Synopsis
From bestselling and award-winning author Brendan Deneen comes Tracer, a fast-paced sci-fi romance adventure that sends one mercenary on a dangerous mission across a postapocalyptic landscape. Perfect for fans of Mad Max and Blade Runner.
In the near future—after a virus has swept the globe and oil has run dry—what’s left of humanity has created a new technology, one that turns plastic back into oil. A mad scramble for resources ensues, with new cities being built on the seven largest landfills in the world. Plastic is the new gold.
Tracer is the adopted daughter and hired gun for the president of PH City—built outside of what used to be Los Angeles, atop the Puente Hills Landfill. When a distress call comes from the landfill city outside of Las Vegas, the president of PH sends Tracer to answer it.
But Trace soon discovers this mission is more than she bargained for, and that a dangerous deal has been struck without her knowledge, sending her further down a complex and violent path …
Review
Set in an indeterminate future where humanity has been decimated by a killer flu strain and fossil fuels have gone extinct, Brendan Deneen’s Tracer is a rote post-apocalyptic sci-fier more content to tread the usual, well-worn genre trails rather than carve its own path forward.
Only a handful of cities have survived – urban areas built quite literally off the garbage of the old world, and plastic reigns supreme as the currency of this new world. A technology has been developed to turn plastic back into the oil it came from in order to keep these cities running, but it’s really little more than a MacGuffin to get these characters moving from Point A to Point B. Puente Hills City, built atop the landfills of what used to be Los Angeles, is run by President Bell, but she’s more violent mob boss caricature than politician. Her lead enforcer is her adopted daughter, the titular Tracer, who is tasked with killing anybody who gets on Bell’s bad side, which isn’t exactly a difficult thing to do. When Apex City’s converter goes kaput, Tracer is tasked with delivering them a repair man. What she doesn’t expect is that she’ll be bringing back another passenger, one of Apex’s best roguish thieves, Ezra, as part of a secret trade deal nutso Ma Bell negotiated. Even less expected is the quickly brewing romance she develops with Ezra and all the ways love can change a person.
Tracer’s never known real, honest to god, unconditional love before. She never knew her parents, and the adoptive couple that took her in didn’t have any qualms about selling her to Bell for some cheap plastic. Bell isn’t exactly the lovey-dovey type, either, and her affection for others is measured by whatever they’ve done for her lately. Tracer was trained in combat, and whatever feelings her gangster mom has for her is based only on her abilities and her ruthlessness as the president’s enforcer.
Tracer is built in the typical Sci-Fi Tough Gal™ mold – hard drinking, full of scorn for herself and others, scarily proficient at killing, and nigh unstoppable. Getting shot, choked, stabbed, beaten, etc. does nothing to slow her down, although she occasionally pauses long enough to pour whiskey on her wounds and get stitched up before going right back to getting shot, choked, stabbed, beaten, etc. She’s a comic book character, and taking a gunshot to the shoulder doesn’t stop her from scaling city walls in the pouring rain, or brawling with a barroom full of men twice her size. None of the characters in Tracer feel or act like real people. Instead, they act and feel exactly like characters in a not especially good book. They’re here to check off roles and tropes and to do the expected things their characters have been defined by through a long line of other books in this fashion.
Deneen’s story is phony and superficial, and Tracer plays out in the expected checkmark fashion. Bell is capital-E Evil and Tracer will eventually grow wise to it and do what’s right, all in the name of love! Check. Tracer and her adopted brother hate each other, but rather than come to blows he’ll eventually help her to make up for past sins! Check. Tracer will return to Apex City to rescue the man left behind and show the ruthless masterminds behind it what justice really is! Check.
The only real surprise, storywise, to be found in Tracer is why Bell wants Ezra, and I won’t spoil that because it is kind of a neat reveal. The rest is all pro forma been there, done that. Each story beat and their resolution aren’t just familiar, they’re foregone conclusions long before you ever reach them. The romance between Tracer and Ezra, the supposed beating heart at the core of this story, is a half-baked instalove riff that fails to deliver any authentic emotions between either the characters or the reader. A romance for the ages theirs is not. The biggest shocker in Tracer, though, comes in the author’s afterword, where Deneen confesses it took him over ten years, in between writing for various other intellectual properties, to write a novel this generic.
There’s no heart, no soul, no spice behind any of it, and Tracer’s romance never rises beyond an unconvincing one-dimensional, plot-mandated artifice. Her being forced to contend with the mortal and moral consequences of her life’s work after getting some D in the dessert doesn’t arise as a natural consequence of the story and these characters or the depth of their relationships (there isn’t any), but because it’s what’s expected from these types of stories. Tracer has the strict feel of a book that has been outlined to death and Deneen doesn’t allow any room at all for improv, let alone originality. The characters don’t dictate the story so much as the plot and genre conventions dictate them. The problem is, it’s a plot we’ve seen a thousand times before and done better plenty of times elsewhere, and with more compelling, three-dimensional characters to boot. Maybe if Deneen had taken another ten years to write this thing, he might have been able to come up with something worthwhile.
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