This is a wonderful hard science fiction story, marred only by occasional repetition (characters show tension so often by running their hands through their hair that I finally decided they all needed a change of shampoo) and, in the Kindle edition, at least, enough typos, misspellings, and grammar mistakes to make an honest proofreader turn to drink.
Seriously, folks, the $6.99 price is just right, the story very surprising and well done, but the publisher (Little, Brown and Company) should be ashamed for this many text errors in one file. I suppose they consider the ebook a throwaway, which is remarkably shortsighted, even for a mainstream book publisher stupidly wedded to paper in the face of rising ebook sales. It’s also a pity because author Sarah Zettel deserves praise and respect for her intriguing tale of machine intelligence run amok.
But no reader deserves to have to wade through so many mistakes in a text, particularly in the last half of the story. I was constantly trying to decide which word or tense was intended. Even the characters’ names are repeatedly misspelled. Not even a homicidal AI would be so cruel!
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 