Company Town – Madeline Ashby

Building a futuristic world is a bold assignment when you want it to be credible. If you’re not on top of it, all kinds of contradictions, inconsistencies and implausibilities can sprout up and multiply. Even so, readers will still bear or overlook a slip or two as long as the writing’s good and the story’s a solid one.
 
That ain’t the case here.
 
The main premise for the plot is that humans are now genetically engineered or cybernetically upgraded, except for our hero, Hwa, an elite bodyguard. She is 100% natural. She does, however, have a “dazzle-pattern” face that the enhanced humans cannot recognize. How, I do not know. Go figure.
 
In this highly advanced world, there are no robotics or sophisticated surveillance and policing, presumably since that would render Hwa ‘s profession redundant.
 
Hwa is certainly athletic. In the first action sequence, “Her navel met her spine.” (sic) Our crack is attacking a man because she has mistaken a microphone boom for a rifle. What big boss Lynch’s right-hand man is doing up a tower with the broadcasting equipment, I was unable to ascertain.
 
When Hwa is ushered into the presence of the superrich caricature “I’m a powerful man” Zachariah Lynch, she is surprised that he knows who she is. She will go on to be surprised that, as the precious son’s new bodyguard, they check up on her.
 
Lynch has a crystal ball from beyond the Singularity. Very nice. A must-have, I’m sure you will agree, for someone with his kind of wealth and status.
 
Meanwhile, despite society’s prodigious progress, they still teach French at his young son’s school (they still have schools). When a gunman shows up there and the alarms ring out, it’s time for Hwa to take charge and show what she is made of. Instead, she chats casually with the boy in the washroom where they are hiding.
 
Cory Doctorow called Ashby’s work “often profound” and “never boring”. No, it isn’t, and yes, it is. So awful I had to stop reading. The short sentences seem meant to be impactful and pithy, but they’re just corny. Then there’s the flat tone. It never varies. Like this. And that’s quite enough.