Company Town

DNF at 47%. Interesting setting and main character but too slow for me.

Disappointing.

I liked the start, but my hope that I had come upon a good, new sci-fi writer soon dissipated. There were some interesting, if not novel, ideas but the writing was shallow.

★★½ out of 5 via spikegelato.com/2016/07/03/review-company-town/

Summary: Hwa is a rarity. She's a pure, non-augmented human. She's hired to protect the heir to the corporation that owns her floating city. When her new job leads to the deaths of her former colleagues and friends, Hwa must solve the mystery of their deaths without neglecting her new responsibilities.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Company Town presents an interesting future world, but I had a lot of difficulty grasping the setting. There are five towers...and an oil rig...they float(?) in the middle of the water...in Canada...but I never really felt a sense of place while reading. The story jumps around from place to place without firmly establishing any one location.

I think there was untapped potential with the high school setting and storyline. You have an older, gruff protagonist who is thrust back into a high school where she is out of place and uncomfortable, but there are no 21 Jump Street fish-out-of-water hijinks. Something like that could have acted to humanize Hwa and provide some levity in a very dark story. Any scene involving the high school devolves into chaos (i.e., first day of school is disrupted by a gun-toting assassin, homecoming is disrupted by an adult party and a murdered guest, etc.).

In the end, though, Hwa is a flawed, yet sympathetic protagonist, but her story never quite hooked me. I always felt on the periphery of the action and had a hard time visualizing what was occurring. A better dedication to worldbuilding would have benefitted this story and my interest in it.

A series of murders rocks an oil rig the size of a small city, just as new owners take over the business. A bodyguard - one of the few people in society to no longer have biological implants - works to solve the mystery of the murders to keep her client safe.

This feels like a collary to Gibson's Law (“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”). Usually that's thought of in terms of geographic location, but in Company Town Ashby looks at how that it's also true across social class. There's a lot to process here about ideas about how different types of labour are valued, how technology impacts our relationship to each other and ourselves, and how the future looks increasingly like a utopia for those that can afford it, and a dystopia for those that cannot. It is a Big Ideas book, and Ashby's thoughts on those ideas seem interesting and hopeful and terrifying. The downside to being a Big Ideas book is that the plot suffers from clarity at times, especially in the last act, but overall this was a great read and definitely influenced my thoughts on a few issues.

Company Town is the story of Go Jung-Hwa, the half-Korean, all Newfie daughter of an embittered ex K-Pop star working as a bodyguard for the sex workers' union, on an oil rig city off the coast of Newfoundland. Whew - that was enough to sell me.

Hwa suffers from Sturge-Weber Syndrome that leaves her with a port-wine stain across her face and body as well as leaving her prone to seizures. Most would have had the necessary implants to cure the disease but she's financially unable. Instead, as a purely organic, non-augmented human she's essentially un-hackable which proves beneficial when she's tasked with being the bodyguard to the young scion of a powerful tycoon that has essentially purchased the city Hwa lives in.

This is the definition of a page turner. Perfectly engineered to an almost insidious level to promote late night, “Just one more chapter” consumption. Ashby drops some serious beats throughout the story and pushes you right through till the end. Hits all the right sci-fi notes for me.