This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill. The book is available from Amazon (and, as of this writing, on sale for $0.99).

Blurb

“Don’t mistake my silence for weakness. No one plans a murder out loud.”

Veteran Marine Mint only worries about one thing—herself. But after being ordered back to the front lines, she has a decision to make—stand up and do the right thing, or finally get what she always wanted.

Fifteen-year-old Frida lives in deep space on a pirate vessel. Her father is a dissident warrior who fights the corporations running the system. When a corporation battle cruiser catches up to the ageing pirate vessel, death appears to be the only escape.

A gripping tale of war, survival, and corporate exploitation in the depths of space. Filled with bone-crunching action and unexpected twists, ‘Cold Blooded’ will keep you on the edge of your seat until the bloody end. Melding the best of ‘The Expanse’ style deep-space battles and corporate greed with the class struggle of ‘Red Rising’, fans will love this riveting sci-fi adventure. Grab your copy now.

My Review

This is a lean, action-packed military sci-fi book with bigger-than-life characters who jump off the page. Plenty of action, mayhem, gore, and surprises throughout. A space marine story with plenty of battlesuit combat, there’s also a goodly chunk of politics and worldbuilding as well.

Plot and Characters

There are two main POV characters with a bunch of others who get varying amounts of play. The main one is a grizzled, sarcastic space marine, Mint, who’s a long way past believing in anything. She’s my favorite, and definitely the most realistic and the most nuanced. The other main POV character is almost more of a superhuman comic-book hero guy, although he has a little more internal complexity at first. By the end, he’s mostly just muscles, without as much introspection, although with ever more ass-kicking. We also spend some time with Bjorn’s daughter, Frida, is another interesting take, an enigma of sorts, but also by far the easiest character to cheer for – headstrong, capable, caring, and fun.

I found most of the characters painted in bright colors, many of them with extreme quirks or big personalities. There are precious few normal folks in the Cold, which gives the book a comic-book or anime feel at times. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does strain credulity a little bit to have everybody live their emotions this large and loud and have such extreme proclivities and personalities. I suspect your response to this book will hinge on your comfort with this part of how it is written.

My Thoughts

If you’re looking for a gritty, action-packed, often hyperviolent and gory joyride through a chaotic future replete with mech suit combat, evil corps, and shadowy figures (and really, who isn’t?) you’ll find it here. The book does have some quiet moments, and they’re well-written and fun and sometimes even really moving, but the point here is humans riding tons of metal screaming across the outer solar system and blowing each other to bits.

The book is novella length, so easily digestible, and there is another book in the series and I think another one on the way. There’s enough world-building to give you a framework for the action, although not all of it seems realistic, especially the bloody televised contests between armed mechs sponsored by corporations who have a sporting-event-like battle to take over new asteroids that enter the allowed mining zones. But the point of that setup is to allow there to be cool battles, so you have to spot the author that bit of setup – a book with fierce space marines will always win out over a book with mild space real estate contract attorneys.

The main character, Mint, is really well done and far less cartoony (again, not in a bad way) than Bjorn and the ancillary characters. You feel the weight of her trauma, her situation, her frustrations, and her bad decisions, and she’s relatable as she tries to adapt to bad situations turning worse. She has a moral core, but it’s a flexible, patchy one, and she’ll often do things that surprise you. Other than a bit of a cheat at the close of the first chapter, I found her sections uniformly the strongest of the book, and I cared about her and what she was going through. Likewise, Frida had similar depth and evoked a similar response, although we got to spend less time with her.

I enjoyed my time with the book, and while I personally would have preferred a different direction with the plot than the book took towards the end, one that allowed the delicious tension and uncertainty of the second half to continue, it’s not my book, and I can understand the narrative choices O’Duill made.

One special note – the tactics in the battles (both mech suit and hand-to-hand) were fun, and that always gets me going – I love understanding what people are up against in the moment, what they’re thinking, and why they’re trying the strategies they choose. I really think this is one where if you like the genre (and I do) you’ll like the book, because it’s doing the genre well, but if you’re not a fan of the genre, you might struggle a little. Also, if you get squeamish, the book moves deeper and deeper into gore as it goes, so be warned.

Summation

This is a strong entry in its genre, complete with cool jargon, big heroes, well-paced action and fights, and a big heart. It seems from O’Duill’s recent social posts that the book is doing well, and I’m glad to hear it. I enjoyed my time in the Cold, and I’m glad I got to meet the funky bunch of heroes and villains who live there.

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Time Traitors by Eli Donovan. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Jurassic Park meets Romancing the Stone

Dr. Grace Carson is one of the lucky few scientists cleared for time travel. Years ago, her husband nearly destroyed her career by poaching dinosaurs. Grace turned him in, divorced the deadbeat, and two years later she’s ready to return to the work she loves: studying dinosaurs in their natural habitat. She has no interest in the new time agent, Ben Nakamura, assigned to her research station. No matter how charming or clever he is.

Unfortunately, her team isn’t alone. Poachers are trapping dinosaurs for the black market again. Another scandal like this could kill her research if it comes out, and Grace’s boss wants her to look the other way until the thieves are gone. But Grace can’t bring herself to let the criminals get away.

When the poachers discover Grace’s plans to blow the whistle, they attack her research station. Nakamura and Grace flee into the forest with her time machine, but it’s broken in the process. Nakamura knows a secret cache where they can hopefully fix the time machine, but it means a perilous trek through the wilderness.

Braving prehistoric dangers together shows Grace she can trust Nakamura with her life, but she’s still not sure she can ever trust him with her heart.

My Review

This is a fun romp, full of romance, time travel, action, betrayal, secrets, quickening heartbeats, and even some kissing. You don’t have to work very hard to get me interested in a humans-in-the-Campanian story, and this delivered on the premise and played really well with the concept and the space it provides.

Plot and Characters

There are two POV characters who mostly alternate between chapters but sometimes alternate within chapters. One is Grace, a paleontologist (and technically field biologist, which paleontologists usually don’t get the chance to be), who’s working herself back from a previous betrayal and disgrace to get to run a second research mission into the Late Cretaceous. Her disgrace was at the hands of her (now ex) husband, who went with her on the time travel research trip and ended up poaching materials and dinosaurs to sell to shadowy present-day figures, something expressly forbidden by the Time Guard, a law enforcement agency who controls time travel with a less tight fist than it first appears.

The second POV character is Julia, another paleontologist, but she’s turned poacher, helping a team of baddies operating in the same timeframe as the research group. It’s Mesozoic madness! There was a detail with Julia I should have picked up on much, much sooner than I did, i.e. before it was revealed, and I may have to turn in my plot perception card now in shame.

The research team comes with a gaggle of scientists and Time Guards, and the baddies come with a gaggle of thugs and criminals, so there’s a big cast of time travelers to keep track of. The plot centers around these two groups operating independently and at cross purposes, eventually moving more and more into each others’ spaces. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s a satisfying story with the two perspectives and the different motivations and conflicts pulled off well.

My Thoughts

So, this book is about a lot of things, and it does almost all of them well. For example, this is a book about paleontology and field research, and it nails the species names, the concerns that scientists might have in this weird situation, the wonder they would feel at having this unique opportunity, and the nuts and bolts of research. It’s really remarkable for a book like this to be this good with that stuff, and I applaud Donovan for what must have been a lot of research and a commitment to portraying made-up impossible research in as realistic a way as possible, complete with imagining how technological shortcomings in the distant past might impact research methods.

This is also a book about time travel, and it handles that really well too, and with increasing complexity as the book goes on. With any such book, you need to have a method to violate the laws of the universe, and here we have “time tubes,” which have limitations but are wisely not explained much – they’re the magic you need to make the book work, and that’s fine. The political structure that’s grown up around managing time travel is interesting and seems realistic, and the attitudes toward paradox and changing the past seem reasonable. The story discusses paradox early on and plays with it more as it goes on, as any time travel story absolutely should, and it’s done in a satisfying way, making a fun set of choices as to how the rules might apply. I particularly like the idea that time and destiny have momentum, and that it’s hard to alter the history we’ve come to know. The concern about leaving behind artifacts and bodies seemed maybe a little over-the-top at times, since such things have almost no chance of surviving in identifiable form to the present day, and since such concerns seemed to be ignored by the Time Guard itself at times, leaving shuttered research stations around to decay, but that was a minor quibble.

This is also an action story, including some elements of horror (the big-animal-wants-to-eat-us kind) and some of sci-fi shoot-em-up. Once we shift more into action mode, it’s very exciting, and the challenges keep coming for both groups we’re following in unpredictable and harrowing ways. The one thing I’ll say here is that there are some head-scratcher decisions that I had a hard time accepting, such as the semi-complacency of one group upon learning there was a traitor in their group, which was explored but then kind of stalled out, leading to an entirely predictable outcome. The attempts to throw suspicion around to different parties seemed a little too much to me, too, and I found myself thinking, well, it can’t be that person because they’re pointing too hard at them. There was also one groaner moment for me when one party incapacitated a guy who’d been hell-bent on murdering them, including stating his homicidal intentions and acting on them convincingly, and then the aforementioned party DIDN’T SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD or even tie him up. I hate that, as does Scott from Austin Powers.

The stupid impetuousness of some parties also seemed a little forced, and it often caused predictable bad results. I can’t speak to poacher rings, but I have to think that, just like with high-stakes space missions, Antarctic research, and other small-group scientific work, that there’d be a good deal of psychological profiling to avoid having conflict-laden hotheads join the scientific team. You also don’t meet your grad students for the first time in the Campanian – you recruit them and you work with them for a while before you take them on a huge undertaking like this. But those are nitpicks.

This is also a romance, although that’s only one of the book’s many flavors. I don’t read a ton of romance, although I’ve now written one with a friend (see Best,), so I may not be the audience for or the most knowledgeable reviewer about such things. The longing and the lust-slash-romance elements here work and seem to hit the beats and tropes that such stories demand, and you feel for the people going through it and cheer for them as they go. The primary romance on the science side is particularly satisfying and interesting because of its connection to time travel. One thing I tend to find a little frustrating in romance novels is that characters tend to go around in a high emotional state all the time, triggered by all kinds of stimuli, which leads to lots of conflict, bickering, impetuousness, yelling, and swooning, which sometimes seems unrealistic to me, who lives life with the emotion dial set much lower. Nothing wrong with that, though, and who am I to question a $1.4 billion romance novel industry?

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

Sorry to have to issue a IPW for the second straight review, but my tendency toward pedantry cannot be denied, and this is the second book in a row that’s at least partly about paleontology, which I’ve taught many times in my geology professor career. Although the paleontology portrayed was pretty darn good, I did take issue with one aspect of of it. That was that the paleontologists had a family-level and often genus-level name ready for every dinosaur they found, almost all of them matching dinosaurs that are currently known from the fossil record. However, the fossil record is super-duper incomplete, because fossilization after death and survival of the fossils for 70 million years is unlikely as hell. Some estimates suggest we only know of maybe 5% of dinosaur genera from the fossil record, while other estimates are higher, but none I’ve seen more than maybe 25% or 30%. That means that even the absolute best paleontologist who knew everything there was to know would be completely surprised by anywhere by 70% to 95% of the species they see around the Campanian, and that would even higher for fragile or rare organisms that don’t make it into the fossil record, like forest dwellers. Therefore, there should have been many more “wow, I have no idea what that thing is, but it’s very neat” moments than there were, and in fact a good deal more of those moments than there were proper identifications. You could explain some of this away by them having visited the past before and identified some of the newbies (although then the taxonomic names would generally then be new rather than ones we currently know in the real world). But the various dinosaur spottings also allow our favorites to have cameos in the story, and that’s definitely a noble cause.

OK, rant over. Sorry.☺

Summation

This is a fun book, one that feels lighter weight at first but which still has a lot of complexity, both human and sci-fi, and explores that with gusto and with thoughtfulness. Definitely worthy of a semifinal spot, and we’ll see how it does making it into the finals – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the final ten. I enjoyed my time with it, and if you’re up for some mildly spicy dinosaur scientist action/romance (and who isn’t?) this is a great choice.

This is my first review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is ab initio by Jacob Terracina. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Raza Mugabi, a biologist turned software engineer, is not sure why this particular tech startup hired him. His track record is far from stellar. In fact, he’s not certain what the company ultimately even does. Sometimes it’s better to keep your head down and your mouth shut, he figures. At least, until his curiosity gets the better of him.

Eight years later, Raza finds himself as a defendant and key technical witness in a high-profile court case. A world-class prosecutor and a woefully inexperienced defense attorney go head-to-head against each other, their clients, and their consciences in an effort to answer the question on everyone’s mind:
Is the startup’s invention, legally speaking, human?

The arguments leap between the technical, political, ethical, and philosophical consequences of the decision, and as the trial progresses, the many, many secrets of the startup are laid bare in this hilarious cross-genre thrill-ride.

My Review

This is a great, great book, all the more impressive as a debut novel. At its heart is a common trope in sci fi, the personhood of artificial beings, but the book soars far, far beyond that foundation, with courtroom drama, an interesting back-and-forth narrative structure, imaginative tech, a future semi-dystopian society, and the best part by far, a bunch of richly imagined and delightful characters.

Plot and Characters

The book centers around a company, jinwha (lower-case j sic) that has found a unique way to develop an artificial human brain, through a recapitulation of the evolution of humans on Earth. I’m talking a full recapitulation, too, from the earliest single-celled organisms to modern humans. The plot has two threads that it swaps between as the story unfolds. One thread is a present-day courtroom showdown between a prosecutor backed by a shadowy luddite non-profit who is pushing to categorize this new kind of parahuman as artificial, not deserving of any rights or protections. On the other side is a legendary Icelandic defense attorney and his adopted daughter and partner, working to defend jinwha and its creation, and to establish a precedent that this particular kind of artificial human is deserving of the rights and protections of law and of personhood.

The second thread is a series of progressive flashbacks, showing Raza, a biologist turned coder, from his very first days at jinwha through his deeper engagement with the project as it proceeds. Raza’s jangling, perceptive, funny, neurospicy voice is a delight – at times, he is a genius, at other times, a fool, and his passion for the work despite barely hanging on most of the time gives the book a richness and a tension I’ve seldom seen anywhere.

We see the story through three main characters. Each is different, deep, and well-drawn, with a unique voice and perspective, and each is a delight. I’ve already mentioned Raza, from whose perspective we see nearly all of the flashback plot, although there are occasional forays into other very cool characters’ heads. The other two are Javinta Puri, the prosecuting attorney, who is ice cold and professional but also aware that there’s more going on in the case than there seems at first glance, and Sovhi Egilsdottir, who is there to assist her brilliant foster parent but who ends up taking on far more of the defense than intended.

My Thoughts

What a ride. In a book that alternates plotlines, you run the risk of one plot being less interesting than the other, or of cutting away when a reader might rather read more. I never felt that way here – I was always excited to see how the other plot was doing, and I enjoyed the characters so much it was always a joy to return to them and see what they were up to in the other storyline. Raza, especially, has this comic, tortured, idiosyncratic, unsure journey through the world, and seeing him bumble, then react, then self-critique, all with wisdom and humor, is a treat. His coworkers, including a friendship-turned-love interest that’s handled with so much care, subtlety and realism, and a hard-driving boss, and an only partially sane tech guy, are absolutely terrific. The sci fi here is interesting and thought-provoking, but it’s really the characters that make the story, and you care about all of them.

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

As a guy with a Ph.D. in geology who’s taught paleontology a lot of times, I will admit to being a little confused/bemused by the impossibly unlikely premise of trying to recapitulate all of evolution in a model in order to reproduce each exact step and branch on the way to perfectly simulated humans. This is a conceit, for sure, and Terracina wisely doesn’t go too deep in trying to make it make absolute technical sense, instead leaving it to some fun discussions, a little bit of computational arm-waving, and some fundamental principles which, despite not making a ton of sense, provide a reasonable framework for where the book wants to go. Real evolution is full of randomness, of course. One of Stephen Jay Gould’s favorite words, serendipity, governs a lot of evolution, so any model trying to reproduce it would be full of luck and random chance, not something that a computer could easily model, and not something that would lead to the same result that we happened to arrive at in the real world. jinwha’s model is very highly deterministic, with an exact copy of human intelligence as the goal, which is not at all how biological evolution actually worked, and which falls prey to the common fallacy that humans are somehow special and somehow the end-state of all evolutionary processes, neither of which is true, at all. Still, if I can let that go, surely most everybody else will be able to, and it didn’t really hinder my very great enjoyment of the story.

Despite my nitpicking, the mechanism of the evolution scheme and the technology weren’t that important. Buy into them, and you’ve got a great story to follow. I had a little bit of an issue with the court proceeding also, which seemed to have no real rules of evidence and some questionable strategies on both sides, strategies that seemed more geared to increasing narrative tension than to winning the case, but the story is so damn good you just let that stuff go. The high-stakes ending is perfect, and I found my breath literally catching in my throat as the final courtroom scenes played out. Just wonderful writing, and a perfect payoff for everything you’ve invested in the story.

Summation

This is a great book. I still have quite a few semifinalists and finalists to read, and I know the books get better the farther you go in one of these competitions, but this is the book to beat for me so far. I really loved my time with it, and I would gladly follow wherever Terracina goes next. Wherever that is, it’s sure to be populated by amazing characters that you won’t want to let go of when you’re done.

This is my fourth review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Final Season by Andrew Gillsmith. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

For fans of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and PG Wodehouse.

It’s one thing to know that the End is coming, quite another to know the exact date and time right down to the nanosecond.

Such is the unhappy fate of the inhabitants of Rexos-4, a once-thriving planet that has lived under the doom of an inevitable apocalypse for millenia. Their entire philosophy of life may be summed up by the phrase “Mxtlpicam’ bnak ooligapn,” which in most languages translates to something along the lines of “What’s the bloody point?”

Unbeknownst to the poor Rexans, their predicament has also been the subject of the longest-running and most successful reality television series in galactic history, now translated into over 200 million languages, with closed captioning. With the end of the world just around the corner, the show is entering its all-important final season. Everyone knows how difficult it is to pull off a satisfying finale–such stakes fill even the most hard-boiled Gallywood executives with fear and trembling.

Join Gumpilos Tfliximop, Elvie Renfro, Rufus Camford and a cast of colorful characters as they battle the notorious showrunner (and subverter of expectations) Betty Neezquaff, all while tackling the big questions of life’s meaning and purpose with wit, warmth, and–dare I say–optimism.

The Final Season is The Truman Show meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with just a dash of PG Wodehouse.

My Review

This is a really funny romp done in a style very reminiscent of Douglas Adams. Gillsmith’s clever prose, told from the POV of an in-world narrator observer, shines, even when he goes off on silly (and sometimes deeply thoughtful) tangents. The world and the alien people in it are (despite complicated multisyllabic names and varied body morphologies) deeply human, and Gillsmith uses them and their situation to do a Jonathan Swift-style takedown of humanity, media, and ambition.

Plot and Characters

The book starts with a totally-out-there killer concept – a world that has been the subject (unbeknownst to them) of a long-running reality TV program, and which is now only weeks from destruction. This is introduced by the narrator, who self-describes as a mid-level writer for Gallywood, the entertainment industry that has run the show (and many others, including a not-too-disguised Star Wars homage). In reality, I suspect the narrator sounds an awful lot like Gillsmith does, but that’s fine – he’s clever, eloquent, and full of cynicism and wry observations.

The main plot follows a lovable couple on the doomed planet, and it starts as they meet and fall in love, a desperately romantic thing to do as their world is ending. We follow them throughout the last days of Rexos-4, but we also follow four Gallywood characters – producers and interns and managers – as they scheme about how to handle the end of their long-running program (and of Rexos-4). Some of them have noble goals, trying to save some of the victims, while others are so cynical that they are rooting for a tragic ending to the show in order to please critics or their own aesthetic taste. This conflict plays out in a slim novel frequently interrupted by observations, explanations, ruminations, and general silliness.

My Thoughts

Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide books the plot here is secondary to the jokes and commentary. Unless you are Douglas Adams, that is a risky thing to try, but Gillsmith’s fun style and the absurdity of the views and situations and people he’s describing more than make up for a plot that sometimes lurches around and never seems to matter that much, at least until some poignant moments towards the end, which also work and, though somewhat out of keeping with the breeziness of the rest of it, were effective and unexpected.

One other difference here from Douglas Adams is the scale and sheer goofiness of the universe described (where the scale is smaller and the universe, though silly, slightly less goofy). There are the same silly societies and weird technology and amusing references, but the focus is much tighter, on just a few people and just a couple of alien races (although they’re so human as to not seem very alien). I think there’s also a little more of a search for truth or meaning here, and maybe a little more social critique, than I remember from the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, although I read them long ago.

The book largely worked really well for me, and I really enjoyed it. If I were going to offer some criticism, it is that the plot mostly didn’t really matter (despite being about the deaths of billions), and the people making the big choices didn’t seem to have complex motives, or at least, they weren’t complex other than to set up a joke or an extended amusing ramble. I guess I mean that while they were very funny, they were either Tess Trueheart or Waluigi, complete with mustache twirling (or virtual twirling) without much complexity or agency beyond that, and in many cases their elaborate strategies didn’t work and were just swept away by the next silly thing.

That breezy, comic tone and back-and-forth plot made what I felt like the emotional climax of the book feel slightly off-kilter or off-tone for me, in that it dove deeper and assumed a seriousness and complexity lacking in the rest of the story, although it did embrace a lot of emotions not previously explored. In the copy I had, there were also a good many formatting or punctuation errors, including a lot of extra mid-sentence line breaks and some paragraphs where two people spoke in succession, a dialog no-no. Those didn’t hinder anything, but in case Andrew ever reads this, it might be worth making sure they’re cleared up in the official published work.

Summation

This is a really good book, and Gillsmith is a clever, funny writer. Comedy in sci-fi is actually a little hard to pull off, especially if you’re putting yourself next to one of the masters of the genre, as his book description does. But he pulls it off well, and this is a quick, fun read that will make you laugh a lot and think more than you expect.

This is my third review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Gamer by Belinda Crawford. The book is available from the author’s site.

Blurb

Vlad – gamer, hacker, scourge… Angel of Death.

Vlad’s parents died in a car accident; she can still feel the flames licking her skin, smell the burning batteries and fire-retardant. Except it wasn’t an accident, someone made it happen.

She’s has spent the last nine years tracking those responsible; planning, plotting.

She’s almost done.

When the last move is over, her opponent will wish they never played with the Angel of Death.

Get ready to jack in and play along as Crawford masterfully weaves a complex, action-packed tale of virtual reality and revenge.

My Review

Of all the books I read during our scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists, this one definitely had the clearest and most intense sense of style. It dripped with cyberpunk goodness, reminding me of my time with William Gibson’s books, of my many Shadowrun adventures back in the 1990s, and of my heartily enjoyed playthrough of the Cyberpunk PS5 game. Coupled with a strong vengeance motive (as is clear from the blurb above) and a bunch of richly realized game-based scenes, some with a cool LitRPG flavor, and a full cast of characters who would be at home in NeoTokyo or Neuromancer, and you’ve got a rich story based on a solid foundation that I know took a ton of work to put together.

Plot and Characters

The book mostly stays with the main character, Vladana Tong, although there are occasional chapters from other points of view. She’s a handful – a badass hacker, a netrunner, a Scourge (the book’s lingo for someone who plays in the main VR game but hacks the system for advantages), and also on a personal quest to avenge her parents’ murder.

The plot basically follows that whodunit mystery to its conclusion, although there are tons of side adventures full of midnight motorcycle rides, secret hacker lairs, esports and politics, shady megacorps, and skeezeball lowlifes. Vlad has a past life she gave up to steep herself in the hacker world, and some folks reappear from that time with complicated relationships to who she is now. Her parents have left her a confusing and unclear legacy that she needs to unravel to understand why they died. She also falls in with an esports team full of colorful larger-than-life folks. They need each other but don’t trust each other, and there’s a lot of interesting jockeying there as the titular gamer part of the book occurs over a series of virtual-world trainings and combats. There are also shadowy criminal elements, sometimes pursued by Vlad and sometimes pursuing her. If you get the idea that there is a ton happening in this book, you’re one hundred percent right.

My Thoughts

For me, the book’s biggest strength is its vibe, although “vibe” doesn’t really do justice to the complexity and worldbuilding going on here. There’s a huge lingo and futuristic cultural context to everything, from vehicles to tech to clothes to food to game tools to corporate shenanigans, and it runs rich and deep throughout the whole thing. There’s hardly a paragraph that doesn’t have some cool jargon or slang or tech to reveal. There’s a very cool running issue of how the game world works, and the sacrifices that some players make to get an edge, including fascinating descriptions of when characters suffer “lag” when the game world they were so immersed in carries over as hallucinations in “the Real.” The descriptions of the characters and tactics in-game were really fun for me, and the real-world grit and tension is just as interesting.

The vibe is more than enough to carry the book, and it largely does, which I think was probably Ms. Crawford’s goal. I loved all of that stuff, a lot. Where the book was weaker for me was in a few areas. One was a plot that jumped around a ton, focusing on different people and places, sometimes hiding information from the reader that would have been helpful to know. Vengeance plots are a little limiting in general, but the choices here made the story a little hard to follow for me. Vlad’s detective work sometimes made sense and led logically from one discovery to another, but at other times, she found a ton of bewildering stuff that wasn’t always clear to me (or her, I think), until she just pulled on a thread and got somewhere else. I think I would have appreciated more planning and more focus on the detective parts, and more thought than impulse on Vlad’s part in tracking stuff down. Sometimes she made what seemed to be rash and uninformed decisions, and sometimes those turned out to be exactly what she needed, while others were just as stupid as they seemed, but we sometimes didn’t find that out for a long time. She also seemed to be variable in her hacker competence – sometimes effortlessly deadly, and sometimes seeming to make basic mistakes. That made her a bit of a frustrating character to follow – at times, and especially towards the book’s conclusion, she was almost a spectator to her own mystery rather than the active, super-competent hacker sleuth she is in other parts. I may not be smart enough to have understood everything, but I had trouble figuring out the full plot of the mystery and all of the factions involved, although the big bad’s role is spelled out pretty well at the end, and the book has a conclusion that wraps most things up.

Another thing I had some trouble with was the intensity of all the characters, particularly with their emotional state. Vlad seemed to be in a constant state of near-explosion rage, and the side characters were often right there with her. That’s good for a few tense scenes, but it was way too much for me. She made a ton of errors by being impetuous and ragey, too, which added to my frustration. I know that was part of her origin story and her character, but I found that I sometimes wanted her to, like, make a sandwich, draw a bath, and watch some cartoons rather than tearing somebody’s head off in a screamfight, rage riding her bike, or punching herself to exhaustion in the gym. There weren’t a lot of fundamentally likeable characters in the thing, although some of the esports team got there. Even they would have hissy fits from time to time, though, and I just wanted to turn the emotional volume down a little. From an editing perspective, also, there were a LOT of comma splices, at least one every couple pages, and my radar pings at things like that.

Most of those complaints are nitpicks – personal-taste things, not harsh critiques. I did enjoy the book, and I really enjoyed following Vlad’s adventures. I might have made different (and no more valid) choices with regard to plotting, focus, and characterization, but I’m absolutely in awe of the depth and consistency of the worldbuilding, use of language, and vibe. All of this flavor seeped into every scene and sentence, popping naturally and sharply off the page. That’s great work, inspiring both awe and envy in this author, who has never even attempted anything this ambitious.

Summation

This is a solid book that well-deserved its quarterfinalist status on the full read. If you’re a fan of cyberpunk and gamerlit, you’ll find a ton to enjoy here, as I did. A richly-imagined near-future society and gamer/hacker culture spring to life here on every page.