RogerBW's Blog

Mainline, Deborah Christian 10 March 2023

1996 SF. Reva is an assassin with a strange power: she can jump between similar timelines, so that chance is always on her side. She'll need more than that to survive her latest entanglements, though.

This is also a cyberpunk world (or rather space empire), and we have implants and netrunners and crime lords and corrupt cops. It's not noir exactly, but it does explore how you can try to be a good person even while doing necessary bad things.

Meanwhile we have female characters with exactly as much agency as the men, multiple overlapping factions that collide as they pick the same moment to spring their coups, and an alien assassin with his own system of ethics.

All right, there is the classic first-novel problem of trying to cram in everything, but it still works remarkably well.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Series: Mainline | Next in series: Splintegrate

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