Kas is passionate about Earth antiquities. What she doesn’t realise at first is that she’s supposed to do the work and her higher-status (and fairly mannerless) colleague is supposed to get the credit to burnish her career.

Kas is a young scholar who’s come to Earth as part of a research team. It sets itself in a far-future where Earth is a relatively lawless backwater in a human society that has colonised the stars – and replicated inherited class hierarchies there as well. I suppose all I can do is go back to waiting for Blood of the Chosen now.Hard Reboot, Django Wexler ( Tordotcom 978-6-2, $14.99, 150pp, tp) May 2021.ĭjango Wexler’s Hard Reboot is a standalone science fiction novella from the author of Ashes of the Sun (2020) and the Wells of Sorcery trilogy ( Ship of Smoke and Steel, City of Stone and Silence, Siege of Rage and Ruin). I mean, really, in the end, if I had any issues it’s that it was only a novella and not a full-length novel.

Django Wexler, if you’re reading this, how’s about a sequel?

In fact, they’re sort of characters that you want to know more about. Obviously, novellas don’t have time to info-dump or to go in-depth into everything, but here I felt the balance between telling you some things and letting you pick up on the rest was perfect.Īdd onto that characters that you can easily sympathise with, and who have a great dynamic, and you basically have yourself the best kind of novella. I think what I liked best about this book is just how seamlessly the worldbuilding fit into everything. (Which, also, I realise is a massively convoluted way of explaining the plot.) Which, obviously, leads to them to go all-or-nothing on a second fight, to each get out of the debts they’re in. When the mecha she bet on loses, she still owes, so she follows Zhi in an attempt to get out of it. The story follows Kas, a junior researcher come down to Old Earth, who ends up embroiled in a con by Zhi, accidentally betting a lot of money she doesn’t have on a mecha fight. At once a self-contained story, but that leaves you wanting more of the world, it’s a book I highly enjoyed reading. If you’re looking for a novella that you can devour in just a few hours, Hard Reboot is for you.

Hard reboot django wexler