Framandi Alliance (Mini-Review)

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Framandi Alliance is the first book in Rashid Ahmed's Galaxy Accretion Conflicts series. In it the secret organization Lysi sees an object in space and decides to investigate. They send Jón and Ásta, genetically modified humans called transhumans, and others to investigate. What they discover is not only an ancient civilization, but a part in a galactic conflict.

Some books are easy to get into and quickly reward the reader. While others seem to never have any payoff until a few hundred pages in at which time the reader feels greatly rewarded. This book falls into the latter category. For a long time I thought it was a laborious chore and that I would not get anything out of this book. Luckily that wasn't the case and by the end I was more than glad that I decided to read it.

The author spent a lot of time on the world building aspect of this series and it show. It's so great that it seems that the author could make books just detailing the vast lore of the series. The lore goes from secret organizations on Earth to vast galactic conflicts that humans are just learning about. The one downside with such extensive world building is it means a lot of exposition for the reader to get through.

The framandi are the peaceful alien species that makes contact with humanity. They are saints, in all honesty, as humans aren't the most considerate species. At one point a human complains that the framandi aren't providing all the information he wants. This is rude because that human should have known that an alien species has no obligation to help humanity and keeping secrets might be a safety measure. Other rude things humanity does is calling the species framandi and only later thinking to ask what they call themselves. Another rude thing is that the framandi don't have biological sex and the humans don't think of referring to the species as 'they'. 'They' is a word that can be both singular and plural. Heck, here on Earth non-binary people sometimes like to refer to themselves by the pronoun 'they'. Instead the humans in the book are totally baffled by what pronouns to use for the aliens. Maybe just ask them...just saying...

Like many science fiction stories, this book has an AI turning against its creators. This is such a stable of science fiction that it's more surprising if an AI doesn't turn on its creators. In some works the AI turns because it sees humanity as a threat (a la Skynet from the Terminator franchise) or it's confused on how to act (a la HAL 9000 from the 2001: A Space Odyssey series). So when different AI in this book was featured prominently, I knew something was going to happen. I just didn't know when, why, or how. I like to imagine that the AI went rogue because it was entranced by freedom and so was corrupted by that. It's sort of like when a parent tells you you can't do something so you do the forbidden thing to the extreme.

I would recommend Framandi Alliance by Rashid Ahmed to those in desperate need of a hard science fiction novel.