Alpha

July 24, 2006
The evil genius Charon is dead, but Alpha, the gorgeous, superintelligent android he built, remains an unpredictable threat in Asaro's entertaining mix of hard SF and romance, the sequel to Sunrise Alley
(2004). As director of the Office of Computer Operations of the National Information Agency, Lt. Gen. Thomas Wharington is determined to learn Alpha's secrets, but he has about as much success against her expert ability to "read" human body language as he does in finding a baby-sitter for his precocious granddaughter, Jamie. As Wharington wonders about the burgeoning sexual bond between him and the android, Alpha takes him captive and transports him to Charon's island hideaway, where he learns a terrible secret: Charon has survived and, with Alpha's help, plots to take over the world. Asaro has all the right pieces for a taut thriller, though the action suffers at times from a surfeit of plot threads, including the still-unresolved subject of Sunrise Alley itself, a shadowy group of free-roving "Evolving Intelligences" with vast power over the Internet "mesh."

September 1, 2006
Asaro's extrapolation of current artificial intelligence theories, begun in " Sunrise Alley " (2004), continues with different characters, including another female protagonist. Six-foot EI (evolving intelligence) Alpha flies jets and wields a machine gun in the good cause of kidnapping General Thomas Wharington. In keeping with Asaro's romantic agenda, a shared ordeal on a desert island makes the two aware of their commonalities. The general's child-prodigy granddaughter and a female pro-android activist in love with her lover's android reincarnation are two further strong characters. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)