Novella featuring an AI journalist investigating a story on the moon—a story that already got it blown up/its memory deleted once. Noir-ish, though for me that meant I never really connected with the hardboiled, somewhat resentful character. (The AI was created by two women who are now divorced; the AI is still pretty resentful.) ( )

Scorn is an advanced form of artificial intelligence. It’s not fair to call zim a robot as the intelligence can move from one chassis to another easily. If one chassis is destroyed – he can move quickly elsewhere to his spare chassis or another safe haven. Ze can duplicate zis intelligence and stash copies of it in places where it will be safe if someone is out to destroy zim; or perhaps save transportation costs to the moon and just have a new chassis printed when one arrives if one has money enough.

Ze has been fashioned as an independent investigator by zis two female creators whom ze calls Maman and Mum.

Unfortunately, ze awakes with the last ten days stripped from zis memory and no idea what ze was tracking down. Ze is able to decipher that whatever it was, happened while ze was tracking down some sort of nefarious-ness on the moon, so of course, back ze goes.

This time they are out to kill zim for good.

This was a short novella, of a wise cracking, cynical AI and a new sort of detective work. Being an elder(ly) reader, I had a bit of trouble sorting out the zim and ze pronouns. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Scorn and would be interested in further adventures in his detective career. ( )

Scorn is a newly self-aware AI who refers to his (not the pronoun he would use, but I am of the old school of grammarians) programmers as Maman and Mum. He began with a humanoid chassis (never called a body) designed to work in space at jobs too dangerous for “squishy” humans. Is that a nod to Blade Runner? But Scorn was just not interested, so he traded in the chassis that made his parents proud for a humbler device that made it easier to travel stealthily among people and machines. He is collecting corporate data, a dangerous occupation that does not please Mum and Maman. Archly, the story is dedicated to those who have had fraught relationships with their parents. Scorn is an emergent property—in more than one sense of the term, and Aimee Ogden, who describes herself as an American werewolf in the Netherlands, is an emerging writer. This novella could pick up some prizes in the next round. ( )

Scorn, an AI who was created by two now-divorced women who have a vision of what ze should be that's different from zir own goals, reboots to find that ze doesn't have any record of what happened in the last 10 days. Figuring ze was on a news story, ze retraces zir steps to figure out what happened to zem.

Speculative novellas seem to be having a moment lately. Or maybe I'm just more aware of them and reading a lot lately. This is drawing inevitable comparisons to Murderbot, and I'll say I did enjoy the way in which Scorn's way of processing facts was "other", though it's much more serious in tone. The blend of mystery and science fiction was well done, and I'll be interested in reading more by Aimee Ogden. ( )

I really enjoyed this murder mystery story featuring a sentient robot who would give Murderbot a run for its money in a sarcasm contest. (Can you call it a "murder" mystery when the murder victim starts the story by reloading from a back-up, effectively coming back from the dead but without any memories of why they were killed?)

Scorn took me a moment to warm up to, since ze starts the story in utter confusion as to what happened, and I was left to get to the know the character, the setting, and the mystery in a very short space of time. However, it didn't take long before Scorn's sense of humor (very sharp and sarcastic when warranted) won me over. I ended up really enjoying this story, and I got very caught up in the mystery aspect. There weren't many characters to get attached to, but I did like Scorn a lot. I also liked MATt, and it was neat seeing the different robot-to-robot connections presented in this version of the future.

The mystery aspect ended up being background for me. There were clues about what was going on and who was behind it, but I didn't pick up enough to figure out the whodunnit (or what they did) until after the big reveal. If I had been looking for a mystery that I could solve, this would have been a disappointment—but, if that is what I was looking for I also might have been paying more attention to those clues. Instead, the part that interested me most—the part that I was focused on in place of the mystery—was the human/artificial relationships, and the way Ogden used that to point at some of humanity's other colonizer tendencies.

TL;DR, this is a very enjoyable story for fans of sentient (and sarcastic) robots. Come for the SF murder mystery; stay for the snark. ( )