Tuesday, December 20, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Exin Ex Machina by G.S. Jennsen

 



Exin Ex Machina is the first in a self-published Sci-Fi trilogy (but one of many in a similar setting) written by author G.S. Jennsen. It's a novel that was submitted for consideration to my Judging Team for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC), and two of my co-Judges liked it enough to make it a Quarterfinalist. As such, it was up to me and the team's other remaining Judge to pick this up and evaluate it to see if it would go forward, and I was excited to see what had appealed to my co-judges in this book which takes far future science fiction and cyberpunk as the backbone of its setting.

And I liked Exin Ex Machina a good bit, and definitely will consider it highly for the semifinals. The novel reads really well as it tells the story in a far future society, where the population consists of beings called Asterions who can update their own programming to try to make themselves better in ways they so choose, and who can back up their minds for reuploading into new bodies if things happen to them. Here we have an Amnesiac Heroine in Nika, a woman whose memories/psyche was seemingly wiped and then her body left in an alley, who finds herself leading a rebellion against a government led by Guides that seems to be tolerating an ever growing number of disappearances and who enforce justice in harsh obtuse ways through their underlings, the Advisors. Nika's story, and the story of those around her is told really well, and while the story rarely touches on themes deeply as it might, it is always engrossing and entertaining in at least a popcorny way, which makes this a very satisfying first novel in a trilogy that I'll definitely consider continuing.



------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------------

5 Years ago Nika awoke facedown in an alley, with no memory of who she was and only the name "Nika" to come to mind when someone asked who she was. And while Asterions like her in the Dominion might choose to up-gen their own psyche, to change who they were on their own accord, the idea of being psyche-wiped like Nika, remembering nothing of who she was before, is unprecedented and should be unthinkable...It's perhaps lucky for her that she was found by two caring strangers, Joaquim and Perrin.

Now, Nika leads NOIR, a resistance group against the powers that run the Dominion, with Joaqui and Perrin at her side as assistants. Nika has put her unknown past behind her and is focused upon leading her small but growing group against a system run by Guides who seem to care less and less for justice, even as people begin disappearing from the populace at a higher rate and criminals are arrested and sentenced to harsh imprisonment on a space station for seemingly the smallest of crimes...without any notice of the punishments being changed. Nika has formed a tight knit group with NOIR and she would do anything to keep her people safe and to try to make a difference in this world.

But when one of her people is changed forever by a virus hidden within what should've been a harmless innovative piece of tech, Nika finds that the darkness in the system she fights is far darker and more dangerous than she and NOIR could have known...and that darkness is connected to who she once was. To unravel what's happening, and to possibly fight it, Nika will have to discover who she was five years ago and who was responsible for her psyche wipe...and will have to be very careful to prevent it from happening once again....
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Exin Ex Machina is a book that does not hold its reader's hand when it comes to setting. This is a book that does not use narrative tricks to try and have a character explain how certain concepts generally work or what various terms mean - you have to generally understand them in the context of the narrative, which jumps between a bunch of POVs, but largely stays with Nika (as the primary POV) and with Dashiel (as the secondary POV). But the book generally works at doing this in a way that I didn't find TOO confusing (even as characters doing certain things with their minds is represented kind of confusingly as code with greek symbols, which didn't add anything for me), with a setup for its characters that is very interesting in its potential: each of the characters is some kind of bio-android who can backup their memories and psyches into other bodies and can, at their own choice, modify their personalities to better fit what they want to do (an "Up-Gen") - with up-gening being also occasionally doled out as a punishment to change who a person was in response to a crime. This, in combination with the protagonist's amnesia, preventing her from knowing who she was before what must have been some kind of up-gen, willingly or not, presents some really intriguing bits of setup with regards to ideas of identity and who people truly are and what makes them that way.

That said, this book doesn't really present these ideas at its forefront or really capitalize on these themes. Characters up-gening is just a thing generally, and it is rarely remarked upon as something super important by the characters when someone chooses to undergo one, with the story instead dealing largely with violative forced mind alterations by the bad guys. In fact there's one situation I felt offputting and possibly problematic, where a character seems to have an "autistic process" which prevents him from being comfortable working with others and Nika suggests and he agrees to "up-gen" himself to make himself more comfortable with people so as to improve the team. There's some obvious anti-disability issues with this concept that the book doesn't seem to recognize, with the book and author not realizing that being not disabled isn't necessarily "better" and that the problem is one for others to work around to accomodate, not for the disabled person to literally alter his psyche to accomodate others. There's also the fact that since these characters are all bio-androids who can choose various personality traits, that the book is kind of suggesting that individuals in this world choose to be autistic to be savants at programming and tech, which is itself a bad stereotypical trope.

I'm harshing on this problem quite a bit, and I've dropped this book's score a point because of it, but I did actually like this book and this problematic plot point is very minor so it can be ignored. In fact, when it comes to things other than trying to deal with these themes however, Exin Ex Machina does work really well. The dialogue and plotting moves and a really nice pace, the prose is written in a way that it reads really quickly and fits my reading style, and the major characters are very excellently done, ranging from Nika in her quest to lead her resistance ovement and to get answers, to Dashiel who has for five years felt like he can't trust anyone due to his loved one's disappearance and who gets caught up in the conspiracy to the minor POV characters like Joaquim and others who get small bit parts to shine. Despite the series title being Asterion Noir, the book isn't really a noir and it never really hides its bad guys or conspirators from the readers...again the book bounces around POVs enough that you practically always know what side a given character is really on, but even with the lack of surprise or the massive foreshadowing of events it tends to work really well thanks to its likable characters and intriguing plot. You may not be surprised by the specific twists when they occur, but the book does do a good job at doling out its reveals to the characters in such a way to keep things moving in a way that never seems too abrupt or too slow and winds up being very satisfying in the end.

This is book 1 in an already concluded trilogy, and this book does end on a cliffhanger that suggests that things that are hinted at heavily in this book, particularly the issue of a new (or possibly old) threat, will come to bear quite strongly in the next book. So I might wind up picking that up as I am kind of intrigued - we'll see. Definitely a contender for the SPSFC2 semifinals.
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