On an anarchic, ruined Earth, biologically mutated young men pilot hulking, armored exoskeletons and fight global and extraterrestrial enemies.

In the devastated future conjured by Ford in this SF/fantasy novel, a “coda,” or apocalypse, happened on Earth on April 1, 2096, a collision of a nuclear world war, a polar shift, mutant uprisings, robot revolts, a mass extinction, a cosmic cataclysm, and the sudden appearance of “exids,” inscrutable aliens. The exids besiege the planet’s wretched survivors in ships, using weapons programmed to simply evaporate rather than get captured. With a Communist Party–style apparatus called Möbius in control, often remotely from the safety of space, humanity’s main defense against this array of enemies is “iron gods,” giant cybernetic battle armor suits (in fact, some degraded “cargo cult” survivor settlements worship the fighting machines as deities). Now, a formerly teeming military base holds a skeleton crew of ace pilots of these cybernetic giants—predominantly hypersexualized teenage girls, specialists in the advanced iron god called the “Matryoshka.” But the base has a quantity of an earlier model, the “autozlav,” whose neural linkages invariably killed those who tried to pilot them. Thus, Matryoshka combat specialists Kumi, Contessa, Iris, and Joy are either sent on military sorties or tasked with capturing young men among the ruins. The male captives—considered expendable because they can’t give birth to new generations of soldiers—go through sadistic boot-camp rituals and sexual humiliations, destined to become lab rats in mad science experiments that either end in fatal fusion with an autozlav or genetic transformation into a fertile woman. Or worse.

From the start, with a salute to the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972), readers should note this is a dizzying mashup of Russian-Japanese SF/fantasy tropes, especially those seemingly endless Nippon anime cartoon sagas (Gundam Wing is perhaps the best-known title). Those sagas contrived to place nubile high school students in the cockpits of titanic mecha, human-shaped war droids that were somehow more than machines yet less than artificial intelligence fighters. But Ford turns up the knob—practically breaks it off—to upload a heady borscht of fairy tale/folklore storytelling, cybershock, mad science, and kinky future sex (readers who aren’t acquainted with Japanese hentai genre pornography, be warned). He gives the dazed audience a hellish future whose timeline and geography are laid out succinctly in chapter subheads throughout (sure enough, energy-greedy humans meddling with the environment are at the root of the evil here). Characterizations are broad but well drawn—though the author has had generations of big-eyed, big-breasted comics girls to mine for inspiration—and, to echo the praise of trash-culture critic Joe Bob Briggs, anybody can die at any time. Best of all, Ford proves to be just as adept at scripting kinetic action scenes as writing perverted bedroom prose (it just takes a while to get there). Is this SF literature for all tastes? No, but if one has ever cast an appraising eye at both a Battle Angel Alita figurine and an H.R. Giger “biomechanical” painting of demonically seductive females morphing with the help of technology, it’s an amazing ride.

Slavic folklore, Soviet SF, and Japanese fantasy kitsch mutate amazingly well into a surreal extravaganza.