Out soon from Hodder & Stoughton, Kate Dylan’s YA sci-fi novel Mindalker offers up a breathless blast of neon-soaked, tactically-modded fun laid over a surprisingly dark and powerful core. In a divided, post-apocalypse America, eighteen year-old Sil Sarrah is a Mindwalker for the Syntex Corporation – modded and trained to step into field agents’ minds from afar and extract them from the most dangerous missions. Knowing full well that she only has a year or so of life remaining before her implants finally kill her, Sil is determined to go out with her perfect mission record intact, right up until something goes horribly wrong and she finds herself on the run from her own people. As she searches for intelligence on Syntex’s enemies in an attempt to clear her name, Sil starts to relearn how to live outside the protection of the company, along the way gaining a new perspective on the world around her.
As you might expect from what is essentially YA cyberpunk, this starts off fast and never slows down, packing in action and excitement from start to finish. Sil knows that her time is running out, and once she realises the danger she’s in that sense of urgency ramps right up – every action she takes could tangibly reduce her life expectancy, but she has no choice but to keep eating into her lifespan as she desperately searches for answers. Completely out of her comfort zone, unable even to fully rely on her inbuilt tech (including the supercomputer implanted in her brain, amusingly named Jarvis after “this pre-Annihilation movie Dad and I used to watch”), she’s forced to look at the world from a new perspective, and while she starts off very focused on what she knows to be right and wrong, she gradually acknowledges that perhaps life isn’t quite as black and white as her role at Syntex had led her to believe.
Mindwalker might be theoretically aimed at a relatively young audience, but it’s certainly not sanitised or simplified, in fact in places it’s downright dark. Behind all the action and adventure, the corporate espionage and the high-tech hijinks, this is an incredibly relevant and powerful story exploring themes of technological consent, of choice and personal responsibility and the dangers of unchecked capitalism. If nothing else, the concept of an eight year-old being allowed to agree to technological implants which, while astonishingly powerful and capable of facilitating amazing things, will kill her in little more than ten years, is genuinely pretty grim…but at the same time strangely believable. Likewise the post-Annihilation setting, which feels worryingly familiar with its emphasis on unchecked corporate power, and increasing controls being presented in terms of protection and safety.
It’s that balance of light and dark, the pacy action and the thought-provoking questions being raised, that elevates this beyond just a fun action romp. Of course this is a lot of fun, not just because of the fight sequences, hacking, body mods and snarky dialogue, but also in its judicious use of familiar, effective tropes (not least Sil’s reluctant friendship with (handsome) anti-tech activist Ryder). The lively, comfortable elements of the story, along with some clever plotting which feels fairly straightforward but ends up taking some interesting turns, all mesh so well with the points Dylan is making about the risks of technological over-reliance and the worrying path the world is treading regarding privacy and consent. Nothing feels forced, but rather elegantly incorporated into an overall sense of a dystopia which doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on the past, and a hugely entertaining adventure that can be enjoyed on multiple levels.
Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Kate Dylan for sending me a review copy of Mindwalker in exchange for my honest opinions.
See also Kate Dylan’s excellent guest post Sci-fi in a Fantasy World.
Mindwalker is published by Hodder & Stoughton on the 1st September 2022 – check out the links below to pre-order your copy*:
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
