A BONE TO PICK

In Gephardt’s SF novel, a pack of genetically enhanced, intelligent police dogs investigate sabotage on their adopted space station.

The author here continues the SF trilogy launched with What’s Bred in the Bone (2019). In the future, humankind has taken to the stars in the “Human Diaspora.” The most powerful colony-empire, the Transmondians, has developed—among other weapon and surveillance technologies—the “XK9,” a genetically modified police dog with superior size, intellect, and, via an electronic translator/vocalizer, the ability to speak. Still, the profiteering Transmondians considered them mere property, law-enforcement tools, when 10 XK9s were sold to the large, autonomous space-station called Rana. Charlie Morgan, a police detective, partners with XK9 leader Rex (full name: Rex Dieter-Nell). The two even share neuro-linked thoughts, and they earn celebrity when the progressive Ranans grant the XK9 pack full legal rights and recognition as sentient beings. The situation is fraught as this sequel begins: The dogs, especially Rex, were abused in the brutal Transmondian equivalent of boot camp, and Charlie lies mangled in a clinic after saving a number of people in a spaceship breach that was no accident. Rex must protect his pack (including his mate Shady) as vengeful secret agents of the Transmondians infiltrate Rana. Charlie, meanwhile, recovers via radical technological regeneration and augmentation, which reshapes him into a “semi-SuperCop” dogged by emotional side-effects. Two previous women in his life have deserted him; will Charlie do better with Hildie, the exotic nurse who has been attracted to him for years? (“The old magic was still there. Still there, and stronger than ever.”) The initially unpromising premise of talking-dog-cops-of-tomorrow is redeemed by the author taking the material seriously. No poochie-cute comedy or proud-pet-owner or furry-fetish stuff here—just solid SF police drama (even if the mystery aspect is cursory) with an emphasis on workplace relationships, jurisdictional conflicts, emotional bonds, and various feuds. (A number of these cops happen to be not human, that’s all.) Gephardt engagingly conveys the four-footed perspective of minds and routines shaped by scent communication, pack mentality and predator-pursuit instinct, intriguingly suggesting that the spacefaring human cultures have shaped their own societies into structures not unlike dog packs.

Anthropomorphized canine-centric SF, not as whimsical as it initially seems—this dog hunts.