Dogs of Mars: Dog from the Machine by Adam Browne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unlike author Adam Browne’s ‘Imperium Lupi’, ‘Dogs of Mars’ occurs in a universe in which canines alone substitute humans. The prologue occurs fifteen years before the main action of the novel, with Shep being a zero-model X-dog. The “present” action begins with an environmental malfunction on a spaceship, with automutts, or robotic canines, going rogue, the vessel destined for self-destruction. The first few chapters follow the scientist Sasuke, Shep, and another X-dog named Bryce, attempting to evacuate the doomed Sojourn, with another ship known as the Capricious providing a potential means for escape.

The action picks up eight years later, with an older Holly Hunter, daughter of the ill-fated Katre Hunter, traveling to Mars with Oscar from Olympus Tech, initialized O.T. A powerful collar known as the Rig, standing for Regenerative Intracellular Gestalt, receives its introduction, playing a critical role in the final chapters. The novel occasionally bounces between past and present, with notable backstory chapters numbered with lowercase Roman numerals instead of Arabic numbers. The X-dogs ultimately find themselves battling an entity known as the Mold, its nature revealed later on in the book.

Overall, the book is an admirable effort and doesn’t come across as verbose, but it has issues such as the difficulty at many points of keeping track of the breeds of the various canines throughout the text, given the absence of the Kindle’s X-Ray feature, with illustrations given no captions occurring only between the major sections, and actual notated images of the characters provided only after the primary chapters. There are also frequent acronyms throughout the narrative such as P.T. that don’t receive definition, and while I didn’t have much trouble following the overreaching plot, most characters like the X-dogs come across as interchangeable, and I can only hesitantly recommend the book.

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