WIN CONDITION

In Schultz’s SF novel, a high-tech athlete finds herself caught in power plays between political elites and would-be usurpers in a world ruled by cryptocurrency and deadly sports gambling.

Teenage Miranda was unwilling to accept a life as a downtrodden factory worker, as her parents had, so she left home and, over a 10-year span, reinvented herself as “Arrow,” a rising star in the hugely popular game BreakPoint, which involves one-on-one, sometimes-fatal gladiatorial battles, assisted by high technology. Practically everyone gambles on BreakPoint bouts (as well as on random street duels, officiated by patrol drone-robots), which sometimes affect the fates of billions. (“BreakPoint was so lucrative that nations regularly adjusted their election dates to accommodate major tournaments.”) Meanwhile, the island-state Char is an international hub, thanks to its control of the CIN token, a universal crypto-coinage; BreakPoint is a key source of CIN’s value. Arrow owes much of her success to a mysterious longtime patron, Sage, who reveals herself as a political exile and long-lost sister of Char’s “First Citizen” despot, Violet. Sage and her cohorts are determined to reform, or at least overthrow, the establishment with a strategy that partially requires Arrow, via BreakPoint, to manipulate the CIN market. But as the would-be coup unfolds, Arrow realizes that her role as a symbolic girl-of-the-people may be enabling a system that seemingly victimizes everyone. Schultz evokes an Earth-like world of the future with such recognizable dystopian touches as rising sea levels and massive wealth gaps. Economics has often lurked in the background of SF worldbuilding—as in Frank Herbert’s Dune books—but here, such financial matters come to the fore. With its large ensemble cast (including a memorable AI), this lengthy, complex saga takes a while to get readers invested—but once it does, the material takes the kinds of transfixing twists and turns that money can’t buy. BreakPoint itself remains semi-abstruse; perhaps it’s best imagined as a computer-assisted battlefield-chess simulation—with the occasional option to try to physically kill one’s opponent.

A richly imagined SF novel of gaming, economics, and attempted coups that offers a good return on readers’ investment.