Reviews of Nova Sapiens
On Booklife

“This gripping epic of robot sentience is urgent, emotional, and scientifically exciting.

On NetGalley

The author has done sterling work on presenting the future human race in all its guises.

I found this near-future story very engaging and fast-paced, quite enjoyable and full of action.

Also, how nice to read about a world that’s not US-centric!

The author has written a very moving, fascinating and thrilling Science Fiction book based around artificial intelligence and its dangers.

This was a poignant read, that was brave enough to explicitly outline themes and big ideas in the dialogue between characters. Indeed, the ideas made this novel, offering thought provoking takes on the nuances of freedom, independence, and what it means to be human.

Nova Sapiens: The Believers

Kasih is a robotic child drawn into a project to discover her secrets, and into a war that threatens all humanity, including her own.

The murder of her family by Union troops in Bandung leaves the rebels’ robotics experts, Losana Maraiwai and Wei Dingxiang, with nobody to explain Kasih’s design but Kasih herself.

She is not what anyone expected. In Darwin, Dingxiang suspects a magic trick may explain away her human-like artificial intelligence. In Beijing, Union politician Gabriel da Costa fears an extinction-level technology. Both sides of the war see a weapon that might win it. But Kasih is not strong, fast, or even particularly coordinated. She tries in vain to make sense of her father’s death, and of a world ready to dismantle her and repurpose her technology. And she cannot escape the Union’s plans.

The rebels, including Kasih’s original rescuers, Paul Kanner and Debra Hall, are powerless in the face of a new army of robotic soldiers based on her design. The Union has created monsters, whose cold efficiency unleashes wholesale destruction. They threaten the world’s only chance for freedom, and perhaps its very survival.

Neither Kasih nor Dingxiang understand why Kasih herself is not like them. Kasih must fight back against the fate others have determined for her, and for the world, and Dingxiang needs her ingenuity to solve the very conundrum that her existence represents. For Kasih to save her human friends, she must help them destroy her own kind.


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Front cover of "Nova Sapiens: The Believers"
Evelyne Tymms (from Magic Studios) chats with me about the audiobook.
Robots in Sci-Fi (commentary): The experience of being a robot.
Robots in Sci-Fi: Don’t invent robot brains – they already exist.
Robots in Sci-Fi: Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics are slavery. Also, they don’t work.
Robots in Sci-Fi: Why do sci-fi robots have lights for eyes?
Robots in Sci-Fi: Why do robots have head-up displays?