Jupiter - Illusions of Faith by Kynan Waterford (3.5 stars)

Fans of Matthew Reilly will find a lot to like in this book. It's packed with intricate action scenes featuring "the most dangerous man in the solar system" Garen Maertikye deploying a dizzying array of body enhancement technology to move stealthily, outsmart, and when forced to, destroy his enemies. In fact, the body enhancement tech was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, with the highlight being the "type-seven augmented plantim" (i.e. plant matter) body. The description of the surgical implantation of a new occupant into this body and subsequent adaptation to the user was fantastic, as was seeing its capabilities tested through a number of violent encounters.

For me the piece that was missing here was a back-story on how Maertikye came by all of his amazing tech, especially since it is far more advanced than that available to the well-funded Coalition soldier elite. Presumably there's a thriving and dangerous black market for body enhancements, an exploration of which would make a great novel on its own. But we're given little insight into how Garen has survived all of these years - how is he funded? Being an emotionless badass might be a tactical advantage, but it doesn't fuel and repair a spacecraft, or make a stormsuit.

The body tech and fight scenes sit more towards the science end of the science-fantasy spectrum, but there are also elements of the story that are much more solidly at the fantasy end: energy transfer between heavangels and humans, direct manipulation of human emotions by heavangels, and a spontaneous complete body transformation. I found these aspects hard to reconcile with the preturnatural body tech and fight scenes that were full of much more realistic physics - I've never read the term "angular momentum" so many times in fight scenes before!

I'm not against science-fantasy, but my personal preference would have been for these aspects to have a pseudo-science grounding: like the heavangels are nano particles that move through the atmosphere in clouds but can inhabit humans as brain parasites. There's a great potential twist here if the humans try to stop killing them, only to be overtaken as hosts for an alien parasite. Garen's stormsuit could have been specially designed to harvest energy from a cooperative cloud of nano particles.

While I'm on my high-horse writing my wishlist, I also wished there was more ship slang, which is bound to develop on a closed ecosystem like the Golgotha, and less use of the word terrorist, which is cringe-worthy in a couple of cases. Like when a soldier is supposed to be verbally abusing a captured Maertikye, and the best he can muster is "You're in more trouble than you know, terrorist".

While the action has a Matthew Reilly flavour, it is far from being mindlessly dumb like those novels. A lot of thought has gone into the Coalition's economic stranglehold on the population and life on board the Golgotha. Character development isn't spectacularly deep, and having a main character with deliberately suppressed emotions doesn't help in this regard, but it isn't completely absent. To its credit, things don't get tied up in a neat bow at the end, it's suitably complicated, and suitably open for plenty of sequels.

Looking forward to the next one.

3.5 stars