Wexler has a deft touch for appealing characters (and for writing believable queer women: I’ve yet to read a novel of his that doesn’t feature a queer relationship) and for vivid action. What starts as reluctant co-operation turns into willing partnership, both personal and professional. Sympathy, common interests and adversaries, and more than a little attraction: Zhi and Kas find themselves drawn together. Zhi, meanwhile, is aiming for a big robot-fighting score, after success in which she’ll cancel Kas’s debt to her – and while they’re working together, they each develop sympathy for each other’s predicaments. But Kas can’t afford it, and in order to solve the problems that attend Kas’s now-debt, she finds herself forced to co-operate with Zhi. Zhi’s is a hardscabble life, and she figures that Kas is a rich offworld with a cushy life who can afford it. Zhi’s the robot pilot who conned Kas into betting money she doesn’t have.
Unfortunately, she’s just been conned into wagering money she doesn’t have – money from her university’s funds – on the outcome of a fight between crewed robot prizefighters. Kas is passionate about Earth antiquities. What she doesn’t realise at first is that she’s supposed to do the work and her higher-status (and fairly mannerless) colleague is supposed to get the credit to burnish her career. Kas is a young scholar who’s come to Earth as part of a research team.
It sets itself in a far-future where Earth is a relatively lawless backwater in a human society that has colonised the stars – and replicated inherited class hierarchies there as well. Hard Reboot, Django Wexler ( Tordotcom 978-6-2, $14.99, 150pp, tp) May 2021.ĭjango Wexler’s Hard Reboot is a standalone science fiction novella from the author of Ashes of the Sun (2020) and the Wells of Sorcery trilogy ( Ship of Smoke and Steel, City of Stone and Silence, Siege of Rage and Ruin).
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