Kieran Shea

Enjoying a licentious retirement as a brothel owner five hundred years into the future, former corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar finds her uncomplicated life shattered by a former comrade's hit order on her life.

Koko Takes a Holiday

Fraser Simons

Koko manages a pleasure resort after retiring from doing mission after mission in the mega-sprawls. But when she makes a little mistake of offing some clientele, her one time friend, now exec, puts an order out to take her out. What ensues is a very fast-paced action thriller where she attempts to figure out why her friend would betray her while evading professional killers on huge mammoth like ships in orbit. It's a pretty fun time with a few sprinkles of societal commentary that, at times, clash with the tone of the book. The cyberpunk world is pretty cool, 500 years from now filled with corporations running the show across the globe. The locals are pretty cool but there isn't much world building to speak of. 

It definitely feels like it would be a good graphic novel, with the pacing of the chapters and the way action is set up reading a lot like a panel to panel shot. Dialogue is sparse, characters feel a bit incomplete, but it never bills itself as a cerebral book, so I ended up being alright with it. I think it would actually be superior as a graphic novel, but it's bombastic and fun in this medium too. No worries.

Although billed as an "Altered Carbon with a dash of tank girl", it's more the reverse. Where Altered Carbon is filled with a very structured analysis and commentary on larger issues currently and may arise with more technology, Koko Takes a Holiday does so only fleetingly. I wouldn't go so far as to say the "style over substance" is true, as one of the characters, Flynn, is basically a walking talking commentary as the everyman in America. Buying what doctors and governments selling him, Flynn thinks he has a disease called "Depressus", from which there is no cure. He's also the embodiment of a lot of "femme" type characteristics. A welcome change up in the genre, with Koko and her rival being hyper-sexual, hyper-violent individuals that are also pretty well in line with their feelings, expressing them as they happen in often pretty visceral extremes. 

As good as subverting a couple tropes are and having a cool female protagonist, I'm finding when the female protagonist is not stereotypical and written by a dude, their headspace reads like a dude, go figure, right? But the problem for me is the fact that if the protagonist isn't a doe eyed female, their instead the last action her, along with their labido. I haven't read any characters with a happy medium and it makes it feel like subverting the trope is no longer very interesting and satisfying, even though I recognize that they're trying. 

That said, I still enjoyed the story a lot and I'll be checking out the sequel. I'm hoping the next one will be a bit more focused on "non-sterile" prose. That's what I'm calling it anyways. Basically when women write, the world is a lot more organic from what I can tell and I enjoy it a lot more. Whereas when men write emotion is often removed and the prose are very rigid, telling you exactly what is going on but does not help for world-immersion or getting into a character's headspace. Altered Carbon remains my favourite male written cyberpunk story because it does not suffer from either problem. 

For a fun ride with a little sprinkling of, but nothing new, societal commentary. Check it out, if nothing else it's like watching an action flick with a bunch of tropes subverted. I'll give it a 3/5.

Koko Takes a Holiday

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