Tuesday, January 22, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada




This Mortal Coil is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel full of ideas that's essentially the first in a trilogy of cyberpunk thrillers.  In a sci-fi world in which genes can (sort-of) be hacked and a new virus has spread all around the world and changed life as we know it, the book features aspects that raise questions about free will of thought, pro/anti-vax issues, restrictions on self-expression, and more.  So there's a lot of things being raised here as the story goes on and our characters and the story move on.

Honestly, there's too much, and the book doesn't really get to focus on any single issue long enough to really make it clear what's being said - and sometimes gives off ambivalent messages, which is a bit of an issue on things like vaccines.  Outside of the ideas, the story flows rather well and moves at a good pace with decent characters, with some surprises along the way, but never really hits a mark higher than "solid."  There was a lot of potential here, and I really want to see if the sequel can fulfill that potential, but this book tries to do too much and fails to meet the high standards it sets for itself.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
In a not too distant future, the world as we know it has changed dramatically.  Nearly every person around the world is implanted with nano-technology, allowing them to change their bodies through the use of programs and apps, and gene-hackers are able to do truly fantastic things.  But not everyone is okay with such unrestricted use of the technology, and an organization known as Cartaxus has gained control of the world and used its powers to outlaw unauthorized use of such technology, to the great dismay of many who wish simply to be free - to say nothing of the people who are forced to use unauthorized code in order to survive due to failures of their own bodies.

And then the Hydra Virus came and brought humanity to the brink of extinction.  With no cure or vaccine in sight, Cartaxus took all those who would follow its rules into bunkers to live in quarantine, leaving everyone else at the mercy of the virus.  Catarina "Cat's" Agatta's father, Lachlan Agatta, was once an ex-Cartaxus scientist and the most prominent gene-hacker in the world and one of the few with the potential to create a vaccine for the Hydra Virus.   But two years ago, Lachlan was kidnapped by Cartaxus and left Cat behind on the outside, warning her to stay away from Cartaxus.

In the two years since then, Cat has barely survived on her own, using her own prestigious gene-hacking skills to steal code from Cartaxus to help those outside the bunkers.  But when a Cartaxus soldier, Cole, appears at her house and claims Lachlan is dead and that only Cat can finish his last work - the vaccine to stop Hydra, Cat finds her whole known world thrown into disarray.  For the story Cole tells about her father doesn't match what Cat has always known and as she journeys with Cole to find out more to try and finish her father's work to save the world, she will find herself discovering some truths about the world, her father, and everything else she knows....that will change everything.
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This Mortal Coil is setup as a member of a classic genre - the cyberpunk thriller where the protagonist thinks the world she knows works one way only to discover as the story goes along that possibly everything she knows is wrong.  As with any of these stories, a lot of the question of whether this works depends upon the quality of our lead character.

Fortunately, as our lead and point of view character, Cat is a pretty strong heroine.  I'm not normally someone that wow-ed by a heroine who makes things happen through "hacking" - it might as well be magic in how its generally used so I'm not that impressed - but Cat's ingenuity in how she solves problems and her determination that drives her makes her a really solid character to follow along.  The secondary characters, particularly Cole but a few others are never more than solid as they tend to revolve around either Cat or other ideas the plot has rather than being three-dimensional characters, but Cat is easy to root for and rather relateable as her world is turned upside down.

The plot and world is also rather well done, as the book does a great job setting the scenes up for the reader before - as with much cyberpunk - turning everything around by revealing how much Cat knows is wrong.  Some of these surprises are predictable, but most are not - or at the very least, they're not predictable until the plot is well under way to a reveal.  And none of these twists - despite being very far off from what you might have expected in the beginning - feel like they were pulled out of nowhere, so the plot winds up working rather well from beginning to end, with the ending setting up the direction for the next book in the trilogy rather well without feeling like a mean cliffhanger.  And the book's flow is rather quick, so if you're looking for a book that is absolutely  not slow, this will certainly work.

Still, once again, the issue with this book is that it, like a lot of cyberpunk-esque stories, brings up a lot of different real world issues and it doesn't stick with any of them long enough to seemingly make an interesting point.  One particular issue that comes up is the ethics of vaccination, which is a major real world issue with major implications, and well....at one point our heroine makes a statement which could be interpreted as in support of anti-vax sentiments, although it seems from the rest of the story that the author is not inclined in that direction.  And well, given the major problems caused by the anti-vax movement in the real world today, I'm not a fan of the idea of giving any support, even accidentally, for the movement, so this is a bit of an issue for me.

But again that's not the only issue/idea the book brings up - it brings up a lot, and really doesn't spend enough time dealing with the implications of such to satisfy.  So we have the issue of self-gene modification and how that affects a person and who they are, the ethics of behavior modification and free will, of deceit and credit done for the greater good, etc.  It's a lot of ideas, and the book never really takes time to breathe and actually go into any of them - it just continues along at a breakneck pace, and usher its protagonist from set piece to set piece where more issues come up until the conclusion.  It's a bit disappointing in how things work out.

I expect to be getting the sequel to this book off hold from the library soon, so we'll see if that improves upon the problems of this story.  If it does, I suspect I'll be rather excited for the conclusion.
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