From the ingenious author of Jennifer Government and Lexicon: a brilliant work of science fiction that tells the intimate tale of four people facing their most desperate hour--alone, together, at the edge of the universe. The video changed everything. Before that, we could believe that we were safe. Special. Chosen. We thought the universe was a twinkling ocean of opportunity, waiting to be explored. Afterward, we knew better. Seven years after first contact, Providence Five launches. It is an enormous and deadly warship, built to protect humanity from its greatest ever threat. On board is a crew of just four--tasked with monitoring the ship and reporting the war's progress to a mesmerized global audience by way of social media. But while pursuing the enemy across space, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson confront the unthinkable: their communications are cut, their ship decreasingly trustworthy and effective. To survive, they must win a fight that is suddenly and terrifyingly real.

Providence is a frustrating novel. On one hand, the core conceit is incredible. Barry imagines what a relationship between humans and advanced AI would be in a clear and powerful setting: four essentially useless human monitors on a massive AI driven spaceship. The novel shines precisely because the AI is unknowable, and the humans can only guess at why it does anything. Barry pulls very elegant plot twists out, causing us to doubt the AI and then question its intentions in a great set of character studies of how people fall apart when they are bored and useless. There is a simple beautiful set piece of the AI fighting battles against aliens while the reader watches from the perspective of the human crew, who see absolutely nothing but the AI readouts of what's happening. But then at about two-thirds of the way through the book, Barry decides to turn the story into an action movie with talking aliens and laser fights, and it's just straight up dumb. None of the action is outright badly written or offensive in itself, but what was shaping up to be an amazingly dread-inducing story about the incomprehensibility of technology we rely on just wipes out into standard cheesy sci-fi fare. As I said, it's frustrating. You can see the novel Barry could have written, and that novel is brilliant. Instead, what we have is a really good setup that loses its way completely. Someone else is going to have to write the great novel of the horror of overly complex technology, we guess. If you have a good tolerance for standard sci-fi tropes, it's worth checking the novel out for the first parts, but if you don't, stay away because the ending will destroy any good will you had from the premise.