First Angels

Digitesque #2

by Guerric Haché

Isavel has seen what comes after death, and wishes it on no one. Miraculous in the eyes of her peers and her elders, she has become the gods’ unwitting hand in an effort to stop an invasion of otherworldly creatures who would take human bodies as their own. She may fight bravely, but she is also beginning to learn that her influence may come at the cost of who she once was.

But this invasion is not incomprehensible. Ada's ancestors corrupted the world this enemy is fleeing from, and so she believes the war is her problem to fix. After all, if civilization is to be built anew, the crisis threatening to destroy what little remains of it must be solved first, and Ada sees nobody better placed than herself to save the world and reverse Earth’s decline.

As they both fight to restore the world, their disparate fates weave ever closer together. These gods-chosen mortals know each other’s face, but each has yet to understand who the other truly is, and the consequences of their collision could resonate beyond Earth, out into the stars that still keep watch over this forgotten planet.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction

407 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Guerric would really rather not be on an Amazon-owned platform. They would highly recommend you check out alternatives like BookWyrm, Storygraph, or Open Library.

For-profit, publicly-traded corporations should not be in charge of mediating trade or communication between creators and audiences, or between producers and consumers. When they do, the result is pure parasitism.

Reviews

[ReadBecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly enjoyed Zeroth Law, but this was even a step up from there.

The world we see is now three factions, war seems to be inevitable. Ada and Isavel at the head of two prongs, keep crossing paths unintentionally yet inevitably, as their paths are leading them the same place - both for opposing purposes. Each woman believes she is doing the will of gods, yet on a grand scale we are witness to the conflict between knowledge versus faith. Even when revealing their purpose it can only lead them to disagree, question themselves and if the gods are testing them.

At the same time, they are progressively gaining power, or truly more fully understanding their power. As this is slowly revealed, the novel beautifully becomes a tapestry of Clarke's third law for us - any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don't know, but have to assume this is by intent, but the impact is incredible. At points I was distracted from actually reading, after technology and science made things clear, causing me to wonder what other clearly magical elements were also scientific advancements.

The volume wraps up nicely, but one persons explosive actions to get there, leave clear room for schism and unrest in the coming future if the cause cannot quickly rally.

[Randy Harmelink · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good follow-up to the first book. A lot of action with the two armies and two main characters opposing each other. I thought the story flowed a bit better in this one, but many of the secondary characters kind of got lost in the shuffle.

[Nancy Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ada's very own super awesome spaceship can teach her how to become an even better coder now that she has a special Arbiter permit from the gods of the ring?

Isavel is being dragged by an army of slobbering worshippers to destroy the Machiavellian plans of the body snatching ghosts without even knowing why she is doing it?

What could possibly go wrong?

I love it how Ada and Isavel would be the best lovers ever if they could rub off the problem they are... uh... supposed to be enemies without even realizing it. They are complete opposites in many ways. Ada sees her world via the lens of science whereas Isavel is superstitious with a tint of naïveté. Officially everyone back home hates Ada because of her revolutionary ideas to make the world a better place and Isavel just rubs people in the wrong way through no fault of her own even though she is desperate for a true friend.

But not everything is so obvious in this strange cat-and-mouse LGBT friendly dystopia adventure. Ada has friends that tolerate her brashness because at least she is being honest about her ideals (such as the funny cat aliens named "Outers" that live in a secluded city and the young guy named Tanos who was abandoned in the first book by Ada). Isavel starts to question everything she is being told when a few coders spot her dancing with Ada in a party and tell her to stay away from the woman because she is an exiled troublemaker heretic. Ada starts to care more about not hurting other people’s feelings and Isavel stops being a doormat.

Oh, and if you get those vibes Ada and Isavel could become an Avatar Korra/Asami couple sometime, I feel it too and I am so rooting for them!

The plot of the book sort of goes like this: there is an artificial virtual reality afterlife created for humans that some inept coders ruined 500 years ago by mistake and the world of the dead is this black hole where souls scream in misery forever. Ada is convinced she can fix it because she is the world's best coder, whereas Isavel is convinced the ghost army can be stopped if she destroys the shrine where this mysterious relic is being held. Both women have very good reasons why they have to save the day, neither one of them knows the full story to see where they might screw up.

I wouldn't like to spoil much about the story, but Hail and Sam are cool characters so keep an eye on them. We also discover there are machines called a Geneforge that can change your body up to a certain point. I'd love to say more but it could be a spoiler. Lest to say the technology sounds very cool and it was obvious Ada would kill to learn how it works to curb her curiosity.

We are hinted in book one the gifts some humans develop as they become teenagers aren’t magic per se, but a sort of "magic" created by nanomachines that is inside the blood. They are passed down to the next generation and while the ones Isavel uses are quite common, there are a lot of rare ones. Book 2 delves into this a bit further as Ada wants to know why she is immune to the technophage that ensures people are incapable of understanding written language and show very little interest in it. Curiously enough, people retain other semblances of intelligence such as learning other spoken languages (you won't be burned at the stake by terrified farmers for being bilingual).

It isn't a spoiler that Isavel is like some sort of Avatar who could potentially learn how to bend all of the gifts. Heck, she learns she can use two gifts around chapter 2 of the first book! So when Isavel transforms her skin into blinding light at the end of book 1, it was only natural to assume she awakened a 4th gift. One of the really fun things about this series is to cheer for Isavel and hope she keeps on awakening more and more gifts as the story advances. Much to my surprise, the light technique isn't a rare new gift; she just combined elements of her camouflage Pathfinder gift with a barrier particle field from the Warrior gift. Isavel does obtain a new gift in this book and we also discover the mechanism that is required to unlock more gifts. It's really nifty and I'm certain Isavel will continue to blend her new ability with the other gifts she has mastered to continue being even more badass. I'd say more but it would be a spoiler.

Ada of course doesn't stay in the sidelines. Taking advantage she learns new code sigils from her spaceship database and the library of the Outers, she also obtains a super nifty ability to etch better and impossibly faster code that will probably become even more awesome in the future. Would love to say more... but it's a spoiler too.

I didn't give the book 4 stars because I hated it. The ending is bombastic (literally), and even the endless typos didn't put me off too much. I feel like the middle stretches a tad bit too long and trying to find the shrine a turns into an endless quest.

However, the book ends on a high note and I'm starting the third already!

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ada and Isavel's stories continue and their paths seem destined to always intersect. In Haché's second Digitesque novel both of our protagonists come into their own power as their diametrically opposed goals seem to ultimately lead to similar outcomes. But who's vision of how to end the second Ghost War will win out?

My issues with the first Digitesque novel were twofold: Ada's jerk-ish personality and how the ancient technology continued to be powered after 1000 years. This second novel redeems Ada wonderfully in my eyes while I think I just need to accept the fact that I won't get resolution about how the technology is powered. Ultimately, I'm fine with this scenario because Ada was the bigger issue for me. She's still very untrusting of others and quick to think she's smarter, but now she's trying to listen to people and is less likely to default to being a complete jerk. As a result, I found myself rooting for Ada's worldview over Isavel's because I personally align myself with scientific advancement and belief in humanity's own desire to control our own destinies vs. completely having faith in unseen and unknown Gods who will direct our destinies. Blind faith provides no agency for the characters while belief in one's self is so much more satisfying.

[Torfinn Ingolfsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it.

[Aneta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The world, and everything we’ve ever known, is so small. It fits into the blink of an eye. It’s a wet grain of sand in the dark. And yet here we are, fighting and bickering over petty things when we have so much potential for greatness. It’s shameful. This planet… I was about to leave, you know. But this world is our cradle, now as ever, and I couldn’t just let it become our grave.

Yet another fantastic installment of the series. It picks up approximately 3 weeks after the ending of Zeroth Law. I was worried this installment wouldn't deliver because middle books are usually my favourite in series, but I needn't have. It delivered.

THE GOOD:

+ The worldbuilding continues to shine bright. Still given to us in small doses, enough to keep us interested byt not enough to completely overwhelm (heh, that's a reference). For example, mosquitoes were eradicated in 2042.

+ Diverse, non-heteronormative world. The diversity is visibly built into it, not just added to make the book look progressive (e.g. there's a subplot dealing with being transgender in that world/the world of the ancients and something called a geneforge).

+ The direction in which this story went was genuinely surprising. And the story itself is great.

+ Parallelism of the title, the bright vs. dark angel imagery.

+ The main characters continue to be absolutely amazing.

She had been lost and ignorant, and suddenly she had seen the words of the ancients, read their voices in their relics, and she had felt… more. She was becoming what she needed to be.

Ada: still owns my life. We learn a bit of her backstory from the Institute. She's smart. She's ambitious. She's risk-taking. She's badass. She's relatable (to me). But she's not infallible, in the end. I like that she isn't presented as this perfect badass hero. She's not athletic or good at social interactions, and gets jumpy sometimes when she loses control over the situation. She needs validation and to reaffirm herself sometimes that she's doing the right thing, even when she isn't. Also, a horrible dancer. She cares about the world and people, but does a lot of the good things for entirely selfish reasons. She is written in a way that makes her feel like a real person, not a caricature.

She was their fearless commander, their dragon-fighting hero, their gods-blessed Saint Herald. She was no longer a lover, a companion, even a friend.

Isavel: we have a complicated relationship but I appreciate her as a character. She has a severe identity crisis in this book. She's been reduced to an icon, not a living breathing person, and struggles with it, especially when she notices how it influences her thinking and behaviour. She wants to believe so badly, do sesperately, and it ultimate causes her to easily fall for manipulation and be misguided. She's also an utter badass, tho. And we get an insight into how she got her powers (which involves a pretty unsettling scene with a dragon).

She makes a pun once and nobody appreciates it. But I did.
Also, the most epic line of the book goes to Isavel, hands down (sorry Ada, still love you):

I’ve killed and eaten dragons today, Venshi!

+ The relationship between Ada and Isavel gets more complex and I LOVED it. The dance scene was SO CUTE. I ship it really hard. The parallels between them were fantastic, too.
There was this interesting contrast between Ada's and Isavel's ways of going about doing things: Isavel approaches the shrine and wants to destroy it with brute force while having blind faith in her gods, Ada wants to understand it in order to fix it.

+ Antagonists are well-written and have complex reasons to do the things they do. They are heroes of their own stories, not villains. I really like that moral ambiguity.

+ I found the treatment of supporting characters somewhat better in this than in the 1st book, at least on Ada's side of the story. I liked Tanos, Sam and Zhilik and hope to see more of them.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD: (p much the same as in book 1)

- The book felt disjointed once again between the first and second half.
- Side characters from Isavel's side of the story were pretty useless and I didn't care for them (except for Venshi, that's intriguing).
- Some mistakes in the text but again nothing bad.

Overall, 4,5 stars. Can't wait to get into the next installment of this series. It's quicly becoming one of my favourites!