I borrowed a copy of Emily Devenport‘s Medusa Uploaded from my local library.
Description from Goodreads:
The Executives control Oichi’s senses, her voice, her life. Until the day they kill her.
An executive clan gives the order to shoot Oichi out of an airlock on suspicion of being an insurgent. A sentient AI, a Medusa unit, rescues Oichi and begins to teach her the truth—the Executives are not who they think they are. Oichi, officially dead and now bonded to the Medusa unit, sees a chance to make a better life for everyone on board.
As she sets things right one assassination at a time, Oichi becomes the very insurgent the Executives feared, and in the process uncovers the shocking truth behind the generation starship that is their home.
Review:
I thought that this was basically ok, but it didn’t blow me away. I liked a lot of the characters, I greatly appreciated the diversity and that women played a big role in the revolution (even if they played almost none in the power structure of society), and I thought the whole thing had an interesting premise.
But from the blurb and cover I’d thought Oichi would be an actual worm and I was disappointed to find that was just a particular human slur. Further, since Oichi seemed to be able to tap into all technologies and impersonate anyone, I felt that everything happened far too easily. And that without considering how no one on her team turned out to be duplicitous, everyone she trusted turned out to be trustworthy (even children). How lucky that is.
Lastly, though I know the music played an important role, all the music references got tiresome. I was also skeptical about how they’re all contemporary. How many generations in the future and Bach, Holst, and Louis Armstrong are still the go-to composers? The movies references are all from modern-ish times too. After a while I found the references anachronistic. Surely the Earth that these generation ships departed from (or wherever) had written at least something new that was worth remembering.