This debut novel by Elly Bangs rockets out of the starting gate with the high-powered energy of such nth-gen cyberpunk as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, before settling down towards its climax into a (comparatively) meditative ramble on identity, kinship, communication, and individual responsibility for the survival of the species. Along the way, there’s seldom a dull moment—although the success or failure of one certain authorial maneuver (a particular tactic I’ve often employed myself in my own fiction) could be the subject of aesthetic debate. We open in the year 2159, at a time when the surface of the Earth has been ravaged by climate change and is an unstable wasteland, subject to super-storms and other phenomena. Most of the flourishing remnants of civilization are found in underwater arcologies of a sort. One such is Bloom City, run by a clan named the Medusas. Here live the three folks who will become central to our tale: a woman named Danae, who features a mysterious past—and a unique nanotech implant; her lover, a sensitive and resourceful man named Naoto; and a merc-for-hire named Alexei Standard.