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asianamlitfansWritten by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, I didn’t expect Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021) to be the type of book published by Soho, which typically boasts a strong crime fiction catalogue. Certainly, this novel follows some generic expectations but it’s also set far into the future. Other reviews have called this novel a cyber-noir, which is a term I’ve only vaguely heard before but it seems very apt.
Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer.
With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.” This novel had so many twists and turns, my head was spinning, but what I love about the narrative is that the protagonist was highly flawed and has a complicated perspective. Akira Kimura is widely embraced by modern society all over the planet as a savior; she is in some sense deified when she is able to take out the asteroid. Yet, over the course of the narrative, we begin to peel back the layers behind Akira to find out exactly how complicated a person she was. For starters, she had twin daughters, one of whom she herself killed when she found it had a birth defect. The other daughter, though surviving, nevertheless bears incredible trauma not only from the loss of her sister but also from her upbringing.
So, at this point, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so that those who may not want such narrative details will now look elsewhere. So, as I was saying: This daughter, Ascalon (which is also the name of the scar that appears across the night sky where the asteroid was blasted) is crucial to the plot, as she seeks out a complicated form of revenge in which she could take the place of her mother. Ascalon knows that Akira would reach out to her former bodyguard, so Ascalon begins to play everyone in Akira’s life like pawns. Of course, our protagonist-detective is himself blinded to Akira’s own machinations, so the story becomes one in which we see how much mother and daughter are alike. I think the element that I struggled with the most was trying to figure out where I stood in relation to both Akira and Ascalon: were they sociopathic narcissists that could not see the damage that they produced? Their actions strike quite disparately against the narrator-protagonist, who still seeks to find justice amid the ruins of Akira’s many stratagems. Supposedly, this particular work is the first in a trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where McKinney moves with this novel. For those not in the know, McKinney is the author of several other novels primarily set in Hawaii, so it’s always exciting to see an author really push himself aesthetically. A thrilling yet dark dive into a futuristic noir!
Buy the Book Here
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, I didn’t expect Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021) to be the type of book published by Soho, which typically boasts a strong crime fiction catalogue. Certainly, this novel follows some generic expectations but it’s also set far into the future. Other reviews have called this novel a cyber-noir, which is a term I’ve only vaguely heard before but it seems very apt.
Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer.
With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.” This novel had so many twists and turns, my head was spinning, but what I love about the narrative is that the protagonist was highly flawed and has a complicated perspective. Akira Kimura is widely embraced by modern society all over the planet as a savior; she is in some sense deified when she is able to take out the asteroid. Yet, over the course of the narrative, we begin to peel back the layers behind Akira to find out exactly how complicated a person she was. For starters, she had twin daughters, one of whom she herself killed when she found it had a birth defect. The other daughter, though surviving, nevertheless bears incredible trauma not only from the loss of her sister but also from her upbringing.
So, at this point, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so that those who may not want such narrative details will now look elsewhere. So, as I was saying: This daughter, Ascalon (which is also the name of the scar that appears across the night sky where the asteroid was blasted) is crucial to the plot, as she seeks out a complicated form of revenge in which she could take the place of her mother. Ascalon knows that Akira would reach out to her former bodyguard, so Ascalon begins to play everyone in Akira’s life like pawns. Of course, our protagonist-detective is himself blinded to Akira’s own machinations, so the story becomes one in which we see how much mother and daughter are alike. I think the element that I struggled with the most was trying to figure out where I stood in relation to both Akira and Ascalon: were they sociopathic narcissists that could not see the damage that they produced? Their actions strike quite disparately against the narrator-protagonist, who still seeks to find justice amid the ruins of Akira’s many stratagems. Supposedly, this particular work is the first in a trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where McKinney moves with this novel. For those not in the know, McKinney is the author of several other novels primarily set in Hawaii, so it’s always exciting to see an author really push himself aesthetically. A thrilling yet dark dive into a futuristic noir!
Buy the Book Here
