What if your body was both your battleground and your revolution? In Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon crafts a searing, speculative exploration of transness, surveillance, and techno-corporeal resistance through a love story between two women—one flesh, one memory. In this futuristic world, humans wear animal-inspired masks that biologically enhance their bodies—granting speed, strength, or heightened senses—to better survive in a hostile, corporatized galaxy. When scavenger Wylla discovers an experimental HAWK mask on a supposedly barren planet, she doesn’t just find salvage—she finds Sable, the disembodied consciousness of a dead woman trapped in the mask with no memory of how she died. What follows is a breathtaking journey through grief, rage, and reclamation, as the two reckon with the systems that tried to erase them.

This is a book that pulses and bleeds. Haddon’s prose is intimate and gorgeously lyrical without sacrificing momentum. With an eye for political nuance and emotional devastation, Volatile Memory delves deep into the violence of state-backed conformity, where bodily autonomy is criminalized through data and surveillance. Wylla, a trans woman haunted by her pre-transition self, is a striking protagonist—sharp-edged, vulnerable, and deeply principled. And Sable? Sable is unlike any narrator I’ve encountered: possibly a ghost, possibly an AI, definitely a woman, and achingly human in her desire to be a part of the world.

The worldbuilding is chilling and precise: a galaxy ruled by the Corporate Federation, where every citizen’s genetic identity is logged from birth. Tech is intimate, exploitative, and inescapable. Yet amidst this dystopia, somehow, love blooms—as both romance and care, rage, and mutual protection between two women who refuse to be erased.

Haddon doesn’t just tell a story—he builds a body out of language, memory, and resistance. Volatile Memory is for the girls who survived, the ghosts we carry, and everyone still trying to make a home in their own bodies. It’s what happens when Murderbot meets Time War, with more tenderness and an A.I. spin. I can’t stop thinking about it.

📖 Read this if you love: trans protagonists fighting the state, poetic sci-fi, queer speculative fiction, or stories that ask what it means to reclaim your body and your history.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy & Trans Embodiment, Surveillance Capitalism & Oppression through Data, Memory, Ghosts & Digital Consciousness, Queer Love Against Corporate Fascism.