Incredibly good dystopian novel!
I won a free copy of the book from the author in a release party giveaway contest. I'm happy to give it an honest review.
Others have covered the plotline, and mentioned that the ending is a downer, so I won't rehash all of that. Let's be clear on this: Legacy Code is a dystopian novel. Worthy to stand beside the great classic dystopias, such as 1984 and Brave New World. If you are expecting or wanting something like Star Trek or Star Wars, this isn't it. Not all science fiction stories (or even all fairy tales) have nice, pleasant happy endings. This is not a children's story.
Still here? Cool! If you have any appreciation for 1984 at all (I don't ENJOY reading 1984, but I acknowledge what a masterpiece it is. Even though Animal Farm was better.), you should be able to appreciate Legacy Code just as much. If not more. This short book takes you on an emotional roller coaster. Not the nice, open-air kind. Like Space Mountain, but all the lights malfunctioned and the cars are emitting intense metallic screams because they are moving too fast.
You'll come to really care about most of the characters, who are in survival mode in a situation that's just not conducive to surviving. Like the book itself, their lives are brutal and short. They have to cram a lot of living, painful as it is, into the short time they have. The beautiful thing is, they do. The will to survive is a powerful force, and it does not surrender easily to even the most hopeless situations. Just like in Alien, the worst of it is the human actions. The government is brutal and oppressive, and yet damned if you don't see that it's not doing anything wrong, from the point of view of those making the horribly tough decisions. They truly don't see that they have any other choice.
For those who read the earlier reviews, especially those with one or two stars, rest assured this book does have a sequel, Paragon, which will be released on December 1st, 2014. It's part of a larger series of novels. This book is a complete story in itself, but the bigger story starts long before the events in this book and continues after it.
I'm still stunned by one feature of this novel: one of the characters is writing a song, and the lyrics are part of the book, but the song is real; Autumn Kalquist wrote music as well as the words, and she sings it, and you can download the song for free if you sign up for her free newsletter! Not many novels can boast of that feature when they have not been made into a movie.
And yes, there are some vocabulary words which are a direct result of it being set in the distant future. Slang changes over time. I did ask the author about one of them, and she confirmed that "quin" (a food raw material mentioned many times) is short for "quinoa", and hence is pronounced "keen". The rest of the words should be self-explanatory.
I give this book my highest recommendation, granting that you accept that it is a dystopia and consider it R-rated due to the subject matter. I concur with the other reviewers who say that Autumn Kalquist is an author to watch. I think she's on the track to become both rich and famous through her writing, and deservedly so.