A review I wrote of Paul Cornell's novella Rosebud is currently up at Strange Horizons.
This book is a surreal story about five characters residing within a space-craft called the Rosebud, all of whom possess an eclectic set of unique backgrounds and personalities. The main plot of the story unfolds when this crew discover an apparently inert alien vessel drifting in Saturn's rings, and in the process of attempting to make first contact with this entity, are forced to confront the true nature of the corporate dystopia in which they live. An excerpt from my review is below:
The plot of Rosebud follows a group of five partially artificial digitized intelligences residing within the computer of the titular Rosebud—a one millimeter wide space craft harvesting dust from Saturn's rings. Working on behalf of a totalitarian corporation called the Solar Company, the main character of Rosebud is Haunt, an artificial intelligence originally created as a non-player character in a now long-forgotten video game. Along with Haunt, the simulated spaces of the Rosebud’s memory are also populated by Diana, a formerly human woman described as “some sort of science aristocrat,” a cybernetic hive mind called Quin who represents themselves via the digital avatar of a swarm of insects, a being called "Huge if True" who takes the form of (bizarrely) a giant ball of human hands, and a sentient party balloon named Bob who has a habit of making offensively derogatory comments about his fellow crew-mates at regularly scheduled intervals.
Overall I felt that Rosebud was a complex and intensely creative story. I did wish that the book had done more with tying together the backstories of each of its protagonists--specifically linking together the centuries worth of memories which all the characters hold regarding the forces driving the creation of the corporate dystopian future which this novella portrays. At the same time, Rosebud takes on some pretty weighty themes even despite its brief length, and thematically Cornell has quite a lot going on in the story as is.
The complete review which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be found here.