Decades after a natural disaster fractured the political system of North America, a con-man finds himself unwillingly deep inside a conspiracy to restore freedom to the subjugated people.
This book started out with a bang, throwing the main character into a political situation where he had to rise to his dead brother’s stature. But when he finds himself out in the wilds, in a despotic land with no rule of law, I grew less interested. The story of tyranny is important, and the book is very well written. I loved his commentary on freedom and people’s desire to be led, complete with the desire for protection at a cost of some of that freedom. Aside from the heavy exposition near the start of the book, the repercussions of global warming are barely touched on. Unfortunately, for me the actions of the story itself were less compelling, and by the end, I was happy to be done.
While well written, the book struggled to keep my interest. My favorite parts by far were the opening chapters, where we’re thrown into the despotic regime in New Manhattan. The history of the Fall, where global warming cause sea levels to rise, drowning the coasts, changing the climate, and vastly reducing the amount of viable land. The northern part of the world is completely frozen, the central part of North America is too hot for anything to grow, so people cram into the eastern and western cities. At some point in this book, the west coast gets shattered by an earthquake.
Luke Stokes has been living under the radar since the Fall in the early 2020s, and we get up to speed on the backstory pretty early on. He arrives in New Manhattan because his brother, whom he hasn’t seen in many years, called him in. Although Luke is called a con artist by the author, and he gets away with stuff he shouldn’t, it isn’t because of his demeanor. He takes risks, and when he coerces the woman at the security kiosk, I think he gets lucky that she’s in the religious resistance.
His brother, it turns out, was part of a super think-tank that was creating a dream reality, which they call Hive to be activated through the holoband implant. But his brother is now dead, and he is forced to take his place, pretending to be somebody he isn’t, and discerning things he shouldn’t know, as his brother was part of the dictator Tenner’s inner circle. I suppose his con-man instincts help him get through these situations, but again it feels like he gets lucky.
Now that the project is nearly complete, Tenner is killing everyone involved, which is strange, because he doesn’t seem to be setting up a successor, knowing he’s dying. I suppose he did the same thing as Matt, though, downloading himself into the holographic world so he can live forever. Could he actually rule like that, though?
Luke tracks down Carina, from the security gate, and she puts him in touch with others, who know how to hack into one of his brother’s hard drives. Unfortunately, due to his brother’s holoband, Tenner is tipped off. After sex with the woman, Matt’s next door neighbor comes ringing, shoots him for a reason I couldn’t understand at the time, but couldn’t bother going back to figure out, and turns him in to Tenner.
Suddenly, he’s on a train to the barren Otherlands for his public execution. Fortunately, though, the resistance isn’t done with him, and blasts him out of the high-speed train, along with another man called The Kid, who ends up being the kid of the most famous traitor since the Fall. The Kid now works for Blackthorn, who himself was once a partner of Tenner’s, until he was exiled out here.
Luke, of course, doesn’t trust any of them, and when Blackthorn’s people show they are willing to kill for no reason, he ends up shooting some of them and escaping into the wilds. There are some subtle clues to society’s collapse, which I assume will have some follow-up in subsequent books, like the FEMA camp, which is avoided by the Remnants group, or abandoned Atlanta, which has prefab skyscrapers dotting its skyline. Something went wrong, and not just the flooding and other natural disasters.
The author puts his main character through a lot of torture, and some back-and-forth between different rebel groups, as he inadvertently retraces his brother’s footsteps. Matt had split up his pet project, separating them between the factions. Now, though, Blackthorn knows where each of them is.
The bank heist was probably my favorite of these late-book segments, as they stake out and infiltrate a building about to collapse. And due to their interference, it does collapse, and he manages to escape again. But time and time again, he ends up at Blackthorn, who at least seems to want to do something right, though Luke assumes he’ll succumb to the brutal power scheme of his predecessor if he succeeds.
At one point, he even refuses to go on, sleeping with Evelyn, who treated his wounds, someone who just wants to feel something in this world of violence and detachment. But he’s caught again, continuing the trend, and is forced back inside the remains of Atlanta, his face plastered on every screen and holoband because he’s betrayed Tenner. Kid, who’s been escorting him, disappears, and reappears just in time to save him, having abducted Carina and Evelyn, which is the only way to really force Luke to do anything.
At his final destination, the coordinates for which he received in the city center when he obtained a demo of Hive, he finds a digital version of Matt, who offers to explain everything. Then he wakes up in bed again with Evelyn, and everything is right with the world, until he’s woken up, Matrix-style, and told that he was sucked into the Hive three years ago. Now he’s the only one who can save the world.
I have trouble describing how I felt about this book, mainly because I didn’t feel much after Luke left New Manhattan. The technology of the holoband was neat, but everything else was modern-medieval, and survival against a fractured, devolved, gangster society. I see how this series might get interesting, but I’m a lot less interested in this book than I was with other post-apocalyptic series, and will probably not be continuing on.