dystopia Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / March 27, 2020

Review: The Mother Code

The Mother Code by Carole Stivers
My rating: ★★★☆☆

Blurb:

It’s 2049, and the survival of the human race is at risk. Earth’s inhabitants must turn to their last plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots-to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order-an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right-the Mother Code.

Kai is born in America’s desert southwest, his only companion is his robot Mother, Rho-Z. Equipped with the knowledge and motivations of a human mother, Rho-Z raises Kai and teaches him how to survive. But as children like Kai come of age, their Mothers transform too-in ways that were never predicted. When government survivors decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai must make a choice. Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z? Or will he fight to save the only parent he has ever known?

In a future that could be our own, The Mother Code explores what truly makes us human-and the tenuous nature of the boundaries between us and the machines we create.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A bit of a sore spot for personal reasons as well as in the current situation (long story short, and not spoiler since it’s revealed in the first chapters: man-made bio-weapon targeting lung cells to make them immortal and proliferating, aka welcome lung cancer). But that’s just me, of course, and the story itself was a good read all along, even though I didn’t absolutely love it.

The premise of this novel hinges on the “illness” I mentioned, on the need to conceive human babies with modified genes who’ll be able to survive in this not-so-brave new world, and on that other need: the babies will need mothers, and those won’t be human women, since they’ll be pretty much, well, all dead soon. Quite a ghastly future, this. The story thus follows two timelines: one where Kai, one of these new children, travels with his mother Rho-Z; and one, a few years before that, where scientists desperately fight against time to engineer suitable embryos and robotic mothers.

I must say, I liked that second timeline: as frightening as it was, I enjoyed the technological and genetic basis on which it was built. Another aspect of the book I liked was that, all in all, it still deals with hope, with thoughts about what being human is and about parent/child relationships, and with a deep-seated desire to help the children survive. The world they’re in is not hostile the way it is in traditional post-apocalyptic stories—no bands of looting survivors is threatening them; but it is empty, desperately empty, and that means scavenging for dwindling resources while also being restricted in some ways by the “Mother Code” . For 10-year-old kids, that’s not so grand.

Where I didn’t love the novel was in terms of characters. They’re good in general—they have motivations and background stories of their own—yet for some reason, I didn’t feel a connection with them, or not enough to make me really love them. The children didn’t feel like they were “children” enough, and the world of the adults was a little too… distant?

Conclusion: Interesting story and an overall interesting read, even though I didn’t connect much with the characters.

Yzabel / February 29, 2020

Review: The Companions

The Companions by Katie M. Flynn
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

In the wake of a highly contagious virus, California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high rise towers, the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in—and they come in all forms, from sad rolling cans to manufactured bodies that can pass for human. Wealthy participants in the “companionship” program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people—a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will.

Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate, leased to a family of strangers. But when she realizes she’s able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away, searching for the woman who killed her. Lilac’s act of rebellion sets off a chain of events that sweeps from San Francisco to Siberia to the very tip of South America in this “compelling, gripping, whip-smart piece of speculative fiction” (Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters) that you won’t want to end.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A fascinating theme, that ties with certain questions I see raised when it comes to consciousness, AI, and “the cloud”: what if, someday, we found a way to upload human consciousness at or shortly before the moment of death, so that our minds could keep existing on a server, or, in the case here, in artificial bodies? With an added theme in “The Companions”: all these “reborn” humans are actually no more than slaves, being the property of the Metis corporation, leased to people wealthy enough to afford them, and hindered by safeguards so that they remain the, well, obedient little slaves they’re meant to be.

Interesting, right? There are so many things wrong here, starting with the property part, and going on with what happens when the artificial body is damaged, or how memories fare after years spent like that. This is one of the conundrums of Lilac’s existence: now the companion to a teenager named Dahlia, she was murdered as a teenager herself, and keeps her memories alive at first by telling Dahlia her “story”. Up until the day she gets information that the person who killed her is still alive, and realises that, for some reason, her “failsafes” aren’t exactly working.

But.

The narrative itself turned out to be increasingly… random. At first, having Lilac’s perspective to rely on was fairly intriguing, and the additional, other characters’ points of view seemed seamless at first (after Lilac, we get Cam, who works at the place where Lilac goes to find her killer, so that does make sense). However, it quickly became quite muddled, with the characters themselves not leaving much of an impression. In a way, this read at times like a collection of short stories that were trying to form into a novel, and in the end, that made for neither strong short stories nor a strong novel. The overall story, all in all, kept meandering, and never gave the sense of an actual plot/red thread tying everything together.

Conclusion: Good theme, but not particularly well-handled.

Yzabel / November 30, 2019

Review: Body Tourists

Body Tourists by Jane Rogers
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

In this version of London, there is a small, private clinic. Behind its layers of security, procedures are taking place on poor, robust teenagers from northern Estates in exchange for thousands of pounds – procedures that will bring the wealthy dead back to life in these young supple bodies for fourteen days.

It’s an opportunity for wrongs to be righted, for fathers to meet grandsons, for scientists to see their work completed. Old wine in new bottles.

But at what cost?

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Interesting theme here: dead, wealthy people being brought to life for a couple of weeks in the bodies of fit, but poor youth for whom this is the only hope of making some kind of money.

There’s a lot to be said here in terms of morals and ethics, some on the religious front, and some not. In itself, this is ground for deeper discussion, from the value of money vs. one’s body to whether a human being suddenly “reanimated” in a younger body can be trusted with it or will just do whatever, and not care about their “host”, since they go back to being dead after that anyway. One could even argue that the rich are robbing (shall I say “once again”?) other people of something precious, in this case their time and their youth, and potentially more (this is a bit spoiler-ish, but it happens early enough in the novel anyway). Especially since, in the novel’s near future, the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots has grown even bigger, with “estates” now being entire towns from which their inhabitants just never escape.

The story explores several of these “body tourists”, from different points of view. There’s Octavia, one of the tourists herself; Luke, the scientist in charge of the project; Paula, a host who then has to go back to her life and the aftermath of this experiment; Rick, who wants to bring back his father; and Elsa, a woman whose partner died after a particularly harrowing event in their lives, leaving so much unsaid. Each narrative highlights a different take on the matter when it comes to reflecting on the whole body swapping angle—whether it’s a valid option, or should be banned altogether, or could work but only within a specific framework.

That said, I had a hard time getting into the story itself, in that these narratives don’t seamlessly join each other. Most of the time, I got the feeling that I was reading a collection of short stories forcefully brought together, rather than a complete story. (And for what it’s worth, perhaps it’s actually how it started, before being turned into a novel.) It doesn’t detract from the philosophical aspect, the concept of body tourism itself, but in terms of storytelling, it was jarring in several places, and because of this, a few parts of the various characters’ stories were also glossed over, when they could’ve been interesting to explore as well.

Conclusion: 2.5 stars. I liked the theme, but the story itself fell flat for me.

Yzabel / November 13, 2019

Review: The Orphanage of Gods

The Orphanage of Gods by Helena Coggan
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

Twenty years ago, the humans came for their gods.

In the bloody revolution, gods were all but wiped out. Ever since, the children they left behind have been imprisoned in an orphanage, watched day and night by the ruthless Guard. Any who show signs of divine power vanish from their beds in the night, all knowledge of their existence denied.

No one has ever escaped the orphanage.

Until now.

Seventeen-year-old Hero is finally free – but at a terrible price. Her sister has been captured by the Guard and is being held in a prison in the northern sea. Hero desperately wants to get her back, and to escape the murderous Guardsmen hunting her down. But not all the gods are dead, and the ones waiting for Hero in the north have their own plans for her – ones that will change the world forever . . .

As she advances further and further into the unknown, Hero will need to decide: how far is she willing to go to do what needs to be done?

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

It took me ages to get into this book (actually, I did it on my third attempt), and I have no idea why. It wasn’t terrible, the beginning was sort of ‘standard’ (= nothing particularly off-putting), it read easily, there wasn’t anything stylistically bad in here, and there was a good chunk of the novel where I actually wanted to read, once I got past the first chapters. However, in the end, I wasn’t sure what the point really was in terms of the story and the characters’ evolution, and this is the kind of thing that is likely to make me forget ‘The Orphanage of Gods’ fairly soon.

I never connected with any of the characters for starters. Hero was somewhat likeable, but too whiny and dwelling on the same things over and over again. Joshua had no redeeming qualities that I can think of. Kestrel was OK but pretty much thrown in there as a puppet. Raven (who’s the narrator of the middle part, out of three) was supposed to be that super future leader, but she was 10 and didn’t do much (apart from being targeted), so that defeated the whole purpose. Eliza, well… it was very convenient that she could avoid many consequences thanks to her powers. The guards were just depicted as monsters and never anything else, and whenever another god or demi-god was somewhat likeable, they just got out of the picture sooner or later.

(Bonus point for same-gender relationship, which is a nice change; but as usual in such/YA novels, it was insta-love and came out of the blue… so I guess that’s no bonus point, all in all.)

The ending was murky and left me unsatisfied. It felt both unavoidable (it was either that or just offing everyone, I guess) and like a cop-out, because so many things were unresolved at that point.

Yzabel / November 9, 2019

Review: The Nobody People

The Nobody People by Bob Proehl
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

When a group of outcasts with extraordinary abilities comes out of hiding, their clash with a violent society will spark a revolution—or an apocalypse..

Avi Hirsch has always known his daughter was different. But when others with incredible, otherworldly gifts reveal themselves to the world, Avi realizes that her oddness is something more—that she is something more. With this, he has a terrifying revelation: Emmeline is now entering a society where her unique abilities unfairly mark her as a potential threat. And even though he is her father, Avi cannot keep her safe forever.

Emmeline soon meets others just like her: Carrie Norris, a teenage girl who can turn invisible . . . but just wants to be seen. Fahima Deeb, a woman with an uncanny knack for machinery . . . but it’s her Muslim faith that makes the U.S. government suspicious of her.

They are the nobody people—ordinary individuals with extraordinary gifts who want one only thing: to live as equals in an America that is gripped by fear and hatred. But the government is passing discriminatory laws. Violent mobs are taking to the streets. And one of their own—an angry young man seething with self-loathing—has used his power in an act of mass violence that has put a new target on the community. The nobody people must now stand together and fight for their future, or risk falling apart.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

It took me a while to get through this one. I’m not exactly sure why I wasn’t thrilled and not in the mood, but part of it probably had to do with the fact several characters have their arcs develop throughout the book, without enough screen time for each. When this happens Moreover, while there will be a second volume, and I didn’t expect everything to be solved here, some of these arcs were also cut short, without any proper ‘aftermath’ time being given. It’s akin to someone being deemed as super important because they will save us all, then that person suddenly refuses to do it, or dies, or is out of the picture for any other reason, and… that’s all. It’s supposed to be bad, but no one really dwells on it. It felt very strange.

I also struggled to get through and not skim. Not sure if it was the style (present-tense narrative is fine with me in small doses, but not for hundreds of pages). Or the apparent ‘main character’ who turns out to be sidelined pretty quickly, and wasn’t super pleasant to read about anyway. Or the plot jumping between characters but without really giving a feeling of cohesion. Probably a mix of all. In the end, the story deals with heavy themes (acceptance & rejection, internment for people with powers instead of trying to integrate everyone in a new society, being killed just for being different…), that affect the characters a lot, but… I didn’t really care about the characters. In fact, to the risk of sounding awful, the one character I enjoyed reading about the most was Owen Curry. Yes, that one. Also the circus/freakshow subplot. I guess that’s quite telling.

It wasn’t a bad story in itself. Depressing in parts, sure, because we already have enough of that intolerance crap in our real world out there. But that doesn’t make a story bad. As far as I’m concerned, though, the above made it a slog for me, so it was okay-ish in the end, but I can’t say I absolutely liked it.

Yzabel / September 27, 2019

Review: The Memory Police

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.

When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I hadn’t read anything by Ogawa in 10 years or so, and I admit I don’t really remember anymore all the details, but I do remember I tended to like this author. Hence my seizing the opportunity to get and read this one.

It is a strange story in a way, in that, all in all, the characters are not so memorable themselves (their names are never revealed), and yet still leave an impression due to what they are going through. As inhabitants of an island where certain things disappear from memory at random, they are constantly faced with not knowing what the next thing to go will be, with the Memory Police coming to enforce this by making sure people get rid of all traces of the now-forgotten things (including also getting rid of those who are able to remember), and where one question lingers at the back of many minds: will the people themselves be forgotten someday?

The novel follows a woman who writes novels for a living, and whose mother was one of the islanders who retained their memories. While the narrator is affected by the disappearances, and does her best to lie low and be an abiding citizen, she also does uphold a tiny streak of rebellion, up to the day she decides, with the help of an old friend of the family, to hide someone who remembers in a storage space between two floors. As the disappearances increase, and the Memory Police searches more and more homes and arrests more and more people, not only does she have to face the fear of being discovered, but also her fears of what will happen in the end.

This said, the story is less about the dystopian state of the island (the size of the island itself is never specified: it feels like a small island with just one town, and at the same time it must be bigger than that), or even about providing an explanation as to the collective, gradual amnesia taking hold, and more about memories, about how various things are important for us, about exploring what forgetting could mean In time, the inhabitants lose the names of what vanished, and even when presented with a surviving item that escaped the police, said item doesn’t elicit anything in them. And there lies another question: are memories precious in themselves, or only for as long as they feel precious to us? The narrator constantly struggles with this, as another character does their best to help her recover her memories of disappeared things and she’s never sure this can even happen.

Woven into the narrative is also the story the narrator (an author) is working on, that of a typist who’s lost her voice and communicates with her lover by writing on her typing machine. At first, I wondered how this was supposed to tie with the main story, and was a little afraid it was here for flavouring more than anything else—but it does tie with it at some point, and in a very relevant way.

Conclusion: 3.5 to 4 stars. In terms of narrative and of memorable characters, this is not the most striking book ever, but it has the sort of gripping, haunting quality that won’t let go.

Yzabel / August 22, 2019

Review: The Kingdom

The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg
My rating: 3/5

Blurb:

Welcome to the Kingdom… where ‘Happily Ever After’ isn’t just a promise, but a rule.

Glimmering like a jewel behind its gateway, The Kingdom is an immersive fantasy theme park where guests soar on virtual dragons, castles loom like giants, and bioengineered species–formerly extinct–roam free.

Ana is one of seven Fantasists, beautiful “princesses” engineered to make dreams come true. When she meets park employee Owen, Ana begins to experience emotions beyond her programming including, for the first time… love.

But the fairytale becomes a nightmare when Ana is accused of murdering Owen, igniting the trial of the century. Through courtroom testimony, interviews, and Ana’s memories of Owen, emerges a tale of love, lies, and cruelty–and what it truly means to be human.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Not as good as I had hoped it would be from the blurb, but still an entertaining and interesting read.

(I’ve seen it compared to/inspired by “Westworld”, but not having seen it, I honestly can’t tell, so that won’t play a part in my review.)

I definitely liked the premise: “the Kingdom”, an amusement park of the Disney World variety, with seven princesses, a.k.a the Fantasists (Ana and her sisters), and various themed areas, such as Mermaid Land, where customers can spend the day, have fun and live mini-adventures, far away from their bleak everyday life (the world outside seems in a constant financial, housing and environmental crisis). Moreover, the visitors can interact with the perfect-Disney-like princesses—always smiling, kind, helpful and aiming to please—and see “hybrids”, animals that used to be extinct, but have been re-created through a combination of genengeering and cybernetics (yes, including dinosaurs).

Of course, this immediately raised controversial questions as to the nature and role of the hybrids, whether the princesses or the animals, and the way they were seen and treated by people in general, and by their creators more specifically. The veneer of a dream-like life for the princesses is very early shattered when Ana describes how they are tied in their beds for the night, how firewalls prevent them from accessing the whole of Internet and communicate with the outside world, and how sometimes, some of them seem to lose their memories of the previous day or evening.

The story is seen through Ana’s eyes, as well as through snippets of interviews and articles, most of which are related to a trial following Owen’s death at Ana’s hands. I usually tend to like this kind of format, for several reasons (varied points of views that are easy to separate from each other, short “chapters” that are really convenient when I can’t read for long stints…), but some of those weren’t too relevant, or at least, only became relevant long after, which gave me enough time to dismiss them. These different narratives offer more and more information as to the “dark fairy tale” that unfolds throughout the novel, with Ana and her sisters developing more and more of a personality and feelings of their own, in spite of their creators claiming they cannot do more than what their programming allows them to. While we don’t get to see through her sisters’ eyes, Ana’s recounting of the story lets us see what a slippery slope it is, when AIs in human-looking bodies are meant to act like human beings, but at the same time constricted into prisoners’ roles that deny them any claim at even a scrap of humanity.

Why I didn’t give more than 3-3.5 stars to this book was, first, how the romance itself unfurled. I get what happened, I get what the characters did, but I never really got a strong feeling for their relationship, nor did I feel strong chemistry between them that would justify, well, an actual romance. I also found Ana’s narrative style somewhat dry and bland, which in a way fits well with her nature as an artificial intelligence, but didn’t do much in terms of gripping writing. And the last third of the book lacked coherence at times, as if everything collided together at the same time without tight reasons in the background—so in the end, it felt rushed, and poised on the edge of unfinished (“was that a standalone or will there be a sequel?”).

Conclusion: Not as gripping as I had hoped, although it does lend itself to interesting discussions about AI, artificially created beings that are nevertheless sentient, and how they should be treated.

Yzabel / August 21, 2019

Review: The Grace Year

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
My rating: 2/5

Blurb:

“No one speaks of the grace year.
It’s forbidden.
We’re told we have the power to lure grown men from their beds, make boys lose their minds, and drive the wives mad with jealousy. That’s why we’re banished for our sixteenth year, to release our magic into the wild before we’re allowed to return to civilisation.
But I don’t feel powerful.
I don’t feel magical.”

Tierney James lives in an isolated village where girls are banished at sixteen to the northern forest to brave the wilderness – and each other – for a year. They must rid themselves of their dangerous magic before returning purified and ready to marry – if they’re lucky.

It is forbidden to speak of the grace year, but even so every girl knows that the coming year will change them – if they survive it…

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A strong premise that definitely caught my interest (what’s not to like about a female-driven version of “Lord of the Flies”, so to speak?), but whose execution unfortunately didn’t work for me.

The story starts with a typical “dystopian place where women are expected to behave in certain ways, and are under men’s yoke without any recourse”. Bleak (and sort of over the top), but that’s why it provides for a good starting point: heroines aren’t born from cozy lives where nothing unpleasant ever happens, after all.

Tierney is that person: a girl on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday, after which she’ll be exiled for one year with all the other girls born the same year as her, to live in some remote camp in the woods where they’ll all have to expel the “magic” out of them. (A magic that is clearly threatening only because it is meant to have an impact on men, of course, such as the girls being rumoured to be able to seduce anyone if left unchecked, and so on.) So that’s where we start: on the eve of that fateful day, with Tierney disagreeing with it but not having much of a choice, and determined to make the most she can out of it—she knows that no boy in the county will give her a veail (= propose to her before she leaves), due to her being the local tomboy, so she wants to work in the fields instead when she’s back, to at least have some kind of freedom by working outdoors. To no reader’s surprise, things don’t go exactly as planned, and Tierney finds herself leaving with the promise of enmity in that camp, rather than of working together to survive the upcoming year.

The “grace year” is clearly not a good year for these girls, and I did like that part of the world described in the book. Again, not a rosy part at all, rather an infuriating one at that, for the girls having to live in that camp on an island was an obvious attempt at breaking them and better subdue the future wives and female workers of the county. Is the magic real? Most people in Tierney’s town probably wouldn’t be able to recognise it if it stared them in the face, but they are nevertheless quick to seize this as an opportunity to get rid of a wife judged as too old now, or to smear someone’s reputation. You want to root for Tierney here, hope that she, at least, will find a way out of this, or a way to turn the table and bring change to her society…

…But that’s where the book lost me, for several reasons:

– The camp setting could’ve been a perfect opportunity to show us young women having to cooperate in spite of their differences, and perhaps finding and retaking their own power in a place where no one else would see and judge them. Unfortunately, it went down another road, one I don’t care for much, in a “one vs. all the others” way, complete with mean girl extraordinaire and appalling behaviours. Although the latter was somewhat part of the very patriarchal society depicted here, the problem was how it only contributed to pitch girls against girls, even more than in their hometown, instead of giving them a common ground on which to build something else.

– Tierney was introduced as resourceful, but there were several moments when she was helpless in situations where she should’ve made more use of her skills, and let herself be bullied to an extent that could’ve been lethal. Maybe I was expecting too much here? I expected her to catch on much more quickly on how the others would behave towards her, and have, I don’t know, some backup plan?

– Following this: the huge problem, for me, of having the female lead placed in dire situations… and get out of them only because men helped. This completely underminded the feminist aspects, from the man who helps Tierney in the woods, to the one who lies to save her skin. Not only did it make her look helpless, but it also enforced the message that, all in all, men were deciding everything about her life. Again.

– The romance. Unnecessary in such a plot, and without any real chemistry anyway.

– The world itself. I’m still not sure whether it’s a fantasy world, or whether the county is located in England or the future USA or something (mention is made of people from varied origins with different languages, then of English having become the common language; Vikings are also briefly mentioned). It was pretty much a bubble world, with only the county and the one town in it, and nothing else beyond this. Still unsure whether societies in other counties was the same or not, if they had grace years as well or not, etc.

Conclusion: I filed this one as “it was OK” because I did finish it and it had a few points I liked, but it could’ve been so much more, and ultimately wasn’t.

Yzabel / August 8, 2019

Review: Tangle’s Game

Tangle’s Game by Stewart Hotston
My rating: [usr 2.5]

Blurb:

Tense tech-thriller based on the growing role of blockchains, encryption and social media in society.

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Yesterday, Amanda Back’s life was flawless: the perfect social credit score, the perfect job, the perfect home.

Today, Amanda is a target, an enemy of the system holding information dangerous enough to disrupt the world’s all-consuming tech – a fugitive on the run.

But in a world where an un-hackable blockchain links everyone and everything, there is nowhere to run…

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A techno-thriller with interesting AI-related themes, although in the end, I wasn’t awed by the story.

Set in a somewhat near future where transactions are handled through blockchain-based contracts and people’s quality of life is dependent on their social credit score as well as on their financial credit score, “Tangle’s Game” tells the story of Amanda Back, a successful investment banker who finally got a complete grip back on her life after an ex-boyfriend stole her money and left her betrayed. Flying back to London, and after an invasive search episode at the airport, she comes home only to realise that said boyfriend has involved her in a dangerous game where a mysterious USB stick and the information it contains is key. The only problem? Amanda isn’t a hacker, or a conspiracy theorist, or a whistleblower, and is probably the last person with the proper connections to do something with said information.

The premise really hooked me in, and I quickly wanted to know more about how this would all unfurl: who were the enemies, how would they try to get the info, what was Tangle’s exact part in that, who could be Amanda’s allies… Most of all, I was interested in Tatsu, the little AI contracted to help her decrypt the contents of the USB stick. I always have a soft spot for AIs, and Tatsu was definitely endearing.

By contrast, though, I never really warmed up to the human characters. Mostly they were “unlikeable” as people (Amanda is pretty much self-centered, Tangle is no better and probably somewhere on the sociopathic ladder…), but that in itself is not a deal-breaker for me—they can be the most rotten pieces of crap in the world, I can still find them likeable as characters, provided the execution goes this way. It wasn’t much the case here, in part because these characters as a whole made problematic decision after problematic decision, in a way that made me keep wondering how on Earth they were still alive. (I’ve been a tabletop RPG player for over 20 years. Trust my experience when I say that “’eceiving mysterious information and just hanging about in one’s own flat—where everybody know they can find you—while trying to come up with ideas about what to do” is a sure way of being assaulted at night by men in black or other unsavoury characters.) I was actually glad when one of the bad guys finally called them on their ability to come up with plans that may work in movies, but never in real life. And that was worth for pretty much the whole cast, not only Amanda, who at least I would’ve expected to be the most clueless.

The last 20% picked up, and with Tatsu still involved by that point, that made me want to read until the end at any rate. The ending itself is fairly open, and leaves much unresolved, but in a way, it also makes much sense: things got mired, then exploded, and now the world’s in turmoil… and the fragile situation at the end, teetering between hope and potential catastrophe, fits that pattern.

Conclusion: 2.5 stars. Mostly I didn’t care much about the human characters, and there were a few plot holes that annoyed me, but I did enjoy the part played by the AI, and the way Amanda (and Tangle, too, after all) considered it.

Yzabel / June 9, 2019

Review: The Warehouse

The Warehouse by Rob Hart
My rating: [usr 3.5]

Blurb:

Gun violence, climate change and unemployment have ravaged the United States beyond recognition.

Amidst the wreckage, an online retail giant named Cloud reigns supreme. Cloud brands itself not just as an online storefront, but as a global saviour. Yet, beneath the sunny exterior, lurks something far more sinister.

Paxton never thought he’d be working Security for the company that ruined his life, much less that he’d be moving into one of their sprawling live-work facilities. But compared to what’s left outside, perhaps Cloud isn’t so bad. Better still, through his work he meets Zinnia, who fills him with hope for their shared future.

Except that Zinnia is not what she seems. And Paxton, with his all-access security credentials, might just be her meal ticket.

As Paxton and Zinnia’s agendas place them on a collision course, they’re about to learn just how far the Cloud will go to make the world a better place.

To beat the system, you have to be inside it.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

In a not-so-distant-future America, where most of society has collapsed, Paxton and Zinnia get hired in the same Cloud facility, each for their own reasons. As they start seeing each other more and more, and confirm (more than realise, to be honest) that their jobs aren’t as shiny as the recruitment ads would let people think, their own deadlines loom over them: for Paxton, the visit of Cloud’s CEO; for Zinnia, her actual job, that is, finding out what really powers Cloud’s warehouses.

Not so much a thriller per se, although there is definitely an element of mystery when it comes to “what powers the Cloud facilities”, as well as a couple of other things. More than that, “The Warehouse” is part social commentary about corporate practices pushed to an extreme we may, in fact, not be so far of: living at your workplace, eating at your workplace, with your days governed by your employee rating, until the line between both tends to blur and losing your job doesn’t only mean “losing your financial means” but pretty much “losing your whole life” as well—there’s very little hope for any other kind of employment out there. Cloud is most obviously a future Amazon, but also Uber and all other workplaces where one is just but a cog in the machine—and just as replaceable—all the while being lured in by shiny promises of being a “valued employee”.

In terms of story, I enjoyed it general, but I admit I didn’t feel that much invested in the characters, perhaps because a lot of their interactions was coloured by the daily grind of their respective jobs, which made the pace slower than I would’ve liked it. I liked the couple of twists towards the end (I had already guessed who was Zinnia’s employer, though it’s always good to see one’s theory vindicated)—I was expecting maybe something a tad bit more gruesome, but what actually happened was still good. I was, however, left unsatisfied by the very end itself, I guess due to the way it dwindled down rather than stopping on a “high” (it was back to the grind, sort of, which was like going out with a whimper rather than with a bang). Fitting, in a way, considering the prospects of one’s life at Cloud; less fitting for me in terms of storytelling.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars. Enjoyable, but I think I was expecting more from it.