Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

if you are seriously considering purchasing and reading this book, check out the positive reviews and compare them to the negative reviews. I wish I had looked at these with a much more critical eye before purchasing this book, as it seems that hardly any of the positive reviews mention specifics about the content of the book which makes me doubt that many of them have actually read it. I was honestly surprised that the gender issues came to the forefront, because after reading all of the reviews and descriptions on the front page there was NO mention of this being an exploration of gender/sexual issues. A well-written, mature handling of that sort of subject matter in a sci-fi setting would have been thought-provoking and interesting. This book is not well-written, mature, or thought-provoking. Where do I even start with this book? I got about 2/3rds of the way through this book before it reached a point of unbelievability that bordered on the ridiculous. At no point is AI discussed in a meaningful way - it seems as if this is simply a story exploring sexuality and gender issues that is given a sci-fi veneer. The only identity the characters in the book seem to possess is a sexual one. There doesn't really seem to be much character development happening here - the protagonist has some sort of belief against corporations creating medicine, but no clear reason she feels so strongly for this. The antagonists consist of a robot and a generic "cia agent" style badass guy, neither of which went through any sort of significant character development throughout the first 2/3rds of the book. The overall world is broken down into two distinct factions "the pharma corporations" and the "freelancers/pirates". There is not much moral gray area in the nuance between these two factions, with the corporations being portrayed as evil and the freelancers being portrayed as good. This worked for Star Wars because that was a lot of cool action sequences throughout the movies, in this book there are a few of these, but they are not very well written. A more nuanced discussion of why people were fighting and what each side was striving towards would have made this book much more interesting. Writing sexual scenes in books is incredibly difficult to pull off, and the scenes in this book completely derail any sort of interest I had in the novel. The "romance" between the robot and their partner was confusing and unrealistic. For no apparently reason the robot's partner feels sexual attraction to something that basically consists of a talking, walking refrigerator with wings and guns inside of it. As soon as he finds out it has a female brain inside of it, he has sex with it. The main character also has sex with several other characters in the book and it doesn't really add anything to the story and seemed gratuitous. This is a spoiler>>> The part that caused me to stop reading the book was when the robot has "sex" with her partner for the first time. In a confusing turn of events, as soon as the robot mentions it has a female brain inside of it, her male partner has sex with it. The entire narration was very confusing because this is a large robot that apparently is made of some kind of metal and there is no clear reason for the man in the situation to be sexually attracted to it. The worst part came when they start discussing if the robot can have an orgasm and the robot simply replies something along the lines of "oh hey I have this program that simulates an orgasm that I can run!" and her partner then asks "can I watch you run the program?". I have suspended my disbelief to believe a lot of insane things in numerous sci-fi and fantasy novels, but this one was a bridge too far.