Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:05:00 -0700

Review: Machine, by Elizabeth Bear

Series: | White Space #2
Publisher: | Saga Press
Copyright: | October 2020
ISBN: | 1-5344-0303-5
Format: | Kindle
Pages: | 485

Machine is a far-future space opera. It is a loose sequel to Ancestral Night, but you do not have to remember the first book to enjoy this book and they have only a couple of secondary characters in common. There are passing spoilers for Ancestral Night in the story, though, if you care.

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a rescue paramedic on Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living. That means she goes into dangerous situations to get you out of them, patches you up enough to not die, and brings you to doctors who can do the slower and more time-consuming work. She was previously a cop (well, Judiciary, which in this universe is mostly the same thing) and then found that medicine, and specifically the flagship Synarche hospital Core General, was the institution in all the universe that she believed in the most.

As Machine opens, Jens is boarding the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a generation ship launched from Earth during the bad era before right-minding and joining the Synarche, back when it looked like humanity on Earth wouldn't survive. Big Rock Candy Mountain was discovered by accident in the wrong place, going faster than it was supposed to be going and not responding to hails. The Synarche ship that first discovered and docked with it is also mysteriously silent. It's the job of Jens and her colleagues to get on board, see if anyone is still alive, and rescue them if possible.

What they find is a corpse and a disturbingly servile early AI guarding a whole lot of people frozen in primitive cryobeds, along with odd artificial machinery that seems to be controlled by the AI. Or possibly controlling the AI.

Jens assumes her job will be complete once she gets the cryobeds and the AI back to Core General where both the humans and the AI can be treated by appropriate doctors. Jens is very wrong.

Machine is Elizabeth Bear's version of a James White Sector General novel. If one reads this book without any prior knowledge, the way that I did, you may not realize this until the characters make it to Core General, but then it becomes obvious to anyone who has read White's series. Most of the standard Sector General elements are here: A vast space station with rings at different gravity levels and atmospheres, a baffling array of species, and the ability to load other people's personalities into your head to treat other species at the cost of discomfort and body dysmorphia. There's a gruff supervisor, a fragile alien doctor, and a whole lot of idealistic and well-meaning people working around complex interspecies differences. Sadly, Bear does drop White's entertainingly oversimplified species classification codes; this is the correct call for suspension of disbelief, but I kind of missed them.

I thoroughly enjoy the idea of the Sector General series, so I was delighted by an updated version that drops the sexism and the doctor/nurse hierarchy and adds AIs, doctors for AIs, and a more complicated political structure. The hospital is even run by a sentient tree, which is an inspired choice.

Bear, of course, doesn't settle for a relatively simple James White problem-solving plot. There are interlocking, layered problems here, medical and political, immediate and structural, that unwind in ways that I found satisfyingly twisty. As with Ancestral Night, Bear has some complex points to make about morality. I think that aspect of the story was a bit less convincing than Ancestral Night, in part because some of the characters use rather bizarre tactics (although I will grant they are the sort of bizarre tactics that I could imagine would be used by well-meaning people who didn't think through all of the possible consequences). I enjoyed the ethical dilemmas here, but they didn't grab me the way that Ancestral Night did. The setting, though, is even better: An interspecies hospital was a brilliant setting when James White used it, and it continues to be a brilliant setting in Bear's hands.

It's also worth mentioning that Jens has a chronic inflammatory disease and uses an exoskeleton for mobility, and (as much as I can judge while not being disabled myself) everything about this aspect of the character was excellent. It's rare to see characters with meaningful disabilities in far-future science fiction. When present at all, they're usually treated like Geordi's sight: something little different than the differential abilities of the various aliens, or even a backdoor advantage. Jens has a true, meaningful disability that she has to manage and that causes a constant cognitive drain, and the treatment of her assistive device is complex and nuanced in a way that I found thoughtful and satisfying.

The one structural complaint that I will make is that Jens is an astonishingly talkative first-person protagonist, particularly for an Elizabeth Bear novel. This is still better than being inscrutable, but she is prone to such extended philosophical digressions or infodumps in the middle of a scene that I found myself wishing she'd get on with it already in a few places. This provides good characterization, in the sense that the reader certainly gets inside Jens's head, but I think Bear didn't get the balance quite right.

That complaint aside, this was very fun, and I am certainly going to keep reading this series. Recommended, particularly if you like James White, or want to see why other people do.

The most important thing in the universe is not, it turns out, a single, objective truth. It's not a hospital whose ideals you love, that treats all comers. It's not a lover; it's not a job. It's not friends and teammates.

It's not even a child that rarely writes me back, and to be honest I probably earned that. I could have been there for her. I didn't know how to be there for anybody, though. Not even for me.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals.

It's who we are when nobody is looking.

Followed by The Folded Sky.

Rating: 8 out of 10