SAABRINA: TANGLEWOOD

The road gets rocky for an agent of the United Star Systems when his partner, an AI marvel shaped like a Saab car, faces reprogramming in Cohen’s SF novel.

Widowed New Jersey dad Bob Foxen was rescued from his dull routine as a middle-aged corporate drone when he accepted a position as a “sentinel” (who serve as “police, diplomats, intelligence and counter-intelligence agents, commercial regulation enforcement, tax collectors, stewards of intellectual property, and, very occasionally, the military”) for the benevolent, extraterrestrial United Star Systems. Bob oversees Earth and goes on missions for the USS in partnership with a shape-shifting robot/spaceship whose base-model appearance is that of a snazzy black Saab automobile. Saabrina has a female-personality AI and is especially friendly with Bob and inquisitive about human emotions. The USS sends the pair to discover who is visiting pre-spacefaring planets, which are officially off-limits to premature alien contact. In scenes reminiscent of Star Trek, the duo search for violators in such novel locations as a Teutonically themed world in which military evolution was deliberately halted at the Napoleonic musket-and–horse-cavalry era to forestall high-tech mass destruction. Meanwhile, a conservative politician in the USS gleans Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics from Earth’s SF literature—codifying intelligent machine-life as slavishly subservient to biological beings—and desires to impose these strictures on Saabrina and her sisters, who are opposed to losing their auto-autonomy. The author continues his SF series (which began with 2015’s Saabrina)with this sequel set four years later, a cosmic joyride through episodic peril, domestic dramedy, the unlikely romantic tension between Bob and Saabrina, and plenty of in-joke references to other SF properties—including Star Trek, Doctor Who, Japanese anime, and more. As with the first installment in the series, straightforward storytelling, good dialogue, and smart characters prevent the dubious-sounding premise from become too cartoonish.

This outlandish tale of a space-hero average dad paired with a feminine robot/car/spaceship consistently takes the high road.