Providence

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Barry, Max
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Barry, Max	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson are astronauts captaining a new and supposedly indestructible ship in humanity's war against an alien race. Confined to the ship for years, each of them holding their own secrets, they are about to learn there are threats beyond the reach of human ingenuity--and that the true nature of reality might be the universe's greatest mystery. In this near future, our world is at war with another, and humanity is haunted by its one catastrophic loss--a nightmarish engagement that left a handful of survivors drifting home through space, wracked with PTSD. Public support for the war plummeted, and the military-industrial complex set its sights on a new goal: zero-casualty warfare, made possible by gleaming new ships called Providences, powered by AI. But when the latest-launched Providence suffers a surprising attack and contact with home is severed, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson must confront the truth of the war they're fighting, the ship that brought them there, and the cosmos beyond"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Fast Paced and Suspenseful Science Fiction submitted by Jinxyluis on August 26, 2020, 2:53pm This fast paced and suspenseful novel follows the four person crew of a sophisticated AI-controlled battleship as they travel across space exterminating an alien threat. It takes a toll to spend four years farther from home than anyone has ever been, with nothing but each other and their jobs, which are really more to provide pro-war propaganda to viewers back home rather than control any aspect of the AI-driven mission. This novel shined for me in its little worldbuilding details, and its characters and their battles with their own limitations, fighting a war against aliens that they fundamentally don’t understand, while passengers on this ship that they ultimately don’t understand any better.⁣
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Providence is driven by big and fascinating ideas, but for me the plot diverged somewhat from those ideas and veered more into frenetic action I enjoyed less as the book went on. That said, I really loved how Barry wrapped the book up and the strong development of the characters carried the novel.