Simon Fay

When I read books, I usually skip the blurb. Sometimes I only have a brief glance at the cover and fret over the title and number of pages. Other than that, I tend to enter books without knowing anything about them. Another thing I have noticed over the years is I tend to know which book will end up as a 5 star read within the first 5% of the book. Doesn't work everytime, but usually you notice there is something about a book when you start that it will trump most other reads.

For a while, this book was heading straight for a 5 star read. This author has certainly found their unique writing voice and can make the reader connect to characters, even ones that only appear for half a page. In every sense of the word, this book is really, really good. It has nailed the magic formula to make a compelling read. June and Violet are fabulous characters.

The worldbuilding gives me huge vibes from the Vandread anime and the Will Smith film I, Robot. I know that movie was panned in the cinema at the time for just being a 2 hour commercial ad with lots of special effects. I think I am one of the few people that saw it in cinemas and liked it. Sonny reminds me a lot of Violet. Both are standard issue humanoid robots that are supposed to look like everyone else that begin to question who they are and their purpose. Sonny was programmed from the start to have a unique personality so that it could help their scientist owner to commit suicide, whereas Violet does this organically over the centuries after a series of life experiences that stay embedded into their memory.

This book is kind of like a bizarro Vandread. While humanity flees a polluted and culturally incompatible Earth to colonize new planets in both stories, they differ in huge ways. In Vandread, the first generation of each planet knows they are Earth's slaves and will sacrifice their people (some planetary systems do rebel though). Each planet has cultural and other factors that make different organ systems more valuable for "the harvest". The protagonists in Vandread are men and women from two rival planets where everyone is the same gender (and thus heterosexuality is taboo) and end up trapped in an unstable colonizer ship when a band of pirates from the female planet attack a male military fleet. The series focuses on how men and women learn to trust eachother and join forces against the Earthlings that want to kill them.

Icon-Violet veers away from Vandread in several key factors. One, while Earthlings have become abominable monstruosities with altered bodies, in this book they live normal lifespans and are technologically behind the conquerors. Both stories do mention the atmosphere spews acid rain and it is becoming incompatible with life, so it does remind me of how Earth started to become the enemy civilization in Vandread. Whereas in Vandread the Earthlings create floating sky cities and turn to harvesting organs because they have become infertile, the humans in Icon-Violet are still fertile and live on the surface. Will they end up in a similar situation to the Vandread Earthlings in a few centuries? Maybe!

The colonizer society is quite the opposite of Vandread. They strive for everyone to be the exact same way. It is like some kind of weird Stepford Wives story where they take the annoyance to travel 100 years somewhere and build a space station with identical looking strip malls and mass produced suburbia houses. I swear I was getting Fight Club monologue vibes here. I never quite understood why they would create human inhabitation with such huge space differences when the story gives zero hints anyone even lives on a planet. Seems like everyone lives in different huge space stations. Benedict is very similar to planet Mejere, which is the female birth planet in Vandread. A series of hermetically sealed space pod cities that float on the planet's clouds. The station where Violet has lived most of their existence is called Provinence, which is supposed to be located in the Solar System, just a few months away from Earth. Their close proximity to Earth means they are constantly thwarting illegal immigrants and some key staff live in Earth for brief diplomatic assignments.

I continue to feel confused about Icons. They function in a similar way to the I, Robot ones, but they are semi biological with auto repair nanomachines (they are insanely hard to kill) and don't have the Asimov three laws. Icons have stomachs (I guess they use the bathroom too?), but are capable of surviving in space for 1 year. If a higher ranked space station official tells Icons to murder someone, they are supposed to follow suit. It's quite surprising this suburbia space utopia hasn't fallen into disorder given the fact it is possible to hack into Icons and turn them into killing machines. Whether either this or Earthlings someday develop technology that surpasses the colonies will cause an impact in the future, both seem like equal possibilities. Maybe even Icons gain sentinence and start disobeying their human overlords.

I would not like to spoil the plot of this book, but it continues giving me vibes from I, Robot and Vandread throughout the whole story. The ruler of Benedict reminds me of the old lady that commands the rebel island city in the Fafner anime (looks can deceive you). I really enjoyed the cat and mouse tension as Violet and June want to rip each other's throats half of the book while at the same time learning to respect each other. I don't wish to spoil anything else. Let the reader see the story for itself. I do however hate the eugenics of colony society. They purposely don't want children with inheritable genetic defects (yet plenty of them are de novo mutations). They seem a very ableist society to me.

Now, for everything great about this book (the truly imaginative worldbuilding, the fabulous characters with believable motives and tension filled story), I could not give it 5 stars. I wanted to, though! Every writer has tics and I feel this author loves writing the word "it" in variable iterations way too much. It this, its that... I could spot over 30 it, its, & it's in one page. Obviously, this pronoun is needed in the POV chapters focusing on Icons like Violet and its sibling Yellow. But most of the its in the book could be replaced with other words like their or theirs. Maybe even completely reworded sentences here and there can tone down the ititis. I also noticed a heavy-handed aversion to the words "it has". I am unsure if certain British English variants have vastly different grammar rules where the word "has" can be replaced by an "it's" (as in: it's a good chance to win this battle against the robot). To me, they sounded like incorrect grammar usage and I spotted it over 20 times in the book. Plenty of instances where apostrophes were also incorrectly used. I am not referring to Icon POV chapters where they refer to themselves with it pronouns or it is a case of establishing ownership of objects with names with an S at the end like James (James's book, for example). I noticed far too many instances where sentences were incomplete. I understood the meaning, but you know the sentence is missing prepositions such as "to" or "in". The missing words are not even idioms, but rather common use sentences describing an action. I also spotted one or two instances where their and there are mixed up.

In a nutshell, this book has what it takes to become a fabulous read. The author mastered the hard part, so the word usage quip is fortunately something that can be easily fixed in a future edition. I would not know if proofreader editors focus on these issues or line edit ones. These problems seem like a simple fix and would be a worthwhile investment. This story could be a great standalone, or the start of a new series with plenty of different ways for the story to go.… (mais)