Rancid

The Lost Starship by Vaughn Heppner My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Lost Starship by Vaughn Heppner. This book has qualities of hard science fiction. No fantasy or magic. * Alien AI * Stardrives * Genetic engineering * Evolution * Weapons technology It is a typical science fiction book that starts off a series. I will not get into the plot of the book that could be found in a Google search. I am interested in science about the "alien AI". Can we really call it an AI? In the book, this particular AI of the alien's starship possesses the engrams of the original captain. This would explain the unbalanced personality of the expert system running the ship. For those of us in computer science, a program is only as good as the programmer who wrote it. In this case, the alien race found a way to attach and upload memory into a computer system this, of course, is not a new concept but it is an interesting one. As far as StarDrive goes, every author seems to want to invent their own...

Weight of the Heart by Rosa Montero My rating: 3 of 5 stars Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky book 2) by Rosa Montero Here are my thoughts on the book. It took me about a week to read the book. I was on a work assignment so I had some free time. It is a second book from a trilogy. On this occasion, I read the book in English. The original book is written in Spanish. I read it in English because I am cheap as dirt. I am multilingual so I shouldn't have a problem. However, The person who wrote the intro to the book in English. Should have done their research. The intro goes like this: "Part human and part robot, private investigator Bruna Husky..." Bruna Husky, it's not a cyborg she's a replicant a flesh-engineered creation that comes from the Phillip k. Dick universe. The promo then says: "Traveling from a distant planet populated by an extreme religious sect to landscapes destroyed by rising sea levels..." Uh... No. She does not travel to a distant wor...