The thing I love about science fiction is that it really makes you look in the mirror. It makes you question things that are going on in the world and things that you do every day that you may not ordinarily spare a second thought about. In Recoil, J.T. Nicholas makes you think about the big questions. The REALLY big questions. Life, reincarnation, big business, technology, space and even gender. You would think with such heavy questions floating around like the debris of an exploded space station bumping against Earth atmosphere that you would lose some of the pure thrill a science fiction romp can deliver but this is in no way the case.

Recoil starts with our protagonist on a deadly salvage mission in zero gravity. There he is out in the cold darkness of space trying to cut his way in to a ship that it is clear the old crew didn’t want anyone to find their way in to. When he eventually lasers his way in he is confronted by the corpses of the long dead crew and a powerless abandoned bridge. Unfortunately not long after that he dies. He wakes up in his new body thousands of lightyears away and with missing pieces in his uploaded memory. Then suddenly an assassin turns up and tries to kill him! Again! But he has no idea why! Forced to flee, our hero has to find out how and why he died and the only people he thinks might have the answers are his old crew mates. Problem is that they died too and one of them is pretty hacked off at the body they have been uploaded into. As she struggles to come to terms with the male body that she has been wrongly given the pair work together to get to the bottom of a major galactic conspiracy that is truly horrifying.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. The way that J.T. Nicholas uses his protagonist’s inner dialogue to pose questions about mortality is great. It’s weird because when you have the idea that your body is little more than just another form of fast fashion it calls you to question what really makes you… well, you. It is suddenly nothing external. All those solid, chunky, slim, fleshy aspects are thrown away. You can’t define people by their genitals or their skin colour anymore. It becomes clear gender is more than just phalluses or vulvas. Skin colour does not determine intelligence or temperament as supremacist would try to claim. Love doesn’t always conform to heterosexuality. This I loved. Like two fingers up to the sexists, transphobes, homophobes and racists in the room.

The book has some great old fashioned sci-fi feels. The fact that the characters get to spend time in a bubble on Mars was great fun. The narrative has this sort of early cinema crime novella feel but with the back drop of a world that is a cross between Black Mirror’s San Junipero and the landscape of Total Recall.

Nicholas has really thought about our current levels of dependency on modern technology. We spend most of our day with our phones in our hands and the only way we could have more instant access to google would be to have Siri implanted in our heads.

Something that is done really well is how the characters talk about the ways that people are allowed to have this never ending life. The cost of literally living vs. living a happy life. That is something that doesn’t change from what we experience in reality today. For those in lower skilled positions it is a case of working to live not living to work. It gives the reader a push to think about class divisions. How wide in society is the gap between the have and the have nots? Do people risking their lives deserve better pay than others working in positions of comfort? This is what makes Re-Coil a great sci- fi novel. It is born in the same spirit as some of the more epic giants of the genre.

I was at a party recently and some older bloke cornered me. Started drunkenly having a pop at me about how my generation had ruined Star Trek, how it was “all too political now”. A horrible man giving me a lecture on how “pc culture makes everything worse” and was “forcing looney lefty views down our throats” like Uhura hadn’t been creating space for incredible black characters on TV by being on bridge of Enterprise since 1966. Science fiction has always been a tool for fighting for human rights. Re-coil is a book that adds to the tradition of giving political issues a voice through literature. I think this would make an excellent addition to giving political issues a platform on screen too.

Re-coil by J.T. Nicholas is published by Titan Books. Click here to go to the site to order a copy.

Thumbnail credit: Photo by Jonas Verstuyft on Unsplash