Hard Reboot (Django Wexler)

Hard Reboot
Django Wexler
Tordotcom
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: As a descendant of Third Wave migrants to the stars, Kas has had to fight for every drop of status she's ever had. Even the scholars of Sentinel, ostensibly more concerned with the pursuit of knowledge than social standing, find ways of reminding her that she's something less than those whose ancestors left Earth with the First and Second Waves. She bent over backwards to get in on the week-long sojourn to Old Earth, but is certain that she can finally make a name for herself if she can unearth something for her research amid the countless layers of detritus left from the countless empires to rise and fall on the junk heap that once birthed her species. But it's only her first night there when, watching one of the mech battles staged for the benefit of tourists, she impulsively makes a bet with money she doesn't have - and gets pulled into a dangerous power struggle between a corrupt betting house and a rebellious underdog pilot.
Mech pilot Zhi doesn't want to become a slave to the House that controls the battles (and most every other aspect of life around the arenas), but getting away will require a lot of money or a miracle, or possibly both. But she has a plan, albeit a risky one: if she can convince some rich offworld sucker to put a big enough bet on her, she can use her winnings to finish repairs on a secret prize she's unearthed far beneath the inhabited layers of the city, an ancient mech from the near-legendary Third Empire that could mop the floor with anything in the arenas today. But when Zhi loses, she finds herself on the run from a House that wants its money as well as its newest enslaved pilot... and a persistent offworld scholar who may be her only ticket out of the hole she finds herself in, assuming they don't both end up dead first.

REVIEW: A quick story, Hard Reboot delivers what the cover promises: giant robots fighting to the "death" in a gritty future world. What it doesn't deliver is much more than that. I suppose I shouldn't expect much character depth in a story that is unabashedly honest about being little more than an excuse for flashy mechs to pound each other to scrap like metal gladiators, but I still found myself expecting more than I got. The baddies in particular are bland in their badness, evil and mean for the sake of being evil and mean, whether they're scholars who think nothing of exploiting Kas's research efforts to benefit more "worthy" (read: wealthy and connected) students or the House that torments and tortures and kills the desperate people of the city just because they can. The world is nicely gritty and desperate, at least, and the robots are sufficiently awesome, and if the story doesn't deliver any huge twists, at least it moves decently, though the ending feels a bit too clean and... I don't want to say "easy", but given the dystopian Old Earth setting and the utter depravity of their enemies I expected there to be a bit more of a price or a few more strings on the main characters' finale (I write vaguely to skirt spoilers), especially given that there seemed to be some leftover potential in earlier developments. If you're just looking for steel-crunching, monocrete-cracking, rocking and socking robot action, Hard Reboot does indeed offer that - just not a lot more.

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