J. T. Nicholas

Carter Langston is a salvage man working in space. He and his small crew have a ship which tracks own and recovers wrecked space ships. It's a rough and dangerous life but it earns enough to pay for his re-coiling insurance.

It this future, when you die, you can be reborn in a new specially bred body. You keep your core backed up and you end up not losing much of your life. A new body is called a "coil" for some reason, maybe for the catchy title. Sound familiar, well it's the same basic idea as the "Altered Carbon" books where they call new bodies a "sleeve", which actually makes some sense. Here, the body you get depends on how much you're willing to spend. If you've got no money, you're guaranteed a new body, but you might have to wait for years and what you get may not be to your liking.

Carter and his crew are trying to salvage a dead passenger ship. While trying to salvage the cores from the stiffs, they come alive, and the next think Carter knows, he's waking up in a re-coiling facility somewhere. And then someone tries to kill him. The rest of the story concerns Carter trying to find his crew and why one of the big corporations (the one who owned the derelict passenger ship) are trying to kill him.

I mostly enjoyed the book but only gave it 3 stars because:

The core business didn't make any sense. If you destroyed a persons core, you apparently killed him permanently. But theres no evidence that Carter's core was recovered but he was brought back.

The book spends too much time over explaining things. Yeah, I got it that you might be uncomfortable if you identified as bio-female but were brought back as a bio-male. This happens to one of Carter's crew mates. I would guess that we were reminded how uncomfortable she was with the new plumbing at least 30 times. Once or twice would have been sufficient.

Ships seemed to be skipping around the solar system a little too fast to be possible. Much like the "Expanse" stories but at least they had a cover story.

As I said, a bit too derivative of other novels.

On the other hand:

Although this seems to be the start of a series, the story was wrapped up mostly satisfactorily.

The interplay between Carter and his "agent" Sarah was interesting. Sarah was an AI that lived in his head.

I liked it enough that I'll give the sequel a try.… (plus d'informations)

I can't believe I paid full price for this. Suckered again. The premise and world-building of J T Nicholas' debut novel are sound, even fascinating, but the storytelling mires any intelligent and futuristic concepts in dumb Hollywood dialogue and pathetically macho action sequences. AI is threatening to take over the world, how can we save humanity? Why, with guns, of course! In fact, the irony of making mankind immortal by uploading the human soul onto a kind of sim card to be 're-coiled' into artificial bodies seemingly only to preserve the right to bear arms had me rolling my eyes, as did the line about 'playing God' by taking away man's right to eternal life - err ...?

The first chapter is excellent at building tension and setting the scene. Carter Langston is on a salvage mission in space when he boards a derelict ship. The first warning sign is a crewmember who has been killed by decompression after sealing himself into an ante-chamber, but Carter presses on into the rest of the ship, where he finds thirty other bodies. While retrieving the 'cores', or human hard drives, from the deceased 'coils', the ship suddenly powers up. While attempting to escape and get back to his own crew, Carter is attacked by one of the bodies, suddenly reanimated. He kills the coil, but can't escape the ship, which is heading towards the sun and certain death. Months later, Carter wakes up in a new body, with no memory of what happened aboard the ghost ship, but a desire to find out what happened to his former coil - and his ship, which has disappeared. Only one other crew member, also re-coiled, is able to help Carter. Shay Chan, a female programmer and hacker, has been re-coiled into a male body, which she hates, but is motivation enough to fight for her old life.

Then. Then followed three hundred pages of technobabble and relentless world-building, interspersed with ridiculous dialogue and much gunfire. Carter is re-coiled into a big burly beefcake of a coil, and his answer to every situation is to shoot his way out. Much is made of Shay now being a man, which is a problem because Carter is only attracted to petite, 'naughty schoolgirls' with tinkling laughs, and he thinks he might be developing a bit of a crush on Shay's 'mind'. Gender stereotypes aside, the clever plot - the company who creates the coils has developed AI which can wipe human cores and install and replicate itself through nanotechnology - is sadly buried under an avalanche of exposition and dumb action sequences. The AI takes over a ship, turning the coils on board into zombies, which Carter has a field day shooting his way through.

I wasn't expecting too much depth, but was still disappointed by the blockbuster script in disguise that this novel turned into. I was firmly on Team AI by the end of the book, which I reached by skim-reading the last half.… (plus d'informations)

Nicholas, J. T. Re-Coil. Titan, 2020.
If you liked Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon but wished it had less sex and more martial arts and gun battles with AI-controlled zombies, Re-Coil is the book for you. In a future where personality and memories can be easily uploaded and downloaded into bodies called coils, humanity has spread out through the solar system. Langston, our first-person narrator, is part of a deep-space salvage team. He runs into trouble when he cuts his way into a derelict spacecraft whose crew and passengers have died mysteriously. The problem, it turns out, is a rogue AI—and most of the novel deals with attempts to stop the bad nanotech that can revivify corpses for nefarious purposes. His efforts are hampered by corporate skullduggery and a very efficient assassin. The narrator is engagingly businesslike and adaptable. The action is graphic and fast-paced. But I do have some quibbles. First, we are never told why adult coils don’t have their own consciousnesses. Then, Because of the first-person point of view, we never get to know Langston’s crewmates as well as we should. Finally, someone needs to tell the posthumans that when Hamlet talks about shuffling off his “mortal coil,” he is not talking about his body but the trouble and strife that go with it. If there is a sequel, I hope some of the world-building gets spruced up, but I will know doubt read it in any case.… (plus d'informations)