Melissa Hill (Author)
(71)Buy new: £0.99
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Sunday, 30 September 2018
#7: Something You Should Know: We DARE you to guess the plot twist in this one ....
Melissa Hill (Author)
(71)Buy new: £0.99
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#9: Theft by Finding: Diaries: Volume One
David Sedaris (Author)
(38)Buy new: £0.99
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September: On The Pile
Everybody's back at school now, right? Got your maths books and new rulers? No, us neither; we've got plenty of books, though - click through to see what we've been getting through this month over at Bookmunc
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Saturday, 29 September 2018
#10: Slabscape : Reset
S. Spencer Baker (Author)
(193)Buy new: £0.99
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Friday, 28 September 2018
#10: Back When We Were Grown-ups
Anne Tyler (Author)
(44)Buy new: £0.99
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‘The best Hornby since High Fidelity’ – Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
There have been reviews of Juliet, Naked that seem to take issue with it for not being a different book (castigating Hornby for even introducing Tucker, wanting the book to be about the failure of a relationship, Richard Yates stylee). This is the book that Hornby wanted to write. And he has done a great job of it. If you've enjoyed Hornby in the past, if you've read a Hornby a long time ago and not read much since then, Juliet, Naked is the perfect opportunity to reacquaint yourself.
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‘The best Hornby since High Fidelity’ – Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
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Thursday, 27 September 2018
#9: Christmas at Conwenna Cove: A gorgeous, uplifting festive romance set in a beautiful Cornish village
Darcie Boleyn (Author)
(118)Buy new: £2.99
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13 Ways Book Lovers Make More Time for Reading
So many books, so little time? Every reader's been there. We asked on Facebook and Twitter: How do you make more time for reading? From savvy tips ("Listen to audiobooks while you drive!") to cheeky suggestions ("Just don't sleep!"), these are the ways your fellow book lovers fit reading into their busy lives.
1. "Throughout the day I play a little game. I read a chapter (just one) and then I get up and clean something. Example: Go and sweep the kitchen floor. Then read a chapter. Then fold a load of clothes and put them away. Then go read another chapter. I can do this all day. It works great for me!" -Shannon
2. "I always carry a book with me, so if I have to wait—like at a doctor's office—I can get some reading in." -Brigitta
3. "Get called for jury duty! Ha! Waiting can take hours. Get prepared to catch up on your reading." -Elizabeth
4. "I take the bus to work instead of my car, which saves me money and gives me lots of time to relax and read!" -Michelle
5. "Well, I stay up late reading, which has lead to a mild sleeping disorder…but, guys, books are worth it!" -Kyushu
6. "I wake up a little earlier each day and enjoy a book with breakfast." -Kaitlynn
7. "I am a huge fan of audiobooks. I listen to audiobooks while driving, taking a walk, cooking, and traveling…. Audiobooks offer huge opportunities to make the most of your time while you are doing something else." -Emile
8. "Instead of watching TV before bed, I read! You sleep better that way, too. -Raquel
9. "I actually 'plan' my reading time each day and night. Even if I have a hectic day, I schedule at least 30 minutes for myself." -Susan
10. "It's not the safest way to make time, but I read while walking to work." -Eliza
11. "I've actually called in sick when I've been reading something particularly good!" -Angela
12. "I watch TV a LOT. However, it finally dawned on me that the commercial breaks these days are much longer than they used to be. So I keep my book with me when I'm watching TV, and I can get several pages read during commercial breaks. I average about 30-40 pages per night this way!" -Sara
13. "Get old. Retire from your job. Presto! More reading time!" -Linda
How do you make more time for reading? Share your tips in the comments!
Check out more recent blogs:
Finding the 1,000 Books to Read in a Lifetime
Paulo Coelho's 'Hippie' Travel Tips
The Most Beloved WWII Novels of the Last Decade
(Top image credit: Beauty and the Beast)
posted by Hayley on September, 27
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Rick Riordan Presents: THE STORM RUNNER by J.C. Cervantes (Giveaway)
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Rick Riordan Presents: THE STORM RUNNER by J.C. Cervantes (Giveaway)
We Smugglers have been super excited about Rick Riordan’s new imprint with Disney, which highlights mythologies from all around the world. We read and loved the first book, Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi, a whole lot. Since we also loved The Storm Runner by J.C. Cervantes – a fun, adventurous book featuring Maya mythology and a pair of endearing protagonists – we are delighted to partner with Disney Book Group for a giveaway of The Storm Runner.
About the Book
How can one boy with a limp stop the Maya god of death, disaster, and darkness from destroying the world?
Zane has always enjoyed exploring the dormant volcano near his home in New Mexico, even though hiking it is challenging. He’d much rather hang out there with his dog, Rosie, than go to middle school, where kids call him Sir Limps a Lot, McGimpster, or Uno – for his one good leg.
What Zane doesn’t know is that the volcano is a gateway to another world and he is at the center of a powerful prophecy. A new girl at school, Brooks, informs him that he’s destined to release an evil god from the ancient Maya relic he is imprisoned in–unless she can find and remove it first. Together they return to the volcano, where all kinds of crazy happens. Brooks turns into a hawk, a demon attacks them in a cave, and Rosie gives her all while trying to protect Zane. When Zane decides to save his dog no matter the cost, he is thrust into an adventure full of surprising discoveries, dangerous secrets, and an all-out war between the gods, one of whom happens to be his father.
To survive, Zane will have to become the Storm Runner. But how can he run when he can’t even walk well without a cane?
About the Author
J. C. Cervantes is the author of Tortilla Sun, which was called “a beautiful and engaging debut” by Kirkus, an “imaginative, yet grounded novel” by Publishers Weekly, and “lean and lightly spiced with evocative metaphor” by School Library Journal. Tortilla Sun was a 2010 New Voices pick by the American Booksellers Association and it was named to Bank Street’s 2011 Best Book List. When Jennifer isn’t reading or writing, she helping her husband with his gubernatorial campaign.
About the Giveaway
MYTHOLOGY 101: RICK RIORDAN PRESENTS
Courtesy of Disney Presents, one (1) winner will receive a trio of introductory mythology tales from a variety of cultures, including:
The Storm Runner by J.C. Cervantes;
Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi;
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan!
Giveaway open to US addresses only. Use the form below to enter:
The post Rick Riordan Presents: THE STORM RUNNER by J.C. Cervantes (Giveaway) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.
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“Fairly lukewarm” – Snap by Belinda Bauer
"The best thing I can say about Snap is that it’s readable. Maybe even tense at times. But when that tension is almost always built on circumstances that seem too ridiculous to be believed, it does not make for a book worth recommending. Crime fiction deserves a much strong representative than this..." - Fran Slater reviews Snap by Belinda Bauer
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Blog Tour: A Blade so Black - L.L. McKinney (Guest Post: Mad Hatters Tea Party)
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Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Andy Briggs - Drone Racer - Interview (Q&A) - Published by Scholastic UK
It's brilliant to have Andy Briggs on Mr Ripley's Enchanted Books today to answer some questions on his latest book - Drone Racer. The book was recently published on the 6th September 2018 by Scholastic books in the UK. It's probably the first book to feature the sport of Drone Racing. Technology and gadgets are blended together in an action-packed story that will thrill all. I'm a very big fan of Andy's books as he always delivers super narratives and engaging fast-paced stories that everybody will love regardless of age and gender.
Can you tell us about Drone Racer from a film directors point of view?
Drone Racer is an idea that I always felt fitted into those feel-good movies from the 1980s… but set now. I was brought up on sci-fi-adventure stories, such as ET, The Last Starfighter, My Science Project, Batteries Not Included, Flight of the Navigator, to name just a few. I wanted this to be that kind of story, one you would expect Spielberg to make during the height of those classic Amblin Films.
With young protagonists, shadowy villains, and an artificially intelligent racing drone, my aim was to create an adventure my readers would love to experience themselves.
Describe this book in ten keywords
An action packed childhood adventure for geeks of all ages.
What makes Drone Racer an exciting read for children and why? Do you think adults will also love it?
Ultimately, as a creator I enjoy writing about worlds I know (at least in my head!) and adventures I personally would love to have. Drone Racer is very much that labour of love. Set against the canvas of the emerging new esport of drone racing (yes, it’s a real sport around the world, with very real prizes!), readers of all ages will experience a new, yet familiar world.
We enter the story through our three drone racing team members, Carson, Trix and Eddie, who are ordinary kids. Carson lives with his estranged father, Eddie is a bit of a geek who never seems to fit in, and Trix is an engineering genius –a girl who is shattering a boy oriented world. When they discover an artificially intelligent drone called Vanta, they embark on a spectacular adventure that takes them around the globe… as a mysterious force pursues them…
Has technology inspired you to write this book? If so, how?
Most of my books revolve around technology. My pervious series, THE INVENTORY, was about the world’s greatest gadgets hidden from the rest of the world and it allowed me to combine my two joys – cool tech and travelling the world!
With Drone Racer, I had the opportunity to focus the entire book on the wonderful world of quad-copters – drones to you and me. It's a technology everybody seems to know about. They have been one of the most popular Christmas presents over the last few years and when I am on a school tour and ask the kids who owns a drone, I am amazed by the number of hands that go up. It’s pretty incredible.
When I discovered drone racing as an emerging esport, I instantly saw a brilliant arena in which to set a story… I just needed a story.
We’re all used to talking to our phones and home hubs, so why not drones. And what if they not only answer back, but have personalities of their own? That’s when I realized I could push the technology further by making Vanta artificially intelligent; turning her into a real character. It was a joy to blend tech with a fun main character!
What is your favourite gadget?
I suppose it would have to be the thing I use every day, my mobile phone. But I am tending to use the phone less as a phone, and more for assisting in using even better technology. I use it to fly a drone (of course!), via a headset so the screen becomes the view point of the drone’s camera. I’m now also using it with more and more augmented reality apps because that’s going to be the next big thing…
If this was ever made into a film which actors would you choose to play the lead characters in the book and why?
Carson, Trix and Eddie are all young, so there are not that many actors who would fit the bill (although I have seen some amazing youngsters in the theatre lately). I think finding new talent, as they did with Harry Potter, would be the way to go. But for our bad guy, I always had one person in mind… the awesome Rachel McAdams. I’m not going to tell you too much about the villain… but she’s it!
We know you have a passion for 80's and 90's films. Which film do you think would work the best if it featured a Drone in a revamped version and why?
Ha! Brilliant question… the obvious one is Batteries Not Included as the little space aliens in there are, kinda, drones. If Goonies had a modern makeover then they would definitely have some kind of tricked out drone to help them on their adevnture!
I really love the book cover as it is very appealing, what are your thoughts on it? Do you think good book covers play a big part in the way we choose books to read?
The old saying, “you can’t judge a book by its cover”, is true. But that doesn’t mean people don’t do just that. These days it’s less the kids who are judging the covers but the retailers, such as Waterstones, who now – quite wrongly – have a say on cover design.
I have to say, when I first saw the cover I was instantly taken back to the covers of my old Commodore 64 games (for young readers, that was a computer that had a whole 64k of memory. K, not Gb, and for that you got dozens of levels of coolness, music and animation. Now a similar game will take up a hundred Mbs on my phone!). It was as if I was looking at a cover from my past that was strangely also futuristic!
What tips would you give children who are interested in writing a sci-fi fantasy adventure?
There is no such thing as a bizarre idea! Just go away and write it, and don’t worry if it seems too futuristic. The chances are, when your twice as old, your sci-fi idea will start becoming a reality. We need pioneers to think ahead, to try and second guess how the world will change – and we could all do with more adventures in our lives. If we can’t have them now, then let’s read about them.
Twitter: @abriggswriter
Website: www.andybriggs.co.uk
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Trash & Treasure: My Hero Academia
Trash & Treasure is a miscellany of monthly opinions on SFF, fandom and general geekness from Foz Meadows.
Over the years, I’ve had what I’d a call an on-again, off-again relationship with anime. My tastes are fairly scattergun, and I’ll sometimes go through long periods where I don’t watch or keep track of the genre at all before suddenly re-immersing myself, as I’ve just done this month. After seeing it crop up endlessly online, I decided to put my shiny new Hulu account to use and try out My Hero Academia (aka Boku no Hero Academia, aka BNHA) and somehow ended up mainlining all three seasons – or most of them, anyway; the third is still updating – in a week.
Set in what is either an indeterminate near-future or an alternate present, BNHA posits a version of our world where, several generations back, human beings started manifesting superhuman abilities called Quirks, which are now an accepted part of everyday life. While the majority of the population develops some sort of Quirk, only a select few grow up to become heroes: government licensed protectors who assist the police in taking down villains who use their Quirks for evil. Enter Izuru ‘Deku’ Midoriya, a teenage boy determined to follow in the footsteps of his idol, All Might, the number one hero hailed as the Symbol of Peace. The only problem? Midoriya is Quirkless – and without any superpowers, he has no chance of being accepted into the hero course at UA, All Might’s alma mater. But after a fateful encounter with All Might, Midoriya is given a chance to realise his dreams. Unbeknownst to the public, All Might’s Quirk isn’t an inborn talent, but one he was chosen by its previous wielder to inherit. Impressed by Midoriya, All Might agrees to train him and pass on his Quirk, which earns Midoriya a place at UA. But using All Might’s power takes a terrible toll on Midoriya’s body: in addition to butting heads with his rageful childhood friend/rival, Katsuki Bakugo, Midoriya has to learn to use his Quirk without destroying himself.
And that’s just the first few episodes.
When I set out to watch BNHA, my expectations were fairly low. I figured it would be a relaxing, trashy anime that I could dip in and out of; what I got was a narrative, premise and characterisation that sucked me in and made it difficult to stop watching. On paper, there’s nothing particularly original about BNHA – neither superhero narratives nor stories about schools for teens with special powers are in short supply at the moment, and this is a show that manages to combine both. The conceit of an ordinary, hardworking boy elevated to specialness by a famous mentor is likewise nothing new, especially in anime; and yet BNHA manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Though archetypal in some ways, Midoriya nonetheless makes for a compelling protagonist: what he has, he earns through sheer bloodyminded determination and hard work.
The supporting cast is similarly engaging, with characters developing in unexpected ways. All Might in particular is a fascinating trope subversion: as Midoriya discovers in the first episode, an unpublicised battle some years ago left All Might badly injured. His muscular ‘hero form’ is revealed to be, not his regular body, but a shape into which he transforms – now, though, he can’t maintain it for more than a few hours. His regular body is hollow-eyed and skeletal, dwarfed by too-big clothes, a mass of scar tissue scrawling over his abdomen where his stomach was removed. In a setting where superheroes don’t need secret identities, All Might is nonetheless forced to live a double existence, hiding the extent of his weakness as he trains Midoriya to replace him; while Midoriya, in turn, is forced to conceal the true source of his Quirk. This enables a neat twist on the traditional superhero arc of living a double life: both All Might and Midoriya are publicly known as heroes, but the private nature of their intertwined strengths and weaknesses dovetails neatly with the larger themes of self-sacrifice, the cost of hero-work and the balance between self-belief and egotism.
Also fascinating is the focus on tactics. Though there’s plenty of visual spectacle in terms of how various Quirks are used, the limitations on Midoriya’s use of power, which literally breaks his bones, means that a great deal of attention is paid to thinking through problems creatively. This combines with the range of Quirks in the setting to create some truly engaging battle sequences. Ordinarily, the tendency of anime to intersperse inner-monologue voiceovers with grandiose actions during fights can get a little wearying; in BNHA, it suits the context perfectly. One great fight sequence in Season 2, for instance, shows a face-off between two students: Ururacha, whose Quirk is Gravity – she can make anything she touches float – and Bakugo, whose Quirk is Explosion – he sweats nitro and can use it to create fireballs, among other things. In addition to constituting a moment of great characterisation for the two combatants, the ways in which they utilise their abilities against each other is genuinely compelling. (I’d say more, but I’d rather not spoil it!)
The other main strength of BNHA? It never quite does what you expect it to. No sooner is All Might shown to us as the archetypal perfect hero than the narrative subverts him into a wry, decaying man whose optimism, while sincere, is elsewhere expressed in very different ways. By the same token, though the first few episodes set up Bakugo to act as Midoriya’s primary foil and bully, their transition to high school quickly shows Bakugo his own comparative lack of importance. For years, Bakugo has been a big fish in a small pond, his bullying of Midoriya encouraged or ignored by those around him; but at UA, he’s instantly recognised as an asshole by their classmates, while his arrogance and temper start to have an adverse impact on his abilities. This makes Bakugo a weirdly fascinating character even when you want to strangle him: though we’re only given a tiny glimpse of his homelife and history to explain his frequent cruelty and aggression – his mother hits him, calls him weak and shouts at him, just as Bakugo does all these things to Midoriya – the whys of his actions are ultimately less significant to the narrative than his status, not as an antihero, but as someone self-obsessed and self-driven to the point of total blindness.
Because even though Bakugo bullies him, Midoriya has never quite stopped thinking of them as, if not friends-now, then certainly friends-once. On multiple occasions, Midoriya’s heroism is explicitly shown in his desire to save Bakugo – from others; from his own hubris – in a way that contrasts sharply with Bakugo’s relentless egotism. Yet by Season 2, there’s another angle on things: as Midoriya starts up a healthier, more emotionally invested and friendly rivalry with Shouto Todoroki, the son of the world’s second best hero, Bakugo is not only forced to re-evaluate his importance to Midoriya, but is explicitly shown in contrast to Todoroki’s father, Endeavour. Through Todoroki’s chilling narration, we learn that Endeavour is monstrously abusive: a man who monetarily engineered marriage to a woman with a powerful Quirk in order to try and breed even more powerful children with her. With Todoroki the only such child to show suitable promise, Endeavour ‘trained’ him from a young age, hurting both his son and, when she protested, his wife, obsessed with the idea that, if he couldn’t be stronger than All Might, then it would have to fall to his son. His cruelty culminated in his wife having a mental breakdown: she harmed Todoroki and was hospitalised for her actions, and has remained there ever since.
Just as Endeavour is obsessed with besting All Might, so is Bakugo obsessed with besting Midoriya, whose relationships with Bakugo and Todoroki mirror each other in turn. With Endeavour’s cruelty showing us the darkest possible version of Bakugo’s future – one in which his need for public praise and status as a hero turns him criminal in private – we’re also shown the contrast between Todoroki and Bakugo: two boys whose relationships with Midoriya are pivotal to their development, but in radically different ways. Whereas Todoroki accepts Midoriya’s help and uses it to push back against Endeavour, Bakugo fiercely resists his every effort and suffers for it – and yet, when the League of Villains, the recurring bad guys, try to recruit Bakugo to their cause, pointing out how his teachers and classmates are thwarting his desires, he refuses to be swayed.
My one complaint about BNHA – which is, both sadly and in fairness, a complaint I have about almost every anime I’ve ever seen – is the fanservice: unnecessarily sexualised female characters and costumes, especially on characters who are meant to be teenage girls, and the seemingly mandatory inclusion of a gross creeper male character, Mineta, whose predations are called out as such in the narrative, yet never sufficiently to outweigh the offensiveness of his inclusion in the first place. There are still some great female characters – Ururacha and Tsu are my favourites – but, yeah: it’s not without certain traditional flaws. Even so, I’ve quickly become addicted to it, and despite the occasional sour note, I really want to know what happens next. You should give it a try!
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“A philosophical exploration of what is meant by identity” – The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appia
"Divided into five main sections – creed, country, colour, class and culture – The Lies That Bind is a philosophical exploration of what is meant by identity in our contemporary world. To better understand how fluid any definition will inevitably be it is necessary to delve into history, and to consider how people choose to interpret different aspects of their inherited place, upbringing and potential..." - Jackie Law reviews The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appia
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“A philosophical exploration of what is meant by identity” – The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appia
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Tuesday, 25 September 2018
#8: Because of Miss Bridgerton (The Rokesbys Book 1)
Julia Quinn (Author)
(76)Buy new: £5.99
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#9: The Runaway Wife: A laugh out loud feel good novel about second chances
Dee MacDonald (Author)
(159)Buy new: £0.99
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#10: The Wonky Donkey
Craig Smith (Author), Katz Cowley (Illustrator)
(129)Release Date: 13 Dec. 2018
Buy new: £7.99
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Mr Ripley's Enchanted Books: Children's/Young Adult Book Picks September 2018 - US Post Two
Mary Downing Hahn - The Girl in the Locked Room: A Ghost Story - Published by Clarion Books (September 4, 2018) - ISBN-13: 978-1328850928 - Hardback
Ghost story master Mary Downing Hahn unrolls the suspenseful, spine-chilling yarn of a girl imprisoned for more than a century, the terrifying events that put her there, and a friendship that crosses the boundary between past and present.
A family moves into an old, abandoned house. Jules's parents love the house, but Jules is frightened and feels a sense of foreboding. When she sees a pale face in an upstairs window, though, she can't stop wondering about the eerie presence on the top floor—in a room with a locked door. Could it be someone who lived in the house a century earlier?
Her fear replaced by fascination, Jules is determined to make contact with the mysterious figure and help unlock the door. Past and present intersect as she and her ghostly friend discover—and change—the fate of the family who lived in the house all those many years ago.
Kevin Sands Call of the Wraith (The Blackthorn Key) - Published by Aladdin (September 25, 2018) - ISBN-13: 978-1534428478 - Hardback
Christopher Rowe is back and there are more puzzles, riddles, and secrets to uncover in this fourth novel of the award-winning Blackthorn Key series.
Christopher Rowe has no idea who he is. After being shipwrecked in Devonshire, he wakes up alone, his memories gone. Villagers tell him he was possessed by an unseen evil, and only became conscious after being visited by the local witch.
As Christopher tries to get his bearings, he realizes his current state may be far from coincidence. Dark events have been happening in this corner of Britain—village children are disappearing without a trace. There are whispers that the malevolent ghost of the White Lady has returned to steal the children away, one by one, and consume their souls.
Thankfully, friends Tom and Sally find Christopher and help him reconnect with his unique skills and talents, even as his memories elude him. But as motives and secrets are revealed, Christopher finds himself in a desperate race to reclaim his memories and discover the missing children before it’s too late.
Pete Hautman - Otherwood - Published by Candlewick (September 11, 2018) - ISBN-13: 978-0763690717 - Hardback
What happened in the woods that day? Pete Hautman’s riveting middle-grade novel touches on secrets and mysteries — and the power of connections with family and friends.
“Hatred combined with lies and secrets can break the world.” Grandpa Zach used to say that before he died, but Stuey never really knew what he meant. It was kind of like how he used to talk about quantum physics or how he used to say ghosts haunted their overgrown golf course. But then one day, after Stuey and his best friend, Elly Rose, spend countless afternoons in the deadfall in the middle of the woods, something totally unbelievable happens. As Stuey and Elly Rose struggle to come to grips with their lives after that reality-splitting moment, all the things Grandpa Zach used to say start to make a lot more sense. This is a book about memory and loss and the destructive nature of secrets, but also about the way friendship, truth, and perseverance have the ability to knit a torn-apart world back together.
Daniel José Older - Dactyl Hill Squad - Published by Arthur A. Levine Books (September 11, 2018) - ISBN-13: 978-1338268812 - Hardback
Magdalys and her friends flee to Brooklyn and settle in the Dactyl Hill neighborhood, where black and brown New Yorkers have set up an independent community--a safe haven from the threats of Manhattan. Together with the Vigilance Committee, they train to fly on dactylback, discover new friends and amazing dinosaurs, and plot to take down Riker. Can Magdalys and the squad rescue the rest of their friends before it's too late?
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7 Great Books Hitting Shelves Today
Need another excuse to go to the bookstore this week? We've got you covered with the buzziest new releases of the day.
To create our list, we focused on the top books Goodreads members can't wait to read, which we measure by how many times a book has been added to Want to Read shelves. All these highly anticipated titles are now available! Which ones catch your eye?
You should read this book if you like: Historical fiction, Life After Life, World War II stories, reluctantly being drawn into a world of espionage, radio, days of reckoning
Check out our interview with Atkinson here.
You should read this book if you like: Fantasy, Vicious and A Darker Shade of Magic, superpowers, haunting experiments, life after death, severely flawed heroes
You should read this book if you like: Memoirs, poetic prose, quirky animals, charming illustrations, a life informed by the creatures you meet, adventurers, finding your passion
You should read this book if you like: Fiction, the Vlogbrothers, big debuts, alien discoveries that change everything, the effect of social media, how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty
You should read this book if you like: Thrillers, the Mitch Rapp series, impossibly dangerous missions, avoiding the Kremlin's ruthless security forces, black-ops, averting the next world war
You should read this book if you like: YA historical fiction, horror, Frankenstein, escaping misery, retellings of classic tales, survival, being consumed by darkness
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PHANTOM LIMB by Reiko Scott
Phantom Limb by Reiko Scott
Published 9/25/2018
I received my first cybernetic arm when I was eight years old.
Naomi Shimizu has undergone several enhancements. A cybernetic arm, to replace her crushed one. Smooth pale skin and visual implants, to replace what was lost in an accident. Over the course of her life, she has traded organic body parts for constructed ones—not always with her consent. So now, Naomi works for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under the Cybernetic Registry, to halt and prevent the blackmarket sale of cybernetic mods. But modifications have a way of changing a girl—and Naomi will do anything it takes to do her job. To be perfect.
At first glance, how cybernetic do I look? Can you tell my face has been reconstructed from a mold or that neither of my arms are made of flesh and bone? Cut them and you’ll see—they shed sparks, not blood. But you probably already noticed the seam in my neck and the color of my skin. There’s only one way to get skin as white and flawless as mine.
“Naomi, where’re you heading?”
I slip my tablet into my jacket pocket and clear the remnants of my lunch from the desk. Taste hasn’t been the same since my jaw replacement left me with a synthetic tongue and I’ve left most of my dessert untouched.
“I’ve got a lead on a place on Bleecker,” I say. My voice is my own, though barely. It’s too difficult to recreate the minute variability in vocal cords from scratch, so they salvaged those from my organic throat and stitched them into the folds of a fabricated larynx. The timbre has a metallic echo, though I’m told I’m the only one who notices.
“University kids, huh? Sounds about right,” Williams says, hoisting his bag onto his shoulder. “I’m heading downtown too, want to grab a cab?”
I received my first cybernetic arm when I was eight years old.
All I remember from the crash was the wail of tires and a sound I associated with a tin can of soda being crushed underfoot. After that, nothing. No yelling, no sirens, no sobs. But that’s what the mind is meant to do, right? Forget?
If it had happened ten years earlier, the doctors would have tried to save the limb. Patched the tattered meat back together and left the scars to grow like vines over what was left. It would have been ugly, but it would have stayed mine. Instead, my parents insisted on fine-tuned silicon and steel, the best of what medicine had to offer.
“The somatosensory system is equal to or better than organic skin,” the nurse had explained when running through orientation to my new limb. “Electronic mechanoreceptors are more finely tuned at the fingertips than any bio-receptor can be. Pain is also cut off at a threshold.”
I rubbed my shoulder where metal met skin. The attachment process was more agonizing than the accident itself—if only because I remembered it—but I didn’t tell the nurse. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
The Bleecker street lead is my first breakthrough in weeks. There are rumors of an underground cybernetic clinic selling mods—memory enhancements, sensory acuity adjustments, that sort of thing. There’s need in a city like New York that runs on firsts and bests, and community health center prescribed ADHD stims don’t cut it. I get it, it’s hard to compete against the first-chair violinist when her cochlear implants give her perfect pitch and her wrist has been replaced after a bad case of carpal tunnel. It’s tempting to want to program one or two fewer hours of sleep with just the flick of a dial. Cybernetic equal opportunity.
It’s just my job at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under the Cybernetic Registry to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The apartment is retrofitted to look just like any doctor’s office. The waiting room has bland couches and mag-tablets spread over the particle board coffee table. A metal plaque inscribed with “Min-ji Kim, MD” is tacked over the door. The receptionist stares at me, his eyes roaming over the top of a book that’s fallen loose in his fingers. Politeness, or the appearance of politeness, tends to make people look away from my implants. This man truly stares. My clothes hide most of it, but he lingers on the subtler tells. The bump of the seam between shoulder and torso that makes the fabric of my jacket fall strangely, the thin scar that ghosts along the bottom of my jawbone toward my ear.
“Water?” he says, slow and careful, like the words have spines.
“No thank you.” I take a seat, grab a mag-tablet and wait.
Screen after screen of modded men and women in the ads flash in my face. The desired body is the perfect body. No wonder there are so many pop-up cybernetic shops. I fiddle with the screw on my knuckle as I put down the mag-tablet and stare at the patterns in the rug instead.
When Dr. Kim finally emerges, I see she is a thin woman, dressed in loose fitting black slacks and button down floral shirt. She wears her white coat and stethoscope with the air physicians always do, as if they need to remind you of the power they have over you and your liver and lungs and veins and teeth.
“New patient?” she asks. “You need to fill out your forms with Mr. Cortez.”
“I’m just here to talk,” I say. “Can we go to your office?”
She taps her heel into the carpet. “We can speak here.”
“Dr. Kim, I’m from the DOH.”
The receptionist, Mr. Cortez, puts his book down.
“No,” Dr. Kim says. “You need to leave.”
“We have reason to believe—”
“I’m fully registered,” she says. “Up to date with my licensing.”
“We have reason to believe,” I try again, “that you are signing off on prescriptions for cybernetics in unqualified patients.”
Mr. Cortez rises from his seat and walks to Dr. Kim’s side. His eyes glide from the line at the edge of my jaw to the screw on my knuckle I’m still playing with. When he opens his mouth, he speaks to the metal of my palm. “You don’t understand how hard it is for people like us.”
“Francisco, be quiet,” Dr. Kim says.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take you in for questioning,” I say. “Mr. Cortez, you are free to go.”
“No,” he says, placing a protective hand on Dr. Kim’s shoulder. “Dr. Kim doing the work that the hospitals won’t. Not all of us can afford the so called qualifications.”
“Francisco.”
“Dr. Kim,” I say. “I’m giving you this chance to come without fuss. Please.”
I wait. Somewhere, a phone chimes. A door slams shut down the hall, neighbors bickering over the crinkle of plastic grocery bags. Dr. Kim doesn’t move, so I reach for my handcuffs, collapsed under my belt.
Mr. Cortez grabs my wrist first. The intrusion is quick, sudden—the man’s hand on mine before I blink—but even as he twists, trying to wrestle the cuffs from my grasp, I don’t feel the pain. I step back, turn, and press my chest against his, restraining him. The unwanted sensory input of skin against skin against fabrication is a bolt of lightning over my nerves.
He writhes. He can feel it too. “Fuck. Is any of you real?” Dr. Kim doesn’t struggle when I escort her out next.
In my first year of university, I contracted meningitis. One week into my hospital stay, drugged and tubed until I felt I had become one with the hard plastic of the bed, the doctors decided it would be best to restructure the lining of my central nervous system. I wasn’t awake when my parents signed me off to be a test subject for the radical procedure.
They wanted the best for me, and if I was qualified for new cybernetic upgrades, how could I say no? Memory mods would get me further in life. Sensory acuity enhancements would allow me through more doors. It would make me better. It wasn’t my first cybernetic procedure since the arm. I had one for my vision (nearsightedness) and some spinal reconstruction (scoliosis), but this was the first procedure that made me wonder how much of me was still Naomi.
Am I like the ship of Theseus? If I replace each part of me one by one, will it still be the same me?
You could say the same for the life cycle of cells, I suppose.
When I went back to university for my second year, I started to notice the changes. I could remember better, yes, but I saw it more in the tip of the head of a professor after a didactic. In the lips of the first boy who slept with me, grin fading from giddy at the beginning of the evening to half-formed sneer afterwards. In in the greedy twist of words from the well-known bioengineer I applied to do research with, studying the neural links of synthetic limbs. Under “skills” I had put down my cybernetic enhancements. I was given the position because I was told I would be easier to train.
That’s when I stopped trying so hard to hide my arm in public.
I learned about cybernetics on my own, reading papers and tweaking my hardware whenever I had a chance. When I didn’t know if I could call this synthetic arm my arm, I reconstructed it to be mine alone. When I didn’t know if the thoughts that started racing through my mind over sleepless nights belonged to me or the flickering feedback of circuits embedded in my temporal lobe, I decided it didn’t matter. I used the extra waking hours to devote to computational models of neural networks.
“When are you coming home?”
I was talking to my mom over the phone on a hot June day of my third year. I’d elected to stay at school over the summer to work in the lab, finals week running into long, humid nights with no air conditioning in my dorm room.
“I have a week off before starting the semester,” I said.
“Will you be able to make Kimi’s wedding? She told me she wanted you there.”
“In August, right? Sixteenth?”
“It’s a weekend, let me find the invitation. Oh, I can’t read it in this light, give me a moment.”
“You should think about the new visual implant they put on the market,” I told her, listening to the far-away rustling sounds of my mom searching her desk. “You can stop complaining about needing reading glasses.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’ve had reading glasses forever, it isn’t bad. I’m not like you, Naomi, adapting to all this new technology. Oh, here it is. Yes, the sixteenth.”
“It’s a walk-in procedure, you’ll be approved immediately. Uncle Ken had it done last year.”
My mom laughed and it sounded tinny across the line. “I’m fine how I am,” she said. “Now, tell me more about that project. I can’t believe your advisor is letting you take that on yourself. And you said there’s a conference…?”
I didn’t end up going to that wedding. I didn’t find time to visit home at all. Another opportunity popped up, an experiment my Principle Investigator needed to finish before she could submit to a journal. It was the first time I got my name listed as an author on a paper.
Instead of getting angry as I thought they would, my parents told me they were proud.
It doesn’t go well in the interrogation room back at the DOH.
Dr. Kim’s is just a small clinic, but it’s the closest we’ve come to rooting out the ring of suppliers that serves the tristate area in a while. Two years of work—of dead ends and dropped calls and shit luck—flash in my mind. Reports of untraceable cybernetics on patient discharges are piled on my desk next to pages of contacts in the major hospital in all the boroughs. Stories of stashes filled with forgotten limbs scatter across tales of stripped corpses and I’m left to untangle the whole mess.
We need concrete information to arrest the guys in charge, dates and locations, but Dr. Kim won’t speak to any of the investigators about her suppliers.
Detectives Williams and Parker call me over after two hours with no headway.
“We think she might open to you,” Parker says. “Since you’re—I mean, you’re the one who brought her in.” He coughs, swallowing the remnants of the words still on his tongue. I know what he’s implying. Mods and implants aren’t the only thing people aren’t comfortable talking about out loud. Not the only thing that prevents people from looking me in the eye.
“Room two?” I ask.
“Go ahead.”
I bring a bottle of water and an apple I nabbed from the kitchen in with me and slide them both across the table. As I sit, Dr. Kim reads my name on the badge that’s now clipped to my shirt pocket. She laughs. A quiet little puff of air, just barely a chuckle and very far from real amusement.
“When I first saw you, I assumed you were just another one of those entitled brats,” she says. “White trust fund kid from the Upper East Side, daddy’s connections getting you cool gadgets. Hungry for more.”
No, I’m not any of those things, but I’m familiar with the impression I give.
Drumming my false fingers across the table, I work to keep my fabricated face steady. If she’s comfortable enough to start speaking, maybe she’ll say something of use. There’s a click in the knuckle of my middle finger whenever I move it. I noticed it a couple days ago, but haven’t had a chance to go in and fix it yet. I fiddle with it again. Drum, drum, click, drum, drum.
“But you’re something else, aren’t you? A machine,” Dr. Kim says. “They made you into a machine. And now, look at you, you’re perfect.”
I stop drumming and she stops talking. The fan bolted to the ceiling rotates lazily and the lights hum overhead. Dr. Kim doesn’t touch the food or water.
I walk out after fifteen minutes of silence.
“Sorry, Parker,” I say. “She’s not going to cooperate.”
“She said something when you—”
“Nothing of importance to the case,” I say, but he notices the way I stiffen. Reactions are reactions, no matter how synthetic the neural impulses are.
I think he’s going to let it go, but instead, he leans in, as if we’re buddies. As if we talk like this all the time. “Don’t worry. You did well today, Ms. Shimizu. Really well. The boss is going to be happy.”
To my parents’ confusion and disappointment, I didn’t go into academics after college. All the hope they had stored in me since we immigrated to the US from Japan—the dreams they had cradled and fed me for years—disappeared the moment I graduated. Instead, I applied for a job at the New York City Department of Health.
On some level, I deserve what happened. I took the ship they built out of their faith and sailed it into a storm. And in that storm, my body fell apart.
I had tracked the location of a lab conducting unregulated testing of performance enhancing implants. They were applying new materials to old cybernetics, seeing if they could change out the energy storage systems in the fluid musculature of synthetic legs. The scientists knew the risk. As soon as I cornered them, they overloaded one of their own prototypes, sending flammable gas, shards of metal, and live wires cascading toward where I stood, a freeze still caught in my mouth and a hand too slow to shield my face.
It was pain like nothing I’d experienced before. There was no shut-off mechanism, no override. It was organic pain, so my pain alone, and I was sinking. The doctors must have told me what parts of me were dying—the flesh of my chest and shoulders and face that couldn’t be saved—but I couldn’t hear them under the sound of rushing water in my ears and the thudding of my own heart.
I was drowning.
If they ever asked me if they could change my body like they did, I didn’t hear them. I never said yes.
Sure, it was actually easier to have two cybernetic arms instead of just one. I got used to that very quickly.
The face? It took me months to get used to that. They evened out the shape of my ears so they would be symmetrical, enhanced the little freckles on the tip of my nose that only used to come out in the summertime, lightened the color of my eyes a few shades, because who wouldn’t want to see those beautiful eyes pop? They sparkle wide under the eyelid fold and defined brow ridge I never had before. It was all an improvement, they said. All to be just like those models in the mag-tablets.
After I got out of the hospital, I cut and dyed my hair so I could be in control of at least some of this new me. I ran my fingers through my short, blue bob and stopped looking in mirrors. After that, I could deal a little better.
My new metallic-tinged voice, though, I never got used to.
Mr. Cortez lets more slip in his interview than Dr. Kim does and it’s enough to give us a lead on Kevin Yang, the younger of a pair of brothers running the Manhattan branch of the cybernetic suppliers.
His information leads me to a little shopfront in Washington Heights. The faded yellow and red lettering on the awning says Home Supply, but the metal grates over the doors and windows are shut. Inside, the store is empty except for a few shelves of paint and a lonely checkout counter. It’s easy to find the back entrance, easier to break the lock with a lazy twist of my government-issued cybernetic hand. I take a breath and look up the stairwell. The dust hasn’t settled like it had through the foggy window of the shop. It’s been disturbed recently, the metal steps cleaned with the feet of frequent guests.
I ascend.
As soon as I make it past the third story, I hear voices.
“The doc down on West 103rd is looking for attention mods,” a man says. I recognize his voice from the vids I studied over the past couple months. Yang, my target.
“CNS mods are tough. Skulls aren’t forgiving.”
I take a cautious couple of steps toward the open door of the office. The shadows of two men spread like spilled ink over the floor.
“There’s a pediatric neuro clinic attached to Mount Sinai that runs through those like candy. Dumpster dive, for all I care.”
I crawl closer, ear to the wall.
“I don’t—”
“Shh. I hear something.”
I hold my breath, knowing that the mechanical drone of air around my synthetic larynx would give me away. There is total silence for one, two, three seconds. And then, I know I’m found.
Before I can react, Yang leaps forward, slams the door shut, and throws his chair against the handle with a clatter of wood on metal. Without hesitation, I smash my fist through the glass of the door to unblock it, disregarding the crisscrossing wires that would have cut flesh. My fist can’t bruise or bleed. The chair clatters to the floor and I burst through the entrance, but Yang has already climbed out the fire exit, his partner following behind.
I leap after them, the rickety metal ladder shaking so hard I think it’ll collapse. When the pavement nears beneath me, I jump, ankles buckling, but the two are already half a block ahead of me. The light streaks over the line of parked cars and my legs burn with effort, fatigue coursing through my last organic limbs. My arms can only pump in a whir of useless motors and circuits. Yang leaps into the driver’s seat of a black Toyota.
I gasp and call, “Stop!” but they don’t hear me over the thrum of the engine starting.
It’s over as soon as they start driving. They’ll head straight for the George Washington bridge into New Jersey where there’s nothing I can do to catch them. The tires skid as they pull away and all I can do is shout after the headlights whipping around the corner.
One week in May, after my first year with the DOH, I’d garnered enough time to stay with my parents for a week.
“Just in time to see the flowers bloom,” my mother said in Japanese as I kicked off my shoes in my parents’ genkan, ignoring the pile of slippers in a basket by the door. I liked the feel of bare feet on wooden floors, toes free to stretch and curl.
“Just in time to have me work in the garden,” I teased back in English, leaning into the hug she was waiting for. It had been eight months since my surgeries and my mom still couldn’t meet my eyes, instead fixing her gaze somewhere past my right shoulder. She visited me right after the accident, when she had pressed her palms on either side of my face, searching for something in the ridge of my nose. She said nothing, only nodded, like it was all so normal that her daughter no longer shared her wide set mouth or crooked canines. That nod wormed its way into my mind again and again, like a wave crashing on the shore. Like an error message in code, a loop I couldn’t escape from. I didn’t know what it meant.
“Dinner first. Help me cook.”
My dad waved at me from the living room with the same look that slipped right by me, like water over a duck’s back. It passed by the electronic photoreceptors in my eyes and tracked across the signal replicators under the synthetic skin that allowed me to smile and laugh and frown. The look ignited something, a tic in my circuits that shorted and cracked, and I could feel myself grimace.
I retreated to the kitchen and took the knife from my mom’s waiting hands. I’d never been able to wield it with the same deftness as her, but I always tried my best to mimic her precision. Out of practice, even with my enhanced reflexes, the scallions were torn to shreds and the onions diced into uneven chunks.
“Who taught you to cook like that?” my mom joked, though we both knew the answer.
The joints of my hands froze. I sent commands to them to keep moving, but some signal got lost in the electric jumps between brain and fingers.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all your new technology,” she said. “Makes you forget all the important things.” She stole the rest of the vegetables back from me and started chatting so quickly I could only catch half of it, my fading command of Japanese dropping words and phrases. I hadn’t spoken fluently since I was little. Little and whole. Maybe when they cured my meningitis and enhanced my memory, they did so at the expense of my language centers. Now, whenever I reached for Wernicke’s area, it was like there was a file I couldn’t access. When I tried, all I got in return was a buzzing sound at the back of my throat and shame electrifying my spine. “Remember when you were six? All you did was follow me around when I was cooking. What happened to my little girl?”
I didn’t remember.
My right arm started to hurt.
I was afraid that when they fixed me, they reorganized my episodic memory too. That they picked through my thoughts and chose which ones I was allowed to keep before stuffing them all back—that my memories were tainted by surgical hands. I’d never dared voice this fear with the synthetic throat they’d given me.
Something I did remember: the ship of Theseus was remade to honor the hero’s trip home. The Athenians had built it strong, over and over, to preserve the legacy of their past. What was I but a thing my parents made? Carefully constructed, over and over and over.
“Sometimes I wish you were still that little girl,” my mom said.
I wanted to scream, but my traitorous voice was soft and full of static. “You wanted me to become like this.”
The phantom pain in my arm grew worse. The nerve endings to the spinal ganglia had all been connected to the cybernetic limb, but I was simultaneously processing false data from my lost organic. For a moment, I felt like I had three arms—the two still cradling the knife, and the third, a ghost. My arm flared up in the agony of an impossible feedback loop, growing and growing before shorting out. I gripped the right limb with my left so it wouldn’t spasm. I was pitching forward. I was losing the vision at the corners of my eyes. I didn’t want my mom to notice.
She was still speaking quickly, but I didn’t have enough processing power to listen.
“Wakaranai,” I said, because it was the only piece of broken Japanese I could manage. I don’t understand.
I call into the DOH to report what happened with Yang. My boss tells me I was impulsive. That if I knew what I was doing, I would have waited for backup.
“Shimizu, I expected better from you.”
I know. I told him I could do it and I made myself a liar.
I end the call as I drag myself back up to the empty distributor’s office, hoping to find salvageable data on any tablets left behind, but there’s nothing. The men are gone and that’s what matters. All the effort, wasted. The extra time I put in updating my cybernetics. The holidays I missed because I needed to catch up on my reports. Working on January first? My mother had asked. That’s a bad omen for the new year. But I still need to prove myself. I need to catch these guys and show that my education, that my body, wasn’t a waste.
I look out the window, at the rusted fire escape, and know that if I had been just a little faster, a little stronger, it would have ended differently. That I could plan all I wanted, but it came down to a race that I had lost.
I stick my head out, then my torso, and finally curl my legs out into the fresh air. Four stories doesn’t seem too far. What if I could have jumped?
I rub my organic legs, feeling the prickle of hair that I hadn’t shaved in a couple days, the scars on my knees from when I was nine and fell playing tag in the yard, the goosebumps that perk up when a cold wind blows my way from over the Hudson. I squeeze my shins, feeling the release of lactic acid makes them ache. Sweat comes off in my palm. I look down again.
I know why there are unregistered clinics all over the city. I know why people who have the means pay double or triple the uninsured prices on cybernetics. I even know why MDs, who devoted their lives to making others well, making others better, would risk their licenses to serve people who couldn’t afford the implants they wanted.
I know.
The fire escape shakes as I stand, though it might just be a reverberation from the trembling of my knees. My organic heart races as my cybernetic fists open and close. I shut my eyes, imagining myself on a ship, salty air whipping through my hair as I prepare to enter the sea. I hold my breath as I jump, feet first.
There’s a Japanese equivalent to the ship of Theseus. Shinto shrines, in a ceremony of renewal, are rebuilt every twenty years with entirely new wood. There are festivals to celebrate the reconstruction, the gods as their witness. The building is still sacred.
But is it the same?
At the hospital, they fit me with state of the art legs, more perfect in every way. Indestructible, two inches longer, blemish free, hair free, and milky white.
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