Award winning author Suzanne Palmer adds to her growing stack of novel-length SF with Ode to the Half-Broken, an engaging tale of friendship and treachery, adventure and revenge among post-apocalypse AI “mechs” and a few surviving humans in what used to be the United States. It’s a stand alone story that follows her popular and acclaimed The Finder Chronicles, four books published between 2019 and 2024. Ode is a complete story as it is, but the world and characters Palmer has built are worthy of a series if that’s in the cards.
This is the story of a nameless mecha (large biomorphic AI) who has been avoiding engagement with the world for at least a couple of decades, studying ants in a gated compound that used to be one of New York’s botanical gardens. As the tale begins, it powers up unexpectedly in an unknown place, with a bunch of heavy scrap metal weighing it down, and missing one leg. With the help of a hybrid mech dog that apparently just wandered by, it extricates itself and sets about finding out who or what took that leg and how to get it back.
The novel is told in chapters that alternate between the mecha’s present and its past … or rather, events that led up to its creation. In those past chapters (which begin in the late 2030s, so very near future!) we become acquainted with a Dr. Milton, founder and chief engineer of Milton Mindsystems, with headquarters somewhere in Connecticut. He’s the abrasive genius who has brought on the Singularity with his invention of an artificial intelligence that attains sentience. The CEO of Milton Mindsystems, a smarmy fellow named Litchfield, is in the process of taking control of the company and getting into defense contracting, a lucrative field as things get worse and worse in the world. The accelerating climate disaster and waves of pandemics are wrecking the world economy and tensions are rising as nations jockey for resources.
What happened between the past chapters and the mecha’s present is referred to simply as the Conflict. It appears to have eliminated as much as 90 percent of the human population in the Northeastern U.S. and possibly globally, with mechs now the dominant sentient life form on Earth — and in orbit. As our mecha sets out on his quest to regain its leg, it learns that things are starting to go wrong in odd ways. It also learns that, as much as it would like to continue living in solitude and studying bugs, it needs the assistance and companionship of others, like the dog Atticus, the network of sentient train locomotives that crisscross the country, and some humans and mechs who can help it with that missing leg.
And we, the readers, learn that our mecha was one of four siblings created in secret by Dr. Milton, used by him to take revenge — on those who took over his company and killed his one friend, and perhaps on the world in general. Can you say Mad Scientist, boys and girls?
I’ve kind of made this sound a bit grim. On the contrary, this story — or at least those parts that focus on the mecha and his quest — is engrossing, entertaining and bubbling with humor. The mismatched duo of a humorless, powerful warrior mecha with the gregarious and irreverent mech dog Atticus makes for a lot of laughs. The story’s tension and action build continuously toward a climax, but there’s frequent comic relief from Atticus and another friend they make on their journey, a scout drone named Charp. Our heros acquire a purple, steam-powered VW bus and travel the countryside in it, Atticus hanging his head out a window, sometimes howling in glee, and of course being distracted by squirrels.
I found the sections focusing on Dr. Milton to be less interesting and engaging, but I immediately fell in love with the nameless mecha. Equally endearing are the rest of the sincere and hardworking AIs — trains and drones and construction mechs — who are working with some humans to rebuild and restore both the natural and built environments on a more egalitarian footing in the wake of the Conflict. This passage regarding that rebuilding starts off straight but ends with a bit of meta humor from Palmer.
There are also radio connections, human-run, forming a web-like peer network that crisscrosses the continents, and I can see nearly in real time a ship, mid-ocean, operated by both human and mecha, slowly spooling a new transatlantic cable from Newfoundland toward Ireland. Science, literature, history are all shared over these networks, most of it fact-checked and annotated by mecha as it passes; there was a long and heated argument before mecha agreed not to fact-check fiction in the same way, though I find the mecha still do so — with some glee, when it comes to the prewar genre of literature called science fiction — and just no longer share those analyses with their bio counterparts.
Add Palmer’s community of mechs to the growing pantheon of better-than-human AIs that have begun to grace the SFF bookshelves, including Martha Wells’s Murderbot and Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle food service bots Staybehind, Sweetie, Cayenne, and Hands. They have a lot to teach us about how to be better people.
(Daw Books, 2026)
