He is the leader of one of the first few multi-form squads, meaning teams that consist of more than one kind of animal/bioform. He combines canine senses with sentience, human DNA and then also got cybernetically integrated weapons systems. This book, then, is about Rex, a dog-like bioform engineered for war. It is also clear that the author doesn't consider animals to be 'just animals' but sees them on the same level as humans if not even one above. Only recently I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and it is clear from these two books that the author has a wonderful sense of bringing the thoughts and feelings of animals (sorry, bioforms) to life.

If you like: Murderbot, Worm, Max Gladstone, give this a shot.I finished this late last night (has been a while since I stayed up so late to finish a book) but had to seriously ponder how to write this review.

I usually don't care for sentiment but the fact that it's a dog - Tchaikovsky knows exactly what he's doing. It's a well-explored idea to sink back into and I can't claim it says anything new there - but it has a fun cast of characters and made me cry while saying it, so dammit, I've got to recommend it. But pared down, at its heart Dogs of War is about what it means to be a person and what it means to be a slave. The science fiction aspects are required for the story to work - I mean, without the crocodilian sniper known as Dragon and the distributed AI network of Bees, you hardly have the same story. And that means committing wartime atrocities.

He's the leader, and the chip in his brain tells him Good Dog or Bad Dog. Rex is a cross between a dog and much else, but I pretty much pictured him as a dog in a mech with guns (this is, as it turns out, inaccurate). Humans tried robots, and the robots didn't work out so their next war machines were hybrids, flesh and blood with implants and genetic engineering. The characters are convincingly other-than-human but clearly conscious and deserving. The style of the prose is neither overwrought nor sparse but where it really shines is the dialogue. Then this book was recommended to me and damn does it make some deep cuts. Rampant misogyny in the year 3142, anyone?) and aliens being reskinned humans, about how I saw scifi more as a reflection of the time period when it was written than a look through a scope into a potential future. Not two days ago I was complaining about scifi never being weird enough, about humans just being human no matter what their setting (particularly in older scifi - where the dated human views are particularly noticeable. While the conceit of cyborgs, robots, consciousness debates and the rights of non-humans has all been done to death before, Dogs of War does it so well that I don't even care.

No spoilers (barring the first like two pages and the blurb of the book).

Dogs of war adrian