Machine

Elizabeth Bear's second White Space novel is, in some ways, better than the first. Once again, the story is told through the eyes of a compelling and complex character. The setting of the novel—a post-scarcity interstellar polity called the Synarche—is once again central to the novel, but the this time the inner workings of the Synarche, the relationship of its various citizens to it, and its flaws are examined in greater detail and from a more internal perspective, which makes the setting more interesting.

The novel suffers from pacing that could be better at times. We get to hear a lot of what the protagonist's thoughts are, but sometimes this feels redundant, with her explaining her already previously stated feelings on the situation multiple times, which does help to establish the stakes and motivations, but past a certain point feels a bit redundant.

Once again, this is an entertaining novel akin to the Culture series or Star Trek, in its depiction of a utopian-but-perhaps-flawed spacefaring future, though it is less epic space opera and more character-focused.

Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.

It turns out, with further research, that human thought is, by its nature, not logical. We can lessen our susceptibility to confirmation bias, egocentrism, and denial. But it turns out that nearly everything about our decision-making process is emotional, and that this is actually a good thing. Because our conscious minds are slow and ineffectual, and if we actually had to sort all the information our subconscious minds process in order to present us with hunches, gitchy feelings, and the occasional epiphany, we’d never fit through the birth canal.