This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
‘Tangle’s Game’ is a near-future sci-fi thriller that manages to succeed despite its flaws. It’s bold, engaging and not afraid to make statements about the modern world.
The plot is not entirely original but works well. A successful businesswoman, Amanda, living in a familiar but more technologically enmeshed London, gets delivered a mysterious flash drive from a former lover. She sets of on an odyssey to find out what’s on the drive, and her journey helps her to better understand the world she lives in and the forces that control and shape it.
It’s a story we have seen many times before, but Stewart Hotston makes it fresh and compelling by giving it a setting that feels only a few steps away from our own world. It’s set in an England where your credit rating is everything and drives your access to public services. Where minor misdemeanours lead to everyday expenses going up and good behaviour is enforced through economics. The world this England sits in is fractured. Brexit has happened, leading to the breakup of the United Kingdom; America has split between Republican and Democratic states and the Eurozone is also under threat. All these geopolitical events are tied back to today’s news, with Russia and China as the winners.
Against that backdrop, Hotston gives us a pacey, globe trotting narrative. The book is packed with incident and the characters are fun. Amanda makes a good protagonist, and the various personalities she engages with on her quest are entertaining too. Humorous Irish mobsters, an elderly tech savvy woman, a benign AI – all add to the richness of the book. It’s sometimes funny, and always readable, inventive and exciting.
I suspect, though, that it’s a book that will date quickly. Its themes and obsessions are so desperately current – blockchain, Brexit, Trump, Russian interference – that in even a couple of years it might feel naïve and ridiculous. Today it works brilliantly though, if you share the author’s world view at least. I suspect conservatives will scoff at his bleak predictions, but so many technothrillers have a right-wing world view that it was a pleasant experience to read one with a more liberal bent. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it with the caveats noted above. Read it soon, and avoid it if you voted Trump or Leave.

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Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for honest review.

DNF at 22%

This sounded interesting, and the plot might have been enough to get me through, but I can't get myself to overlook the fact that the main character seems super self-congratulatory about being a woman in man's world because it's so damn hard, am I right, ladies? I already feel like the author is just trying to pat himself on the back for his woman-in-business protagonist, in case we forgot she's a minority woman in finance which is mostly made up of white men and that's HARD, okay? The way we're told this is hard is that she explicitly tells us in dialogue over and over and over (and I didn't even get a quarter of the way through the book) in the most unnatural places for it to come up in dialogue. I'm a woman with a physics degree and I wouldn't respond to someone in the middle of an action scene saying I'm tougher than I look by also saying, "Yeah, well, it's TOUGH to be a WOMAN in SCIENCE."

It's so clear this is a man's attempt at writing a woman character who works in a male-dominated field. I'm not saying the underlying content of the message is bad. There are difficulties in being the only woman in an office or class or lab. But the delivery was so in the reader's face and so lacking nuance and so repetitive and in such unnatural places of dialogue where it shouldn't have been at all in just the first 22% that I was rolling my eyes. ( )

Below Average

This is a story set in the near future. A financial analyst receives a parcel from her long-despised lover. It's a thumb drive (long outdated tech) that turns out to contain code that disrupts blockchains, the supposedly unhackable technology that runs that future world. The story is moderately interesting until near the end when a bunch of unlikely and unneeded stuff is added in. The UK governments renditions her to China for no reason that I can figure. The rendition lasts a few days and she is then flown back. During the rendition she does not wash or use the toilet, her nose is smashed, and she is only fed one. But when she arrives in London she is not given a cleaned up for her press appearance but no one notices the mess. A bunch of story lines go flat. A break-in at a secure is very poorly planned but succeeds because the security systems are almost non-existent. The most irritating thing about the text is that people don't "park" cars, the "park up" cars. I have been around the world several times and I have never heard anyone say "park up" and neither has Google as of a few minutes ago.

I received a review copy of "Tangle's Game" by Stewart Hotston (Rebellion Publishing) through NetGalley.com. ( )