Re-Coil by J T Nicholas
I would like to thank Sarah from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Titan
Published - Out Now
Price - £7.99 paperback
Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel - a major inconvenience as he’s downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he’s backed up, several weeks’ journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job.
Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in anew body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter’s backups - supposedly secure - have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission.
With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate - re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand - to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it.
Science Fiction and death have an extremely close relationship. Mary Shelley helped the genre come to life in her tale of Frankenstein - it explores our fear of mortality, how technology may push our boundaries and how if we don’t take responsibility for our creations we can be undone by them. Over the centuries the technology may shift but themes survive long after Shelley left this mortal coil. Which appropriately leads me to talking about JT Nicholas’ science fiction thriller that explores a future where technology all but but has abolished death but that doesn’t mean we don’t have problems that could still destroy us.
We start in space where we briefly meet one of the many salvage teams exploring and retrieving the unfortunate space wrecks that are found in a now vastly colonised solar system. Expert Carter Langston enters the ship to find thirty mysteriously dead people staring at him; and then one of the dead attacks him and soon everything goes horribly wrong and he dies…..then he wakes up. Just another risk of working in deep space? Then someone else attacks him and he just about manages to survive. Clearly something has gone very very wrong with this last mission and he finds his salvage crew missing and some dead for good. A secret has been found which he doesn’t understand and he is clearly wanted to be killed again and while in this time death just means being out on ice until a new body is ready that’s not something he is prepared to take. Happily Carter’s many lives means he is more than prepared to stroke back and find out what is going on.
The standout feature of this story is Nicholas has really created what feels a very plausible technologically advanced future. The highlight is the concept of coils - our personality is stored into complex quantum computers that can be saved and enters into artificially grown bodies. Yes this will be familiar to those who have read Altered Carbon but I thought that Nicholas did a lot more to explore the consequences of the technology. It helps humanity advance; creates issues to those people who don’t pay their insurance premiums on time and I really was impressed how Nicholas looked at gender. People can swap between genders but there is one character who identifies as female and is due to emergencies placed in a male body. The handling of body dysmorphia and interesting how Carter respects his friend to still call her ‘she/her’ was refreshing. On top of this we have examination of space colonies, corporations and space travel. Nicholas has put a lot of thought into how this can work and what issues it would create in a society and it’s a fascinating solar system to explore.
The thriller elements are very well handled. We start in space with Carter’s death and then move to battles with assassins on space stations and Martian colonies. Nicely building the tension and mystery interspersed with well executed fight scenes as Carter tried to survive against professional enemies now helped by Chan his shipmate who has a great ability to hack any security system. However what feels like a standard conspiracy thriller takes a very SF and almost horror turn in its final act….which I don’t want to spoil for you. The clues are there but I hadn’t thought the story would morph into something a lot more action packed and does raise the stakes for humanity. That element was a pleasant surprise and gives the story a final push of adrenaline as our characters put everything on the line.
My one reservation is all our main characters - salvager, hacker and later on a very very cool and collected assassin are all just very competent professionals doing their jobs for good or evil. It’s great to watch and in particular Carter is an engaging first person narrator explaining the world without too much exposition and has a good moral compass but I never felt I understood where these characters come from and what made them tick. They do fantastic and interesting things and you root for them but I’d had loved a little more depth but despite that I found this a thriller I got behind the cast and watching experts do their thing and do it so well is something I still rate in a story.
Overall this is a highly inventive science fiction thriller that if you enjoy a good mix of action; thrills and exploring what issues technology can pose us then is right up your street. I really think Nicholas has done something quite interesting with this story looking at how we could cheat death and provides a very entertaining story on top. Well worth a look.
