{Blog Tour} Re-Coil by J. T. Nicholas – A Book Review

Swords and Spectres happens to be the stop for the Re-Coil Blog Tour today so sit back, relax and get your appetite whetted for some good old Sci-Fi goodness. Other stops along the way can be found on the following blogs:

 

Blurb:

The Expanse meets Altered Carbon in this breakneck science fiction thriller where immortality is theoretically achievable, yet identity, gender and selfhood are very much in jeopardy…

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

 

Author: J. T. Nicholas

Publisher: Titan Books

Pages: 384

Release Date: 03/03/2020

My Chosen Format: Paperback

My Rating of ‘Re-Coil’: 4 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon UK, Amazon US

 

Review:

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Re-coil is billed as The Expanse meets Altered Carbon. I haven’t seen Altered Carbon but know the gist of it so can say that yea, there is the similarity of potential immortality. I have read the first five books in the Expanse series and can’t quite see how (other than the fact it involves stuff happening in space) this is similar to what may be my favourite Sci-fi series … but there may be a touch of bias there.

The blurb for Re-coil grabbed me and refused to let me go. It was painful having it sat there whilst I got through other books but it just served to ramp up my interest. My heightened expectations weren’t let down by the opening. If I hadn’t already been hooked by the blurb, I was certainly hooked by the first chapter of Re-coil.

From then on it goes at a pretty good pace and blends shady government/big corporation evil-doing with space age espionage really well. I’ll admit that, in parts, the pace does sort of meander (but there’s not a book in all the world that keeps rocketing through from start to finish). There were also parts that I felt just sort of happened a little too easily almost as if it was to accommodate the main characters on their quest. But it wasn’t rubbed in your face and didn’t really detract from anything massive as far as enjoyment goes.

The world of Re-coil interests me and I’d certainly be interested in exploring more if that were to happen in the future. We were only introduced to so much of it in this book and I get the distinct impression that there is so much more intriguing goodness lurking in the world/system/galaxy that J. T. Nicholas is populating.

I suppose my only real downside to the book was that I felt it a little difficult to get too attached to the characters in any meaningful way. I mean, it’s hard to get a bond with someone that could just die and get recycled into a new body for the rest of time. That could be my utter jealousy that I only get one life (but in truth, it did make it hard for me to feel too sympathetic when that safety net of a re-birth was potentially taken away.) Or it could just have been the repetitiveness of telling the reader how different this body was to the last one etc (in all fairness, I imagine this would be a massive issue for me if I were in said character’s head-space. So I can hardly hold it against him) … Whatever it was I just didn’t ‘click’ with some of the characters like I have in other books. I still greatly enjoyed the story, however. It was just the odd thing here or there that took this from a 5 star read to a 4 star read.

One aspect of the characters that I did like was the use of A.Is. That sort of thing really interests me when it comes to science fiction and it’s far too easy to use A.Is in a bad/boring way. I really enjoyed all of the ways that Nicholas used them in Re-Coil and feel that that is pretty much how I could imagine our own culture might go about using them.

The way things ended had me seriously interested in what comes next. If there are future books following Carter and friends in the coming years, I’d be amongst the first to dive into a copy. One character in particular had me really intrigued for more, so I’d be interested to see more of him.