Friday, July 6, 2018

Nanoshock by K.C. Alexander


Riko is back and more vulgar than ever. Her cred is almost completely destroyed and she's working for a corporation. If anyone else knew, the saints would kill her for it. She still has months of missing memories and the blame for killing her girlfriend Nanji. Now, someone has a grudge against her sells her out, causing other gangs to view her as weak and ripe for killing her to collect more cred. It's all evil corporations, no help, and violence at every turn for Riko.

Nanoshock is the sequel to Necrotech and takes things even further. The very first scene has unconventional sex and blasphemy in one memorable and graphic package. Riko narrates the story and has the most inventive disgusting language I've read. Her outward emotion is to be constantly angry and wants violence to solve everything. She's frankly pretty immature and impulsive, but the story inside is different. Her separation from her core group hurts a lot. They still speak, but they aren't really friends anymore and it crushes Riko. Her situation makes her feel emotionally and physically vulnerable, which only makes her more angry. Her inner monologue betrays the depth of her emotions. Throughout the novel, Riko experiences betrayal after betrayal and keeps fighting. Her drive to keep going is something to admire even if sometimes she makes the wrong decisions and alienates almost everyone around her.

The background of this world is expanded a bit. It started with rollbacks of environmental regulations and a small ice age that had many disbelieving global warming until it was too late. The suns rays are so toxic that no one can live outside the shields even with nanos. We find out more about Riko's background. She was born into the Good Shepherds, a deranged religious group that takes Catholicisms and makes it even crazier. Transubstantiation now means that all the men in the group are Jesus (which means their sins of rape and pedophilia are forgiven) and the women are left as servants (as usual). Lucky saved her from that and she joined a crew (that almost killed her) before she joined Indigo. Her life makes a lot more sense and some of what she knew to be true turned out to be false.

There aren't as many zombie scenes as the first book, but one is particularly spectacular. Just like in the last book, corruption can set in due to overworked nanos that leads to nanoshock. This overwhelms the system and leads to possible corruption, which is when the nanos inadvertantly kill the person and power their corpse. Metacorp experiments with weaponizing corruption and rumors that it could spread to other vectors, maybe including bandwidth. Riko experiences nanoshock multiple times as she gets her ass kicked throughout the book, but gets saved from turning each time. she is forced to move on before she truly heals or gets her tech fixed, risking corruption each time. The end scene is a wonder of zombie violence with an explosive, crazy ending.

Nanoshock is just as fun to read as Necrotech. However, there are too many unanswered questions, compounded by the fact that this a sequel. No answers are given to the mysteries of the first book including why Nanji stayed sentient after turning necro, what happened during 4 months of Riko's life, why that blackout even happened, why she has a voice in head, and on and on. The novel ends with Chapter 1 and the first lines of the first book. What's with that? Is the series continuing? This book answered no questions and created a whole slew more. So much of the book went by without a whole lot happening and it felt like many wasted opportunities. If there is another book, I will read it. However, if it's just another book of no answers and more questions, I'm done with the series.

My rating: 3.5/5 fishmuffins

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