Product Description

Charon was the most ruthless—and brilliant—criminal of the twenty-first century, a practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. He is dead now, and General Thomas Wharington believes his team of experts has deleted all the electronic copies the megalomaniacal inventor created of himself. However, one major problem remains: Alpha,

the only android survivor of Charon's cybernetic empire. Outwardly indistinguishable from a human woman, Alpha has superhuman strength and speed, and perhaps even more deadly capabilities still unknown. Thomas's superiors want her dismantled and studied, but to Thomas it feels like murder. He stalls for time, a move that could prove disastrous. Alpha escapes from an escape-proof compound, kidnaps Thomas, and takes him to one of Charon's hidden installations. Charon might be dead, but Alpha continues to carry out her late master's orders, and she refuses to elaborate on what those orders entail. Her behavior is becoming more human—or so it seems. Is she developing emotions and a conscience, or is she just learning to counterfeit them as a means of carrying out her enigmatic orders? And do those orders include Thomas's death sentence?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #922422 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416555124
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
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." (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
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. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Catherine Asaro has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard. She has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and now teaches at the Caryl Maxwell Classical Ballet. She has written fourteen novels in the popular Skolian Saga, the latest being Schism (Tor, 2004) as well as two near-future technothrillers, The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code. She currently runs Molecudyne Research and lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Good mix of science fiction and romance
Alpha is a well written romance between a dangerous 'female' android and the man trying to pry secrets from her. It is set in a future close enough to now to be recognizable, but distant enough that some artificial intelligences have developed to the point where they are at or above human intelligence level, while still remaining non-human. This is a recent enough development that governments and societies are still groping for ways to cope with it.

The story is well-plotted, with characters I cared about, plenty of action, a believable relationship at its core, and quite a few loose ends that probably imply that there will be more books in this universe.

Alpha is a sequel, and the author certain leaves room for additional stories, but it stands well on its own.

Riveting thriller.
Charon was a ruthless criminal who created and traded in illegal robots and androids so his death benefits the world - unfortunately his android Alpha survives to bring his legacy to the world. Alpha is indistinguishable from a human woman but has superpowers - and General Thomas finds her as intriguing as she is dangerous. For she is carrying out her last orders from her maker - and Thomas finds her too human to kill. An intriguing story of robots, androids, and a touch of love evolves.

No Android
I didn't adhere to that story. First, General Wharington quite often behaves like a woman would do, I mean not as a military man should do. Then, there is absolutely nothing seductive or alluring in him and you just wonder how anyone can be attracted to such a guy. To me, he's just pitiful. Secondly, Alpha is indistinguishable from a human being. For example, she's not consistent as a programmed machine should be, she's as irrational or contradictory as all human beings are. Then, the story would be identical if the General was a kind of master and Alpha an escaped slave.

Let alone the capacities of self-defense and survival an old man (the General) afflicted with cardiac arrests and plagued by a broken leg! Quite ridiculous, indeed.

Though the ending was crystal clear I read the book through. In my opinion, a female writer has often problems in writing that kind of hard SciFi story. In this way, CA is similar to Elisabeth Moon. They both tell unbelievable and at times silly stories. Lois MacMaster Bujold makes a much better work at it.