The children are the future.
And someone is turning them into highly trained killing machines.
The cover of this book had me hook, line, and sinker from the first glance. Meet Archaeidae, the deadliest assassin alive, in a state of the art military grade chassis housing the scanned mind of a fourteen year old. Nearly every glimpse we get into the scanned minds of these children reveals how they can be utterly human and completely psychotic at the same time.
You can listen to our author’s introduction to Archaeidae read by RB Watkinson on the audible version. It’s brilliant. You will find a link below on the audible cover. So well done it will give you goosebumps.
This is an exceptionally well thought out SciFi cyberpunk dystopian stand alone. Ghosts of Tomorrow reads like Fletcher’s been writing thrillers for decades. This is the first full novel I have read by this author, but it certainly won’t be the last.
A non-stop ride in action, the characterizations are perfect in all their flawed intensity. Gloriously violent and highly imagined tech based world building. No holds barred, every character that appears even briefly or even relegated to the background, is memorably vivid. There are more than a few who make an appearance, only to die in the same chapter. There is no predictability in the plot and that just makes it more impressive because it’s very tightly written.
The story itself revolves around human scans and every implication you can imagine from their existence. Are they still people? Are they dead or alive? Should they have human rights? The populace being marketed to, is lead to believe that it’s a safe, painless way to leave their physical bodies behind along with all the age and disease related issues which plague humanity. Sign on the dotted line, get scanned, serve a decade or two as labor machines, then head to virtual nirvana. The biggest problem is that the youngest minds make the best processors. Of course, killing children to create scans is hideous, and illegal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening and someone has to find out who is doing it. Children are disappearing. Children are being taken and raised, even genetically altered, to produce better scans. They’re raised in crèches funded by the black market and controlled by the mafia. A black market which was created by the massive needs of technology fueled consumerism and the wealth of profit found in weapons development.
The implications are staggering and it’s just that sort of imagining, gone down a very dark road, that make Ghosts of Tomorrow a must read for SciFi lovers who like them brutal, bloody, and mind blowing. Highly recommended.
5/5 stars
Synopsis:
Available now on Audible narrated by the incomparable Rosa B. Watkinson. Click the image to listen to a sample on Amazon.
- Print Length: 396 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
- Publisher: Michael R. Fletcher (February 25, 2017)
- Publication Date: February 25, 2017
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B06VTF9BS
About Michael R. Fletcher
More by Michael R Fletcher
The Manifest Delusions series, including the short story Fire & Flesh, are as dark as they come. In Fire & Flesh you can get a feel for the exquisitely terrifying world-building and leap-off-the-page characterizations that reside in Fletcher’s dark world.
Grimmedian 