Cox mixes classic cyberpunk and near-superpowers with the emotional impacts of isolation to produce a fast-paced science-fiction thriller that is much more than fancy gear and wish-fulfilment fantasies
Warning: Information Hazard. This novel is the fourth in the Awakened series. Readers unfamiliar with previous volumes who proceed beyond this point might suffer damage to surprise matrices.
The government wanted to create a pyrokinetic orders of magnitude more powerful than normal. They succeeded. Kate doesn’t merely create flames, fire is an extension of her body; a body hot enough to damage or even destroy almost everything she touches. Declaring the experiment a failure, they attempted to kill her. Instead she escaped to the criminal controlled outskirts of society. After many years using her powers to kill those who cross the Syndicate, she is resigned to a life of wearing only ceramic-shielded technology and holograms, and never feeling a loving touch. Until a powerful group of psionic revolutionaries offer her a cure, if she can reach them.
As with the previous books in the series, Cox builds his story around the possible implications, good and bad, of immense ability; and the balance is skilled. Kate’s intense body heat makes her almost immune to projectile and mêlée weapons, but at the cost of never being touched. She can destroy anything even vaguely flammable but cannot wear ordinary clothes. But, Cox doesn’t just focus on the big things: perhaps one of the most poignant demonstrations of her situation comes when she sleeps: as psionic powers stem from the mind, they don’t work during sleep; so bedclothes would ignite before she fell asleep, but as soon as she does, she loses her envelope of heat; leading to a cycle of waking from the cold, rapidly heating until she falls asleep, then waking from the cold again.
In addition to the self-limiting nature of Kate’s power, Cox places her between two forces of equal ability: a government that has reconsidered whether she might be an asset, which doesn’t really care about the rights or safety of others; and a super-psionic revolutionary group that believes it has a manifest destiny to replace the current order. Compared to the big-picture justifications of these moral forces, the criminals for whom Kate works treat her with respect and value her comfort. As with Cox’s other novels, this presents the reader with the brutal message that sometimes the only choice is which flavour of corrupt structure one supports: the very essence of cyberpunk.
Kate is a highly sympathetic protagonist. With no memory of her childhood from before the experiments started, she has spent her entire life unable to be touched while she’s conscious; thus, she is both a loner and obsessed with an intimacy she can’t have; physically hardy and emotionally vulnerable. This need for any connection at all to mimic the basic contact readers take almost for granted renders her intense gratitude toward anyone who treats her well highly plausible, so it’s easy to excuse the harsh acts she commits for her “benefactors”.
The supporting cast are equally well written. Seen through Kate’s biased perspective, the representatives of various factions seem to both offer a better life than living by her wits alone and seek to use her, with insufficient evidence to be certain which. The concerns of ordinary people seem tiny compared to the struggle for psionic rights, but are similarly a mix of possible compassion and apparent self-interest.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel greatly. I recommend it to readers seeking a post-apocalyptic or cyberpunk thriller that has substance as well as style.
I received a free copy from the author with a request for a fair review.
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