Dissidence
The first instalment in the Corporation Wars trilogy, space opera giving a robot’s-eye view of a robot revolt, from Arthur C. Clarke award nominated science fiction author Ken MacLeod
They’ve died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration for the benefit of their owners – the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod (born 1954), an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer, lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
MacLeod's novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist.
He is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross and Liz Williams.
The Corporation Wars
The Corporation Wars consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.