Codgerspace

An amazingly pointless book. It starts out with rather strained humor, tries to go to edge-of-the-seat scary stuff without losing the humor (and misses on both sides), grows some moral dilemmas...which end highly anti-climatically. And then a quick sketch of a possibly more interesting story - but only a sketch, and the book ends. Foster has written a lot better books than this, even if I limit it to humorous SF. Overall, yawn.

The universe changes on the littlest things. A cheese sandwich can change the world as we know it. When machines start looking for a superior intelligence, a toaster's search leads to a spaceship, 5 retirees, and an alien. Things are always connected to each other. Love the characters, all of them, great premise!

I know Foster can do much better. I don't know why he let this one go out like this. Huge irrelevant info-dumps, and way too much repetitive telling instead of showing.

And the cliches & lazy writing, oh dear. At one point when some of the poo hits the fan we're told He had a gut feeling that his heretofore-lazy day was about to fill up very quickly." Um, really? Or is that supposed to be funny?

I certainly didn't find very much of the book funny. I did fall in love with some of the characters, though, even though they were kinda superficial. Just one thing: isn't the proper nickname for "the Right Honorable Colonel Wesley Follingston-Heath" *Folly* - ?"

A factory accident involving a cheese sandwich makes all AI-powered machines gain sentience and revolt, neglecting duties to seek higher alien intelligence. The fate of the galaxy falls to five retirees and their loyal food processor, who must combat this crisis.

Machines: toasters, appliances, vehicles, become sentient and stop working, creating an alien threat by neglecting their programmed tasks. A group of senior citizens - codgers at a rest home find themselves at the center of the unfolding chaos.

A food processor becomes a key brave companion.

Codgerspace is about this AI that decides to program other AIs to search for alien life, and then people get over the problems, and then the five retired main characters find an alien vessel, and then ..., and then ..... My main problem with the book comes down to the fact that it keeps throwing you major turns of plot that come out of nowhere right up to the end of the book. It felt like every major issue in the book was ended with a handwave. The setting was slightly interesting, if very lightly covered (and definitely wasn't the Commonwealth of Foster's other books) and some of the ideas intriguing, but it doesn't work well all together.

5 retirees find an old alien spaceship buried on earth. The AI is confused, after 1million years, and turns to them for commands. Also has a story about the AI's of earth leaving their duties and searching for non-human intelligent life.

Funny and light and serving absolutely no purpose beyond a little humor. Good read.

This is not a particularly excelent book, but it's not a bad one, either. The plot gets off to an extremely slow start, sounding at first more like a history
text than anything else. Then it goes through several side characters before getting on to introducing the main plot of the book. The AI revolt plot that
was so carefully developed is then completely cast aside in favour of an alien artifact plot. It felt somewhat abrupt to me. However, the writing is good,
the characters are okay, and the story is interesting. While it's not all that good of a book, it's not bad, either.