'Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel - a major inconvenience as he's downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he backed up, several weeks' journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job.
'Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in a new body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter's backups - supposedly secure - have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission.
'With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate - re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand - to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it.'
The modern world is a scary place, one that's filled with upsetting news, scary threats, and the prospect that humanity might not have many generations left thanks to climate change. As such, a story that offers readers a future where humanity has not just escaped the confines of earth to spread ad survive, but also one where death doesn't really exist anymore is incredibly appealing.
This future is built around the concept of 'cores', a technology that allows people to create backups of their consciousness and memories. If someone has the unfortunate lucky to be killed these backups get put into a 'coil', a new lab grown body. This essentially means that people get to wake up in a brand new body and carry on with their lives.
This is a situation that Carter Langston finds himself in when his previous body is killed whilst on a deep space salvage mission. Unfortunately, this immediately highlights one of the biggest philosophical issues about this technology. You see, this version of Carter only has memories up to the point where his back-up was made, meaning that he has no idea what happened in the month between that and his death (information that the readers are given during the first chapter). This lack of information about what happened to him proves to be something of an issue when someone appears trying to kill him, permanently.
Carter finds himself in the centre of a conspiracy that has already led to one of his friends being killed and all back-ups of his memory deleted forever. Knowing that his death would mean a permanent end, and that there's something bigger going on Carter and one of his shipmates must try to figure out what happened to their past bodies, and why they're being hunted.
The central mystery of Re-Coil is very interesting, and gives enough information up front in the first chapter to know that something big is happening, but still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. By the time that some of these mysteries get cleared up you'll have had enough time to come up with your own theories as to what's happening; but will probably be unable to guess exactly what is going on.
It's not just the mystery at the centre of the story that makes Re-Coil so interesting, but the world itself, especially the ability to be put into a new body when you die. However, this raises the question, is the Carter we follow for most of the book the same person as the one we see die at the start?
The people of the future of Re-Coil refer to these versions of themselves who die as 'branches', but don't really seem to be bothered that there are versions of themselves out there, versions that they have no memory of being. This is something that isn't really addressed in the book, and there seems to be a very casual approach to the deaths of older versions of people.
A casual approach to life seems to be something of a big thing in Re-Coil. Thanks to people changing bodies, bodies that most people don't have a say over, a person can change gender and ethnicity multiple times throughout their long life. This means that most people have a fairly laid back approach to things such as sexuality, and racism and sexism seem to be things of the past. There is some notion that perhaps not everyone is as comfortable in this new world, as one of the characters experiences body dysphoria after dying as a woman and then waking up as a man. This was one of the more interesting parts of the book for me, and I wish that more time could have been spent on it.
Whilst there were some elements of the world of Re-Coil that I'd like to have seen explored more, the central story was so engaging that I found myself not minding too much.
Re-Coil will thrill you with its action and mystery, as well as presenting you with a science fiction world filed with interesting ideas about how humanity and society could change. An absolutely thrilling read.
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