Agnes

I picked this up knowing nothing about it except that it was science fiction, and I spent the entire book trying to figure out where it was going, but in a good way. It starts out with a raid, so I was thinking military SF, but then it quickly transitions into a mystery, and from there we go through some spy shit, a bit of romance, a Mission Impossible-style heist, a miner's strike, and, finally, cyberpunk. It's quite a ride. It's got unremarkable queerness (people are queer! it goes unremarked upon!), the protagonist is a woman of color of........complicated origins, and there's a fascinating relationship between her and an AI. Cohen, as he calls himself, is hundreds of years old, controls dozens of networks, and has expensive tastes.

In part, this book is about memory, what your memories make you, and who you are without them, and at times I felt like it was messing with my memory because it seemed to be skipping over important things in the investigation and in the spy shit. Like how did Li get her Beretta back? They took her knife, but left her with that gun and the ammo for it? No. It's also the kind of science fiction that comes with a ten page bibliography at the end in case you want to read up on quantum entanglement, but just tosses you into the world, dumps a bunch of new terminology on you, and lets you figure things out on your own. Which I mostly did, but it's a bit of an uphill trudge at the beginning.

This is the first in a trilogy, a fact I discovered when I was 82% through this one, and happily my library had the other two ebooks, as well, so I checked out the second book as soon as I was done with this one.

Contains: sexual assault, attempted rape—brief and not lingered upon; (sexual?) slavery—underpins a side relationship in the book.