Bear Head

Dogs of War, Book 2

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Nathan Osgood, William Hope

Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Honey the genetically engineered bear starts a revolution on the Red Planet in the new novel from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

WELCOME TO HELL CITY, MARS

Jimmy Martin has a sore head.

He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him.

The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist.

It also claims to be a bear.

A bear named Honey.

Jimmy has nothing against bioforms–he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock–and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.

The problem is that humanity isn't the only entity with designs on the Red Planet. Out in the airless desert there is another presence. A novel intelligence, elusive, unknowable and potentially lethal.

And Honey is here to make contact with it, whether Jimmy likes it or not.

©2021 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2021 W F Howes

Great sci-fi

I loved the story; it was an interesting format to use more than one narrator for all the characters but I think it added something to the story. Only thing about the actual narration is sometimes they used the wrong voice for an established character. Other than that the political aspect of the book really laid in hard and was very anti-fascist. So I guess if you’re a fascist you really won’t enjoy the political aspect of the book because it makes a lot of fun and lays bare a lot of the rhetoric that fascism uses.

Another Fantastic Story by Tchaikovsky

I absolutely love this series so far and this was a great sequel to dogs of war. I hope the series continues.

Loved it!

I would recommend this sequel. Character development is amazing. Story is excellent. Performance is great.

Amazing sequel

Went in a totally unexpected but wonderful direction. Loved the depth of the characters and the keen insight that the author brought to them.

The Path to Dystopia

Cyberpunk has become quite the prolific genre in the modern-to-postmodern landscape. PKDs dreaming androids, Gibson’s console cowboys, and Stephenson’s couriers/pizza delivery guys all paved the way for the development of the cybernetic augmentation and corporate control of the present metaverse. One thing that these trailblazing works lack however is the prologue to their respective dystopias. How did these worlds become so? Enter Tchaikovsky and his bioforms. This near-future novel answers this question of how a cyberpunk world could come to be and poses something even more compelling; If this were happening in reality, would we even notice? The sequel to Dogs of War is even more intriguing and insightful as it paints an all too realistic picture of how humanity may handle our own terrible creations.

Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Looking forward to book three. I love The author's development of characters. I'm hoping book 3 meets up with the Children of Time characters.

Further developed, in unexpected directions.

Warp3
There are a lot of ways thd second book could have gone, but this Martian/western/vampire movie sure wasn't on my bingo card. I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway.

4.5 of 5

Good story, though not as engrossing as Dogs of War. The listener is forced to spend far toouch time listening to Honey, whose motto appears to be, "Why get to the point when I can drop a novella on you instead?" This is exacerbated by the strange cadence of Laurence Bouvard. Her motto appears to be, "Why voice a single sentence when I can throw a weird pause in and end up with two or even three sentences?" Honey's soliloquies are bad enough by themselves (they are taxing even to read), but when those random pauses populate the speech I want to give up. In fact, I did give up and listened to four old favorites before I became determined to finish the last two hours of Bear Head.

Perfect Follow-up to “Dogs of War”

I so enjoyed this book. Like “Dogs of War”, it not only gives you a surface level story but also soul searing ideas to ponder before your existential crisis. Dangerous thoughts that I just loved.

Absolutely amazing sci fi

Read the 1st book- Dogs of War.
Then follow it up with a sci-fi story that picks up years later that is completely different. Oh, and the story is 90% set on the workers building the first city on Mars.
If you don’t like to challenge yourself or have an open mind, go on back to reading the Twilight series or Harry Potter.
Not to completely ignore the performance of the voice actor here- WOW!!! Such an amazing job!!! I’ve got a physical copy of this book but the voice acting on here makes it 20x better!!!
Enjoy