No Life but Immortality: Book 1 of Geryon’s Code Cycle by Liudmila BrusMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
What a great book cover, mysterious, compelling and slightly threatening. Just when I’ve decided to give up on reading anymore dystopian tales of woe for our planet and its inhabitants, along comes this fantastic story from Liudmila Brus. Her world building skills are second to none and I was completely convinced by her characters and their situations and problematic lives. The chapters often jumped several years into the future each time, but after a couple of pages I was there with the protagonist for this part of the novel, eager to find out more.
Mars has been colonised by Earth travellers for many decades and late into the 22nd century, human space travellers from Mars are seeking to correct or prevent the technological and societal ambitions of the tyrant Geryon Lindon. Many of the problems that have long beset human society like poverty, intimidation of lower classes, and prejudice, have been improved and even overcome by the Martians. However, Geryon has been utilising his immense digital and computerised virtuality knowledge to affect the behaviour of thousands of the inhabitants through robotics and cyborg control. The immortality stated in the book’s title is a digital copy of an individual’s perception and awareness of everything and thus comes about through it no longer being ephemeral.
The story includes many ethical and morality issues along the way and will cause a reader to frequently pause for thought in my opinion. Plus the author has given some of these virtual beings problems with emerging emotions and instinctive tendencies. This is not something that tyrant Geryon wishes to continue of course.
I would have liked a lot more information and detail about the technological and scientific issues involved. Some of the switches in time backwards and forwards were quite confusing. Additionally, I could not see the point of changing the names of the main characters; particularly, when the point of view in the tale also changed very often. This did not help you hang on to a very complex plotline. Unfortunately, there were several editing errors with punctuation, spelling and wrong choice of words that also caused my rating to lose a star.
