THE SCORPION GAME

In this debut sci-fi novel set in the 25th century, police detective Durante Hoskin must unmask a fiendish high-tech serial killer whose crimes against the corrupt superrich threaten to spark social chaos.

Jeffries isn’t the first sci-fi writer to project a hard-boiled detective story into the future; Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) wasn’t even the first such tale, nor was the film Blade Runner (1982). However, here he presents a cranked-up-to-11 vision of the mean streets of the future—a post-singularity world of para-human cyborgs, similar to that imagined by futurist Ray Kurzweil. The story takes place on a planetoid-vast, traveling “Starship Settlement,” home to a space-going culture that’s heavily class-stratified: opulent and slum-ridden, decadent and dynastic. Nearly everyone is wet-wired into online and person-to-person communication; radical body modification is routine, and centurieslong human lifespans are further boosted by “blackbox” recorders, allowing people to “relife” themselves from stored data. Yet even in this environment, a murderer at large knows how to strike stealthily through invisible oceans of security minicams, permanently kill the best protected of the elite and spread propaganda of his crimes. On the case is Hoskin, a veteran police detective who’s considered old-fashioned for his habit of physically working out instead of letting nano-bots tone his body from the inside, like everyone else does. Early on, readers get the news that the killer is Venadrik, a brilliant but psychopathic son of a prostitute, whose horrific childhood and messianic religion has set him on a mission to overturn society. Once readers acclimate to the shock of the far-future tech, the book telegraphs the trick Venadrik uses in his serial slayings rather obviously. But the momentum of the storyline and the comfortable noir genre tropes—including a sublimely seductive bad-girl heroine and a young, brash cop partner in trouble—sweep the reader along. The escalating levels of mayhem and weaponry near the end practically transform the book from a sci-fi whodunit to a military-combat action thriller. Although this tale is billed as the first installment in the author’s Age of Transcendence series, it wraps up neatly, like a stand-alone.

A vigorous, visionary and steamy cybernoir crime story with a convincing far-future setting.