PotsandPlots

Seedling Reviews are my shorter overview of books. Written to try to keep up with the pile. If I’m honest, this review is just for completing the record. I didn’t enjoy Sunward that much, and I’m gutted. William Alexander wrote one of my favourite children’s books.

I loved sharing Goblin Secrets with my children as they grew up. Lead character, Rownie, is fondly remembered in this house. Perhaps I had too high expectations because, for me, Sunward did not deliver.

It has been nominated for a LeGuin prize, however, so some people obviously love it.

Growing Information:

Plant With: Science Fiction, AI, Assassination.

Grows Into: A gentle who/whydunnit, that failed to engage me.

Rating: Garage Flowers 🌻 (Check here for rating information.)

Available now in paperback (affiliate link).

The Review:

Sunward is nominally a story about the training of AI and by extension what it means to be alive. While I was intrigued by the novel’s concept, for me at least, it failed to deliver.

Our narrator, Captain Tova Lir, is a courier. Someone who travels around the Solar System delivering packages. On the way, she trains newly sentient AIs in how to cope with the constant stream of data in which they live.

Lir and her AI, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, stumble across the body of another courier carrying an undelivered message. After taking custody of the corpse for a respectful burial, they are attacked by an assassin whose job it is to make sure the message is not successfully delivered.

Agatha ends up being distributed into the technological ether while saving Lir’s life. Lir then goes on a quest to work out who sent the assassin and to see if Agatha can be reassembled.

There are some touching, quirky bits to the novel, and I would say it undoubtedly has some of the same DNA as Goblin Secrets; they share a whimsical quality. Unfortunately, I just didn’t find Sunward at all compelling.

Lir travels across the Solar System, following a series of clues, where she encounters all manner of AI systems. Often ones she herself nurtured to an autonomous existence.

Few of Sunward’s characters engaged me, and I didn’t care very much about the storyline. Indeed, in the middle of what is a very short book, my attention wavered. I struggled to follow or care what was happening. Less than a week since completion, I find myself remembering very little about the book, and nothing about what it was trying to say.

It pains me to say it, but this does not burn as bright as its title suggests.