Mindbreaker by Kate Dylan
(Hodderscape, 2023)
Reviewed by John Dodd
When you have technology suitably advanced enough that it’s indistinguishable from magic, how would the world change?
Would it change?
Well, it would for those with the money and the power, and let’s be honest, that doesn’t come as a surprise. But what would they do with limitless power? Anything they want? Everything they want, and what if a part of that was using the poor to do things that even they couldn’t do?
This is how Mindbreaker opens: Indra Dyer is a young woman who finds herself in an impossible situation, dying from a rare and impossible to cure condition. She is left with a choice, die true to the tenets of her religion, a technology hating sect of puritans, or make a deal with the devil, Glindell Industries, and have her consciousness transferred to a new machine body.
No prizes for guessing which way that decision goes.
For a time, things are okay, Indra adapts to her new body, learns of things here and there, and then one day wakes up soaking wet with the news reporting on an attack on a religious sects compound that could only have been carried out by something that was neither machine, nor human.
She learns that the company didn’t give her the full cyborg conversion out of the goodness of their hearts. Their own black hearts are firmly set on using this new technology to create controllable assassins that can have their memories wiped and are every bit as lethal as anything else out there in the world. One button press and they can have any skillset they need, and their robot body is instantly wired to use that skillset, even if they themselves have no concept of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I did like this book, but it did borrow from a lot of other sources, and while I loved the callbacks to various things, it did leave me wondering if it was possible to put together a story where almost everything is a reference to something that’s already been done.
Turns out it is…
The reason why tropes are so popular is because they have been done before, and so there’s nothing wrong with taking something that you know works and using it. At some point in time, you need to have a unique selling point of your own to distinguish your work from all the others, and that, I didn’t find.
What I did find was a good story made of stories I’d seen before, and I revelled in the references, the dive to freedom out of a skyscraper (I, Robot), waking up soaking after blowing something up (Battlestar Galactica), the inability to act against those in charge (Directive 4 anyone?) and even references to putting the Ghost back in the Shell. Despite all these things, the only issue I had was Indra falling in love with someone after her meat body gets junked. Love isn’t an algorithm, its hormonal, and that robot body doesn’t have any hormones, but the story required it, so…
These are all minor gripes, it’s a bold story told with heart, you have to let go of the foibles of it and read it with joy for the unabashed romp that it is. Kate Dylan knows her science fiction, and she’s done the groundwork for making this interesting. There are twists in the story that you won’t see coming, and it ends as it should, with an interesting take on the nature of human life versus the possibility of engineered life (Yes, Bladerunner, but different). In the end of things, the revelation that unless you engineer things to last, they’ll have just the same issues as any of the rest of us.
So it’s I, Robocop, with a Ghost in the Matrix riding an Avatar down District 9.
But then so was Ready Player One, and this deserves to do just as well.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.