Liz Bourke Reviews Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas

Cascade Failure, L.M. Sagas (Tor 978-1-25087-125-1, $17.99, 416pp, tp) March 2024.

Clearly this is the month for me to discuss debut novels. Cascade Failure is the first novel from L.M. Sagas: a science fiction adventure in the high-octane tradition. Stories set in futures ruled by soulless corporations have multiplied in recent years, perhaps as the naked greed of unfettered capitalism has grown more blatant since the de­cade-defining financial crash in the 2000s. Martha Wells’s Murderbot stories may be the best-known (and most award-winning) recent examples, but the subject has been widely taken up.

In Cascade Failure, corporate conglomerate authority the Trust controls most of the power and resources, held in notional check by the negotiating power of the Union and its labour organisers. A third force, the Guild, ostensibly acts as a neutral police force for the preservation of human life. This universe is full of scavengers and mercenaries, and abounds with abandoned planets whose terraforming was turned off and whose population was relocated as soon as they were deemed unprofitable.

We first meet Jal when he’s desperate, half-panicked, trying to find a ride on a spaceship heading in towards centres of civilisation and away from the bloody frontier. (We eventually learn that he’s wanted as a deserter from the Guild, but that the circumstances behind his disappear­ance had more to do with betrayal than with a voluntary departure.) Unfortunately for him, the Ambit – the ship he stumbles aboard – recognises him instantly. Not only is the ship’s captain the ship themself – the AI Eoan – but one of the two crew members is Saint, Jal’s former best friend and bosom companion (and perhaps, though not explicitly, former romantic interest). Saint, though he transferred away from Jal and left Jal to the mercy of comrades who held Jal in disregard for being a genetically modified human, took his apparent desertion very personally and is holding a grudge on behalf of Jal’s sister and niece. Eoan and Saint, and Nash, the Ambit’s engineer/medic, determine to take Jal in for trial in front of the Guild’s council of captains.

Before they can travel very far, however, the Ambit diverts to answer a Guild distress call. The planet of origin is a dead world, its terraforming turned off or gone wrong so quickly that dozens of perfectly preserved corpses remain – and stuck in a half-collapsed booby-trapped hangar (bombs!) is a Guild ship with one survivor aboard. Search and rescue is a dangerous job for which Jal is well-qualified, so he volunteers, and is allowed, to help.

That survivor is Anke, a young woman and a hacker-type who claims to have come to the planet to find proof that the Trust has a secret piece of programming that lets it shut off (reverse) plan­etary terraforming on still-inhabited worlds, one that they’re using to quietly save money by killing off small communities with expensive relocation costs. Anke very nearly has enough pieces of the puzzle (the ‘‘Deadworld Code,’’ as she calls it) to prove it and come up with a patch to stop it. But she can’t trust anyone – Trust mercenaries, labour agitators, and Guild turncoats all seem to be out for her head. The only people she knows won’t kill her are all aboard the Ambit, because they just saved her life. Jal’s court martial is delayed, since some­thing that can kill worlds is rather more urgent: Neither Jal nor the Ambit’s captain and crew are at all happy with the idea of washing their hands of something like that.

Mercenaries and other unsavoury types are on their trail. But despite everything – despite Jal and Saint’s complicated history, Nash’s abrasive person­ality, Eoan’s passion for the pursuit of knowledge, and Anke’s nervousness – the five of them make a good team. Twists and turns, peril and potential, emotional revelations and unexpected revelations, combine in a fast-paced and atmospheric novel of action and intrigue.

Sagas has a compelling voice, a wonderful com­mand of pace and tension, a fascinating cast of characters, and a fantastic touch with atmosphere: brooding dead planets with fatal atmospheres (pun not intended) and lurking corpses are brought to life with the same vivid intensity as bustling mar­ketplaces and the quiet homeliness of the Ambit’s galley. Like many thrillers, several aspects of the overall plot make less sense the more you look at them, and Sagas’s overall political-structural worldbuilding is sketched in with about as much detail as that of the old Firefly television show, but the confidence, energy and verve of Sagas’s voice, combined with the high-stakes action and high-emotional-stakes character relationships, was more than sufficient to carry this reader along. (And I’m normally picky.)

The characters are fascinating. Jal is, it appears, a fundamentally decent person, and perhaps too ready to volunteer to put himself in danger doing the right thing. His relationship – friendship with overtones of more – with Saint is complicated by feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Eoan, the AI, has layers, and some interesting not-quite-insecurities; Nash’s growing affection for Anke is endearingly prickly, though complicated by the novel’s later developments. And Sagas has a knack for writing fun banter between this crew.

Cascade Failure is a very promising first novel. I’d happily read a sequel.

This review and more like it in the March 2024 issue of Locus.

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