Sometimes I get tired of reading serious books on serious themes and need to cleanse my reading palate. These science fictions novels are good for when you don't want to completely turn your brain off, but want some fun with your literature.
Koko Takes A Holiday by Kieran Shea roars out of the gate and doesn't let up until the final chapter. Five hundred years from now, the world is run by corporations, with some vestigial governments. Koko is a retired mercenary for a hospitality/adventure company, living in a tropical paradise. Unfortunately, the woman who set her up for retirement, Portia Delacompte, is a bigwig in the company and for reasons she can't remember due to selective memory treatments, wants Koko dead. Koko flees to an orbiting community and meets up with a depressed cop, who helps her evade the assassins and defeat Delacompte. Nonstop action and derring-do are the order of the day, as is convincing world building in this compulsively readable novel.
In the universe of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, death is almost eradicated by digitizing one's DNA and personality and "resleeving" into another body when the current one gives out. Takeshi Kovacs finds himself resleeved as a private detective investigating the murder of the very rich and powerful Laurens Bancroft, who has been resleeved, but had his digital consciousness damaged. Turns out, there's a conspiracy to keep Bancroft's murder on the QT, and that's the least of it. Kovacs is going to need every scrap of his military training and criminal smarts to solve this case. Once again, the action is nonstop and the world building and plot are intricate in this sterling example of cyberpunk.
The Human Blend by Alan Dean Foster takes place in a future where bodily alteration is cheap and common. Two lowlifes murder a tourist for his prosthetic hand, but when one of the criminals disappears, the other, Whispr, goes to a doctor with a strange silver thread found on the body that appears to be some kind of data storage device. Whispr is initially interested solely in the cash this item may bring and offers to split the money with the doctor in exchange for some physical modifications. Turns out, more than one person is interested in that silver thread, and Whispr and the doctor are on the run. More world building, strong female characters, unrelenting action and a dark sense of humor make this book stand out.
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