The Swan Riders

Excellent follow-up to the first book. This book examines the complex relationship between human and AI, and what they have in common. Very clever plots; vivid descriptions; my favorite redneck again; and a permeating sense of the beauty, worth, and value of humanity. A lot of AI stories cannot provide any explanation for why humanity is valuable if AI is an option. This book pulls it off. This is now officially The Only Other YA Book I Enjoyed As An Adult.

I spent the last 50% of this book raging in disappointment. [b:The Scorpion Rules|11516221|The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace, #1)|Erin Bow|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1428689952s/11516221.jpg|16452676] was excellent; an interesting premise, an engaging and strong main character, and a strong plot that brought you along at a fast pace. None of that is present in [b:The Swan Riders|26409580|The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace, #2)|Erin Bow|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1457761446s/26409580.jpg|46414238].

At the end of the previous book, to save her own life and that of her fellow condemned Prisoner of Peace Elian, the main character Greta willingly became an artificial intelligence. While the first bit of the book dealt show more with how she adapted to her new expansive intelligence and inhuman experiences, Greta quickly became a background character in her own story. She went from a quiet but compassionate and firm natural leader to a passive person who was largely reduced to saying character names in an admonishing tone. Taking away an aspect of a character needs to be countered with the elevation of another aspect, if it's not, you just end up with a shadow character. That's what we got in this book: a shadow character. Perhaps it was intentional, perhaps not, but it didn't engage me.

For me, the plot of The Swan Riders was weak for one reason: Talis. I found it very, very hard to care about an AI that had spent the last few centuries committing genocide, mass murder, and ritual child murder as ways to force peace onto a resistant world. I didn't care that he was in pain or his 'journey'. It's like how the Star Wars prequels tried to make Darth Vader a sympathetic character: sorry, but petulant fascism is not interesting to me.

The Swan Riders are young. Talis created an army of children to serve as beasts of burden when he wished to take a human form, burning them up quickly and painfully. In hundreds of years, he'd never thought to ask how it felt for them to be ridden. It's hard to care about Talis or Michael or whomever, when his entire ideal of world peace revolves around children dying.

Ultimately, the entire book felt far too slow to me, taking ages to get to self-evident points. It took until the end chapter to really get to the point: that peace through terror is not peace. That soldiers will willingly die for you if you give them respect. That blowing up entire cities over and over again, century after century, accomplishes nothing. Surprise.

A disappointing sequel all in all. show less

Okay, first of all, holy crap.

And now that that's out of the way, let's see if I can manage something a little more, I don't know, useful?

I am not the sort of person who likes sequels. I am the sort of person who usually goes, "Well, the first book was perfect, so I will ignore any and all follow-up books in the hopes that the original will never be ruined for me."

But because Erin Bow is a brilliant writer and I adore her, I knew that reading The Swan Riders was non-negotiable.

And because Erin Bow is a brilliant writer, I needn't have worried, because The Swan Riders is amazing and in no way suffers from a book-two-letdown. In fact, it might actually be even better than The Scorpion Rules, which is a high standard to reach right there.

I show more don't want to spoil anything -- I gasped audibly and also cried noticeably on multiple occasions, so there is much to spoil. But I will say this:

There is a horse named Gordon Lightfoot.

The romance element took a different turn from what I was expecting... but it's amazing and layered with gender, and identity, and power dynamics. No instalove, no sense that it's just a distraction from the main plot. It's something beautiful, complex, and steeped in a horrifying dystopian world.

Talis' development made my heart feel like it was dropping out of my body. This right here is how you do characterization. It's phenomenal. Oh my god, Talis.

And Greta. What do I even say about Greta? Whip-smart Greta. Put-in-impossibly-difficult-positions Greta. Burning-bright-with-humanity Greta. I adore her.

I adore everything about this book. I just wish I'd slowed down more when reading it, because now it's over and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life. show less

A little bit preachy, but still really good. I absolutely enjoyed this one more than the other because it really dealt with the consequences of having absolute power over something with zero checks or balances.

Reviewed 1/9/18

A bit of a slow start, with a narrative primarily concerned with the difficulties of a journey and Greta's difficulties being reborn as an AI. But all in all a beautifully complicated book.

I really loved the purpose of the Swan Riders rebellion. And it worked too! Removing Michael/Rachel from the network and placing his survival as an individual in jeopardy, it changed him. He was not the same as the next incarnation of Tallis. He's much more human. To rebel with the intention of saving the leaders they love and support (and die for in the end), rather than to free themselves, was really a genius move. So instead of getting a re-hash of Paradise Lost, we get a solution that requires the AI-gods to merge with human avatars show more and be re-uploaded anew. And this becomes a way past stagnation and neurosis to a new form of human/electronic reproduction that is consistently going to add new thought processes, new emotions, new ideas to the AIs. Absolutely brilliant.

And that Greta was able to struggle through the transition to AI and retain so much of her humanity was just beautiful. There were so many characters here to love! I cried through the last chapters - but in the best way. Her final act as the human Greta and first as the AI Grace was so fitting and so powerful. I have no idea where their world will go from here, but it feels like it has so much more promise now.

Hoping for more books in this world, but lacking that, looking forward to the next work from Erin Bow. show less

Sequel to The Scorpion Rules. Greta, now transformed, struggles to deal with her new situation and to convince the AI who controls the world by threatening to destroy cities of nations that defy him that peace achieved through terror can never be true peace. There are some hiccups in her process. Not quite as good as the first book, though I did like her exploration of what it means to be loyal to an institution while also wanting it to change.

This sequel to The Scorpion Rules is stressful and sharp (I expected as much, which is probably why I waited over a year before reading it). In the beginning, the situation is deteriorating and seems impossibly bleak. Yet the story works its way towards solutions which are unexpected, believable and hopeful.

This is a thoughtful exploration of artificial intelligence and of being human. I was glad I read it, but, like the first book, I don’t really feel compelled to spend a lot of words reviewing it.

“Shuttles can be shot down.”
“Don’t quote me at me,” Tallis snapped. “So what if they do shoot? I have stage three scarring, I’ve lost three quarters of my mind, people I love keep trying to kill me, and I’m going to catch show more a cold. I fail to see how much worse this could get.”
“Greta could be killed,” said Francis Xavier. He didn’t sound as if he cared particularly.
Talis sighed a long, careful sigh. “Right. When you ask if things could possibly get worse, the answer is always yes. Greta, make a note.” show less