Review by Ian Keogh

In the Singapore of the future anyone with an abiding medical condition is deported from the city. It’s a policy also applied to criminals, and extended down to the disfigured, leaving a veritable hellhole for those who survive their first moments beyond the city. Body parts are greatly prized, and sold, although author MF Wilson never explains their desirability.

Nathan Fox illustrates this initial squalor as a gruesome splatterverse, tentacle porn mixed amid the flying bullets and slashing blades, bodies twisted into grotesque shapes and everything rendered in vivid colour. It’s meant to titillate, but is resolutely unattractive, and so cluttered it’s difficult on the eye.

Still, Fox is only drawing the fevered imaginings of Wilson’s mind. For someone whose introduction states they didn’t want to write another dark future, Wilson fails miserably. The use of bright colour and a tropical setting does not a utopia make if every sordid fantasy spills out. Wilson’s one step into originality in an otherwise mediocre SF thriller is to give it a distinctive twist by having all characters speak English as a form of local dialect, which is rich and can be understood.

It’s a third of the way through before the meanderings stop and the plot kicks in. Max and his gang are hired to storm a genetic facility and return with Nina, a girl on whom many experiments have taken place. She’s considered company property, and extremely valuable, and her presence opens a new world for Max as he and Nina attempt to escape their surroundings and their pursuers.

In reality that’s just propelling them from one gratuitously violent scene to the next, all drawn in incredible detail by Fox. Eventually the repetition ends when the effects of Nina’s genetic splicing manifest and after that Wilson’s had enough and brings everything to a rapid close.

Anyone who likes an SF-themed action thriller will find hundreds better than this.