Half Life
SL Huang
150 pages
published in 2014

SL Huang's first novel, Zero Sum Game was a tightly plotted, fast paced technothriller, which I only got to know about because I'd been following her blog. The sequel to it I got to read because SL Huang offered a review copy, which is always appreciated. It's actually the first time that any author has done this, so it's a bit of new terrain for me as a reviewer. What about ethics in science fiction reviewing? No matter; I would've bought this anyway and getting a free book is nice, but had I not liked Half Life I would've said so too.

Now when we met Zero Sum Game Cas Russell was an amoral math savant making her living doing ...retrieval... work for anybody who could pay. Thanks to the events of that novel she went from being bad at ordinary relationships and not worrying about it to being still bad at them but working on them. In Half Life she goes further; it can be best summed up as "Cas learns the value of friendship through the medium of extreme violence". It all starts when she gets a somewhat particular retrieval mission, to rescue the daughter of Noah Warren, an ex-engineer laid off from Arkacite Technologies, who claims that they hold her for experiments. Cas is weirdly possessive about kids and even though she immediately notices during the rescue mission that Liliana isn't a real girl, but an extremely advanced robot, that doesn't stop Cas from wanting to protect her.

Meanwhile she has other problems as well. Checker, one of the people Cas sort of still has to realise who might just be a friend, is in trouble, having fooled around with the niece of the most powerful mafia matron in Los Angeles, who wants him dead. Cas interferes by putting herself in the way as a target, drawing the mob's fire while looking for a way to get her and Checker out of it alive. As she's used to, she doesn't even tell Checker she's doing so, prefering to work through her problems on her own.

And this is not the only thing she's worried about. Cas still needs to make money and one quick and dirty way is suggested when somebody is rumoured to be in the market for plutonium, or rather plutonium powered batteries as used in deep space probes when they can't rely on solar power. She sees an opportunity to get them from Arkacite Technologies while she's rescuing Liliana, then sells them on to her contacts. That's one easy problem solved.

The situation with Liliana gets from bad to worse though, as just as she's negotiating with Arkacite to find some way to get both the company and Noah what they want, she gets an urgent message that a mob is tearing Liliana apart on television. This fortunately turns out to be a dobbelganger, but it does spell the rise of an anti robot hysteria as more advanced robots are "discovered" living as humans and as Cas discovers, some of those doing these discoveries are robots themselves. Somebody is playing a dangerous game, but why? And how can Cas keep Liliana, her father and her friends save when she herself is the target of the most ruthless mob in L.A.?

Zero Sum Game had been a fun technothriller romp with some hints towards greater things for Cas. In Half Life the plot is still as fast paced, but takes a bit of a backseat nonetheless to Cas' own personal development. She's so very earnest at living up to what her friends want her to be like, without necessarily understanding why for example Arthur, the detective ally turned friend from the previous novel, wants her to not kill people. But she tries and live up to it nevertheless. It's endearing, occasionally bothering on the pathetic. You can't help liking her as she tries to become more human.

I had a slight niggle in the middle of the story, when it seemed as if Cas was getting a bit too hemmed in by the expectations her, mostly male, friends put on her. There have been far too many stories with female protagonists being hamstrung that way, made less effective or dangerous than their male counterparts would've been. Huang however didn't fall into that trap: Cas remains scarily competent, just not quite superhuman enough to solve all her problems on her own.

All in all Half Life is a worthy sequel to Zero Sum Game, with some of the worst of the latter's movie script excesses considerably reigned in. Huang has clearly grown as a writer, is more confident in her voice. I'm looking forward to more of Cas' adventures.