Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆
By the time I reached the end of this, what stood out most is how far we had come from the initial scenario. We start way out in deep space, where the crew of the Váli are awoken from their cryo stasis after the ship suffers significant damage as a result of a hull breach. By the end, everything has changed dramatically. The situation back on Earth, the mission of the Váli, and the very nature of the heroine, 25-year-old comms and electronics specialist, Daisy Swathmore, are are all radically different from what they initially seem to be. It’s basically a dramatic arc for the entire human race.
It begins with Daisy adjusting the setting of her neuro-stim. It’s designed to allow learning while the wearer sleeps. But she disables the firewalls which are there to stop the brain being overloaded. She becomes a lot more knowledgeable and skilled – but also incredibly paranoid, believing the cyborgs and enhanced human colleagues are plotting… something. Daisy is already prejudiced against those who are not entirely human, but are her concerns the result of mental illness, or is there something genuinely going on? She eventually decides to go AWOL, hiding out in the bowels of the ship as she digs for the truth, becoming a one-woman human resistance, before leaving in a shuttle and making her own way back to Earth. Where things are certainly not as she expected to find them.
Baron does an excellent job of engaging the viewer from the very first page. The opening line is, “Should we wake them? I mean, the ship is on fire, after all,” and if that doesn’t get you interested in reading on, I don’t know what to say. It’s an interesting exercise in reverse world-building, in that it starts out at the small and personal level, only gradually opening up to reveal what’s going on in the universe at large. Getting there involves going along on the heroine’s paranoid journey, and in the middle I was increasingly convinced that her fears were justified. They are. And they aren’t. That’s a tricky task to pull off, but the author manages it.
The neuro-stim is a nice Macguffin, which allows Daisy to have the necessary talents for the plot, but Baron doesn’t just rely on that as a crutch. For example, this allows her to build a scanner that will tell her which crew-mates are human and which are cyborg. However, just as tricky is then having to get them to pass through it. The book occasionally feels like the text of a space-based adventure game, with a cycle of problem > solution > progress > problem. Yet this keeps the narrative moving forward, and we learn alongside Daisy the truth about the situation. While ut comes as much of a shock to this reader as it does to her, the facts seems to fit the preceding elements. Well done, Mr. Baron. I think we’ll be revisiting Daisy down the road.
Author: Scott Baron
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Clockwork Chimera series.