Novel Review: Automatic Reload by Ferrett Steinmetz
Hei Hei and Welcome to MacroMicroCosm Literary Review…
Novel: Automatic Reload
Author: Ferrett Steinmetz
Publisher: TOR Books (2020)
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Today we are diving cautious as a paranoid quadruple amputee cyborg into the cyberpunk romantic kill zone known as Ferrett Steinmetz’s Automatic Reload published in 2020 by Tor Books. Strap into something, prepare your payloads and it’s time to dive in.
I borrowed Automatic Reload’s audiobook from my municipal library’s Libby app, and will be critiquing the audiobook narration by Tim Campbell via Macmillan Audio with Steinmetz’ prose. Tim Campbell’s narration hit my auditory nerves with the same grit as a Private Eye in my spouse’s beloved old radio shows. Instantaneously, I was brought back to The Shadow, and Red Panda Adventures. Mat’s internal narration was made vivid with Campbell’s grit. All goes as expected for a guttural masculine-led audiobook… until Campbell narrates female characters. The grit and gruff voice of our narrator and protagonist Mat (whose name I missed completely for the first few hours of audio storytelling), shifted to a nasal ‘quasi-feminine whine’ each a tad different for the few feminine characters in the novel. While off-putting to hear limp feminine audio, it didn’t stop me from listening to the entire audiobook. I wish Macmillan Audio hired two voice actors, that Sylvia and Trish especially were voiced by a woman. I don’t envy Campbell’s options with Sylvia’s voice, especially in the beginning, Sylvia is a panic-attacked whimpering victim and Mat the rough but conscience-bound redeemer. Maybe it’s a pet peeve of mine, when listening to audiobook narration with too ‘breathy’ a character voice, or too much differentiation between a narrator’s timbre and the various dialogue, but it threw me out of Automatic Reload’s prose a few times and elicited many a rant among our MacroMicroCosm discord server on the nature of respecting female characters by allowing them a more natural voice, and not a whining nasal whimper. It’s unfortunate, because Tim Campbell had the perfect voice for Mat’s rough narration. All in, this was the only issue with the audiobook version of Automatic Reload.
On to Steinmetz’s prose. While entertaining, and a fun way of portraying neuro-divergent characters, Automatic Reload is not making it into my top cyberpunk novels. As it was billed to be a cyberpunk romance, the choice to spend a vast third if not half of the novel in a first-person narrator-protagonist dry technological readout of the various guns, cybernetically augmented prostheses and associated weapons-come-defence programs felt stale as a slice of bread on the kitchen counter in summertime. Maybe engineering isn’t my thing, I know of several friends who would love such attention given to the weaponry, and recommended Automatic Reload to all of them, but a good hour into the prose and all I knew of Mat was the amount of weaponry he possessed on his specialized limbs, that he was attempting to halt a kidnapping, and he was paralyzed with the incapacity to kill. A decent bedrock for a PTSD scarred main character, Mat’s inability to take life becomes a mainstay of the manuscript. This is not in itself a negative. It makes for intriguing prose, and shows his caring, ethical side.
But I could not help feeling Mat’s selfish delusions within the first few chapters. His first-person narration of saving the teenaged girl became more about saving the people, who caused her fear and harm at her expense. When I taught self defence in a university and martial art academy setting, one of the first lessons (especially to the female students) was a defender has the right to go home. The attacker has every opportunity to stop harming you, and them refusing to let go is them allowing you to defend your right to survive unharmed as possible. In the introductory arc, Mat rescues a girl from kidnappers, who are prepared to kill her. Regardless of how noble Mat was in his attempts of causing less harm, I could not stop thinking of the harm he was causing to the poor girl frightened out of her mind, with a knife against her neck. Steinmetz goes so far as to have the girl bleed from a superficial slice to the throat, before our ‘wounded hero’ intervenes in a kinetic fashion.
Mat is not a hero, his paranoia at preventing harm does not make him precisely good. It does, however, make him a fascinating study of an injured veteran compensating for the horrors of war. He reminds me of Perseus, played by Sam Worthington in the 2010 released Clash of the Titans, where Perseus discovers his demi-godhood and struggles to go about his mission as a normal man, not a god. As if his spectacular powers were to be feared or forgotten in self-hatred rather than used to others’ advantages. Even when companions on his voyage begin to die, Perseus sticks to his selfish morals and refuses his inner power until it is all but too late. Just as Perseus could have saved multiple companion’s lives had he accepted his power, so too Mat could have saved the girl from trauma (injection of ‘anti PTSD drugs’ notwithstanding) if he hadn’t attempted to wait the kidnappers out as long as he did, until a last second where she looks into his faceplate and knows she is about to die.
As protagonists go, Mat is an insecure, selfish moralist with his own set of obsessive edits, who passes it off as a sheriff’s bravado in the wild world of body hacking. When his contact and seemingly only friend Trish (whom I loved) gets him a job worth millions, Mat dives in to prevent collateral damage only after she cajoles his ethics, and that is noble. But this is where the novel takes its’ turn. I won’t be going into spoilers much here, but from the moment Mat meets assassin-damsel in distress Sylvia, I could see where the novel’s plot was going, and for the most part I was 9 for 10.
Sylvia’s panic and anxiety disorder took centre stage, as Mat tumbled with her assassin-programmed artificial body, and the other body-hackers who were looking to bring her back and finish their job. The bonding between the two (through ‘old timey cinema) was ultimately endearing but fairly stock, between the constant verbal output of every single technological gadget Mat had on hand, or modified to work, or picked to replace old limbs, or because we were at another moment, where Mat needed to drone on about the tech as if to remind us that we were, in fact, in a cyberpunk setting.
My major criticism of the prose isn’t Mat’s struggle with harm reduction, but the sheer amount of technological data Steinmetz pushed into the manuscript, until I felt like half the novel was a sci-fi reader’s guide to emotionless guns, cybernetic components and threat awareness programming. At a fairly early point in the prose, the tech talk got so redundant if I hadn’t been listening on audiobook in my car, I’d skip pages. Yes, I can see this was a coping mechanism for Mat, and the best way Steinmetz had to frame the science fiction setting in a novel completely from the protagonist’s inner monologue (a literal ’subvocal recording’ as we discover), but it threw me. Automatic Reload lacked a balance between the cold cover of Mat’s obsessions and the emotionally gorgeous story of two wounded people falling in love… while being chased by psycho body-hacking killers.
It’s unfortunate, because the relationship development between Mat and Sylvia is agonizingly sweet. Their ability to both freak out and help each other, the peppering of laughter to break the tension of their run with death were all wonderfully done. Trish, Mat’s business contact and friend is the stand alone best character of the novel. Sassy, strong and incapable of selfish intentions, Trish gives Automatic Reload the backbone it needs to evolve both Mat and Sylvia and drive the plot forward, even through the constant re-hashing of the setting as Mat experienced it. I cared about Trish more than I cared about Mat or Sylvia, beyond their growing connection. The enemies, while trope-ish, were believable in their immensity, and brought me to the feel of a 1980’s action flick with Van Damme, or Norris at the fore… if their female lead happened to be more powerful than the Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok.
Steinmetz’s plot in Automatic Reload is visible miles before the chapter headings, and that is unproblematic, if you’re looking for an easy, entertaining read similar to that 1980’s action flick. I won’t say the climax didn’t take a twist, it did, but even when the twist occurred, I again called what would remain of the plot. If you want a cyberpunk weapon’s heavy cute-couple novel to relax with, this will certainly do it for you. Aside from its’ flaws, Automatic Reload has a vulnerability and joy to its escapism, the clinging growth of a relationship in two freaked out, lonely people.
Mat does grow through his moments with Sylvia, but especially with Trish’s advice. If you like to know the technological readout of every warrior’s equipment, watched the Matrix and Maltese Falcon, and enjoy a good gritty radio-show, with romantic plot-line, Automatic Reload is for you. I give it four out of five stars, and imagine the ideal reader would be of the masculine or tech-minded variety who is woke enough to handle a gritty romance with more bullets than people, a transgender best friend, and heroes whose anxiety and PTSD cause as many problems as they eventually, and inevitably, solve.
For those who want something to listen to of a similar feel, I thoroughly advise listening to the Red Panda Adventures.
