Synopsis
With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the call goes out that a lucrative piece of tech is waiting on a nearby planet, she relies on all the swiftness of her prey animal instincts to beat other hunters to it.
What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized, and I was alive.
Masks aren’t supposed to retain memory, much less identity, but the woman inside the MARK I HAWK is real, and she sees Wylla in a way no one ever has. Sees her, and doesn’t find her wanting or unwhole.
Armed with military-grade tech and a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the hunters, Wylla and HAWK set off to get answers from the man who discarded HAWK once before: her ex-husband.
Quick Review
Volatile Memory is a unique sci-fi novella filled with gorgeous prose and a deep need for revenge.
Full Review
Volatile Memory is very much a space-fairing sci-fi story—but it feels heavily cyberpunk, with a fascinating mask-based technology that imbues the wearer with skills and augmented physicality that mirrors traits one might find in the animal kingdom. Each mask is modelled after an animal: masks that are alert and help scan for dangers are largely things like rodents (prey) and ones that help augment hunting or combat capabilities are largely things like wolves (predators). All of this creates a setting and scenes which resemble something out of other sci-fi stories, but feel completely unique. If nothing else, Volatile Memory is expressive and iconic in the best ways.
Add to all of that, it’s told from what appears to be a 2nd person perspective. I don’t want to say too much about this because it would be a mild spoiler, but suffice it to say that I think it works!
At its heart, Volatile Memory is a sci-fi story about Wylla, a down-on-her-luck scavenger who (for multiple reasons) would rather not be around the authorities. She’s not the rough and calloused thief we might expect to see in a story like this. Though her past weighs heavily on her and she is capable of defending herself, she mostly just wants to avoid trouble and keep her head down. It’s the voice in HAWK, the mask that Wylla finds, that pushes her to seek justice—or vengeance—though at times, vengeance is all that matters to them.
The cyberpunk part of all this comes through those animalistic masks. Despite the constant comparison to natural creatures, the masks are an extremely high-tech device, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Putting one on is like accessing a whole suite of tech, the mask fusing with its wearer in a way that reminds me of the mechanical arms and mods we see in cyberpunk stories.
This is even more the case with HAWK, who seems to have a unique ability to fuse with both Wylla’s body and her mind. In fact, that concept of a body is a central part of Volatile Memory. Wylla is a MTF trans person, living in a society that views her as a problem, as all non-cornforming people are in this corporate-ruled world. Meanwhile HAWK has a voice, but no body at all. It’s just a mask. Both wrestle with the concept of what a body and bodily autonomy means.
All of this is wrapped up in a fast-paced novella with no shortage of action. It’s honestly incredible what author Seth Haddon has accomplished here, and I look forward to reading the second half of this duology later.
I recommend Volatile Memory. I don’t know that I’ve ever called a book stylish, but this novella absolutely is. The prose is beautiful, reminiscent of Amal El-Mohtar’s work, and it combines themes in a way that work together so effortlessly. The result is a truly unique story.
I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Emily Gibbons Bouchard, whose performance had me hooked right from the beginning. They effortlessly channeled the yearning and rage in this book, and the way our main characters struggled through that.
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