Tool of War

Tool of War is a science fiction novel by Paolo Bacigalupi, published in 2017 and the third book of a sequence that began with Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. Its central character, Tool, is a creature designed for combat who is half man and half beast.

What his creators intended for him and what he has become are two different things. He has left the pack of bioengineered augments he belonged to and has come out of that break as the leader of a pack of human soldier boys, which is not a role that anybody designed him for.

He is also being hunted by somebody who is determined to destroy him, and that person knows something alarming about Tool that Tool may not know himself. Obedience was the property his makers relied on, and the novel is concerned with what is left of a creature when that property has been given up.

The book is about a creature made for obedience who has become something else, and about the people who still believe he can be returned to service. Tool's own judgement is what the story turns on.