Deus Ex: Icarus Effect is a sci-fi, cyberpunk novel by James Swallow. I’ve never read anything by him before, but I saw that he wrote some Warhammer 40k, Star Trek and Dr. Who stuff before, so I figured someone writing other nerdy stuff couldn’t do that bad of a job with a video game novel. The book revolves mainly around two characters: Anna Kelso, a fairly typical “hot chick who’s also smarter and tougher than most of the guys in the story” secret service agent, and Ben Saxon, another fairly typical “walking badass who also happens to be a good guy at heart and won’t be corrupted” private military contractor. The book takes place in the somewhat near future where augmentations and modifications to the human body are becoming more and more common, and the underlying plot is that both people and governments alike have become split on the idea of augmentation and are at a point where they need to decide whether or not to continue to allow the technology to exist. Competing organizations with their own agendas want to influence this decision, and both Anna and Ben are thrust into a large-scale conspiracy story and must work to find the truth about what’s going on and fight to help ensure that outside threats don’t compromise this delicate point in time.
Handgun, books, bottle of whiskey. Badass? I think so.
The reason I say this book is like an Old C’s pizza is because while it was a good read and I was left satisfied, there’s nothing new or exciting here. It’s a solid sci-fi book, nothing more and nothing less. There’s lots of well-written action sequences that help keep pace. There’s a decent, though somewhat predictable, conspiracy angle. The characters may be somewhat cliché in their character flaws, but they have an interesting enough backstory to not end up being too bland. It’s a good mix of conventional elements that make up a solid final product.
One of the things I did enjoy was Swallow’s use and vision of technology. Many times authors in this genre don’t think far enough ahead and end up having technology in their stories that isn’t advanced enough for the setting. But I was pleased with just about every aspect of it in this book. All the biotech stuff for the augmentations was neat, the military and cyberpunk elements fit in well, and even the general tech for things like mobile devices is well done. Sometimes it’s the little things that set a book apart, or drag it down. In this case, it made an unspectacular book just a bit better.
Another thing I enjoyed was the lack of a cliché romance that sometimes gets shoehorned into a book where a female and male are co-leads. There’s a random, really out of place, sex scene, and a little bit of a romantic tone towards the end, but nothing that stood out or made the book worse. I was also happy with the lack of a “we started as enemies but grew to become friends” type of character relationship. For a book that puts together a set of characters who have never met, its written realistically for how I imagine real people would react in a similar scenario.
This book won’t win any awards. But if you like sci-fi, cyberpunk, or shadowy, conspiracy-type books then you could do worse. I give it a rock solid three augmented badasses
Out of five.
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