Wednesday, August 19, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Digital Divide by KB Spangler


Digital Divide is the first book in KB Spangler's Rachel Peng series, a series of self-published scifi novels set in the same universe as her webcomic, "A Girl and Her Fed."  I've paid attention to Spangler after being redirected to her often amusing twitter feed by Ursula Vernon and have always meant to try out her novels at some point.  And after binge reading through the webcomic archives and seeing this novel listed at $1.99, I couldn't resist the chance.

And Digital Divide is a very solid and enjoyable novel, which makes me want more.  The story is stand-alone and requires no prior knowledge, but takes place within a five year time skip between parts 1 and 2 of the webcomic (which, for context, just started part 3).  The story features an empathic "cyborg" heroine seconded to DC's police force who has to juggle trying to solve a mystery involving a mysteriously technological culprit with the political situation that threatens the lives of both herself and other cyborgs in their program.  The result is an often surprising and usually fascinating version of a buddy cop-esque plot, and I definitely have an interest in going further.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Rachel Peng, former investigator for the US Army, missed her old job, but knew that being assigned to the DC Metropolitan Police would be nothing like it - and would be far more annoying.  That's because Rachel is one of 350+ "cyborgs" created by the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies (OACET), a secret government project that used a mysterious chip to give each agent the ability to hack into basically any digital device at will, as if any digital security didn't exist.  Or well, it used to be a secret, until OACET's new leader called a press conference and blew the project wide open, resulting in months and possibly years of congressional hearings of what to do with the most dangerous security risks America has ever known....who just want to be left alone.

Rachel, whose chip allows her to empathically detect the emotional mood of anyone she sees (in addition to its other capabilities), was given her current assignment to try and build public support for OACET and her fellow agents, by showing the good they could do.  But when a woman is found murdered at a bank, with the camera footage clearly tampered with by the culprit, it becomes clear that the murderer is targeting OACET and cyborgs like Rachel for some unusual purpose.  And if Rachel cant solve the mystery, it could spell the end of the freedom for her and her fellow agents...which could spell the end of her life as she has come to know it.....
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Digital Divide is the first in a novel series set in Spangler's "A Girl and her Fed" webcomic universe.  Readers of the webcomic will have a greater understanding from the beginning of what is going on and who people are, but the book does a fairly good job catching new readers up so they won't be too lost and the book avoids some of the more fantastical elements of the webcomic to make it almost a bit more grounded (there are hints of them in the book that comics readers might notice, but those are basically easter eggs).  The key thing you need to know from the start, as the book catches you up, is that it has just recently been revealed that the federal government had experimented on 500 of its brightest people by implanting chips in their heads, which made them incredibly capable at getting around security of a digital nature....and of doing even more things revealed through the story....and that the cyborgs have banded together and gone public about the project.  The result is that everyone in DC is on edge about the presence of these cyborgs and what they mean for the future of life in the US.

Enter Rachel Peng.  Rachel is one of the cyborgs, but her skills and weaknesses are somewhat unique for various reasons related to the trauma she suffered during her 5 "lost" years in the program (which I won't spoil in this review).  Significantly, Rachel is empathic, seeing people's emotions in person in colors, which doesn't quite make her a mind reader, but gives her a damn good impression of what people's attitudes are towards others and things at any given moment (whether they're lying or not, angry or happy, etc.)   She's also quite good at using her chip in unorthodox ways to "see" things that others cannot - for example, spaces between worlds.  At the same time, she finds it harder than others to navigate the internal structure of the chip, which makes it harder for her to share her skills with the rest of the cyborgs.

But those technological skills don't make Rachel who she is, and aren't quite why she's such a great character to follow, any more than her racial background (she's Chinese-American) or sexuality (she's a Lesbian).  They're mere side effects of the trauma that all agents of OACET went through in the five years they were in the program before it was turned upside down and made public, in which her life was absolutely miserable and not worth living.  Despite being an empath, Rachel isn't a person who cares too much about morals but instead cares absolutely about ensuring that what happened those five years is absolutely never repeated.  Oh she cares about the poor murdered woman who started the investigation that centers this book's plot and she cares about all the victims that wind up in our mysterious criminal antagonist's path in this book - again, it's hard for her not to care when she sees those victims' emotions up close - but for her, the key thing is to ensure the agents' - and her own - new lease on life is never taken away or threatened.  Like the other agents, she doesn't want pity for her trauma, and her pride refuses to let even her friends try to take advantage of that trauma in that fashion, but she will do absolutely whatever it takes to keep OACET from outside interference.  So when the current case features a connection to OACET in a way possibly meant to discredit the agency, it drives her with an urgency like nothing else.

There are other significant characters in this novel who are interesting - Rachel's partner Santino serves not just as a normal person who the background can be explained to, but also as his own character who runs into his own personal problems as a result of his new connections to the cyborgs (and has his own investigative skills).  And then there are the two other normal police officers they have to work with as well as the other cyborgs in the story.  Frequently stories like this fail to establish who those side characters are besides just being either archetypes or beings who revolve around the protagonist, but Spangler does a fairly good job avoiding either pitfall and making them all feel real.

All this goes along with a near scifi-ish murder mystery plot that functions like a thriller and rarely lets up, leading to an ending that both satisfies and makes me want to see more from everyone.  The book has one major issue - albeit one that isn't really the book's fault but the fault of changing times.  As noted, this is a book featuring the police, and while Spangler is very liberal in her political views, it's a pretty standard classic 90s or 00s version of police media: the police are good guys, even if a little discriminatory against the cyborgs, with interrogations being done in good faith to catch bad guys and even the jerkass cops really wanting to do their jobs.  Only one of our three major cop characters are white and the book makes a joke about how he's more intimidating than his black partner in interrogations because of the fear of white cops, but the overall image of cops here are as unquestionably good guys (this also extends to the FBI when they show up midway through).  Obviously in today's environment, and even beforehand, this portrayal kind of sticks out, especially when a late plot point has the possibility of Rachel shooting to kill a suspect being against police policy because uhhhhhh yeah.

But yeah other than that issue, I really enjoyed Digital Divide and I hope to pick up the sequels soon enough.  I really enjoy this universe, and this novel works damn well even if you haven't had a chance to read the webcomic.

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