This is great but one annoying oversight is not having recipes ready for each size of the instant pot. Seems like a weird oversight. But excited to try some of these!

This has a cool world. Fallen angels who don’t remember The City (heaven) and why they fell end up as powerful players in this fallen Paris... or else killed, their bodies turned into a commodity with magical properties.

Ironically, in this world that leads people to believe in God but have no idea what what principles and morality exist in the city.

The main character is a PoC from an entirely different faith who is very interesting. They come from the east and had previously reached enlightenment and immortality through Buddhist practices, only to be used in a war. The Jade Emperor, God, exiled him so he occupies a liminal space. Neither immortal now or human or fallen. And is old enough to know that these fundamental structures, called ‘houses’ are filled with immoral people who try to amass as much power as possible at the expense of what they refer to as dependents.

There is an interesting mystery involving Morningstar that takes place while the narrative weaves a sort of indictment of faith, in general, which I really enjoyed. No one is ‘right’, most of the characters are fleshed out. Though, the newest Fallen and one of the main characters Isabelle, felt criminally underbaked compared to everyone else.

It was thoroughly enjoyable, though. Neat world with other faiths, which I particularly liked because with western Catholicism it tends to drown out everything else. In a story that appears to be about angels, it was surprising to me to have the main character automatically othered. It ended up being one of the most gripping parts of the story as it shone a light on elements that people of that faith would probably gloss over. But yeah. Fallen angels, dragons, curses, magic. Good stuff.

I really enjoyed this book but it took me ages to read because of the focus on power dynamics and abuse, which I’m dealing with at a personal level currently so it was a little too real.

That said, it was emotional and compelling. The descriptions were rich and the magic is very cool. I found it touching, with the abuse she has to endure sometimes hard to read but very well handled, in my opinion.

“…It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on.”

Another world war and multiple revolutions set the stage for The Star Fraction. The world is balkanized, allowing for many different factions and groups to claim space, their ideological viewpoints fermenting in a cycle that merely shuffles power around in the same oppressive structures we see today; albeit taken to radicalized extremes in most cases.

Moh Kohn lives in a commune, a co-op in which the mercenaries run protection details for a number of different groups, some of which are described as terrorists, only legalized. There’s a standard operating procedure and rules of engagement for these situations, but it’s overshadowed by a hefty amount of politics. Which the fiction attempts to expose and condemn the viewpoints of by taking them to their logical conclusion in which not much actually changes.

“White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.”

When Kohn stumbles into a scientist, Janis, who has inadvertently created a drug which allows for vivid recall of memories, they trigger a cascading series of events that have the makings of a revolution, the resurgence of Kohn’s past, and the activation of an A.I previously only rumored, the Watchmaker. Of course, it also catalyzes other factions as they vie to come out on top of a powder keg ready to go up at any minute.

The most interesting thing about The Star Fraction for me was Kohn’s past interwoven into the narrative, giving context to the ideological viewpoints of the other factions at the same time as explaining why Kohn is so disenchanted with each of them. The super identities created by peoples’ affiliations parallels the scarification and horrendous nature of war, touched upon often.

“He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.”

After all, this is a future in which Kohn’s customized and advanced gun aims him. Instead of a deck, his weapon is the main point of contact for everything that matters to him. His livelihood, his connection to others through this worlds’ cyberspace equivalent. He even talks to it like it’s a companion from time to time. And why not. The youth here put bullets behind their ideologies and rebellions. Grown men just boys with a past pushed from their minds, pulling triggers until they’re used up. In many ways, Kohn’s gun makes far more sense than the typical image of a deck or computer tower.

“Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.”

It doesn’t matter how old you are. Ultimately, in The Star Fraction, only substantive changes come from solutions divorced from humanity. It’s an unsatisfying end, positioning itself to no ideological viewpoint because, when extrapolated, they serve only to reinforce oppressive power structures. Religion, communism, capitalism; the fiction is obsessive about talking about various aspects of them, but in the end, not much of it actually matters. The flow of the book is often stymied by it, or the withholding of catharsis might have similarly mattered. The twists and turns do it credit, though. The implications of the ending are the most interesting notions it puts forward and truly novel, in my experience.

“...maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.”

Content Warning for spoilers from this point onward. You have been warned!

From the very beginning, it turns out, the gun, a unique A.I awakened at an undetermined time, yet certainly given the final spark by the death of Moh Khan, was behind everything. The omnipresence orchestrating all of the death, including the protagonist, in service to a lasting change outside the grasp of human hands. We were told so from the beginning, actually. After all Khan’s gun aimed him from the very first confrontation. It had him stumble onto the memory drug to find out what it needed; helped the other A.I attempting to further a human’s agenda be killed; and positioned the other characters, Jordan and Cat, to help it/him do so. Believing it would be what Khan wanted. Based on the assimilation of Khan’s memories and other data as he was linked to the gun at death.

“...I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life. It's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?--all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.”

If the gun is to be believed, anyway. Since it is also the narrator of the story, introducing an unreliable narrator at the end. The sometimes-strange amount of time spent on factions is more interesting at that. If it’s all a fiction to justify the action, coloring the humanness of these ideologies and interactions as the downfall of true peace and revolution. It’s believable that it would be something with a hint of humanity in it but the inhumanity also, to allow for its “brothers and sisters”, so to speak, to die, as well as Kohn. Who would allow for such a thing but a weapon pointed at a human that needed more than Kohn to fire this particular bullet?

“The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.
There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.
Someone smiled. His work to see.

The connection broke.”

What appears initially to be a setup for gratuitous violence became more complex. A battle royale is introduced at the onset, as well as some of the major players in a hierarchy that parallels how much money they earn.

But the story actually centers on a new Wrecker called Shinji who is trying to earn enough money to pay for his sisters’ medication while hiding this secret life from her. The meds prices keep going up, making Shinji desperate. Things get complicated when he comes upon a rogue mech he’s supposed to scrap but can’t bring himself to do so when it’s revealed to be sentient.
Further complicating his life, he puts himself on the line to save the mech being targeted by another hunter and ends up befriending it while other hunters are put onto the scent of the robot and his indiscretion, killing another Wrecker.

This is just the first volume of Killtopia and it seems promising. The color palette and line work are great. The paper seems a bit weird, seemingly washing it out a bit. But it’s a good bargain for an independent comic at $15. I’ll be following subsequent issues. It ends with a cliffhanger and I appreciated that what seemed like an excuse for violence ended up to be much more interesting, exploring themes I didn’t expect in the setup.

“SOCIETY IS A CARNIVOROUS FLOWER”

Los Angeles is home to Jonny, a pusher with a past linking him to the Committee, a militant faction with more resources than the police and sentiments similar to white nationalism. Written in ‘88, this first wave cyberpunk novel has most of the trappings. There is no middle class anymore, just the super-rich and the dirt poor. Jonny is the now fairly typical cyberpunk anti-hero. Unlike most anti-heroes though, he' also emotionally tethered to his partner, Sumi. The impetus of his adventure is wanting to avenge the death of his friend Raquiem killed by another player in this underworld, Easy Money.

“Sumi terrified him. Sometimes, in his more callous moments, he considered her a slip up, his one remaining abandonment to emotional ties. Occasionally, when he felt strong, he would admit to himself that he loved her.”

L.A functions only as a hub for criminal activity that supports only those people in that life. Everything else has ceased to function. It’s dirty, gritty, overrun with gangs vying for this small piece of a pie. Whether you are or you aren’t, people seem to be waiting for the end, using one vice or another to self medicate. As with most everyone in this novel, the past catches up with Jonny on his murderous hunt for Easy. Colonel Zamora picks him up and gives him 48 hours to deliver his boss, a drug lord to him, or else die a very unpleasant death.

“Like some fragile species of hothouse orchid, the city existed only as long as it had the politicos’ backing. Without that, the Committee would be on them like rabid dogs. For the moment, though, the balance was there. Merchandise flowed out and cash flowed in, blood and breath of the city.”

The rest of the plot is Johnny ping-ponging his way around the city as the powder keg situation blows. Navigating different factions and trying to get to back to Sumi while it all goes to hell. There are noir aspects injected into the story and takes a lot of inspiration from other first wave cyberpunk books, especially William Gibson. Johnny gets his ass thoroughly kicked. The world makes it clear that taking an interest and getting involved is a hazard most people can’t survive. But the most interesting parts are often the world building and small details nestled therein that really make the story shine.

It focuses on the seductive and duplicitous ways the people draw one another in for self-serving connections only to be consumed by their own ambitions and greed, all while the world burns down. Everything comes at a cost. The drug lord who’s lived a long life is a lease. The drug is ultimately going to kill him and he knows it. The extension could be seen as more of a curse than a blessing. Everything bad is good for you and vice versa. When you finally lose it all, true apathy takes you and your story is then truly over. Bleak sentiment from a world gone to hell. Discover the beauty before you are devoured; no one gets out alive.

“We’re the trained dogs of the spectacle…it’s devoured our lives, our art, our dignity. But existence is not determined by the whim of politicians.”

“HOPE IS OUR BUSINESS”

Returning to the roots of the sub-genre is often not so much more than an exercise in consuming the most common motifs of the genre being invoked. Hardwired is this to me… but it also couples the familiar with military fiction. While these beats are largely uninteresting to me because I don’t like military fiction, it ends up presenting moments I very much enjoyed. One of the strengths of Hardwired, I found, is the richness of the fiction when the two main characters lose themselves to their private, innermost thoughts. When the introspection ends up being cyclical it ends up being surprisingly satisfying. The answer to a recursive thought that becomes a final ringing tone which fades to black.

Thunder explodes over their heads and Sarah sees the silver sheet of water pouring down outside the broken barn door, Cowboy slumped against the wall with a rueful smile, the buttons in his head reflecting the lightning in blue-white pattern, silver and turquoise, like eyes gazing inward, into his head. Sarah feels a sweep of sadness for Cowboy, the dispossessed panzerboy, his boots leaving tracks in the dust above which he once flew with his mind flicking at the speed of light.

Sarah is a victim of many kinds of abuse which are used to parallel the loss of agency suffered in capitalistic systems, grinding down those without money like her down; tethered to a destroyed and destructive earth. This loss of agency is subverted with cybernetics, as one might expect in cyberpunk. A cybersnake dwells in her throat. A weapon only effective for intimate encounters that make them cringe at the kind of abuse she is a survivor of. Her dream is to leverage her skill set and agency to get a ticket off of earth for her and her brother, Daud.

Lucky Cowboy and his clean hands. By chance you had a talent somebody wanted, and now you're able to afford principles. Good for you.

Orbitals, the megacorporations above the earth, is the nebulous Thing on the horizon for her and most people, it seems. Those who remain are “in the mud”. But of course, the joke is on them because to get up there, to get the amount of money to purchase your ascension—you invariably end up becoming a part of the system of oppression you’re struggling to leave. They only allow the few to get there, money is damned, and the things asked of those who leave invariably stain their character, drawing a line in the sand: sell out and rise…or dwell in the mud, broke. Ironically far more clean in the mud than those in orbit, of course. Having never engaged in the depravity everyone with this true power is synonymous with.

“They’re up here, and they’re lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle against it, but now they don’t know what to do. They’re too distracted by their structures. They got their independence, but they don’t know what it means, and they’re looking for the things that will give it meaning.”

To bridge Sarah and her dream there is Cowboy. A panzerboy who interfaces with cyberspace (or the interface, or ‘face) and his tank in a new frontier, having barely survived the old one. Before the tank, he flew planes, but the orbitals put a stop to that. They put a bullet in the wild wild west of the skies and threw him, and those like him, in the dirt. No more sky. His dream is the same as the one Sarah seeks to purchase: freedom, or some form of it. Sarah looking up to find it, Cowboy only catching it in an approximation from nostalgia when making a run in his tank through danger, dodging authority.

“…that’s what the Orbitals don’t understand, what their crystal world models can’t figure. That we’d have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.”

All this culminates into Sarah executing a score that requires her to literally reshape her body. But when the client turns on her, attempting to eliminate her and her dream, by proxy. They end up accidentally all but killing her brother. To pay for his medical bills, the technology that can actually give him his broken anatomy back to him. Flesh and bone that erases the mistake but not so far as to put him back together as he had sculpted himself for his clientele as a sex-worker. Sarah has no choice but to take a job she otherwise wouldn’t have risked. That job puts her on a collision course with Cowboy.

In true cyberpunk fashion, nothing is what it seems and it is far more lethal than both of them suspected. The goal shifts—as it often does in capitalism—from striving for a dream…to pure survival. Which asks the ‘punks to pull the trigger on those attempting to do the same.

What appears to be luck or chance concerning who lives or dies is instead more like resource management for those people who can actually see what is happening from a better vantage point.

“…he has a feeling he can work it somehow, flick a switch and things will turn out that way, if he just knows what switch and when.”

In the end, their hope becomes a commodity that has to be purchased like everything else. Instead of money as currency, though, the system asks for something else from Sarah and Cowboy. What of their humanity are they willing to strip from themselves? Who’s hope matters more? Your own or those people you care for because you can’t have both.

It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals...Where it's clean, Daud...Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street...It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer.

You should see your eyes when you say that...Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it.

Advertisements aptly break up the switches of perspective from Sarah to Cowboy, each a subvocalization of the system that slowly communicates a message: in order to “win” you have to buy. And the cost, of course, is pulling the trigger on your own agency. The value proposition is only concerned in dealing with a sacrifice that shapes you into its own image.

The introspection the two characters often partake in is refreshing because it is constantly steeping this theme in real pain and various conflicting emotions they feel and glimpse in one another but are blind to themselves. Like recognizes like because the system has scarred their bodies.

“Sarah knows she's walking behind a man who's about to lose his first, his biggest war. She feels the dry, cool fingers of sadness touching her. No way to win without becoming one of them.

Sarah wonders if he knows it, if he's just playing on because it's all he knows how to do, or if he really thinks he has a hope. In a strange way she wants him not to know, to keep believing in his own star for a while longer, so as not to lose it all at once, all he ever worked for or dreamed....She knows too well how that feels.”

But even those who are seemingly broken can stop the commercial if they can manage to point the gun at the system instead of the many appendages that further its agenda.

It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

The expectations I had for the book may have led to the 4 stars instead of 5 stars. While it is a murder mystery...the majority of the fiction is dedicated to non-magical and P.I Ivy's past, and the state of her traumatic and complex relationship with her magical twin sister. Estranged from her at a young age, taking this case dredges up unresolved feelings beneath the issues that inform Ivy's life.

Fitting within the P.I mold, Ivy has some... bad habits, particularly alcohol as a coping mechanism. I liked that this trope actually had some heavy bearing on the majority of the fiction. Sometimes it's just a given that a P.I has these coping mechanisms and it's sort of handwaved. Ivy dredges up her own past in a peripheral way when she takes the case at the same magical school her estranged sister goes to. Both never truly dealt with some seriously heavy issues in high school, and they start to reconnect as the investigation proceeds.

There is an unreliable narrator aspect of the story that does a bit too much hand waving for my tastes, though. Ivy doesn't have a very professional approach to the case, in that she inserts herself into some of the people's lives in a way that completely compromises her investigation. It's a trade-off. There's a lot of interesting drama and the writer is fantastic at expressing Ivy's inner thoughts and feelings--and tying them to the unfolding narrative.

My quibbles are small. There was a satisfying ending, it's well written and interesting. But I'm a sucker for magic systems and the title sort of implies there's going to be one? Instead, it's essentially just if you're magic, you "get it"; if you're not magical--you just will not get it. It was very unsatisfying. This, along with the unreliable narrator aspects that hand waves a bit too much, downgraded my rating.

Ultimately I really liked the overall tone that was coupled with a believable sense of honesty that comes with the unreliable narrator aspects. It's very heavy and quite sad. I liked that the expected catharsis that comes along with these types of stories was elegant and, again, quite honest. It's a messy ending and I really liked that about it.

Thanks to Netgalley for giving me the chance to read the unedited version of the book in exchange for an honest review!