New Release: AKAELA by EE Giorgi

The Gaijins call us Kuklas, their word for “mechanical doll.”

Akaela, the latest from author EE Giorgi, is a book of contradictions. You might even call it “the future of the past.”

Following the Plague in 2189, only two races remained: the Gaijin and the Mayake. (We don’t learn much about the Gaijin from Book 1, but we can guess they’ve had a better time of it than the Mayake.) The Mayake, a futuristic race of 300-some cybernetically-enhanced humans, live rough in an abandoned wreck of a hospital, using scavenged “chips, nanobots, and piezoelectric actuators hidden deep under our skin and in every cell in our body.” They ride horses, scavenge for discarded electronics at the dump, and live under the rule of a tribal council called the Kiva where the punishment for disobedience is deactivation.

The Tower, their dilapidated home, is a not-so-subtle reminder that the Mayake are slowly dying of outdated technology—and now it seems that they may also have a saboteur in their midst. Into this charged atmosphere enters 15 year old Akaela and her older brother, Athel, two kids with an outsized sense of responsibility about their family and their shrinking tribe. Together they come up with a plan to penetrate the Gaijin fortress and save the day…only to find that the real threat is much closer to home than they thought.

I’m not a big reader of YA, but the only YA aspect of the book is the age of the protagonists. Told in first-person, present–tense that alternates between Akaela and her brother, these children are off to solve adult-sized, existential problems with life-and-death consequences.

What I’ve loved most about Giorgi’s writing is her attention to detail. (See my review of CHIMERAS). In Akaela, Giorgi does a fabulous job with the technical particulars, giving each character a unique cybernetic gift without letting it turn cartoonish. She makes it clear these are people first who use technology to deal with disabilities and illness. At the same time, the Mayake have become dependent on their implants, and as their supply of new technology is gone, they resort to scavenging and early death.

A very satisfying first installment of what is sure to be a fabulous series.

David Bruns is the creator of the sci-fi series The Dream Guild Chronicles, and one half of the Two Navy Guys and a Novel blog series about co-writing the military thriller, Weapons of Mass Deception.