For your edification: a brief review of a brief book.

James Islington is becoming one of those authors where I preface every mention of him with a disclaimer; he has written six books, I have bought seven of them, read roughly four and 1/4, and liked … two. Honestly, I only picked Scion up because, as a science fiction novella unrelated to any of his previous work, it promised to be different, and I figure that if I gave the guy a chance in a whole different genre and still wasn’t able to fully endorse his work, it would be okay to put him down.(*)

And … well, damn it, I would like to request to Islington that he stick to short-format science fiction for a while. He’s good at it. You can get away with a lot of shit in a standalone novella that you can’t get away with in a novel or especially a trilogy, and the kind of stuff you can get away with is exactly the kind of stuff that has historically bothered me about his work. You just need enough world building for everything to hang together, y’know? The book is 226 pages and I read it in about two and a half hours. There’s no time to explain everything! It’s no problem!

I am also a sucker for hazily futuristic worlds involving genetically and possibly mechanically augmented assassins(**), which seems like a very specific thing to be a sucker for but somehow isn’t. I like the main character’s voice, I like the overall tone of the book, I like that it’s gritty without being entirely nihilistic and twisty-turny without feeling like a puzzle box. I really enjoyed my time with this book, and in a way that was very different from the rest of Islington’s work. There are a lot of things, positive and negative, you can say about his work, but I think even his biggest fans would not describe either Licanius or Hierarchy as “fun.” This book is fun! It may not surprise you to learn that I like reading books I think are fun.

Now, that said: this is, again, a novella, and while I didn’t personally pay this much for it, the MSRP on the hardcover edition is thirty-two dollars, rather steep for a book that didn’t even last me three hours. I’m pretty sure I used cash back from my Amazon Prime card to buy this, or at least heavily subsidize it, and of course it was discounted already. But if you’re the type to want to buy this in a store that isn’t able to offer the kinds of discounts that Amazon does, maybe wait for paperback, if any such thing is coming. Or maybe not! Money’s not real, and I have a job mostly to support my book habit anyway.

(*) After buying Hierarchy 3, apparently called The Justice of One, of course. I may not read it! But I’m gonna buy it.

(**) Actual assassins, who start the book with an assassination. Lots of main character assassins don’t do nearly as much assassinating as you might expect them to.