Thursday, February 7, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: This Cruel Design by Emily Suvada




This Cruel Design is the second book in Emily Suvada's cyperpunk thriller series (a trilogy I suspect?) that began with "This Mortal Coil" (which I reviewed here).  For those who missed my review of that book, I had some mixed feelings - mainly positive, but still mixed - about the story, which had a breakneck pace and threw out so many damn ideas and barely devoted any time to exploring them.  The resulting story was definitely interesting and hard to put down though, so I'd hoped that the sequel could keep up the best aspects while actually devoting time to some of the issues raised, to make a truly fascinating and great book.

Well, This Cruel Design definitely keeps up the breakneck pace and is hard to put down, but it's....kind of a trainwreck.  The book honestly actually pushes the pace, with the story never taking a moment to breathe at all and instead rushing from one crazy plot point/twist to the next.  And well, some of these ideas thrown around, especially with the book doing little to develop them, just seem kind of silly.  I'm kind of curious how the next book will go and I may check it out - because this series is definitely not boring, but it's not good either, and someone who hasn't started the series may want to look elsewhere.

NOTE:  Spoilers for This Mortal Coil are impossible to avoid below.  Proceed at your own risk:


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Since the showdown at the lab, Cat has been in hiding with Cole and Leoben, hoping her body will adjust to her newly installed panel and allow her full access to the gene-hacking skills she had in her former life as the dangerous Jun Bei.  But the panel just isn't coming together as quickly as she would like, as she knows her "father" Lachlan is still out there planning to reprogram the instincts of humanity, and every moment wasted just gives him more time.  And Cat keeps having visions of Jun Bei and from everything she hears, she's afraid of what she'll find out, and what she'll become if she continues to remember her former life.

But when there emerges a new strain of the Hydra Virus, one mutated so greatly that the vaccine Cat's body produced previously is rendered useless, time is clearly running out - as Cartaxus' plan for the new virus is to initiate a protocol to kill everyone.  The only way to stop Cartaxus, and the virus, is to find Lachlan, quickly.  It turns out tracking him to Nevada is easy.

But what's hard is finding what he's up to, as he is hidden in Entropia, a city of genehackers who have hacked their physical appearances and the like for their own pleasure.  And what Cat finds there are more secrets about her past, as well as more individuals with their own agendas for her abilities.  And as she attempts to navigate it all, it becomes harder and harder for her to trust anybody, even her lover Cole....or even, herself, as she begins to regain the lost genehacking abilities of Jun Bei, including the power to bestow death itself.....
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Let's start with the positives, This Cruel Design is one of the most incredibly quickly paced thrillers I've ever seen.  There's never a moment where the book stops to breathe, and it pulls the reader along with them as they can't help but try to read further to see what's going to happen next.  If there's a crazy idea this book has, it's willing to go with it, and if the main character can discover a new secret that could change everything, she will.  And somehow despite this breakneck pace, the book manages to expand its world quite a bit with more interesting tech and people using genehacking in various different ways.

In addition, Cat remains a pretty strong lead character in this novel, which is good as she's easily the most developed of anyone.  It's easy to understand her unease with all of the developments, her willingness to do things on instinct to try and help everyone, and the stress and mental distress she feels as a result of the events.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is basically bare-bones, with some of the side characters getting reduced screen time or being a little less developed as more characters are introduced and established side characters start carrying secrets from Cat which requires them to be a little more tight-lipped than before.  And some of the introduced new elements of this world - particularly the idea of Entropia - seems kind of at odds with how the world seemingly as at the beginning of This Mortal Coil.

Of course, that's kind of par for the course for this novel, which I described as a trainwreck before the jump - and I mean it.  Again the book jumps from crazy idea to crazy idea, with twists all over the place, and the refusal to ever slow down makes you a little bit numb to any impact those ideas might have had (to take one example that isn't too spoilerish - oh, one character is the mother of our heroine?  Cool.  Are our characters going to try and figure out how that changes their relationships?  Nah).  And some of the ideas, particularly the big one that so much of humanity is simply "instincts" hard-coded into our genes and thus can be manipulated, are taken to such extremes as to seem utterly silly, especially since the book never slows down to try and sell the reader on that idea*.

An example of this in ROT13: (Na rknzcyr bs gurfr fvyyl vqrnf: gung abg bayl vf entr naq ungerq na vafgvapg gung pna or erzbirq, ohg qrngu vf gbb, fb gur frperg bs vzzbegnyvgl vf fvzcyl gb erzbir gur vafgvapg gb qvr!  Ab Ernyyl.)

The ending is especially nuts, with our heroine having one major twist 85% of the way through that sort of puts her on the backburner until like the last two chapters, where suddenly she's in control again to try and stop a disaster, only for the ending to make it rather unclear what really happened.  I'm trying to be vague here - spoilers before in ROT13 - but seriously, I wondered in the first book if the author meant to be making an Anti-Vax argument with some of the plot points and characters, and now I simply think the author is just throwing things out there so fast that she just accidentally is running on occasion into bad implications.

ROT13 Spoiler for the Ending: 85% bs gur jnl guebhtu gur obbx, Png qvfpbiref gung Wha Orv'f crefbanyvgl vf va snpg fgvyy npgvir nf n frpbaq crefbanyvgl hfvat unys bs ure oenva (fbzrubj.  ab guvf qbrfa'g ernyyl znxr nal frafr.).  Nf gur pevfvf fgnegf gb rehcg va gur pyvznk, Png onfvpnyyl gura yrgf Wha Orv qb nyy gur trar unpxvat hagvy Wha Orv qrpvqrf ng gur raq va gur irel ynfg frdhrapr gung fur'f tbvat gb jvcr nyy bs uhznavgl'f zrzbevrf gb erzbir gur ubeebef gurl'ir yvirq guebhtu (lrf, ernyyl), naq Png fbeg bs fgbcf ure...rkprcg rirelbar ybfrf n srj zbaguf bs gurve zrzbevrf, Pbyr naq Naan unir sbetbggra Png ragveryl, naq Png vf abj hfvat gur anzr "Wha Orv" fhttrfgvat gung gurve crefbanyvgvrf znl abj unir zretrq naq gung fur zvtug or gheavat gb Ynpuyna'f fvqr....juvpu jbhyq or n xvyyre pyvssunatre vs gur obbx npghnyyl fcrag gvzr gb rfgnoyvfu jung gung zrnaf be ubj vg unccrarq, ohg abcr, vg'f whfg gurer va n fcrrpu va gur svany cntr.

I kinda want to read the finale to the story to see where the hell the author can go from here, but I can't really recommend this series to anyone who hasn't started it or read the first one and hoped for improvements - what you get here is just an exacerbation of the book's previous problems.
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