The Ganymedan

Ester’s thrilling debut opens centuries into the solar system’s future with the murder of its most powerful man, Archer Lenox-Pileser, aka LP, the genius behind sentient technology. The culprit is his former bartender, Verden Dotnet, or V-Dot, who ensures that LP has no resurrecting backup files and swipes a halo device recording of LP confessing to heinous crimes. Now on the run and desperate to get the halo cache into the right hands, V-Dot hitches a ride through space with an aged sentient space ship, TR-8901. One of the first sentients that LP created, it’s not as advanced as the later models that V-Dot must dodge as the authorities and LP’s vengeful niece, Cloey, give chase, and war brews between humans and sentients. Ester complicates V-Dot’s cleverly plotted escape adventure with flashbacks to how he ended up in this position and crescendoing conflicts between him and the increasingly suspicious spaceship. With meticulous technical detail, abundant local color on various space stations and Martian locales, and sharply drawn characters, this sprawling novel will appeal to both hard sci-fi fans and readers looking for thought-provoking insights into an all too possible future where humans and AI must find an effective symbiosis if both are to survive. Ester should win plenty of fans. (Nov.)