Genre: Sci-Fi, Dystopian, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
What am I?
That’s the question Riel has been running from his entire life.
T.A.D.—the corporation that became a totalitarian regime—dissolved Europe’s nations, erased its borders, and engineered a replacement. New Europa. One language. One order. Every mind connected to SOLACE, an artificial superintelligence that believes, with quiet certainty, it is keeping humanity safe. In Echelon, obedience has never felt so much like choice. T.A.D. calls itself progress. But progress has always had owners.
Nineteen years old. Never Integrated. In a world where that should be impossible, Riel has survived by staying invisible. No questions. No answers. No one to trust. It was working. Until the visions started.
Impossible memories. Glimpses of lives not his own. Knowledge he never learned and cannot explain. Someone else’s past living inside his head, growing louder.
He used to know where he ended. He’s not sure anymore.
When a rebellion group finds him—and with them, Elias—staying hidden is no longer an option. And the answer to the question he’s been running from turns out to be the most dangerous thing in the world.
Symbiosis: Salvation is Book 1 of The Symbiosis Series. A character-driven dystopian sci-fi for fans of slow-burn MM romance, existential dread, and worlds where the most radical act is knowing your own mind.
The Review
This story is set in a dark dystopian time, all the more unsettling because, theoretically, I could still be alive. We are dropped into the middle of an urban slum in winter, in the city of Echelon. Our narrator is Riel (short version of the name Gabriel), who is nineteen and has been raised by a couple named Myra and Jonas in this poor sector within what used to be known as Stockholm.
Riel’s skill is the ability to craft and program technology made from used parts that shields people from the constant scanning by drones of the corporate overlord, T.A.D.
The law says that all people (on earth, mind you) are connected by MindLink, and every thought and action in their lives is controlled and monitored. People who have avoided the MindLink are seen as Deviants and considered criminals. Riel is part of the subculture that helps the unlinked stay invisible. All resources, commercial, medical, and political are controlled by T.A.D. The problem is that universal equality, part of the original plan, has not survived, and all resources are distributed unequally. The world that once was has been obliterated—music, art, religion, language, culture—and the global population has been united into one vast, compliant mind.
Except for rebels like Riel and those in his community. Discovery means forced integration or death.
The story is two-pronged: Riel is recruited by an deep underground group known as The Fracture, which claims to be able to reverse the MindLink integration. He is drawn to these rebels by his own wish to make the world more just and equal; but also by his uncanny skill with and connection to computer code. Riel doesn’t understand where his skills come from, but he knows that hiding in the slums of Echelon is not how he wants to live his life.
There is a complicated back-story that the reader can almost guess at from clues dropped here and there in the narrative. The writing is crisp and the action fast-paced, and the author lets us know the various characters as they appear and work their way into Riel’s life. The world-building is unpleasantly plausible, and the story builds to a penultimate climax that is shocking, only to be followed by an unexpected twist that left me stunned.
It’s a really well-done adventure that leaves you hungry for the second book in the series.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.