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Russell's Attic #2
Half Life
Cas Russell is back — and so is her deadly supermath.
Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she’s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she’s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.
Then she finds her client’s daughter . . . who is a robot.
The researchers who own the ’bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid’s just real enough for Cas to want to protect her — even though she knows she’s risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.
Cas knows logically that she isn’t saving a child. She’s stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she’s never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble — even a fake one.
Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.
Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she’s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she’s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.
Then she finds her client’s daughter . . . who is a robot.
The researchers who own the ’bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid’s just real enough for Cas to want to protect her — even though she knows she’s risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.
Cas knows logically that she isn’t saving a child. She’s stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she’s never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble — even a fake one.
Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.
314 pages, ebook
First published December 25, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
January 8, 2016
Half Life is S.L. Huang’s follow up to the brilliant Zero Sum Game, second in a series she calls “Russell’s Attic” for reasons I’m still not completely clear about.
Zero Sum Game was brilliant. Half Life is “merely” excellent. Call it perhaps a half-step down from its predecessor, but that half-step is because, I think, she aimed higher and didn’t quite hit the mark she was aiming for. And I’m not even sure I can explain what I mean clearly, so keep in mind that I could be wrong.
Cas Russell, our protagonist whose superpower is that she sees the world as math, is back about a year after the previous story. She’s a little bit more human, since she’s maintaining several actual friendships begun in the first book, but it makes her (quite amusingly) grumpy at times throughout the story.
This time around, she takes on two cases. And a half. Sort of.
First, a man hires her to find and return his five-year-old daughter, whom he claims was kidnapped by Arkacite, a big evil internet corporation that his dead ex-wife used to work for. But he’s maddeningly vague about details, and when Cas gets some background from her information guru, Checker, things get very suspicious — there’s no record of any daughter. No birth certificate, no vaccination records, nothing at all. She appears not even to exist, until Cas, in her preliminary investigation, comes across someone who actually saw the girl once, exactly as described.
That confirmation pushes Cas to take the case, along with some other information she comes across, because Cas has problems with corporations, or anybody really, doing experiments on little girls. (Woman after my own heart, there.)
Secondly, Checker drops a problem in her lap. The Los Angeles Mafia is after him. He was a tutor to the niece of the Mafia’s head woman, and made the mistake of sleeping with her. Which turns out to be a bigger problem than Checker seems to realize, since the head woman wants not only to kill him, but destroy his business and business partner as well, as a lesson. And she’s not open to negotiation on the subject.
Cas, being the calm, rational, and thoughtful person she is, tells the Mafia lady they have to kill Cas first, because if anything happens to Checker or her other friends while she lives, she’s going to do extreme damage to their organization.
So, for a big chunk of the story, our protagonist is going around Los Angeles with a contract out on her head. This makes for some excellent comedy.
And here’s were I hit a reviewer’s conundrum. I hate, bloody hate, spoilers. But some of what I love about this novel is (at least, arguably) spoiler-y. The true nature of what Cas is dealing with doesn’t get revealed till a solid third of the way through the book. On the other hand, it’s also in the book’s blurb. And the major premise on which the story hangs.
So I’m going to give that away, but I’m also going to (somewhat vaguely) talk about stuff later in the book, both for why I liked it and for why some aspects of it didn’t work as smoothly for me as I would have wished.
This counts as your SPOILER WARNING. I’m not going to give everything away, but I can’t avoid giving at least some of the good stuff away, because of what I want to discuss. Ye have been warned.
When Cas breaks into Arkacite and gets to the underground lab where the little girl, Liliana, is being kept, Cas’s first reaction is to draw back in revulsion and ask “What are you?”
Turns out, Liliana is an android. A really good android, good enough, both in construction and programming, to fool people who don’t have Cas’s mathematical perception. She was the dead ex-wife’s project at Arkacite. Oh, and the dead ex-wife isn’t dead.
And, as the story goes on, more androids turn up. Huang doesn’t go into details of how they were made so lifelike, but what they are not is something you’d find in a contemporary movie, all CGI and subtlety. What a few scenes actually brought to my mind — and quite to my liking — was bad 1970s TV science fiction. You know, the shows that used the “android” conceit stolen from Westworld and Futureworld, did it much worse, so you’d have an episode of, say, The Bionic Woman with androids walking around with their “faces” removed so you could see the mechanical stuff running underneath, thanks to some really cheesy prop work.
Do I even need to say that I loved this conceit? I was grinning like a madman every time it turned up.
And I’m pretty sure it was purposeful, because there are other bits of the story that are even more knowingly bonkers, and clearly intentional nods to the sorts of older thriller stories that I love and, one must presume, Huang also loves.
Things like a plot to infiltrate humanity with secret androids, and the plot being revealed at hourly press conferences (by another android, in fact).
Things like a nefarious Japanese zaibatsu (not called that, but it clearly is) interfering in the US culture for nefarious purposes.
Things like a plot to force a supervolcano to erupt, and use that threat to blackmail… somebody.
Things like the climax taking place in a super-villain’s no-kidding underground headquarters built into a volcano resting a major fault line.
Like I said, all kinds of details in the story are utterly bonkers, all in ways I truly love.
And once again, Huang’s prose, her chapter construction, her use of suspense and humor, are all totally professional, easily as good as anything being put out by major publishers, and better than most of it. For mainstream snobs who sniff that “real” books can only come from approved “major publishers”, she’s yet another example of an indie author whose work should be putting many Big Five-published authors to shame.
Now, that said, I alluded above to the story not being quite as good as the first book, which is putting it a bit too strongly, perhaps, but let me try to get at what I mean.
First, and most vaguely, Huang uses Cas’s initial reaction to Liliana to bring up an interesting thematic issue — if something passes the Turing Test, but you know it’s not real, does its reality or lack of reality matter? Cas is grossed out by the androids, a reaction that is dramatized nicely, and never once is the phrase “uncanny valley” mentioned. You don’t get talked at about it, you just see it, from her point of view.
But as the story goes on, it is made definitively and unambigiously clear that the androids do not, and cannot have self-awareness. Their programming is mimicry, and cannot become more than that.
And between the surrender of the “what is self-awareness” thematic question, and the lack of exploration of the rich thematic vein that leaves behind, exploring the human ability to emotionally attach to inanimate objects (just imagine a three year old and his favorite stuffed animal), I was left feeling unsatisfied at the rather large number of things Huang could have explored but chose not to, in favor of her (admittedly entertaining and fun) confluence of insane thriller plots.
It feels like there was something in this thematic material that spoke to Huang, that she wanted to deal with, and then, for some reason, couldn’t. Personal reasons? Lack of room in the story after all the other chainsaws she gave herself to juggle? Just not ready for it yet? There’s no way to know. But the fact that the climax includes an action that plays directly into some of this thematic material, feeling almost like an answer to a question that was deliberately not asked, it’s pretty clear that there was more here, potentially, than actually gets dealt with.
Again, this does not at all make the book bad. It’s just a missed opportunity, a potential that went unfulfilled for this reader, and with everything else working so smoothly and satisfyingly, it rather stood out.
A second bit of the story that went unexplained for no purpose I could determine was the client’s wife’s “death”. Cas is told by her client that his wife died of cancer. She relays that information to another character, who had no idea the wife died, and feels horrible for missing the funeral. Then it turns out the wife is very much alive, didn’t fake her death or anything. After that, the matter is dropped from the story. If it was meant to tell us something about her client, which I suspect it was, it doesn’t come through. He’s not manipulative or mendacious, in some ways he’s quite pitiable. I surmise that his belief that his ex-wife died of cancer was meant to show his increasingly fragile hold on reality, and his desperation for life to make sense, or something like that. But it doesn’t really work, it just comes off as a plot quirk for no apparent reason. In fact, as the book goes on, the client basically gets moved offstage and his wife steps up to fill his position in the story. So I’m really not sure what Huang intended here, and it sort of sticks out, again, because everything else is so solid.
Thirdly, her left-wing Social Justice Warrior views intrude into the story for a short space in the middle of the book, in a way I found off-putting. I applauded the way she worked her views into the first book, Zero Sum Game, because they bore directly on the story and she dealt fairly, exploring negative consequences of her avowed beliefs. All of that was to the good. In Half-Life, it comes a bit out of nowhere and feels gratuitous. The “android infiltration” press conferences lead to demagoguing and cultural hysteria, which is dramatized in a trope-ish way, but that didn’t bother me, but all the demagoguing was from right-wing social conservatives who hate gay marriage. And this socially liberal reader was jerked right out of the story during this chapter or two, thinking “Really!? That’s the best you could do?” It just feels lazy, which, again, stands out in a book where so much attention was given to all kinds of details. But, again, it’s not a big part of the book, a few chapters or so at most, and really just part of the background to the main story.
My last quibble is simply that the various plots didn’t seem to mesh together as smoothly as they could. Certainly, Huang put them together for clear reasons, but once you get to them, they seem a bit obvious and convenient, and it doesn’t come off as perfectly coherent to me.
But again, this is largely quibbling, in the face of a second novel with greater ambition than the spectacular first, even if it doesn’t quite achieve everything it sets out to do. It was enormous fun, mostly satisfying, and has me looking forward to diving into the newly-available third book in the series, Root of Unity.
[This review first appeared on the author's personal blog on 12 November 2015. It is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.]
Zero Sum Game was brilliant. Half Life is “merely” excellent. Call it perhaps a half-step down from its predecessor, but that half-step is because, I think, she aimed higher and didn’t quite hit the mark she was aiming for. And I’m not even sure I can explain what I mean clearly, so keep in mind that I could be wrong.
Cas Russell, our protagonist whose superpower is that she sees the world as math, is back about a year after the previous story. She’s a little bit more human, since she’s maintaining several actual friendships begun in the first book, but it makes her (quite amusingly) grumpy at times throughout the story.
This time around, she takes on two cases. And a half. Sort of.
First, a man hires her to find and return his five-year-old daughter, whom he claims was kidnapped by Arkacite, a big evil internet corporation that his dead ex-wife used to work for. But he’s maddeningly vague about details, and when Cas gets some background from her information guru, Checker, things get very suspicious — there’s no record of any daughter. No birth certificate, no vaccination records, nothing at all. She appears not even to exist, until Cas, in her preliminary investigation, comes across someone who actually saw the girl once, exactly as described.
That confirmation pushes Cas to take the case, along with some other information she comes across, because Cas has problems with corporations, or anybody really, doing experiments on little girls. (Woman after my own heart, there.)
Secondly, Checker drops a problem in her lap. The Los Angeles Mafia is after him. He was a tutor to the niece of the Mafia’s head woman, and made the mistake of sleeping with her. Which turns out to be a bigger problem than Checker seems to realize, since the head woman wants not only to kill him, but destroy his business and business partner as well, as a lesson. And she’s not open to negotiation on the subject.
Cas, being the calm, rational, and thoughtful person she is, tells the Mafia lady they have to kill Cas first, because if anything happens to Checker or her other friends while she lives, she’s going to do extreme damage to their organization.
So, for a big chunk of the story, our protagonist is going around Los Angeles with a contract out on her head. This makes for some excellent comedy.
And here’s were I hit a reviewer’s conundrum. I hate, bloody hate, spoilers. But some of what I love about this novel is (at least, arguably) spoiler-y. The true nature of what Cas is dealing with doesn’t get revealed till a solid third of the way through the book. On the other hand, it’s also in the book’s blurb. And the major premise on which the story hangs.
So I’m going to give that away, but I’m also going to (somewhat vaguely) talk about stuff later in the book, both for why I liked it and for why some aspects of it didn’t work as smoothly for me as I would have wished.
This counts as your SPOILER WARNING. I’m not going to give everything away, but I can’t avoid giving at least some of the good stuff away, because of what I want to discuss. Ye have been warned.
When Cas breaks into Arkacite and gets to the underground lab where the little girl, Liliana, is being kept, Cas’s first reaction is to draw back in revulsion and ask “What are you?”
Turns out, Liliana is an android. A really good android, good enough, both in construction and programming, to fool people who don’t have Cas’s mathematical perception. She was the dead ex-wife’s project at Arkacite. Oh, and the dead ex-wife isn’t dead.
And, as the story goes on, more androids turn up. Huang doesn’t go into details of how they were made so lifelike, but what they are not is something you’d find in a contemporary movie, all CGI and subtlety. What a few scenes actually brought to my mind — and quite to my liking — was bad 1970s TV science fiction. You know, the shows that used the “android” conceit stolen from Westworld and Futureworld, did it much worse, so you’d have an episode of, say, The Bionic Woman with androids walking around with their “faces” removed so you could see the mechanical stuff running underneath, thanks to some really cheesy prop work.
Do I even need to say that I loved this conceit? I was grinning like a madman every time it turned up.
And I’m pretty sure it was purposeful, because there are other bits of the story that are even more knowingly bonkers, and clearly intentional nods to the sorts of older thriller stories that I love and, one must presume, Huang also loves.
Things like a plot to infiltrate humanity with secret androids, and the plot being revealed at hourly press conferences (by another android, in fact).
Things like a nefarious Japanese zaibatsu (not called that, but it clearly is) interfering in the US culture for nefarious purposes.
Things like a plot to force a supervolcano to erupt, and use that threat to blackmail… somebody.
Things like the climax taking place in a super-villain’s no-kidding underground headquarters built into a volcano resting a major fault line.
Like I said, all kinds of details in the story are utterly bonkers, all in ways I truly love.
And once again, Huang’s prose, her chapter construction, her use of suspense and humor, are all totally professional, easily as good as anything being put out by major publishers, and better than most of it. For mainstream snobs who sniff that “real” books can only come from approved “major publishers”, she’s yet another example of an indie author whose work should be putting many Big Five-published authors to shame.
Now, that said, I alluded above to the story not being quite as good as the first book, which is putting it a bit too strongly, perhaps, but let me try to get at what I mean.
First, and most vaguely, Huang uses Cas’s initial reaction to Liliana to bring up an interesting thematic issue — if something passes the Turing Test, but you know it’s not real, does its reality or lack of reality matter? Cas is grossed out by the androids, a reaction that is dramatized nicely, and never once is the phrase “uncanny valley” mentioned. You don’t get talked at about it, you just see it, from her point of view.
But as the story goes on, it is made definitively and unambigiously clear that the androids do not, and cannot have self-awareness. Their programming is mimicry, and cannot become more than that.
And between the surrender of the “what is self-awareness” thematic question, and the lack of exploration of the rich thematic vein that leaves behind, exploring the human ability to emotionally attach to inanimate objects (just imagine a three year old and his favorite stuffed animal), I was left feeling unsatisfied at the rather large number of things Huang could have explored but chose not to, in favor of her (admittedly entertaining and fun) confluence of insane thriller plots.
It feels like there was something in this thematic material that spoke to Huang, that she wanted to deal with, and then, for some reason, couldn’t. Personal reasons? Lack of room in the story after all the other chainsaws she gave herself to juggle? Just not ready for it yet? There’s no way to know. But the fact that the climax includes an action that plays directly into some of this thematic material, feeling almost like an answer to a question that was deliberately not asked, it’s pretty clear that there was more here, potentially, than actually gets dealt with.
Again, this does not at all make the book bad. It’s just a missed opportunity, a potential that went unfulfilled for this reader, and with everything else working so smoothly and satisfyingly, it rather stood out.
A second bit of the story that went unexplained for no purpose I could determine was the client’s wife’s “death”. Cas is told by her client that his wife died of cancer. She relays that information to another character, who had no idea the wife died, and feels horrible for missing the funeral. Then it turns out the wife is very much alive, didn’t fake her death or anything. After that, the matter is dropped from the story. If it was meant to tell us something about her client, which I suspect it was, it doesn’t come through. He’s not manipulative or mendacious, in some ways he’s quite pitiable. I surmise that his belief that his ex-wife died of cancer was meant to show his increasingly fragile hold on reality, and his desperation for life to make sense, or something like that. But it doesn’t really work, it just comes off as a plot quirk for no apparent reason. In fact, as the book goes on, the client basically gets moved offstage and his wife steps up to fill his position in the story. So I’m really not sure what Huang intended here, and it sort of sticks out, again, because everything else is so solid.
Thirdly, her left-wing Social Justice Warrior views intrude into the story for a short space in the middle of the book, in a way I found off-putting. I applauded the way she worked her views into the first book, Zero Sum Game, because they bore directly on the story and she dealt fairly, exploring negative consequences of her avowed beliefs. All of that was to the good. In Half-Life, it comes a bit out of nowhere and feels gratuitous. The “android infiltration” press conferences lead to demagoguing and cultural hysteria, which is dramatized in a trope-ish way, but that didn’t bother me, but all the demagoguing was from right-wing social conservatives who hate gay marriage. And this socially liberal reader was jerked right out of the story during this chapter or two, thinking “Really!? That’s the best you could do?” It just feels lazy, which, again, stands out in a book where so much attention was given to all kinds of details. But, again, it’s not a big part of the book, a few chapters or so at most, and really just part of the background to the main story.
My last quibble is simply that the various plots didn’t seem to mesh together as smoothly as they could. Certainly, Huang put them together for clear reasons, but once you get to them, they seem a bit obvious and convenient, and it doesn’t come off as perfectly coherent to me.
But again, this is largely quibbling, in the face of a second novel with greater ambition than the spectacular first, even if it doesn’t quite achieve everything it sets out to do. It was enormous fun, mostly satisfying, and has me looking forward to diving into the newly-available third book in the series, Root of Unity.
[This review first appeared on the author's personal blog on 12 November 2015. It is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.]
February 20, 2022
Another great adventure for Cas Russell and Co. The story starts a little slowly but builds up to a satisfyingly greater complexity through a series of lesser events. As we begin, the "jobs" seem to be minor triflings after the largesse of the Pithica affair - trying to make the Mafia sound big and scary wasn't very effective in the wake of such a globally active conspiracy. Well, I suspect that we all thought Pithica would be a recurring menace, like Batman's Joker, but apart from a few references they didn't even feature in book two.
Although in my opinion it remains as a thin veneer, it nonetheless still excites me to read a heavily pro-science adventure and I think that the applied mathematics was stronger in this story than the first.
If you fell in love with Rio (for some reason I like to roll the 'r') in book one, then prepare to be disappointed. God's self-appointed Angel of Death barely gets a mention in this story and although this didn't bother me in the least, it seemed an odd choice by the author given the character's importance to Cas Russell herself. At this stage I'm thinking there must be a good reason for doing this.
There's a bit of a struggle maintaining the reluctant hero scenario, where Cas is not necessarily a good person but continues to find herself doing good deeds. At least for us depraved readers this is tempered by a pummelling of amoral introspection.
I wasn't going to mention the robots because it felt like too big a reveal, but there it is in the blurb so here it is too. What seems inconsistent to me is that this is pegged as a near-future scifi series but the general population in this story are shocked by the concept of humanoid robots. How crazy could this really seem in a near future?? Considering I've read about such things already in development. I even recall watching some thing about people who want to marry their "lifelike" sex bots.
Look, plausibility of the premise aside, this is another very fun story. The author did a great job with characters, new and old, and the plot gets delightfully sticky as it goes along.
Although in my opinion it remains as a thin veneer, it nonetheless still excites me to read a heavily pro-science adventure and I think that the applied mathematics was stronger in this story than the first.
If you fell in love with Rio (for some reason I like to roll the 'r') in book one, then prepare to be disappointed. God's self-appointed Angel of Death barely gets a mention in this story and although this didn't bother me in the least, it seemed an odd choice by the author given the character's importance to Cas Russell herself. At this stage I'm thinking there must be a good reason for doing this.
There's a bit of a struggle maintaining the reluctant hero scenario, where Cas is not necessarily a good person but continues to find herself doing good deeds. At least for us depraved readers this is tempered by a pummelling of amoral introspection.
I wasn't going to mention the robots because it felt like too big a reveal, but there it is in the blurb so here it is too. What seems inconsistent to me is that this is pegged as a near-future scifi series but the general population in this story are shocked by the concept of humanoid robots. How crazy could this really seem in a near future?? Considering I've read about such things already in development. I even recall watching some thing about people who want to marry their "lifelike" sex bots.
Look, plausibility of the premise aside, this is another very fun story. The author did a great job with characters, new and old, and the plot gets delightfully sticky as it goes along.
June 26, 2023
Review to follow
May 14, 2015
I really liked the first book in this series (Zero-sum game), but unfortunately the second one does not reach the quality of the first. At the beginning, the story is very slow-paced and tedious, but it picks up in the second half. However, at that point the overall story arc also becomes rather predictable (in short, Cas builds herself a little team), and the details of the plot do not make much sense on their own (you often wonder why the protagonists do what they do, and the only explanation seems to be that this is necessary to support the overall story arc). Also, there is one resolution of a sub-story (the Mafia stuff) that just does not make any sense at all.
While I liked Cas' special abilities in the first book, here they've become just a tad too surreal. For example, Cas' is supposedly able to plan a certain mission down to second accuracy days in advance (and then worries when she's a few second behind the plan), when the very same plan involves human guards that are patrolling the area (which are certainly not going to conform to schedule with second-accuracy). Often, it feels as if the author was desperately trying to one-up on Cas' abilities of the first book (which I felt was really not necessary). Cas' sudden reluctance to kill just because she's got some friends who don't like that (even though she's not quite sure what friends actually are) is not plausible either.
Verdict: meh
While I liked Cas' special abilities in the first book, here they've become just a tad too surreal. For example, Cas' is supposedly able to plan a certain mission down to second accuracy days in advance (and then worries when she's a few second behind the plan), when the very same plan involves human guards that are patrolling the area (which are certainly not going to conform to schedule with second-accuracy). Often, it feels as if the author was desperately trying to one-up on Cas' abilities of the first book (which I felt was really not necessary). Cas' sudden reluctance to kill just because she's got some friends who don't like that (even though she's not quite sure what friends actually are) is not plausible either.
Verdict: meh
December 14, 2015
I was reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but around the middle of the novella, it all got so predictable and depressing, so I put it down and whipped through this in about five hours, instead. It's more than four times as long, but ten times easier to read!
Cas Russell is an odd kind of superhero—a math savant. In the first book of the series, she's friendless and essentially conscienceless, but by this point Arthur and Checker have become her friends (not through any fault of hers, Cas is quick to point out), and Arthur has also become her conscience. Now, she's taking jobs by choosing the ones that Arthur would most approve of—well, really, the ones he would leastdisapprove of.
It's a non-stop race through the worlds of corporate espionage and the LA Mafia, with everything just a shade short of believability, but whipping by so fast you have no time to question it.
Cas Russell is an odd kind of superhero—a math savant. In the first book of the series, she's friendless and essentially conscienceless, but by this point Arthur and Checker have become her friends (not through any fault of hers, Cas is quick to point out), and Arthur has also become her conscience. Now, she's taking jobs by choosing the ones that Arthur would most approve of—well, really, the ones he would leastdisapprove of.
It's a non-stop race through the worlds of corporate espionage and the LA Mafia, with everything just a shade short of believability, but whipping by so fast you have no time to question it.
July 5, 2015
Half Life is the sequel to Zero Sum Game, which focuses on a superhero-esque anti-hero who's abilities are fueled by power of math. Admittedly, I didn't like Half Life as much as Zero Sum Game. Some of the later twists were a bit far fetched for my taste. Still, it's certainly worth reading if you enjoyed Zero Sum Game. The characters are all great, and I enjoyed seeing how our heroine, Cas, is developing from book to book. The main storyline delves into the world of AI, which adds an interesting layer to this universe. I am looking forward to checking out the third book when it is released later this year.
March 8, 2015
Cas returns in another intelligent, science-filled thriller. This time there are robots that look like people, problems with the Mafia, and a bona fide evil genius with a high-tech lair. If you enjoyed Zero Sum Game, you'll love this.
July 22, 2015
Less surprising than the first book - you'll figure out what's going on long before the characters do - but a lot of fun.
Read
October 16, 2020S. L. Huang’s book, ‘’Half Life’’ has created a masterpiece that will soon become a blockbuster. It is the intriguing story of a female mercenary-cum ‘retrieval expert’ who goes by the moniker Cas’ Russell. She has the skills of a ninja - a super-powered fighter and assassin all rolled into one- and uses them to get her clients anything under the radar provided the pay is top dollar, be it simple information or classified and dangerous lab materials hidden like bomb-making plutonium under layers of security in top-secret labs. This is until she lands a seemingly crazy client who desperately wants her to find her kidnapped daughter Lilliana. Being a ‘sucker’ for kids, she promises to check it out. Arthur her best friend, the only one who calls her by her full name Cassandra has tried to influence her to reduce her dead-bodies count while on her contracts, something that she agrees to but that endangers, not only her life but also the lives of those she tries to protect.
The girl is a genius, is extremely fantastic in maths that she uses it and of course her superb ninja-like fighting skills to literally maneuver her out of every complicated situation. She enlists the help of Chester, her other genius tech-wiz of a friend, and together, they find out that Lilliana is no human child but a robot simulated so well to resemble and emulate a human kid in every sense, with simulated emotions to boot. Cas’ manages to retrieve the child, steal some plutonium batteries from one ultra-secret lab and sell them to a rival company and Chester gets entangled with the daughter of an Italian mafia family making them the target of the Italian mafia.
The twists get even more complicated when, Cas’, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, actually escalates it, loses Lilliana again, and finds herself in the sights of an assassin. It is a roller-coaster all the way as they race against time to save the ‘half-life’, save the world from being controlled by robots or the anti-AI movement, and even themselves; a tad bit messier when you throw in the mafia and an enraged psychopath who wants to seek revenge for his stolen AI technology.
Luang describes the characters so vividly, builds the plot in a fast-paced thrilling motion a leaves you fighting to save your life or panting as you run away from death pursuing you. Throughout the book, there are no lags, it is a page-turning affair from start to finish. This being a sequel to another book, ‘Zero Sum Game’ you guessed right, I am definitely for the other book and so should you, because I can assure you, you’ll keep at it till the last page and you will be left asking for another serving of this wonderful read.
The girl is a genius, is extremely fantastic in maths that she uses it and of course her superb ninja-like fighting skills to literally maneuver her out of every complicated situation. She enlists the help of Chester, her other genius tech-wiz of a friend, and together, they find out that Lilliana is no human child but a robot simulated so well to resemble and emulate a human kid in every sense, with simulated emotions to boot. Cas’ manages to retrieve the child, steal some plutonium batteries from one ultra-secret lab and sell them to a rival company and Chester gets entangled with the daughter of an Italian mafia family making them the target of the Italian mafia.
The twists get even more complicated when, Cas’, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, actually escalates it, loses Lilliana again, and finds herself in the sights of an assassin. It is a roller-coaster all the way as they race against time to save the ‘half-life’, save the world from being controlled by robots or the anti-AI movement, and even themselves; a tad bit messier when you throw in the mafia and an enraged psychopath who wants to seek revenge for his stolen AI technology.
Luang describes the characters so vividly, builds the plot in a fast-paced thrilling motion a leaves you fighting to save your life or panting as you run away from death pursuing you. Throughout the book, there are no lags, it is a page-turning affair from start to finish. This being a sequel to another book, ‘Zero Sum Game’ you guessed right, I am definitely for the other book and so should you, because I can assure you, you’ll keep at it till the last page and you will be left asking for another serving of this wonderful read.
October 25, 2017
I had to reread book 1, of course, but having caught back up I really enjoyed this second kickass title. As antihero's go Russell's got some serious stuff going on in her head, but somehow it all works and fits neatly together. Bring on book 3!
February 13, 2019
At least as good as the first one, maybe a bit more episodic.
July 25, 2021
3 1/2 stars actually
June 28, 2018
Three and a hafl stars. I did not find this quite so absorbing as I did Zero Sum Game, but it was still pretty good.
June 1, 2016
Half Life is the second installment in a science fiction thriller series I’ve been really enjoying, Russell’s Attic. While I’d recommend reading the first book, Zero Sum Game, before Half Life, you could probably read the two independently, since the plots are separate.
Cas Russell is a mercenary with mathematical based superpowers. After the events of the last book, she’s decided to try and be a bit more ethical in the jobs she takes on. So she takes a job from a father who’s claiming that his daughter has been kidnapped by a corporation. At the same time, one of her new friends has run into some trouble with the local mafia.
Cas is fast becoming one of my favorite SFF anti-heroines. I really loved her character development in the last book, and I’m so glad that it continued in Half Life. She’s actively trying not to kill people! I don’t know how much of her new found morality is internal versus external, her thinking about what Arthur would approve of. She is trying to have friends, but she’s still not very good at interpersonal relationships in general.
Something I’m also really glad about is that Half Life added more female characters, since last time the only ones besides Cas were all villains. This time around, Cas has female allies as well as female villains. And it looks like at least one of them will be returning in the next book!
Overall, this series is proving to be so much fun, and I just can’t wait to read the next one.
Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
Cas Russell is a mercenary with mathematical based superpowers. After the events of the last book, she’s decided to try and be a bit more ethical in the jobs she takes on. So she takes a job from a father who’s claiming that his daughter has been kidnapped by a corporation. At the same time, one of her new friends has run into some trouble with the local mafia.
“So I can do math,” I said. “Just because I can do it really fast doesn’t mean I’m some sort of superhero.”
“I didn’t say superhero,” Checker argued. “You’d have to be heroic for that.”
Cas is fast becoming one of my favorite SFF anti-heroines. I really loved her character development in the last book, and I’m so glad that it continued in Half Life. She’s actively trying not to kill people! I don’t know how much of her new found morality is internal versus external, her thinking about what Arthur would approve of. She is trying to have friends, but she’s still not very good at interpersonal relationships in general.
Something I’m also really glad about is that Half Life added more female characters, since last time the only ones besides Cas were all villains. This time around, Cas has female allies as well as female villains. And it looks like at least one of them will be returning in the next book!
Overall, this series is proving to be so much fun, and I just can’t wait to read the next one.
Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
January 17, 2015
Cas Russell is back, and she’s a kinder, gentler version of herself. Yeah, maybe not. The thing is, Cas has something like friends now--people who actually care about her--and because of this, she’s made certain agreements such as not killing people, which makes her job much more challenging. Her past is still a mystery, with her back story revealed in little snippets throughout the book. Half Life, Book 2 of the series, finds her drawn into an impossible situation almost from the beginning. She’s entangled with the Mob, as well as corporate espionage--with robots. Interesting questions about the ethics surrounding artificial intelligence are addressed in this intricately-plotted, fast-paced thriller.
S.L. Huang knows how to tell an engaging story with plenty of plot twists, but they're not so convoluted as to make me lose my way as the reader. Cas Russell is a refreshing female protagonist. She’s tough and mercenary, but she also has her own code of ethics. Huang deftly straddles the line, almost crossing over and making her unlikable, but not quite. And Russell is quietly developing as a character as she learns to care about others as well as slowly learning about herself. In the end, the multiple story lines converge and are neatly tied up.
S.L. Huang knows how to tell an engaging story with plenty of plot twists, but they're not so convoluted as to make me lose my way as the reader. Cas Russell is a refreshing female protagonist. She’s tough and mercenary, but she also has her own code of ethics. Huang deftly straddles the line, almost crossing over and making her unlikable, but not quite. And Russell is quietly developing as a character as she learns to care about others as well as slowly learning about herself. In the end, the multiple story lines converge and are neatly tied up.
March 15, 2016
This was a fun book. I could see this turning into a SyFy series (filmed in Canada of course).
We have a kick-ass protagonist with a mysterious past and no social skills, a large black PI with a soft heart, a wisecracking computer nerd in a wheelchair, and a perky secretary. They can have a new adventure every week.
Cas Russell is hired by a man to retrieve his daughter. The problem is that there is no evidence he ever had a daughter, and why would his wife's company kidnap their kid. On top of that Checker slept with the niece of a Mafia boss who wants to ruin his life. And Cas has promised Arthur she will try to solve her problems without killing anyone, even if they are trying to kill her.
This book is not as grim as the first one. And the body count is not as high. It really would work as the premise for a weekly Sci-Fi TV series, like Scorpion. Dysfunctional loner with no social skills fixes people's problems while learning how to have friends. I would watch that.
We have a kick-ass protagonist with a mysterious past and no social skills, a large black PI with a soft heart, a wisecracking computer nerd in a wheelchair, and a perky secretary. They can have a new adventure every week.
Cas Russell is hired by a man to retrieve his daughter. The problem is that there is no evidence he ever had a daughter, and why would his wife's company kidnap their kid. On top of that Checker slept with the niece of a Mafia boss who wants to ruin his life. And Cas has promised Arthur she will try to solve her problems without killing anyone, even if they are trying to kill her.
This book is not as grim as the first one. And the body count is not as high. It really would work as the premise for a weekly Sci-Fi TV series, like Scorpion. Dysfunctional loner with no social skills fixes people's problems while learning how to have friends. I would watch that.
October 24, 2015
I still love Cas Russell and will be going ahead to read book #3 in this series. However this book was just slightly a dip from the rock-solid quality of book #1.
Things I loved: Cas, of course. Her characterization is spot-on and the journey she's making from a loner to a team player is so well-written.
The entire science - fiction plot and the ethical and social questions it raised. Fantastic. Tense, intensely written, and a realistic take on how humans would react in a like situation (namely, all over the spectrum).
Things I wasn't nuts about: the Mafia plot. This was the only bit that read a little stilted/awkward and resolved itself in bit of a strange way. Still, minor, compared to the rest of the awesomeness!
Also, I missed Rio! Hope he puts in an appearance in book 3!
Things I loved: Cas, of course. Her characterization is spot-on and the journey she's making from a loner to a team player is so well-written.
The entire science - fiction plot and the ethical and social questions it raised. Fantastic. Tense, intensely written, and a realistic take on how humans would react in a like situation (namely, all over the spectrum).
Things I wasn't nuts about: the Mafia plot. This was the only bit that read a little stilted/awkward and resolved itself in bit of a strange way. Still, minor, compared to the rest of the awesomeness!
Also, I missed Rio! Hope he puts in an appearance in book 3!
March 14, 2021
Zero Sum Game was a quick, tightly-plotted thriller, which introduced us to Cas Russell, Rio, Arthur, and others. Half Life delivers as the next book in the series, by giving us Cas trying to keep a promise she made to Arthur--to stop murdering people. Several huge threats build through the novel, testing Cas' promise to her friend (Cas struggles with the concept of having friends now, as well, which is awesome). Cas develops as a character through this book, but this character growth doesn't compromise her mathematical power or the action, which comes to a tense end. An enormously entertaining book. Can't wait for the next one.
May 20, 2015
a sequel to zero sum game! cat, a math-wielding mercenary, solves several seemingly disconnected cases while trying to cope with having friends, developing ethics and abstaining from her usual 'no person no problem' approach, with varying degrees of success. the plot lost coherency and/or the flimsy veneer of plausibility here and there, but the id-soothing emotional parts made up for it, and cat is such a fun protagonist to share the pov with; she hits the 'cynical loner with a heart of gold and desire to be loved' point a lot of urban fantasy heroines helplessly miss, and does it seamlessly. mostly, you want to hug her a lot, deathly maths and all.
January 6, 2015
I enjoyed S.L. Huang's first book, Zero Sum Game, so much that I will read anything she publishes (check out her short story Hunting Monsters). The Russell's Attic series is one of those rare gems that is a fun refreshing read where I don't have to spend time being disappointing with how an author handles certain tropes. All the main characters in the series are interesting in their own way and you want to know more about them. What is with so many books that have unlikable protagonists? Now back to waiting for the next book in the series that should be out around the end of 2015.
March 30, 2015
Loved almost everything about this. I still mentally pause every time Arthur speaks, despite his being a character I like and who adds dimension to the story. Isn't "ain't" slang for "is/are not"? It's used to mean "do not" here, which just sounds odd to me (e.g. "I ain't think…" or "I ain't know…"). But it's not like I've encountered "ain't" anywhere outside books and television, so maybe it's just me.
Otherwise, I liked this even more than the first one, and the first one was great. I hope we see more of Rio.
Otherwise, I liked this even more than the first one, and the first one was great. I hope we see more of Rio.
March 12, 2016
This series doesn't get enough buzz, but I'm a huge fan: female anti-hero with math superpowers, tight, suspenseful writing, diverse cast that keeps getting better and more rounded out with each book. Totally my kind of thing. Plus, seeing loner Cas navigate her fledgling friendships with Arthur and Checker and develop a bit of a conscience (largely in the form of Arthur) was fun to watch in this installment. I'll definitely be reading the next books in the series and I'm still dying to know about Cas's past.
August 10, 2016
Things get completely mad, but it's a hell of a ride. I was hoping to find out more about Russell's past, but maybe in the next book (or maybe never?). I'm enjoying seeing Russell build her own family despite herself, and the Power of Maths will never get old.
It's also so great to read books with such diversity. It makes me all squidgy and happy inside.
Huge love for the Matrix and Serenity references. Squeee!
It's also so great to read books with such diversity. It makes me all squidgy and happy inside.
Huge love for the Matrix and Serenity references. Squeee!
February 28, 2015
Again a lot of action. The heroine is impressive in micromanaging her brawls and ventures but has lost some edge and impact . The adversaries are generally weak. The story evolves without significant goals and appears primarily as a stage for fruitless brawls.
March 3, 2015
Interesting subject
This was another great story, though I'm a bit skeptical of the premise. I gloated a bit over seeing some of the twists coming, but that might just mean they were easier to see. Can't wait for the next one!
This was another great story, though I'm a bit skeptical of the premise. I gloated a bit over seeing some of the twists coming, but that might just mean they were easier to see. Can't wait for the next one!
March 14, 2015
Cas is back! (One sentence summary - maths is her superpower, she tracks down lost things/people, mostly for their rightful owners). Half Life is action heavy and has robots, plus Cas is super awesome - what more could you want?
May 1, 2015
The plot this time around wasn't as tight, I felt - it was somewhat more inconsistent and didn't have the same overwhelming terror as the Dawna Polk reveal in the first book. HOWEVER, I enjoyed the hints of Cas's past and her continued struggle regarding How Humans Work and How To Have Friends.
August 16, 2016
I'm annoyed by Arthur's influence on Cas. I prefer her willing to do what it takes to survive. I like Checker more and more, but I found Pilar unbelievable. Although I enjoyed the story, it was hard to suspend disbelief.
October 5, 2015
December 29, 2014
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