Monday, March 1, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dealbreaker by LX Beckett

 




Dealbreaker is the sequel to LX Beckett's "Gamechanger" (My review here) and the second in her "The Bounceback" series.  Gamechanger was set in a fascinating universe, which attempted to portray a story featuring virtual reality, social media, dueling artificial intelligences, cruelties of capitalism, and first contact/alien beings.  More interestingly, perhaps, it featured a world that portrayed a hopeful future, in which society was trying to rebuild (first with the "clawback" and then with the "bounceback") after a collapse (the "setback") at the end of the 21st century.  It was a really interesting world with really interesting characters, which made it work for me...even though I was really irritated at the same time with the book's insistence on throwing social media marks - hashtags, @s, superscripts, etc. - all over the place in distracting fashion.

And Dealbreaker remains really ambitious with its plotting and in how little it holds the reader's hands explaining things, as it follows a new generation of characters from the first book, but it just isn't as interesting as its predecessor, while carrying all the same issues that annoyed me in the first book.  The story skips forward 22 years in time and follows the prior book's kid character Frankie and her poly-am family, particularly her wife Maud, as they attempt to push Earth forward against the intentions of greedy and capitalistic aliens.  There's some interesting stuff going on here - the continued story of the power of the human collective against those who would act in greedy self-interest, as well as more emphasized story of how people cope and deal in different ways with childhood trauma - but it just gets lost in all that's going on.  

Note:  The plot description on booksellers and I suspect the back cover is badly incorrect/misleading - it suggests that book 1's protagonist Rubi is once again the protagonist, whereas Ruby only makes what amounts to a cameo in this story (this is her stepdaughter Frankie's story).  I suspect there was a big shift in the plot late in drafting too late for the book summary to be changed, but in any event, please disregard the plot summary on Amazon in favor of the one below.

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Two decades have passed since humanity joined together in a collective vote to reject the poisoned offer of help from Alien interlopers to instead work together, trading favor for favor, to rebuild their planet to prove that they are worthy to join the galaxy's collective of "Exemplar" races.  But the aliens behind the plot, the Kinze, are not willing to accept "no" for an answer - aided by greedy human allies and their own AI individuals ("Sapps") - and have forced the beings of Earth, now known as the Solakinder, into a dangerous gamble: if they can develop the technology to explore the galaxy on their own, with NO help from the aliens whatsoever, they can join the Galaxy in peace and freedom.  If not....the Solakinder may find themselves under the yoke of the Kinze and their allies, deep in a debt they may never get out of for centuries. 

Frankie Barnes was at the front lines of the first alien "attack" on Earth, as an 11 year old runaway who ran right into and foiled their scheme to help the rich and powerful place their minds into the bodies of poor underprivileged kids.  Now, she, along with her family, leads humanity's "Project Bootstrap" to pull it off, creating portals and ships for interstellar travel.  It's a most unusual family - mathematician Ember and his primary husband and doctor, Jermaine, sister Babs (a sapp/AI) and finally Maud, Frankie's primary wife.  Maud was on the other side of that first alien attack - she was one of the kids fated for lobotomy, and has always been too terrified of revisiting those days to truly explain everything that happened. But somehow despite Maud always playing it safe and Frankie always playing it reckless, the two have found love in each other.  

But that love will be tested when the Kinze, aided by the same humans who once abducted Maud as a little girl, make their play once more for the Solakinder, and attempt to sabotage Frankie's project.  Soon both Frankie and Maud as well as the rest of the family, will find themselves separated by light years with the fate of the Earth at stake once again......
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Whereas the first book in this series featured a lot of Virtual Reality sequences and video games as prominent features, often based upon references to 20th and 21st century media, while also featuring both a global like social media system where everyone was rated by reputation at the same time. It also featured constant uses of hashtags (#s) and @s and superscripts/subscripts as if regular language has been replaced by internet slang - so things like a person dying becomes #bodyfail, the bad guy group is known as either @Visionary or @ChamberofHorrors, etc.  While VR is still part of this setting, it's not as big of a deal here (mainly used as part of shrink sessions) which somehow makes the use of language in this way so much more distracting and annoying to read - it doesn't really add anything to the story's themes or message, but instead just really irritates. 

The book also, like its predecessor, trusts the reader to keep up with its events and strange turns of technology without more than cursory explanations as to what's going on.  It creates some issues where there's a lot of crazy action sequences going on at a major climactic moment and it's honestly hard to figure out what's really going on.  And the antagonists in this story are kind of meh - the returning antagonists might as well be mustache twirling, the aliens are more a part of the anti-capitalist theme (see below) than anything else, and the only new antagonist, a saboteur named Champ, is just kind of an asshole who needs to be conditioned through VR and uh chemical therapy to become violent in a really weird sequence that I guess could be taken as a commentary about being misled by one's dick? 

Which is a shame because the two most prominent themes here are pretty interesting.  For the second straight book, we have a very strong anti-capitalist theme and preference for collective action over action by self-interested actors: the main alien bad guys are alien bankers, who use fraud to essentially try to put humanity into so deep a debt they're forced into indentured servitude for centuries to try to get out of it all (and then they seek to sell that debt to other beings). To fight back our heroes try to work together for the benefit of humanity, trying to sell the future they're working for to the rest of the world as part of their plan. The human bad guys are planning on selling out the rest of humanity in exchange for a leg above in the conquered world to come, by contrast and also rely upon propaganda and lies.  This theme doesn't work as well as in the first book, but it still comes across decently well.

The other major theme (and there are a bunch of minor ones too, like how we punish people for wrongdoing for instance) is of how people deal with trauma and can move forward, as exemplified by Frankie and Maud, our two most prominent characters.  Both faced severe trauma as children - Frankie by her family unit coming apart in book 1 through death and divorce, and running away into adventure right into danger, while Maud's family also fell apart and led her to the Chamber of Horrors, who coddled her right until they came close to lobotomizing her.  But they each cope in opposite ways - Maud by playing everything safe, while Frankie charges into death, and neither can admit it or other truths to each other.  And this book emphasizes how they each need the help of the other, and their family, and perhaps professional help, to make them correct for these unhealthy coping mechanisms, because they aren't quite broken but can move forward.  It's a theme that works, although a final climactic speech to this effect kind of feels a bit too much with it all....but even then this theme makes Maud the best character in the book.  

And really that's the shame about Dealbreaker - I've just written two long paragraphs about some really interesting themes, and there are interesting minor themes, to go along with this story of humans, AIs, and aliens which I've barely mentioned....but it all winds up often being overwhelming and confusing and I found myself instead distracted by the annoying use of internet lingo for no reason instead of being able to focus on what's actually happening on page as a result.  While Maud is great, Frankie and Babs just aren't as interesting or well done as prior protagonists Drow (dead from old age here), Rubi (off doing other diplomatic things mostly), or Gimlet (literally off in a different galaxy here), and without them, it just sets this book back a bit.  Ah well. 

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