Dogs of War, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Dogs of War by  Adrian Tchaikovsky available here.

My name is Rex. I am a good dog.

Rex is also seven foot tall at the shoulder, bulletproof, bristling with heavy calibre weaponry and his voice resonates with subsonics especially designed to instil fear. With Dragon, Honey and Bees, he’s part of a Multiform Assault Pack operating in the lawless anarchy of Campeche, Mexico. A genetically engineered Bioform, he’s a deadly weapon in a dirty war. All he wants to be is a Good Dog. And to do that he must do exactly what Master says and Master says he’s got to kill a lot of enemies.

But who, exactly, are the enemies? What happens when Master is tried as a war criminal? What rights does the Geneva Convention grant weapons? Do Rex and his fellow Bioforms even have a right to exist?

Fiction is often one of the most interesting ways to look at what the future could be like, where we are now, and where we might be going. From Silent Running, Soylent Green, and on to Minority Report, and more recently Her and ExMachina, fictional visualisations have often greatly impacted on how we approach our own futures. This book, published less than two years ago aims to come to grips with some key issues that could soon become real and relevant issues. While no one would yet confidently declare that we currently have sentient AIs. We have probably already passed the point where the Turing test can be passed by non human entities, even if they are not actually self aware. It is rather the test has perhaps become meaningless as machines can merely answer questions well enough to fool humans.

Tchaikovsky takes the idea of sentient, self-aware entities in a different, and perhaps more interesting direction as he considers what happens if, or when, humans fuse elements of human, animal and AI together. Rex, the manifestation of ‘man’s best friend’ is both a super engineered bioform and yet also clearly just a dog at heart. In Dogs of War the question is raised of what happens when you are trying to be good, a good dog, when your master has evil intent. Rex, fortunately, is set on the path to salvation by having his hierarchies turned off, though his fate is the exception rather than the rule.

It is an enjoyable read, categorised as speculative fiction rather than science fiction, which is a smart and appropriate way to label a book like this (if it even has to be labeled). It is interesting and provocative, raising important and thorny questions. Can something be deemed a living being if it was created in a laboratory? Should it have rights? Or is it just an object? As always too any interaction with humans always quickly produces a tension between varying types of ‘good’. Rex, once unchained from his master’s command once whines with the strain of having to make choices for himself, much preferring the good old days of simply following commands and the reward of being called a good dog.

This is an enjoyable romp which also forces you to think and question how the future might be as we move closer to a potential singularity and a scenario where we have to share our world with nontraditional human and non human forms of sentient, super smart life, both AI, augmented human, and, potentially even smart bioforms. A well written book and we look forward to checking out some of his other works too.

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