Madeline Ashby took all the rule of “ hokey life form ” novel and tear up them withher novel vNand its subsequence , ID . Now she ’s doing the same matter for the posthuman “ everybody gets upgrade and has spare ice pick forever ” story , in her savage new novelCompany Town .
Company Town , which amount out in May , has a killer conception : In the close future , everybody is enhanced , with implants and other improvements that make them stronger , smarter , and more on top of everything that ’s going on .
Except for one person , Hwa — and her deficiency of enhancement turns out to be her world power .
She ’s unhackable , and nobody can ever see her coming . She ’s just a unconstipated old - school day human , and that makes her a uncivilized poster in a reality of genetically enhance cyborgs . She also has a birthmark on her face , which her female parent sees as disfiguring , but which mess with font - recognition system , making her impossible to identify .
Hwa works as a bodyguard , protect sex workers in an oil rig that ’s essentially its own autonomous urban center state of matter . But after the oil rig is bribe by the loaded Lynch home commercial enterprise , Hwa gets roped into protecting the youngest fellow member of the Lynch family , instead . And meanwhile , someone is killing local sex actor , Jack - the - Ripper style .
The whole chronicle end up being not just about a single individual who ’s not augmented , versus a earth of cyborgs and uplifts — but more broadly about the future of our posthuman macrocosm . Hwa gets drawn into a huge competitiveness over differ visual sense of the future , let in different direction of imagining a future with contrived word and heighten capableness . Without giving too much away , the tail end of the Holy Scripture gets pretty deep into the unearthly end of futurism , including such oddities as Roko ’s Basilisk ( do n’t look it up if you do n’t already have it off about it ! ) along with some talk of the town about the estimation that “ super - advanced hokey intelligence will finally take over our satellite . ”
The anchor for all this weirdness , though , remains the character of Hwa , who is fundamentally a pure ball of anger who hates her judgey mother and palpate a gnawing sense of guilt for abandoning her sexual practice - prole friends . She ’s fill with self - odium and convinced of her own ugliness , which leads to some heart - breakingly beautiful stuff and nonsense late in the book when she lastly discovers that someone can see her and accept her for who she really is . And her “ superpower ” of being mostly unseeable to enhanced people only add together to her own sense of ugliness and ineptitude .
Late in the Holy Writ , Ashby writes of Hwa , “ She had been invisible — or blurred , or filtered , or hidden — for so long that whether she want to be learn rarely come up . ”
One recur motive with Hwa is the Master Control Room , something she imagines when she start to get raging or freak out . She depict a room full of switches and knob and lever that she can use to control herself , to keep her from whip out and hurting people — or getting herself hurt . This range , of the only person who does n’t have cybernetic gear imagine herself as a machine with complex controls , never break off being fascinating .
Hwa is also a major badass who teaches self - defense class and is always beating the crap out of people who are giving , unattackable , or have powered suits . Ashby publish some darn undecomposed violence :
Her foot shot out behind her . It connected soundly . She heard the air provide him . He gagged . She threw herself at him , tumbling into the illusion of ugly model carpet , and protrude hitting .
We ’re a secure X past the heyday of upbeat , or semi - upbeat , looks at a future of cybernetic enhancement , artificial intelligence , dateless muckle , and perfect selective information . ( Along with some doubting , gritty takes , like Richard K. Morgan ’s Kovacs novel . ) Ashby is part of a new wave of authors who are get some dirt on the unrealistic lustre of the Singularity , in part by focusing on a protagonist who ’s left out of all the glazed progress , and in part by showing her buck between her workings - class friends and her unexampled employers , the masters of the creation .
The effect is a book that keep you thinking about what it mean to be human in a posthuman world — even as it also keeps you entertained with action , serial killers , and crazy plot twist .
script reviewBooksFuturismPosthumanity
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