Review: Ode to the Half-Broken, by Suzanne Palmer
| Publisher: |
DAW |
| Copyright: |
May 2026 |
| ISBN: |
0-7564-2013-X |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
441 |
Ode to the Half-Broken is a standalone post-apocalyptic (sort of)
science fiction novel.
As this novel opens, the unnamed first-person protagonist is waking up in
a bathtub in an abandoned building. They are covered in electromagnets and
missing one leg.
Waking up involved a secure reboot from a protected core kernel, so it is
immediately obvious that the protagonist is a robot. That also explains
the electromagnets, which interfere with their ability to control their
body. Or they would, if the protagonist didn't have long-dormant combat
routines available to deploy EM shielding and free themselves from the
bathtub. There are no immediate answers to why someone embedded a virus in
the data attached to a scientific paper on ants, an act so precisely
targeted that it had to be personal. Or what happened to their leg.
"There are a number of electromagnets in the next room," I say. I
point. "Behind that wall with all the holes in it."
"Those are big holes. And fresh, too," the dog says. "I wonder what
made them."
"Electromagnets experiencing sudden velocity."
The dog gives another of its short barks, and I am more convinced now
it is laughing, though I was not attempting to be funny.
Ode to the Half-Broken has a classic science fiction beginning:
in medias res in a future science fiction version of Earth where
nothing is immediately explained, leaving the reader to work out the date
and the setting. Helping us out is the protagonist, who is neither chatty
nor very sociable with other characters but keeps up an analytical
monologue about the world as they narrate events.
We are some decades into a grim future. The United States has largely
collapsed. Large parts of New York City are dangerous to humans due to
disease and radiation. Neither of those hazards bother the large number of
sentient robots; their scarcity, and therefore economy, is instead based
on power. Robots that control solar power stations act as low-level mob
bosses, trading power for information or labor.
Our protagonist doesn't want to care about any of this. They retreated
from the world long ago for a solitary life in the former New York
Botanical Gardens studying ants. But they need a new leg and the best
robot repair person nearby is a human woman outside of the city, so they
reluctantly head in that direction, accompanied somewhat surprisingly by a
cyborg dog.
The typical science fiction apocalypse is caused by something specific.
Classically, that event is a nuclear war, but writers found various
alternatives before, during, and after the Cold War era:
alien invasions,
meteor
showers, plagues,
sea level rise, and peak oil and general environmental collapse, among many others. Less
common is a post-apocalyptic novel where the collapse comes from multiple
overlapping crises and accumulating failures, from a general failure to
meet what Adam Tooze and others call
polycrisis. The first
time I encountered that style of post-apocalyptic story was in Octavia
Butler's Parable of the Sower. It was
one of the choices that made (and still makes) that book feel so
chillingly realistic.
The world background in Ode to the Half-Broken is shaped by that
sort of polycrisis collapse. There is no one reason why New York City is a
dangerous, irradiated ruin and society has collapsed into isolated and
sometimes warring factions. It is not runaway artificial intelligence, or
at least not directly; sentient robots were a late-stage innovation of the
collapsing US civilization and a tool and accelerator of its many wars,
but they were not the cause and may be a critical ingredient in building
some functional replacement. Instead, society fell apart because we failed
to address any of the growing problems and then turned on each other in
the resulting ruins. The reader gets an idiosyncratic view of that
collapse in flashback chapters intermixed with the main narrative of the
initially unnamed robot protagonist, flashbacks told from the perspective
of the man who invented the key component for robot sentience. As you
would expect, those two narratives are linked. The reader will not
discover how they are linked until late in the story.
This book could have been extremely depressing. It is not, which says a
great deal about Palmer's skill in telling it. The clinical distance of
the protagonist in the early chapters helps considerably: They have
rejected involvement in this world and therefore can describe it in
detached, factual terms, aided by the tendency of most robots in this
story to be slightly more precise, logical, and verbose than the human
characters. But as the protagonist's clinical distance fades, as it must
to allow the story's emotional stakes to rise, Palmer fills this book with
moments of beauty and hope. A former nuclear submarine that has become the
mind of a subway car is a key early ally. A collective has turned the
Hudson Bridge into a thriving if chaotic community. Self-regulating
enclaves of humans and robots are working together to try to build a
livable world. Robots oversee pollinator swarms that are attempting to
restore plant life, for no reason other than that they like order and
stability and see this as a way of restoring both. This is a grim,
post-apocalyptic world that does not dwell on either the grimness or the
apocalypse. It is instead full of small moments of hope, collaboration,
and personal connection.
This is a story with villains, danger, pain, and risk. Despite the similar
keywords and cover aesthetics, it bears little resemblance to Becky
Chambers's philosophical Monk and Robot series.
It is not, in any definition of the term, cozy; it's a post-apocalyptic
adventure story about a robot and a dog making their way through a ruined
civilization and fighting people who are trying to build something even
worse on the rubble. But it's also charming and oddly happy. There are
strong found-family vibes in the way that a party coalesces around the
protagonist and eventually gives them a name, there is the quiet happiness
of seeing a grumpy misanthrope slowly come out of their protective shell,
and the rail mechs are an absolute delight.
Like a lot of stories of happy small-group anarchism, I didn't entirely
believe the politics and have some qualms about the realism of the ending,
although perhaps I should strive to be as optimistic as Palmer writes. The
somewhat dry and fussily precise first-person narration will also not be
to everyone's taste; it worked for me by the end of the book, but it took
a bit of reading to get used to it. But those quibbles aside, this was
quietly lovely. It's a satisfying science fiction adventure story in a
world with disturbing parallels to the one we're living in, but which uses
those parallels to focus on small-scale collective efforts to build
something better. And all the small details of the world-building are
delightful: the different tiers of robots and their odd behaviors, the
machine sense of purpose, even the mix of suspicion and generosity. The
plot has large-scale implications, but it was the human-level details that
charmed me.
I still want another Fergus novel, but this was
a highly successful foray outside of that series. Palmer has won two Hugos
for her novellas, so I can't really say she's overlooked, but her novels
aren't getting anywhere near the attention they deserve. Highly
recommended.
There is plenty of world-building room here for a sequel, but Ode to
the Half-Broken reaches a satisfying standalone conclusion. So far as I
know, no sequel is currently planned.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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