Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew: Book Review

Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew is another fiery hot, heart pounding installment in Sriduangkaew’s cyberpunk/space opera Machine Mandate series. It can be read as a standalone but is set in the same universe where humanity has spread across the galaxy and the once subservient AIs they created have evolved and established their own civilizations spanning the universe.

Admiral Anoushka is a brutal and ruthless commander, responsible for countless deaths across the galaxy. With her devoted wives Numadesi and Xuehjiao by her side, she is an unstoppable destroyer of worlds. But even one as powerful as she is beholden…and to an AI no less.

Benzaiten in Autumn (the AI in question) has a new mission for the feared commander. A mission that will send her deep into the heart of the infamous biomechanical warship, Vishnu’s Leviathan. A mission that could uncover serious implications for the Mandate. A mission that will send her on a deadly collision course with her past.

Pros And My Favourite Parts

The writing style is lush and poetic, infused with equal parts beauty and horror. Reading this novella is like listening to a song where the music is ethereal, but the lyrics are devastating and reach in and tear your heart out. The worldbuilding is astounding and the plot is twisty and turny. I loved the emotional rollercoaster.

The novella is also thematically quite dense with motifs of subterfuge, enslavement, vengeance, the inescapable clutches of the past, and the kaleidoscope of identity all wrapped in a steamy tale of espionage. The characters are on the charcoal end of the morally grey scale, yet as more about their relationships and pasts is revealed, they become increasingly relatable. How did I end up weeping for a notorious warlord?! Every turn of the page is another layer of the characters peeled away and all that is with the plot unraveling to its surprising end as well.

Cons And Heads Up

Heads up for death, betrayal, polyamory and graphic sex scenes involving the (consensual) removal of cybernetic limbs.

The Conclusion

Reading this novella requires an intellectual and emotional investment, but the payoff is more than worth it. Sriduangkaew manages to squeeze so much between the covers of this novella that I’m shocked it doesn’t generate another big bang when opened. Political machinations, revelations, Fierce women, betrayal, AIs, giant beastlike spaceships, and don’t forget the explosively hot sex all combine in a unique and captivating universe I highly recommend you explore.

Excerpt from Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Anoushka kneels over a corpse, her hands sheathed in blood, as around her the world comes to an end.

In the most essential sense this is not a world: it is a station orbiting a blue giant, built like rose gardens layered on top of one another in a damask ziggurat. The chamber in which she stands occupies the summit and grants her a monarch’s vantage point, a comprehensive look at what she’s destroying. From the viewport she watches the tiers below wither petaled habitats folding in on themselves one by one, dichroic glaze fading to dull gold.

She wipes her gloved hands on the guard and steps away from the pile of carnage. One of them was a politician with complicated titles while the rest were soldiers, all decorated: doubtless each had a spotless career, gilded with medals and heroics. To her they are, on the whole, unremarkable. There are greater wheels and more important cogs at work than these sacks of flesh which, a few minutes ago, were living minds with thoughts and hopes and dreams.

When a world ends, it is never a single isolated act: it is part of a sequence, either the conclusion or the steps toward it. She has engineered many such sequences, for her clients or for herself. This one is the former, business as usual, a routine job for routinely immense remuneration. In the end these events matter insofar as they provide data, statistics to tally up against past battles and which can be distilled into prediction of future combat. Anoushka is a creature of glittering math.,..

At her foot, a person groans. She sighs, gets down, and closes her hand around their throat. Her fingers dig, penetrating epidermis and subcutaneous layers, those soft tissues which are not so different from gossamer when one has the right tool and sufficient force. Her hand clenches once she’s found the hardness of spine, squeezing until the elegance of cervical curve yields. A small crack as vertebrae crumble between her fingers. Overhead the lights flicker, on and on. Power still works for now, auxiliary generators filling in to keep up the life support: gravity, air, temperature—all the essential necessities for a human body. This will not last for much longer. Anoushka has destroyed the batteries and the majority of the connective couplings that make the system whole. The virus she’s seeded in the station’s matrices will, by now, have completed its work.

No klaxons bare and no alerts shriek through the fractal-flower corridors. When she breached the station, she did so swiftly and exactly, and only those in this chamber were aware of her presence: too late for alarms. Not that there’s any point, now.

“Does easy victory ever bore you, Admiral?”

The speaker is five meters from her, standing in a spot that until now was empty: Anoushka was absolutely certain that she was alone, the dead notwithstanding. But this creature has a way of appearing where xe should not be, in places that should be impossible for xer to infiltrate. Especially in this body. She looks into the face of Krissana Khongtip, once one of her spies, a fine operative back in the day. Now something else, a haruspex—a composite of human and AI sharing a single body. At the moment the latter is in control, the intelligence that calls xerself Benzaiten in Autumn.

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