SPSFC4 Review: Blood Sacrifice by Q. Turner

Blurb:

Welcome to the Isulum Empire. Inflation is high, trust in the government is low, and unrest is growing. Here, oligarchs live offshore on superyachts with their pleasure androids, far from tax obligations and the crumbling, crime-ridden city center. The rest of the population retreats into the digital world of Parallel, a sanctuary that offers daily respite from the real world.

Many of Parallel's users have rallied around the speaker Rita Shor, who challenges the empire's class division and the injustices faced by women. Shor and her followers adamantly oppose the radical ideologies of another charismatic speaker, Doctor Gagarin Sokolo, who promotes extreme misogyny in an effort to address the empire's declining birth rate.

Neither Shor nor Sokolo realize that in the depths of Parallel, a team of hackers is working hard to unite their disparate followers under a singular purpose: to dismantle the Isulum Empire.

As Shor and Sokolo's lives become further intertwined, the empire's fate rests in their hands. But the price of victory may prove far greater than they ever imagined.

Review:

Have you ever had that moment where you just sit down at a place of comfort, stare into the distance, and darkly ponder how you have arrived at where you are now? If yes, then you might be able to sympathise with how I look at my desk and “Blood Sacrifice” by Q. Turner.

This all started with my approach to how I picked the novels I was going to read for the SPSFC, sans “The Wrong Stop” by Rex Burke due to a previous agreement to review before having knowledge that my team would have that book given to us. The way I approached the choosing of the novels? Grabbing the most interesting sounding book names without any prior research after some other team members finished out their pickings. In theory, a great way to do judging, with no prior knowledge of the book. BUT THAT’S THE THEORY PART. In reality, I had and still have little to no clue what awaits me, and if my sanity will hold up while reading the other four reads, so YOLO. 

Once the SPSFC team leaders started revealing the team lists, I dutifully opened up this novel without researching and got to reading… And stopped roughly three chapters in to read the blurb, and then the amazon reviews, my mind going “huh”. Why? I wasn’t seeing what the reviews were seeing. Then, a day or two later, I checked goodreads, and had a similar reaction, only clicking with one review because he said that it did get dark and I could agree with that.

That’s where the dilemma began, and as I was finishing up the last 200ish pages of “Blood Sacrifice”, I began to dread this review process. Mainly due to the catch-22 I find myself in when it comes to saying what I thought about the contents within this novel. As a young, red-blooded male in the middle of Europe just about old enough for the age rating on Kindle that this novel has, my view of the contents could be seen as privileged and any critique I do have can be waved away by saying that I am using that privilege to look down upon a work of art. But, if I say just the positives about it, I’d not be lying to just myself, but also to those who read this review, and therefore also where I stand when it comes to the competition itself. So, I’ll try to walk the fine edge of a review from my standpoint, but also not to the point of it just being my obviously biased view upon a book that is not targeted towards me. And until then, may Schrodinger's Cat reign over how this review will be received.

Going into the idea of working as a bookseller, if I had to sell this book to someone, and had to get them hooked on the idea of the novel, I’d give them this quick blurb:

“Two protest leaders, two different ideologies of how to fix things, each one having their own personal problems. All to have some freedom.”, alongside a “care for more” in a rushed afterthought,  and then I’d quickly move onto the next sale, if I could.

But I can’t, for this is a judgemental competition, and while I want to be nice about critiques I have, they are more or less warranted due to subject matter, lack of substantial warning, and me being outside of the target demographic and feeling very targeted as a punching bag as I was reading this. 

Before I touch upon Shor, Sokolo, and the third and fourth PoV within this book, and then, beyond them, everything else, let me state that this novel would’ve done phenomenal in a nouvelle self published Dystopian fiction competition, due to the setting, characters, and plot, even if the dystopia is disrupted and blown apart by the end. Aside from that however, it’s not one for a SPSF competition, due to the more or less divisive characters, message and other factors, and it lives or dies based on how a reviewer takes that message upon itself. I am pretty sure that I am not going to be the only one that is a part of the SFFI team that’ll review this, but my view of this book is more or less in the negative area.

Now, to Rita Shor, Gagarin Sokolo and the third and fourth PoVs. Rita Shor is a political activist in the Parallel, always interacting with her followers in a virtual setting. Outside of that, she had a life until disease ripped her children from her, and her rage against her abusive husband and his behavior the night of their childrens death caused her to murder him with 30 stab wounds. That leads to her imprisonment for thirty years, and during the time frame of this novel she causes a few prison riots with singing, gets SAed and sent to the hospital, and a few more shenanigans later, she free and watching the fruits of her followers labor unfold, alongside a certain other characters followers whom i’m going to touch upon soon. There was, to me, not much visible character growth, with her remaining static throughout most of the novel, before she decides to bite the bullet that her actions have caused other mothers to lose their children too. 

Now to Gagarin Sokolo, the only male PoV of this novel and I am not counting his lookalike for that for various reasons, not limited to his lookalike not being a human. Gagarin is what I would like to call Isulums drug addicted Andrew Tate (this book was published in November of 2023, I’m not sure if that has anything to do with Sokolos character but it might). He’s misogynistic, racist, and a socialist to a degree, but also a dad. A deadbeat one, but still a dad, and he wants custody of his child. The only problem with that is his former wife’s allegations of him being a child molestor, rapist, addict to both drugs and virtual reality. For him though that’s only a hurdle to overcome, and so when the third PoV of the book approaches him for help getting his followers in line, his only demand is his one and only child that he remembers fondly. Again, another static character that made me want to get a physical copy just to toss into a fire. Not to promote book burning, but because my mind did not want to associate a first person pov male character to him. If that is what the author was going for, it was achieved brilliantly. 

The other two PoVs are as follows: 

• a female journalist, formerly a drug runner with a plane, working in the shadows of her fathers company, with her entire family dead and her family business being state acquired. 

• A copy of Gagarin Sokolo who is supposed to be the best version of him but instead is just one step away from being just like him.

And for both of these characters, there is little character growth. For the female journalist, she remains headstrong and gets terrorized once or twice by things before continuing as if nothing had happened to her, and for the clone of Gagarin… well… his story is more or less a fall from grace. 

Aside from the characters, we have the plot. About 2/3rds of the way through this novel, I went ahead and read an even longer book as a break period, and more often than not, the only motivation I had to see where the plot was going was “fuck it we ball”. It was mostly the standard three people are dissenters against the current ruling class, with the difference being that one was locked up most of the book, one had agency, and the other was more or less a shut in drug addict with too much to say but not enough spine to go outside and see his words in action. So the only moving part of the plot that brought the story forward was either through scenes happening outside of the characters perspective and what was done instead was have the characters reminisce about their life, and how they got to that point. Sokoro moved through the Parallel, Roth moved in the Vert (real life), mostly in prison, and was more a spectator than Sokoro was. The other two PoVs are a lot more active, moving either in both the Vert and the Parallel or exclusively in the Vert. It was fine, nothing too groundbreaking, It was more the characters that made the plot insufferable to read.

Now, the world building. The world building is interesting. The parallel and vert have ties with other works, such as “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, “Snow Crash” and “Fall, or Dodge in hell” by Neal Stephenson and various other novels with two realities clashing with each other, the real and the virtual. The Isulum empire itself is split from the poor schmucks on land and the rich on water. That by itself just shows an interesting gimmick as to how the poor are separated from the rich, but that's not the whole situation. There's more. The rich, the Kani as they are called, are able to afford memory chips to create clones of themselves, so they don't have to worry about assassination attempts, public relations or ever leaving their yachts. The poor however have no such protection, ever in fear of the Üje, a criminal gang. Either them or the police, with their infamous work prison hanging out somewhere.

Besides that, there’s slums, more slums and even more slums, with trash and robots everywhere. The Wasada, the robots, appear in all shapes and sizes, and unlike humans, can’t get sick and die, so their ideal for labour. That just means the rest of the population is poor though. And more or less addicted to some vice, drugs and pornography included. Did I want to get my eyes rinsed out while reading this novel? Yes, yes I did, which, if that was the intended effect that the author had, bravo.

Now to the plot that was dystopian before it dipped into a full fledged reenactment of the french revolution. By itself, it was a fine enough plot, with plenty of twists that was interesting to see by itself and would’ve been enjoyable had it not been for the characters. They were experiencing a journey, but never really progressed further than they did at the beginning of the novel. They just experienced various things, had a revolution, and then the end. It does set up a second book with the ending, but I doubt I’ll be back for that one. 

What did stand out however was the various PoVs I got from three people within the same slum area, just experiencing various things, reminiscent of the single PoV of 1984, yet the fact that we got to experience prison, self imposed isolation and constant journalism to start a revolution was an interesting spin on the dystopia. That brings me to the French Revolution part of the book. By itself, if the novel ended on a sad note, it’d be a truly dystopian novel. However, that is not what the author portrayed. The rebellion works, people die, and life moves on, with change in the works. I’d normally not pick at that, but the ending was such a huge amount of *screeching in the corner*. I usually don’t take offense to a novel with how they play out, yet… when the static characters don’t change, won’t change, and then just poof, end. The plot was just events happening to unchanging characters before ending on a somehow even more depressing note than the dystopia still existing. 

To the unique part… I think this the only novel I’ve read this year that has played around with two realities, several different places, and it being dystopian all in one, not to mention also being a fiction adventure novel. On one hand, I’d like to see more of this, but on the other hand, if it’s static characters, almost one sided “we must break the patriarchy” (for that is what the novel seems to be saying in a loud, loud voice), but then also having both sides commit literal war crimes and then teasing that with the next installment… I doubt I’ll be back for that.

Now, if you’ve gotten to this point of the review, this is where I’d usually critique the book, but I feel like it was unavoidable to point out the problems I had; so here’s the somewhat positive part about it, it was critiquing problems that existed before, while and after the novel was being published. Some of it may be subtle, some of it might be glaring, but it is there, and I applaud the other for doing that.

All the things I’ve mentioned here are my own opinion, and if you’d like to, read this novel to form your own. This book can either totally engage someone or immediately make them want to toss their choice of reading this novel out the nearest window. And for me at least, I belong in the latter category.

If you like disturbing dystopias with somewhat static characters and a bit of adventure, “Blood Sacrifice” is for you. 

As always, and especially with this one, if you’ve reached the end of this review, thank you for reading it, and hopefully I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If not, here’s a random link to a review on the site, which might be right up you alley or it might not be. Carpe diem, seize the day, go explore and read. 

Wherever you are reading this long piece of mind that I have about this book, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night.