Company Town
Ratings19
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings19
Average rating3.5
"New Arcadia is a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community to forgo bio-engineered enhancements, but her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline? Meanwhile, a series of interconnected murders threatens the city's stability and heightens the unease of a rig turning over. All signs point to a nearly invisible serial killer, but all of the murders seem to lead right back to Hwa's front door. Company Town has never been the safest place to be--but now, the danger is personal" --
Reviews with the most likes.
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.
