Harare Review of Books

320 pages. Published December 17, 2024 by DAW Books. SF.

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some spoilers follow

You only need to have a robot or artificial person on your cover to immediately snag my attention. And then the title of this novel makes reference to a Bible verse, “Train my hands for war,” which I thought was intriguing.

Mechanise My Hands to War discusses the place of independently intelligent androids that are used for labour in this near-future society. The most human-like are the AM—the medical assistant/care androids. Security androids—AS—have been designed on purpose not to look like humans. (Presumably there are other robots working in industry and so on, but we don’t get to meet them.) The contrast between them brings up the uncanny valley: The AM are unsettling, while the AS’s reception by the soldiers they serve alongside is simple: if they do they jobs well enough, they become part of the team. The novel’s tension comes from an anti-android faction among humans that’s turned to military force to make their point, which I found only slightly plausible: They seem to gain far more ground than I think would happen in real life, especially considering who’s fighting. Along with that, the action drifts a bit—almost as if the premise gets away from Wagner from time to time. However, that plotline is helpful for thinking through the arguments for and against androids as human replacements.

I found one subplot particularly unsettling—that of android workers on a farm—calling back as it does to American slavery. In fact, as I read this section, essentially nothing differentiated these androids from enslaved Black people—down to the depiction of a “house slave” and “field slave.” Whether the author meant to make this allusion or not, they didn’t deal explicitly with the troubling parallels, and I did not like this. There is a reasonably long history now of arguments showing the parallels between slavery, particularly the enslavement of Black people, and the development of artificial people or robots; it’s a rabbit hole worth exploring for readers of any book like this.

The latter part of the book had me gripped, likely because it allows readers to reinterpret many of the previous scenes from new points of view, for both minor and major characters. It’s most fascinating when we learn what the androids are really thinking (processing?) as we’ve simply assumed, up to that point, that their motivations are human. Wagner does a great job of revealing just how alien they really are.

All said, this is a thoughtful novel that raises interesting philosophical questions.

Thanks to DAW Books and to NetGalley for early access.

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