Zero Echo Shadow Prime Review

Get it for $0.99 on Amazon.

They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but those people are idiots. True, in an ideal world we’d be able to separate the two mediums (cover art/writing), but that’s just not how it works. A bad cover sets your expectations just that much lower, which can be a good thing if the writing/story is great ’cause then you’ll come out of the experience a winner. But more often, I’ve been burned by a fantastic cover with only mediocre innards.

It’s like dating a super-model with no personality versus dating a hunchback with charisma oozing out their lumpy sexy selves.

What’s this have to do with Zero Echo Shadow Prime by Peter Samet? Well, I’m glad you asked, because I picked up ZESP on a lark. Didn’t read the blurb or the reviews, nothing like that. I saw the cover and thought, that’s awesome, proceeded to the first page and read the first sentence which sufficiently held my attention, and then I bought the damned thing.

Minutes after the purchase my girlfriend asked what it’s about, to which I stared blankly at her and shrugged. I honestly didn’t know anything about the book beyond the cover being cool and the title being intriguing.

I tell you this to pave the way for expectations. On the one hand you could say I had no expectations ’cause I knew nothing about the story, or you could say I had very high expectations based on the fact that the cover set the bar nice and high.

Okay, so what is the story about? Lets get that out of the way real quick. Here’s the official blurb from Amazon.

 CONSCIOUSNESS IS IN THE CODE

The year is 2045. 18-year-old Charlie Nobunaga creates the world’s first sentient AI and becomes an overnight sensation. But amid the red carpet galas and TV interviews, Charlie is diagnosed with cancer, and her promising future grinds to a halt.

To save her life, an ambitious tech company uploads Charlie’s mind into the body of a cutting-edge robot. The procedure is a success, but with a horrifying catch. They create additional clones for their own ends.

Charlie wakes up four times as four distinct entities: a robot named PRIME, a holographic assistant named SHADOW, a mysterious four-armed killer named ECHO, and the original dying human renamed ZERO. Separated and imprisoned, each version of Charlie begins an arduous journey alone. But their paths soon intersect in surprising ways as they retaliate against the people determined to destroy them.

ZERO ECHO SHADOW PRIME is the story of one young woman who splits into four…and fights to become whole again.

One of the big complaints railed against Science Fiction in the past is the lack of strong female characters. Take a look at classic sci-fi and they are clearly a product of their times and social views of woman and their place in society. In recent years this has changed in a big way (think Hurley’s The Mirror Empire or Leckie’s Ancillary Justice), and the genre as a whole is only getting stronger.

ZESP takes a female dominant cast and hurls them through a cornucopia of awesome situations. These aren’t your grandfather’s female protagonists who rely on a male to save the day, these are women fully capable of solving their own problems.

Interestingly enough, though many writers have been attempting to bridge the gap and be more inclusive of the female gender in their stories, they go about it by more or less writing a male character and calling him a her. That’s disingenuous and one of my leading complaints with The Mirror Empire.

ZESP does a fantastic job writing a well-rounded, nuanced female lead (a bunch of them actually) without falling back on gender stereotypes for a convenient crutch. In fact I might go so far as to say the many iterations of Charlie were some of the best characterizations of a female protag I’ve read in the past year.

Okay, moving on. ZESP, characterization aside, is an awesome story. Plain and simple. When I go into a book, this, above all else, is what I’m looking for: a good story. From beginning to end ZESP delivered with consistent pacing, escalation in all the places you’d expect, the occasional breather to slow down and smell the roses, and then right back into the tension.

Samet though up a world of tomorrow that is both very cool and fairly conceivable within the parameters of technology as we currently understand them. Things start to get a bit fantastical at the end, but you know what, I’m gonna let that slide because I think Sci-Fi that doesn’t get a little fantastical is just a textbook. Boooring.

The use of nanotechnology, computer simulators, and human consciousness simulators provides a deluge of possibility that Samet handles expertly.

I don’t want to seem like a gushy fan-boy so I’ll say this, my biggest critique of the book was the villain Jude Adler, who’s motivation (besides pure corporate greed and progression of the species) seemed a bit weak for how flippantly she dealt with human life. Which is to say nothing of Bob Sapio and the Sapien Movement which is a great concept, but the way this group was implemented didn’t really make sense.

Somehow this group has the means to cure cancer with a slurpy, hack human consciousnesses’ into robotic systems, and take over space shuttles and crash them into the Police sentry units, without ANYBODY noticing. And then the media call them Luddites, which is so silly and hyberbolic as to be silly. I don’t know, I think the end of the story leaves enough possibility for a sequel that perhaps Samet can flush out the Sapiens and explain how the friggin’ hell they are so far ahead of the curve.

Which he very well may do, actually. If anything Samet showed in ZESP that he can spin a fine yarn. I’m confident that in future installations he will clean up any loose ends which my gut tells me he left hanging for climactic effect later.

We shall see. For my part, I truly hope there is a sequel.

If you’re looking for great, easily accessible science fiction with a strong female lead, plenty of action, and a fair amount of introspection on what it means to be human and the value of individuality, then Zero Echo Shadow Prime should be on your shelf (preferably facing out, cause again, the cover is cool).

Anthony