Enhanced assassin at the core of fast-paced sci-fi story

Opening his careening new novel in the middle of a fight to the death, Australian author James Islington plunges his reader into a gory introduction to its main character, Azure.

Islington’s earlier series, the Licanius trilogy, and the Hierarchy series (The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few, with a third book to come) have been fantasy epics. Scion is science fiction, compact and frenetically paced, set in a world where the ultra-wealthy can become “lifers” using the drug Ichor. However, the world’s “DeGov” has legalized killing lifers, perhaps to add circuses to the bread of a universal basic income.

Lifers’ solitary, hunted lives raise questions about the quality of their extended years. Elaborate defenses include electromagnetic pulse areas which destroy technology as well as biosecurity cloned and cyborg creations, such as the many-eyed Argos that Azure battles as the novel opens.

Azure is an assassin for the Keres Corporation, which assigns him to kill “Proscriptions.” As Lifers come to the attention of the resentful population, crowdfunding makes them “profitable to kill.”

While dispatching the lifer with the opening defenses, Azure’s AI, Atti, lets him know that his next job for the Keres is lined up — two weeks protecting a wealthy client. Azure has not taken a defensive assignment since his last, four years before, had gone very wrong, costing him a friend.

But the payment tokens are too significant to pass up, so Azure finds himself with a surprisingly old-looking Jasa Alwes, who won’t let him use his AI, but whose remote and well-protected supermansion, mostly underground, is not as secure as she believes.

Azure is suited to his job by multiple “revisions,” enhancements to his body and mind: stronger, clearer and faster thinking, faster reaction times, and some, such as precognition and “being able to sense movement in a memorised location,” that verge on magic.

He tells Alwes, “Most people aren’t compatible with even one rev… it usually takes years of training.” Azure is unique, and, he tells himself, “Prideful, I suppose. Not because I can have so many — that’s a fluke of nature. But because they genuinely make me better than anyone else out there… I want this annoying old bat to understand that I am at the absolute pinnacle of what I do.”

Besides hiring him, “Old Woman” (Azure pays little attention to names) promises him information about how his last protection job went wrong. All he must do, besides keep her alive, is answer her questions, ranging from what modifications he has to what his favourite colour is.

After a day of explosions and destructive fighting, Azure and Jasa flee to Themis, where Azure hopes to use his own connections to provide safety after her own defenses had failed.

Themis is slightly more open to lifers than other major cities, whose unemployed live rootless, anarchic lives, funded by basic incomes, and are soothed or excited by “nostrums,” designer drugs which take the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to extremes.

An exciting and fast read, Scion could use a bit more exposition. What is the DeGov’s story? How is it related to powerful corporations like the Keres? What is the proper plural for Argos? The questionable morality of legalized murder for hire is raised early, and hovers over the narrative.

Islington’s world contains many creative and prospective scientific fictions. Blood can be scrubbed to temporarily fool an official DNA test. Clones — “dupes” — exist in a morally and legally hazy area.

However, Azure’s questions are eventually answered, and readers will have to decide whether Islington is preparing to extend Scion into a series, which might fill in more of the background.

Bill Rambo is a retired teacher living in Landmark.