The Sherlock Chronicles & The Paradise Quartet — Edward M. Lerner

Two great adventures in one volume:In The Sherlock Chronicles, AI meets PI...A mile a minute? Nonsense. Even a meat brain knows mind going a mile a minute is mere metaphor. For a quantum mind, a light-second per minute would be nearer to apt, if sadly sans alliteration. Ordinarily, I have my metaphorical fingers in hundreds, even thousands, of figurative pies. Any less stimulation than that is boring, and boredom is the bane of a q-mind's existence.That events in the real world often strike humans as inexplicable is hardly surprising. Meat brains have limits. And so, when an opportunity presented itself, I thought: why not lend a virtual hand? Every moment of diversion was welcome, and this case, surely, a harmless amusement.Thus began my detective phase. Only I couldn't have been more wrong about harmless...And if an AI PI isn't intriguing enough, there's also The Paradise Quartet:A triumph of ingenuity and sheer willpower has delivered a dying generation ship to the exoplanet Paradise. Too bad the ingenious biotech the colonists deployed to settle on that planet triggered an inexorable devolutionary cycle.Thousands of years later, possible rescuers arrive-and are themselves ensnared in the manmade trap that is Paradise. Escape will require new ingenuity and more multi-generational striving...an author you definitely need to check out.-Asimov's Science FictionEdward M. Lerner ... is one of the best kept secrets in SF.-Tangent OnlineWhen people talk about good hard SF-rigorously extrapolated but still imbued with the classic sense-of-wonder-they mean the work of Edward M. Lerner, the current master of the craft.- Robert J. Sawyer, multi-Hugo Award-winning authorOne of the leading global writers of hard science fiction.-The Innovation ShowLerner's world-building and extrapolating are top notch.-SFScope