Volatile Memory

by Seth Haddon

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 176

Synopsis:

With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the call goes out that a lucrative piece of tech is waiting on a nearby planet, she relies on all the swiftness of her prey animal instincts to beat other hunters to it.

What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized and realized: I was alive.

Masks aren't supposed to retain memory, much less identity, but the woman inside the MARK I HAWK is real, and she sees Wylla in a way no one ever has. Sees her, and doesn’t find her wanting or unwhole.

Armed with military-grade tech and a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the hunters, Wylla and HAWK set off to get answers from the man who discarded HAWK once before: her ex-husband.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I needed to sit with Seth Haddon’s Volatile Memory after I’d finished it, because it left me feeling surprisingly unsettled by its violence and vengeance, the dysphoria of the characters, the intensity of the situations they go through — the book never stops, lurching from one crisis to another, so that the shock of one event never fully catches up to the characters before the next hits them.

The characters are both queer and both messy and, I guess, “problematic”. Wylla isn’t the perfect transwoman, Sable’s not the perfect… well, let’s not get into spoilers. The point is that they turn to violence, they roil in fear and indecision, they rush into things, and you root for them anyway while knowing they are making some awful choices. (Knowing, too, that there aren’t any better choices, because that’s what their society does, the hands they’ve been dealt.)

I found the narration really well done: it begins as second person POV, addressed to Wylla, but the speaker also resolves into a character who starts talking about themself in the first person as well. Still, the tone is intimate — this story is being told to Wylla, in a sense. It makes it all feel very immediate. The story doesn’t try to explain itself too much: you have to get on board yourself and figure things out — and I found that it all fell into place beautifully, without too much of a pause for exposition.

Rating: 4/5