Friday, April 2, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Unity by Elly Bangs

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 13, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.      

Unity is the debut novel from author Elly Bangs.  It's a science fiction novel that combines a number of ideas - a future in which humanity is barely surviving after multiple near-apocalypses, mad max-esque (and bioshock-esque) landscapes within that world in which it's incredibly hard to survive, and most prominently the idea of transferring and/or combining minds inside single bodies to make a new being with better understanding of the world.  It really explores that last concept - the idea of the titular "unity" - in multiple ways, through its 2 main viewpoint characters (sorta).  

But well, I don't think it really works too well, as its character work doesn't always quite work (particularly with one of our two protagonists) and I'm not sure its explorations of its central ideas of unity really work out when I think about how they play out here.  Those central ideas certainly are interesting - again the idea of merging consciousnesses to try and fix problems of conflict, to try and combine brilliant minds to increase human problem solving so they can deal with global problems, and to try and avoid violent minds in those consciousnesses to try to ensure a better unified mind - but the book often seems to throw out complications about parts of those ideas without directly or much indirectly exploring them and its almost as frustrating as anything.  I'll try to better explain after the jump.

TRIGGER WARNING:  Suicidal Thoughts/Attempts, Rape Attempt through Body Switching.  

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
For 70 years, the world has teetered on the brink from multiple apocalypses, only being pulled back at the last minute.  Now a pair of gangs, operating out of Cities built deep underwater, are the world's major powers, with the potential for mutually assured destruction at the push of a button.  

To Danae, the world's survival isn't a mystery, it's the result of Unity, the merging of minds to which she belongs.  But 5 years ago, Danae committed an unforgivable act, forcing her to hide from Unity in Bloom City underwater, offering some of the promise of her nanotechnology to its brutal leader in exchange for freedom.  Yet now, with the next time for unity coming soon, Danae - and the artist she has come to love, Naoto - desperately searches for an escape back to the surface to see Unity one last time.  

To do that, she seeks out the help of a mercenary, Alexei.  Alexei is known as the best agent of the Medusa Clan, and with the secret help of the voice in his ear, a woman who goes by "Kat," he used to be the man they sent to kill or destroy anything that stood in their way.  But Alexei has long had a death wish, and during the last mission he saw something inexplicable - an eye in the sky seeming to judge him - that has robbed him of the ability to kill.  Now, all he can think of doing going forward is to take a dangerous mission that might result in his ultimate end at last, and Danae's escape plan seems the perfect plan for that.  

But Danae is hunted by a being from her past, who has long been searching for her in secret, and who is willing to trigger the next apocalypse to find her.  And soon Danae and Alexei will discover that what they know about humanity, and what they think about unity, may not be quite correct after all.....
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Unity takes place in a world that is roughly 70 years into our future, in a world that has suffered multiple near apocalypses that have killed off and devastated much of the world (a man-aided asteroid near-collision, a disease, nuclear war, etc.).  The book doesn't always explain exactly what's going on with some of its setting elements sometimes - for example, the surface features remnants of a war between "Confederates" and the "Free Republic," which I guess is supposed to be a sort of new American Civil War in which the enslaving Confederates won before it all became pointless in the latest near-apocalypse, but these details are all basically nothing window dressings.  There were wars, the world barely survived its destruction multiple times (thanks potentially to intervention by somebody), and now the world is ruled and fought over by two gangs operating from underwater cities and is on the verge of another such apocalypse, that's really all you need to know.  

In this world comes Danae and Alexei, our two main characters, although we jump in perspective repeatedly also to a perspective labeled "I," who is clearly the "Unity" of some of the characters (a concept that isn't clear at first but becomes more apparent as the book goes on forward), and an antagonist perspective known as the "Borrower."  Alexei is kind of the odd man out of everyone, as his origin story is only tangentially related to Unity, unlike nearly everything else, and his relationship with Kat never really coalesces into anything that really seemed to work for me.  Moreover, with Naoto, our other prominent character whose perspective we never see, also along with the ride as Danae's love interest, we don't even need him to work as an audience surrogate to explain the concept of Unity and what Danae truly is. He kind of works in the end as a final step in the journey of Danae and Unity but his own story just never really made me care about him.

Danae and the others work a lot better.  Danae is "Unity" - a collective but not a collective, the product of minds merged together to combine their years of knowledge and insights into a single new person who could use that knowledge to help fix the world.  Danae longs to unify and yet is desperate not to at the same time - because she committed what she thinks of as Murder, which to her makes her unworthy.  And yet that killing, as well as her hiding for five years among the gang underwater, and her new love of Naoto, all have given her a fresher perspective on the world, a more appropriate one really, than when she was operating normally as Unity, and was combining the best and most privileged scientific minds to merge, and wasn't really getting involved in the world of humanity that didn't have access to the privilege she did.  And that perspective contrasts with several others - a spoiler character who is revealed near the end who had unity but instead of branching out into the dregs of humanity withdraws into themselves and loses any concepts of empathy for example, and then the borrower, who used a similar technology to steal people's bodies without merging their minds, and as a result is falling apart.  

But again, these contrasts don't work quite so well because the story never really gets to spend too much time on the implications.  So for example, a part of the book features Danae mentioning that with unity, there's no need for art to get across complex emotions, which horrifies her lover Naoto (a muralist), and then we don't really go into this again.  The borrower's contrast of being a being who steals bodies and identities instead of equally merging, which results in death, just fizzles out.  The fact that Unity was filled with only privileged minds is mentioned directly once and then left explicitly to the subtext, and I don't think the result works.  And the final confrontation tries to lead to an argument that guilt is what keeps us human, and that of the two different versions of Unity, the one without guilt for committing a killing is the one that has thus embarked on the wrong path....except well, the other wrong version of Unity experienced things that absolutely should have given it guilt, and its negative atmosphere is seemingly less the result of not having guilt as much as being emotionally broken through trauma.  

If the above sounds confusing, that's honestly because the book kind of is even through the end in the messages its trying to argue, which is part of the problem.  I suspect that there was a really interesting exploration of these ideas in an alternate version of this book, but here it's all muddled, with implications not fully explored and extraneous concepts just thrown out for no reason, which makes it hard to recommend Unity too much. 

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