![]() But these ain’t your granddaddy’s robotic, mission-oriented cyborgs! Their extreme abilities also come with extreme desires for extreme experience. It’s all more organic than Terminators - think blood nanobots rebuilding shot-up tissue rather than “liquid metal” - but Roland’s powers meet or exceed many of those of your T1000s. As far as I can make out, post-humanism in this world originates with the US military, who “chrome up” soldiers with nanotech, gene modification, internal computers, etc etc. It’s worth noting that along with contemporary wars and ideological madness, Evans also writes a lot about drugs from a participant-observer perspective- the post-McInnes Vice magazine mix. This leads us to Roland, the post-humans, and the strange role Evans gives them. Sasha gets smuggled into the Kingdom, likes it at first, then finds herself in an arranged polygamous marriage with a rapey douchebag. The Kingdom is mounting an offensive based on a new technological exploit- I’m normally not into that as a plot point in scifi but it works here, as Evans depicts the Kingdom as first and foremost opportunistic, an infection exploiting weaknesses, from the corruption and pointlessness of life in Texas and the AmFed to technological flaws, half-consciously, and we’ve seen that everywhere in the twenty-first century from the altright (remember them?) to… well, mostly other right-wing formations… Manny at first wants to make enough money to escape to Europe, but gets waylaid by the offensive. His extrapolations on technology - the key importance of drones, some bio-modification stuff I’m not sure I “buy” but which is fun - work pretty well and aren’t overplayed. ![]() Mostly he does action, and he’s a decent enough action writer, not one of the greats but this is a respectable first try. The Kingdom is ISIS, there’s an equivalent of the Syrian Democratic Forces defending Austin (without, interestingly, as much of the ethnic angle, though there’s more people of color there than among the Kingdom), there’s the “Christian states” in the South kinda-sorta supporting the Kingdom kind of like Saudi, the Emirates, Turkey etc supporting Islamist militias against Assad (paranoiacs who insist that Evans is a NATO pawn will presumably think he soft-pedals that angle here for Reasons), etc etc.Įvans makes the good choice to not linger too much on worldbuilding, and where he does, it’s on something stranger (more anon). Sasha, for instance, is pretty straightforwardly a white American Christian skin for the sort of young people who got radicalized online and ran off to join ISIS in the 2010s. That’s more or less what you get here too. One of Evans’ many podcasts is called something like “It Can Happen Here,” about the possibility of a civil war in the US, and my understanding is that it basically layers his experience doing conflict journalism onto American conditions. They all get embroiled in a surprise offensive that the Kingdom launches that threatens to overrun Texas. And then there’s Roland, a radically biologically modified former supersoldier missing large chunks of his memory who gets bribed into a “one last job” by an old friend. Sasha is a high school girl in the “AmFed,” the American rump state in the northeast, who runs away to join the Kingdom of Heaven, the “neo-Calvinist” (autocorrect wants to say “bro-Calvinist” and there’s some truth to that) ISIS-analogue growing on the plains. Manny is an Austin-based “fixer” for journalists from abroad looking to report on the wars in North Texas between Christian militants and the forces of the Republic and leftist militias. Most of the action takes place in Texas, which became a sort of weak libertarian republic, and basically allowed factions both right and left to control parts of its territory. It’s the 2070s! The US broke up decades before. Evans also worked as a conflict journalist in places like Syria so I thought it’d be worth looking into, especially as he distributes it as a free ebook. I don’t listen to many podcasts these days but I heard somewhere he wrote a sci-fi novel about America after it fractures in a civil war. I vaguely know some people who dislike him because he works for Bellingcat, which produces a lot of Russiagate paranoia, but it doesn’t seem he works that beat. A lot of people I know like his podcasts. Robert Evans, “After the Revolution” (2021) – Robert Evans hosts a bunch of podcasts! That’s close to all I know about him. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A… Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”.
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