(courtesy Text Publishing)
One of the things that makes or breaks a sci-fi novel is how well an author establishes a sense of evocatively definitive time and place; half-do it and you find it hard to imagine the world they create as anything real or tangible, potentially hobbling the ability of the narrative to have any real impact.
But get it right, and your story comes alive, infusing the storyline with a context so vivid, so authentic, even if its futuristic or wildly fantastical, that you immediately buy into it and treat it as if it’s as real as the world you live in.
Stories rise or fall on the strength of this world-building and it’s clear that bestselling author James Islingon learnt this lesson and learnt it well many years ago with his newest novel, Scion (billed as the start of an “electrifying new sic-fi series”) feeling as real as the desk in front of you.
In this future-set novel where the majority of humanity live hard-scrabble lives in dirty, messy, crowded megacities which feel more like feudal fiefdoms that livable urban centres, a select few thousand people have found a way to genetically manipulate themselves so they can effectively live forever.
The world, and to be clear it’s not clear it’s Earth and it could just as easily be a settled planet somewhere else in the solar system, has desperately finite resources and so the decision of the mega-rich to lavish some of them on extending already deeply indulgent lives does not go down well with the vast majority of the population.
OOOO
Enter Azure, an assassin for hire who is employed by a well-resourced corporation to kill the so-called “Lifers” if they so much as even slightly step out of line.
The threat of death is supposed to keep the Lifers in line and curb the worst of their excesses, but the rich will be rich, and sooner or later they cross some sort of unforgivable boundary and it’s up to Azure, a bristling genetically modified and epically modified human being, to see them up to the great luxury stomping grounds in the sky.
It’s not an easy job and often means coming into contact with “bios”, genetically monstrous creatures who can take all kinds of forms, and who defend those they serve with a fierce determination which means that Azure, for all their opponent-defeating abilities, is often scarred, messy and bloody.
It’s not an easy job with the back cover blurb rather amusingly noting that Azure’s job involves dealing “with a ton of boring planning [and] inconvenient hours [and] awkward face-to-face interactions; but they have a mountain of debt to pay off and so they keep doing the dirty work of keeping the Lifers in line, in the hope that one day the debt will be satisfied and they can retire to a house off the grid somewhere remote.
But as Scion opens, that longed-for-dream recedes even further into the future whe Azure is hired to protect a rich person rather than off them, a rare gig that didn’t work out so well the last time they had to do it.
Azure’s fear of everything going right royally south are justified when their client, a fiendishly rich woman called Jasa, who is behind much of the biotech that defines the world on which Azure lives, turns out to have a lot of enemies.
And I mean, A LOT.
While Azure is damn good at their job, keeping up with the constant attempts to remove Jasa from the living world become hugely taxing, her task complicated still further by the fact that there’s a lot Jasa isn’t telling her and that maybe all those assassination attempts are tied into a conspiracy far bigger, messier and bloodier than Azure has been led to believe.
OOOO
OOOO