DISTORTION DAY

Following the trail of his kidnapped girlfriend, a young man tries to make sense of a collective trauma in Aegis’ SF novel.

Mason “Mace” Dunlow is employed as a “vaulter” in this novel’s near future, which means he spends his days watching old, out-of-context video footage that had once been uploaded to the internet. His society is attempting to salvage what it can from the days before the Great Distortion, a cataclysmic event a decade prior when all technology that relied on wireless data was destroyed. Little is known about why or how it happened—only that an enigmatic figure known as the Omnipath was behind it. Mace and his fellow vaulters, including his girlfriend, Kiersten Frey, are engaged with the past but unable to derive any larger sense or meaning from it. However, when two men kidnap Kiersten and burn Mace’s workplace down, he’s propelled into a violent reckoning with history. After stumbling on to a mysterious device that gives him access to other people’s memories, Mace comes into contact with characters who were, in various ways, involved in the Great Distortion. While trying to find Kiersten and get the answers he needs, he vividly experiences their most formative life events—which, in this book, are very often their most damaging. This novel’s use of a girlfriend as a MacGuffin feels a bit heavy on the machismo, and there are occasional moments of excessive exposition over the course of the story. On the whole, however, Aegis has constructed a compelling novel that’s also quite timely, with themes that touch on the development of potentially corrupting dependence on technology, the very human need to make sense of traumatic events, and the complications that can arise from taking on new perspectives that are different from one’s own. Overall, the book manages to be serious and engaging while maintaining a consistently brisk pace.

A grim but effective speculative thriller.