Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½
A woman wakes up in a bedroom, with no knowledge of where she is, how she got there, or even who she is. Gradually, she (and the reader) find out the answers to at least some of those questions. Her name is Diya, and the bedroom is on Luna, which has now been settled and colonised by humanity. That’s the simple part. The rest? It’s complex. But is summary, she is a cyborg, created as part of a black budget research project by the NeuroDyne Corporation (Earth’s biggest employer – they basically own Iceland). An employee who had moral qualms about the scheme, smuggled Diya off-planet, stashing her with his blind sister Terry and a robot caregiver. But NeuroDyne aren’t letting their investment just walk away.
It’s a bit of a slow-burn. While there’s no doubt that Diya has been significantly upgraded in a number of areas, her new talents are only gradually revealed. She doesn’t even leave the apartment until about a quarter of the way through, and that’s only briefly, to rescue Terry from some street thugs. The heroine does eventually head off on her own, seeking more information on the streets of Luna, with the help of a memory hacker called Ryken. However, that puts her firmly on NeuroDyne’s radar, who send another cyborg, called a Scyther, to track Diya down and bring her back. It won’t take “No” for an answer, and the company’s power gives their minion an almost unfettered lack of responsibility.
It feels like Battle Angel Alita is definitely an inspiration, with both having a human-machine hybrid as a heroine, seeking her own identity in a futuristic, urban environment, and starting from a “blank slate”. The world Coral creates is quite detailed, and it’s nice that it is one we discover alongside Diya. This future is clearly one where corporations hold power, though in this volume at least, we only scratch the surface of their influence. That partial nature was, I think, my main complaint. Ending on a cliffhanger is one thing, yet this feels like almost nothing of significance has been resolved. For example, we barely know anything about Newt, the employee who freed her, or why he vanished from the apartment.
To be frank, it’s all a bit less than satisfying. I was left with the impression that the story was just about to get going, when I turned the (virtual) page to see “End of Book 1”. It feels like it wouldn’t be too hard to skip this entirely, start with the second part, and get to the meat of the action. This probably involves Diya realizing her true potential, working out what happened to Newt, and (if my instincts regarding the usual approach in this kind of thing, are in any way accurate) taking the fight to NeuroDyne. I think I am fine just figuring out the rest of the story on my own.
Author: Cameron Coral
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Cyborg Guardian Chronicles series.