Blowback by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel is a direct sequel to Anniversary Day, the first Retrieval Artist novel Kristine Kathryn Rusch took indie. She'd had some problems with Roc, her previous publisher for the series, mostly with putting them out only every other year. But when they included clauses in their contract for that book that she deemed unacceptable and she could not negotiate them out, she took the series indie and began producing the books in a way that fit her conception of how the universe would best be enjoyed, not a corporate beancounter's scheduling notions.
Unfortunately, it had some unhappy results for those of us whose book-buying budgets are less than plush. Because indie books are not reviewed as often or as prominently as traditionally published books, libraries often do not acquire them. And while our library did acquire Anniversary Day and this volume, it appears they are not interested in acquiring further volumes of the series, of which there are quite a number now. This is particularly frustrating because this volume ends in a way that raises a lot more questions than it answers.
Like Anniversary Day, it starts with a side character, in this case Detective Iniko Zagrando, being pulled out of his regular police work and into something that is more along the lines of deep-cover CIA work with his employer, the mega-corp Aleyd, which often acts more like a government. This scene is particularly disturbing because his handlers destroy his old identity by staging his murder, using a fast-grown clone who has the mentality of a small child and certainly couldn't have consented to being sacrificed. And that sets the tone for that thread of the novel, which takes Zagrando into some very dark parts of the underbelly of Rusch's future history. His mission is to arrange the purchase of clone assassins, and in doing so, to collect evidence against the underworld network that produces and delivers them -- and in places like that, one has no friends, only alliances of temporary value, and it may be necessary to abandon or even betray a partner one has been assigned for one part of the mission.
However, Zagrando's mission through the criminal underworld is only one part of the novel, and Ms. Rusch has most certainly not forgotten the principal protagonist of her series. He reappears in chapter 3, meeting with former police partner Noelle DeRicci, who is now head of security for the United Domes of the Moon. During the Anniversary Day bombings, she took extensive emergency powers to keep as many people alive as possible, including sectioning the various domes so that at least some parts of them would retain atmosphere and life-support.
With the crisis over, she's returned to the stated duties of her office, but with the awareness that she can wield a great deal of power if it should be necessary again. She's also aware that someone sent those attacks, and is likely to be planning more mayhem. Knowing her former partner Miles Flint has some extraordinary skills and connections in his work as a Retrieval Artist, she has approached him for help. He may well be able to find out things she could not while working strictly through official channels.
And he's been hard at work on the project -- but so has his daughter Talia, for reasons of her own. She is a clone of his murdered daughter Evangeline, in a world where clones are second-class citizens, marginalized and stigmatized for their irregular origin, rather like the Artificial Persons in Robert A Heinlein's Friday, Talia lives a precarious life. Her father has done everything he can to minimize her diminished status, to allow her to function as his adoptive daughter with as much of the rights of a born-citizen as he can give her. But there's always the risk that the wrong word to the wrong person could bring everything crashing down on her, exposing her true status and leading to ostracism and social cruelty.
Such a situation could produce a fretful child, hyper-cautious of anything the least bit risky. But Talia is made of sterner stuff, and if anything, she's gone the opposite direction. She's a headstrong young woman who has a strong tendency to charge into situations where she believes that she's doing the right thing. Some time ago her father found her trying to track down her clone-sisters, and had to sit her down and explain just what danger she could be putting them into by her careless queries on unprotected systems.
So is it any wonder that she would stand up to a bully who's throwing anti-clone prejudice around at school? And do it so well she practically starts a riot, and ends up in almost worse trouble than the actual bully?
However, the crisis proves an opportunity for Miles when he meets the bully's father and discovers this man has some interesting connections of his own -- and may be willing to work together to get to the bottom of the Anniversary Day attacks. This man is obviously a shady character, but Miles is no stranger to having to work with people he finds distasteful. And given how many innocent people died while just going about their daily lives, finding the people behind the killer clones is worth getting one's hands dirty.
Meanwhile, a human researcher on a distant planet becomes an accidental witness to a horrific scene: one after another member of the world's intelligent species being thrown to their doom, right past the window of her habitat. This sight is particularly shocking because this species is not just physically fragile, but gentle of temperament, with almost no crime or violence. And when she reports it to the appropriate authorities, they reveal that the faces of the victims are all alike. Not just "alike" in the way that members of an alien species tend to look alike to a human observer, but identical to their conspecifics' eyes too. And this species reproduces in such a way that there is no equivalent to human identical twins, triplets, etc.
No, these are clones, made by artificial means. Worse, a little research provides the identity of the original of that face: a tyrannical dictator who filled so many mass graves that the shock and horror of it led this alien species to make fundamental changes to their culture in hopes of eradicating such evil forever. Which means that whoever was behind the Anniversary Day attacks is something bigger than just a human conspiracy -- and they have a new attack planned, even bigger and more ambitious than Anniversary Day.
It's a close-run thing to defeat this new attack, and the battle is not without its prices, some terrible. Talia witnesses a horror that might well leave another child curled up in a ball from the trauma.
But these events make it clear that the ending of this volume is not by any means the end of the story. If anything, it's a new beginning. Yes, the questions posed at the beginning of the novel have been answered, but in a way that leaves Our Heroes -- and us the readers -- realizing just how little we really know.
Which is frustrating when you don't have the money to buy your own copies and the library isn't buying.
Review posted June 18, 2019.
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