli’s militia both recruits young children as soldiers in their efforts, engages in harsh verbal abuse of the androids, and often kills humans in the process of taking down the factories.

On the other side, Adrian Hall, ATF director for the government and representative for the “Feds”, is working alongside to her colleague special agent Trey Caudill to stop the militia and to catch Eli in particular. It also turns out that Adrian and Trey have a complicated childhood history with Eli. Adrian also comes under harsh critique when an android soldier kills a child during an attack on the Eli’s base of operations. The android gets sidelined while Adrian tries to glean what actually happened during the raid that led to the child’s death, and whether this should impact the use of androids in combat.

In a separate side plot, rural Appalachian farmers Shay and Ernst struggle with the failure of the GMO crops, and the sickness they have caused in Shay. To survive, they hire two androids: once as a nurse to Shey and another to work their now toxic-to-humans fields. As both Shay and Ernst deteriorate in their health, the interdependence between the foursome shifts and deepens in completely unexpected ways.

Wagner delivers a vividly imagined and all too realistic future where the battle between AI and humans is underway. The inhumanity in actions by the Civil Union Militia contrasts with the all too human emotions being experienced by AI. The convenience of AI help the labor force, ranging from home health care aides to factory work to soldiering, sets up sharp juxtapositions.

As we already turn to drones to lead our war efforts, the future ways we will mechanize our hands to war has thought-provoking implications that haunt you long after finishing this book.

Thanks to DAW Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

I picked this up because I fell hard into the author’s debut novella, An Unnatural Life, and was hoping for more of the same. I absolutely got it with Mechanize My Hands to War, as this was both more in its continued exploration of a future relationship between humans and sentient AIs, and more literally, as I wished that An Unnatural Life had a bit more time to explore its variations on that theme and this book is nearly twice as long.

Which it absolutely needed to be to get all the things it needed to, even as tightly packed in layers as it turned out to be.

The outer layer of this story is a bit of a near-dystopia. Or a could-be apocalypse. It’s 2061 and the U.S. is on the brink of a whole lot of things that could go really, really pear-shaped. That the setting of this story isn’t all that far out from when we are now is definitely part of the point.

The surface story is about two senior agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – and it’s the “explosives” part of that mandate that has dragged the Bureau into this situation.

A private militia has been growing throughout the heartland, recruiting people who feel that the lives they have built have been stolen from them by a government that is poisoning the land of their farms with poorly tested chemicals and/or filling their factory jobs with robots.

They’re not exactly right – but they’re not exactly wrong, either. Howsomever, their methods are problematic in the extreme.

First, they’re stockpiling explosives, which always draws the ATF’s attention. Second, they are recruiting and training child soldiers, and that gets everyone’s attention even as it complicates every single one of the ATF’s operations.

Because no human wants to shoot a child – even if that child is aiming a weapon right at them.

The situation reaches a flash-point, figuratively and literally, when a robot DOES shoot a child while following its orders and its programming to the letter.

In the midst of the firestorm of controversy, no one is willing to even think the hard truth – that the problem, and the blame – rest not with the programmed unit Ora, but with the humans who programmed him.

Escape Rating A: The story, the outer layer of it at least, is deceptively simple. And then things get really complicated, both in the story itself and in what’s hiding underneath it. Whenever I stop to think about it for even a minute, more ideas pop to the surface and swim underneath.

On the surface, that single story is already multiple stories. The first is the story of the extremely uncivil war between the Civil Union Militia and the ATF as proxy for the entire U.S. government. But underneath that layer, there’s the breakdown of the U.S. into factions, an extension of the tension between the cities and the heartland, that already exists.

A conflict that is exacerbated by the presence of robots as factory workers, mail carriers, and home health aides, doing any job that can be programmed reasonably effectively. But also as soldiers – and cops.

And that’s where Mechanize My Hands to War does what science fiction does best. Because on the surface that story is simple enough. The robots ARE, in fact, replacing humans in a lot of jobs, displacing a lot of people who had work that did not require a higher education, and not leaving nearly as many such jobs behind as there are people who need them. It’s a fear that has been played out recently in both the Writers Guild of America/Screen Actors Guild strike of 2023 and the Dockworkers’ strike of October 2024.

But the robots and the AIs did not create and program themselves to do these jobs and replace those workers. (They might, someday, but that would be a different story entirely – or a later one.) The robots are merely an easier and more reachable target for those who have been negatively impacted by the changes.

They represent the scapegoat that people are supposed to focus on, so they don’t attack who is really responsible – the corporations who have studied the calculus of profitability and know that replacing five humans with one human and four robots is better for their bottom line.

And it’s easy to see the robots of this story as the immigrants in today’s screaming – and all too frequently erroneous – headlines.

Which is where the story turns back upon itself into that original SFnal premise. Just because the robots were intended to be self aware but not sapient, does not mean that they have not evolved beyond their programming. That the more that the programmers attempt to create a complicated enough decision making matrix for the units, one that would keep another robot from killing another child even though that child is a clear threat, the more independent thought processes the robots have to work with.

The place where THAT might lead gives the story an open-ended and very SFnal ending. But the points that it raised keep dancing around in my head. As the best science fiction stories absolutely do.

Mechanize My Hands to War is told in non-linear sections, each in perspectives of different characters whose lives are somehow connected. It dives into themes of personhood, humanity, and tech ethics, and how they connect to labor, capitalism, and American politics.

At first, the story was hard to follow; each chapter follows specific character(s), jumping around in time. But once I let go of trying to plot each point of the story on a timeline, it became easier to understand and felt less disconnected. The story is told by grouping themes, almost like a study of a character, and much of the exposition is implied.

It almost hurts to read, because it feels like a confrontation with the reality of America's current political landscape. I love that it's set in Appalachia, specifically because I don't think it's the first setting one would think of when picking up a book about AI and bots. In conversations about increasingly mechanized labor though, it's a perfect backdrop to the blatant disregard of ethics in AI development, which tangles easily into growing sentiments of anti-intellectualism, extremism, and ultimately violence.

Easily one of my favorite sci-fi reads of the year. The story feels like a combination of many things I love: war and political commentary from Suzanne Collins, questions about personal identity from Phillip K. Dick, and mosaic-style storytelling that's akin to reading classic sci-fi short stories. My favorite chapters were the ones told in the perspectives of Ora and Helios; I can just imagine how fun it was to write them.

Thank you to NetGalley and DAW for my very first ARC of any book, ever! I'm so excited to buy a copy when the book is out.

This is not the type of book I generally read (AI/android stuff and stuff centered around wars are usually not my thing) but the premise of this intrigued me, plus it’s set in Appalachia and written by an Appalachian author. And I’m really glad I gave it a try! But it was very well-written and a primarily character-driven story. Despite the multiple character POVs and time jumps, there is a lot of plot tension throughout the book.

It was somewhat stressful to read, which is why it took me longer than usual to finish. The other main critique I have is that many of the same events are told from different characters’ perspectives, which was sometimes interesting and sometimes a little tedious. But the retelling parts were usually short and included a lot of character introspection, so we learned a lot about each POV character.

Humanity is found—and forged—in how we relate to one another… And maybe that is true for non-humans, too. This novel took me by surprise, in a good way. I wasn’t particularly hooked when I started, but as I neared the end of the first chapter my relationship with the book started to change, and as the further chapters unfolded I was (joyfully) lost deeper into the story. There is a rustic futurism to the story, which is mostly set around 25 years in the future, a sense of weariness, a resignation to ongoing climate destruction, political violence, wealth inequality, and systemic disenfranchisement. There is almost a pastoral feeling, though we spend probably equal amounts of time in cities and facilities as we do in rural environments, but the expansiveness and myth of freedom that comes with pastoral life pervades the story. But there are androids, incredibly lifelike androids, filling all sorts of service, companion, and worker roles—including serving as armed agents for federal taskforces.. Androids that are supposed to have highly sophisticated AI systems detailed to whatever their particular function is, but not actual sentience, but how can you expect boulders to stop rolling down a hill after you give them the push?

The story itself is compelling, though hard to pin down due to the non-linear story telling. I appreciated this, the story was a vehicle for exploring the characters and their humanity, their relationships. It never felt phones in, there were tense scenes and emotional stakes, but if the core story had just been told in a simple, linear narrative from one point of view it wouldn’t take many pages. I think it worked perfectly here, holding the weight of the story in the necessary ways to allow for other investigations. So, let’s talk about the plotting and writing, instead of the story. The novel has ten chapters, each almost the exact same length, and each from the perspective of a different character (or, on occasion, set of characters). Two characters get two chapters, bookending the novel, but the other six chapters are from different perspectives. Within each chapter there are numerous subchapters, and across these we jump around in time. There are some exceptions, more or less childhood flashbacks, but most of the story happens between a span of about five years, and the sub-chapters jump around within that period. Similarly, as we move to new chapters and follow a new character we often see the same scene repeated, but from an alternative perspective. This could become tedious or prescriptive, but I found it really well done, and quite compelling. You are basically given a bunch of pieces, slowly, and left to piece them together as you learn more from other characters, and this does a great job of keeping the reader engaged, juggling the various pieces of the emotional story being told, since the narrative events are more or less cut and dry and just need to be sequenced.

Don’t be mistaken, though, the chopping up and re-ordered of the narrative doesn’t diminish the pacing or sense of momentum. In fact, it creates an interesting tension, one always rising, because we are trying to find out how things that have already been hinted at actually happen. It feels tight and like it is always moving, even when you jump back a few years in time.

The world-building is skillfully done. In most ways it is just the world we are used to, but just small things are tweaked, such as a lack of real coffee due to conflict zones interrupting cultivation, and other very small things like that. Little details that situate the world as not our own but close enough to be a warning cry, a shot against the collective bow highlighting very real possible futures. The characters shine in ways I didn’t expect. Since we only spend one chapter with a given character it is easy to feel distant from them, and that was some of what I was feeling in the very first chapter. But somehow, in part by manipulating the timeline and sequence that details are revealed, but also by having so much overlap between characters, giving you the chance to see a character you followed in a previous chapter through the eyes and instincts of a different character, they all end up feeling really engaging and intimate. All the characters, human and synthetic, were believable. This includes the antagonists, a group of people who are angry and ignored and trying to focus their rage in a way that makes sense to them, lets them feel like they have a modicum of power as the owner-class is steadily eliminating their jobs in favor of automated labor. The antagonists’ actions are in no way acceptable, but they are entirely understandable, their outrage relatable, and this sense of complicity pervades not just the protagonists but also the reader.

And it is important that the characters are so compelling, because the heart of this story is about people, or humanity. And that is found in how we relate to others, how we develop trust and relationship and understand ourselves through being in communion with those around us. Some of the most gripping chapters were told from the perspective of androids, forcing the reader to examine what exactly it is that makes themselves human. Yet, in all this, the story had a light hand, it never felt preachy or ham-fisted. There wasn’t a scold or a condemnation, but instead an invitation, to lean into what makes us human, and more importantly to lean into finding that in others.

I want to thank the author, the publisher DAW, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This story is set in a future America mostly in the Appalachia region, where through technological inventions some jobs are getting replaced by android labor. In resistance to the androids a violent uprising has started, led by Eli Whitaker, who fills the ranks of his militia with child soldiers. As the story progresses, we follow a variety of characters, former members of Eli’s militia, who now work in law enforcement to stop him, a couple living on a farm, who after a miscarriage and cancer and poisoned fields have to rely on android labor, a young girl, whose father died fighting in the militia, Eli and finally also four of the androids.
This is not an easy story to read, often switching between time and with different viewpoints in each chapter, but when things start to come together that is when it becomes really interesting. Through the variety of viewpoints, we sometimes see the same event from different angles, and I found that incredibly interesting. It also helps to understand all the characters, even if not all their actions can be condoned.
My favorite parts of the story were definitely the chapters set in the androids’ minds, especially when technological advancement meant people reacted differently to them. One of the androids, Ora, is for example treated horrible by the humans, who are supposed to work alongside them, as they have limited speech abilities, and everybody refuses to learn their sign language. Nobody really cares for their interior lives and it was incredibly heartbreaking, but also very interesting to read.
Lastly, I also really enjoyed that this story very well showed where the real problem lies. Because it is not android labor that causes rural communities to suffer from poverty. It is not androids that are somehow especially violent and ready to harm others. Instead, the real danger that goes unchallenged (but not un-thought off) in the fight between the militia and the government are the big corporations and insurance agencies, that refuse to work for the people and instead crush them under their boot. While this is not a story about overcoming capitalism, the criticism of that system and the many reasons why it cannot work are apparent in this story and make it all the more tragic, that people are so eager to blame the Other, the Inhuman.
All in all, this is a very well written novel and one I can just recommend to anybody interested in sci-fi that explores artificial life, human reaction to it, the dangers of capitalism and the Appalachia region.

Tw: child abuse, child soldiers, child mistreatment, murder, poisoning, cancer, miscarriage, hospital visit, ableism

I received this eARC on NetGalley for an honest review. I was interested in this story because it was centered on the Appalachian Mountain region, near where I live, and it was SciFi.

This story was well written, with some time jumps that I thought could have been handled differently. The characters are well-developed, particularly some of the non-human characters in the story. I was disappointed in the setting - there wasn’t really anything unique to the Appalachian region and this story could have been set anywhere.

With all of that being said, I did enjoy reading this book, especially past the 20% mark or so - it took me a little while to get invested in the story. In addition, I think this author has a wonderful future and I look forward to reading more of her work!

This should have been a winner, but the narrative distance meant there was very little to draw me in. It’s told in kind of a dry style that uses vague and slightly repetitive human / android interaction to carry the plot. But I think the lack of a single linear story - and a lack of worldbuilding before spreading the reader thin across multiple storylines and disjointed timelines - really undercuts the effectiveness.

The tiny snippets we get of the larger world are bleak and interesting (not to mention the themes of personhood and the rise of AI), but most of our focus is so narrow and distant that nothing really lands.

After several days, I wasn’t drawn to pick the story up and when I did, it didn’t hold my attention at all.

I found Mechanize My Hands to War to be engaging and thought-provoking, but sometimes lacking in terms of exploring ideas fully. I often enjoy multi-POV and non-linear tales, and so appreciated both of these aspects - not all readers may agree with this, especially when the many characters are sometimes difficult to empathise with anyway. Although the non-linear storytelling presents the reader with many flashback scenes, some characters still feel disconnected from their pasts, with unclear motives. The greatest exception to this are a couple it would potentially be a spoiler to name - despite being androids, this pair are often the most relatable and emotionally coherent within the text. The novel is permeated with a contemplative atmosphere, and the reader is invited to form their own thoughts on the world presented - events are often shown with no clear overarching ethos or message. Again, I appreciated this - it made for an interesting read that I was always keen to pick up again, even without urgent plot points pulling me through. There is a focus on characters here, rather than action, which is very much to my tastes.

This was an absolutely fascinating look at a hypothetical near-future in which artificial intelligence is used for human-like androids, utilized for everything from in-home healthcare aides to farm laborers to soldiers. The main plot of the book revolves around an anti-android movement grown out of blue-collar workers' anger with being replaced by androids in factories and thus being out of jobs. There is a really charismatic leader that recruits children to fight for him, and several federal agents trying to track him down, some with a connection to this leader. We also get to see how various people relate to the androids they work with, and you really get to hear from both sides, which is fascinating.

This was very well-written and the world-building felt incredibly realistic, with little details added in--things like insurance companies charging people less for robotic healthcare than human healthcare. The book is written non-linearly, with jumps backwards and forwards in time. These are all clearly designated with years/dates at the start of each section, but it was a little tricky to keep track of at first. However, I did feel like this was an effective way to tell the story and ended up really liking it by the end. The book is also told from the POVs of many different characters (including several androids) and some of the same scenes are recounted from different perspectives, which I found fascinating. Highly recommended for anyone interested in science fiction involving artificial intelligence.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Started better than it ended for me, so I was kind of skimming through the last pages. The themes appealed to me, but the pacing and plot not as much.

This is a story about AI, and androids specifically, and the ethical questions that come up in their wake. There’s one pivotal traumatic event that is a big focus of the book, impacting Adrian and Trey (the main-ish characters). The story is told nonlinearly, and there are tangents into other characters’ lives. It’s definitely in the vein of literary SF as it focuses on thematic content and character interiority.

On a sentence level, the writing is good. It’s spare but thoughtful. And initially I was invested in the story. But I found the jumping around in time to be annoying and a little confusing at times, making me wish it was more linear or at least not broken up into quite as many pieces as it is. We also get multiple scenes from multiple perspectives (without trimming anything), and that definitely got annoying.

I also found myself distracted by multiple questions about why the androids were being used the way they were and why we kept returning to Ora and Helios specifically. It didn’t make sense to me that Ora was still around and on missions. Also why make Ora such that it can’t say many words? It seems like a weirdly limiting thing to do - like, inconvenient for the humans who work with it.

I was also confused by Trey and Adrian’s involvement with the raids and whatnot given their personal history. You see this a lot in media, and it does have me wondering how often this happens in real life. Probably not zero times, but it felt like so many people should be aware of it in this book and stepping in to be like “hey maybe you aren’t the best choice to lead this.”

I didn’t care too much about any of the characters in the end. That’s the downside to literary writing for me sometimes. It’s too clinical in this case.

But the questions the story was considering and the feelings around the traumatic event were very compelling. I think I’d give the author another shot. This book just feels convoluted and unfocused.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A lot of this book felt like prophecy in the way that it pretty accurately depicted what the future might look like, and the near future was almost scary the way I could see it happening. This reminded me a bit of World War Z in the way that we see different viewpoints on a similar thing, but in reality the author is slowly connecting and weaving a web that creates this heartbreaking picture about what it means to be human. I didn't expect to feel so much.

In the opening of Mechanize My Hands to War, a child flees his life as a soldier. He is already beaten down by the world and so, so tired. I could feel a bone-deep ache settle into me with the precise, unsparing prose. Even now I still feel it, though it is tinged with a glimmer of hope.

Told in non-linear character sections from the perspectives of humans and machines, the novel revolves around a series of events some 35 years into the future in largely rural Appalachia. It is not quite dystopian, there is no climate disaster or totalitarian government, but rather a simple continuation of the negative forces in our world; the end comes not with a bang but a whimper. Machines have replaced human work, the soil is poisoned, and despairing and angry people turn to a militia that scapegoats the machines.

It feels eerily prescient, and it is made even more real seen through the eyes of well-crafted characters beaten down by this world and sometimes pitted against each other. This makes the excellent world-building seamless and not caught up in exposition, each detail introduced because it matters to a character. I felt I could step into the world.

Some readers might be disappointed that it is a character and world study rather than the thriller teased at the beginning. The only thing that really bothered me was that in most of the character sections, the protagonists don’t get full character arcs, but rather snapshots. I cared about the characters and so I wanted resolutions, but none were forthcoming. Perhaps this was intentional, but even as I was immersed in the world, I sometimes felt unmoored by the plot, grasping after more concrete structure and meaning.

Fortunately, the two ending characters, Trey and Adrian, do get resolutions in a way that brings home the novel’s world-weary themes. Hope creeps in at the end too. Perhaps the machines aren’t just part of an ending but a chance at a new beginning too. Few novels I’ve read this year have lingered as strongly as this one.

This was a hell of a read and one I'll be highly recommending come this winter. We get a speculative future war that looks at the potential future splinter point of those pushing for the "feds" not to be trusted (which we are unfortunately seeing play out currently IRL via people attacking FEMA workers attempting to help communities in the wake of Hurricane Helene) and also examines the idea of free will via androids, androids built for combat, and child soldiers, and all the ways parameters can go horrifically wrong. You also get what feels like little side stories throghout that end up being examined via multiple POVs and all interconnecting with the larger goings on. Pick this up this winter and enjoy.

Thank you to netgalley for the ARC!

Mechanise My Hands To War by Erin K Wagner follows a non-linear narrative from the perspective of multiple characters, human and robots alike, with the story being centred around federal agents who are hunting down Eli Whittaker, an extremist leader recruiting child soldiers into his army.

On the other hand, Ora, an Artificially created agent, has shot dead a child much to the horror of his human comrades. Yet all his mechanical innards show that he did not break protocol. Ora was simply following the rules.

______________________________________

The strongest part of this novel is it's prose. It's engaging, descriptive, precise and succinct. The writing is poetic when needed and comprehensive when required. There's a good balance between purple prose and beige prose. The novel is, to put it simply, a page-turner and really really interesting to read.

The philosophical questions it poses are interesting, and provide fodder for the brain. Can Artificial intelligence be used ethically? If so, then which sphere of life can it actually be Integrated? Should people direct their anger towards AI or it's invention, or the corporations that capitalise on it's use?

To be frank, the good points about the novel end here. Though the questions it poses are brilliant and rarely explored in fiction, it fails to answer them thoughtfully. There are throwaway lines about how men must protest against corporations instead of fear mongering against the use of AI itself, but this discourse is watered down as it comes from the mouth of Adrian and Trey, two federal agents.

I do believe that agents who are a part of the system which perpetuates violence on minorities, and in this novel have been equipped with 'war made flesh' indestructible robots to do so, can't meaningfully engage in discussions around widespread use of AI in government and private spheres, or it's effects on those who are already disadvantaged.

Further on, the non-linear narrative prevents immersion and is quite jarring at times. Especially as some chapters are just recountings of the same scene from the pov of different characters present at the scene. The last 6 chapters were the same scene from the point of view of Eli, Trey, Ora, Helios, and many more people.

And moving on to the characters themselves, they were interesting at first glance especially the robots, Helios and Ora, but they lacked depth and were one-dimensional. It was obvious that the author was torn between developing the characters or developing the plot. At times, the characters felt like mouth pieces parroting the author's political viewpoints rather than real people.

Moreover, I felt like there was a lack of research and for a novel that deals heavily with the politics of child soldiers, there was little discussions about DDR methods.
Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) methods are extremely important when it comes to child soldiers, and often times these methods are vague and ill-equipped to deal with children who are marginalised by other factors such as race or gender. The novel didn't properly deal with all of these factors which I found pretty disappointing.

From a narrative pov, there was a plot-twist that I felt the author was building upto from the very beginning. It would've bolstered the narrative so so well and I felt like there were so many signs pointing to it but it simply wasn't included. I felt like the entire storyline of Shay and Ernst was pretty much wasted without this plottwist because there was very little connecting it to the rest of the novel.

Overall, I felt like this novel had a lot of potential but poor execution. It wasn't bad but not something that I would go out of my way to recommend. Unique and engaging, Wagner's skill is immense but it is not properly utilised.

This was interesting. I haven't read too much of robot/AI tropes but I kind of liked this one. The only thing I got bored with was it seemed like the author was telling the same scene from multiple POVs but almost in the same way. I was like, "ok that's nice but time to move on with the story".

This ambitious book pays homage to Phillip K Dick and some of the best Southern Gothic.

This books could fill in the missing pieces between the bell riots and a robot controlled future.

You may or may like the narrative roshomon style of showing the same scene from 2-3 points of view.

This book was interesting and entertaining and feels like a realistic extrapolation of our current technology.


This book was an eARC from netgallery.