Unity
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
“Unity is an astonishing debut, twisty and startling, demonstrating both the disciplined development of a long-gestated project and the raw, dynamic flashes of an author’s early work. It shows intense interest in the distance between conversation and communion . . . an absorbing, thrilling ride.” —New York Times
“A vivid, fascinating, and utterly believable future world . . . Echoes of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon or the Netflix series Sense8.” —New York Journal of Books
Danae is not only herself. She is concealing a connection to a grieving collective inside of her body. But while she labors as a tech servant in the dangerous underwater enclave of Bloom City, her fractured self cannot mend. In a desperate escape, Danae and her lover Naoto hire the enigmatic ex-mercenary Alexei to guide them out of the imploding city.
But for Danae to reunify, the three new fugitives will have to flee across the otherworldly beauty of the postapocalyptic Southwest. Meanwhile, Danae's warlord enemy, the Duke, and a strange new foe, the Borrower, already seek them at any price.
Evoking the gritty cyberpunk of Mad Max and the fluid idealism of Sense8, Unity is a spectacular new re-envisioning of humanity. Breakout author Elly Bangs has created an expressive, philosophical, science-fiction thriller that expands upon consciousness itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chock-full of both big ideas and high-energy action, Bangs's thrilling debut centers on a mad chase across a dystopian Earth in search of a collective consciousness that could save humanity from itself. Danae works as an often overlooked tech servant to a criminal syndicate that controls an underwater metropolis, but she is secretly a severed piece of a group mind that encompasses hundreds of people. Determined to get back to her larger self, she hires Alexei, a mercenary with a death-wish, to help her escape her employers. With Danae's lover, Naoto, tagging along, the trio flees the city and heads to what was once Arizona but they are doggedly pursued by bounty hunters and a shadowy figure from Danae's past. Bangs pulls no punches when it comes to plot or characterization, but fails to fully flesh out her innovative settings, making it difficult to visualize events. Because of this hazy scene-setting, the first act drags. But by the time the characters reach dry land, the pace has picked up, leading to a riveting final sequence packed with firefights and fascinating ruminations on identity. This gritty, thought-provoking cyberpunk adventure does the genre justice.
