Well...I liked Machine, better than I liked Ancestral Night. I'm still not really enthused, even though I basically enjoyed it and was engaged in the plot. The story is not simple, nor is the resolution. But I agree with other reviewers that both Haimey (from Ancestral Night) and Jens spend a lot of time introspecting in our general direction, meaning that they infodump big time.
They are also very similar in their basic belief in the Synarche. It comes off as an inhumanly prosocial galactic empire, until it doesn't. The plot situations are slightly different, but both characters react to their situations as though they were representatives of what the Synarche is about on an individual level, instead of real people. I am reminding myself that Haimey was in many ways not a real person. Jens seems to be, though we learn less about her background.
The novel stands alone, and you really wouldn't need to read one or the other first. That is kind of what drives me nuts about this one, because Ancestral Night leaves a very large plot element out there for later development. <spoiler>Singer, the shipmind from Ancestral Night, is a peripheral character in Machine so we know it takes place later. I was really hoping this book would take the idea of the pattern written into the universe that only Haimey can see a bit further. There's a very mild echo of it in the poetry written into the archaic humans of Big Rock Candy Mountain's DNA, but that particular reveal ends up getting dropped entirely</spoiler> So this book, in my view, *should* have been a straight sequel but it wasn't.
I liked Helen Alloy as a side character, and the way the action unfurled kept me reading. But both of these books just leave me thinking they could have been better. Darn.
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