#18: Nicole Kornher-Stace, Firebreak

[kareila]

This is a dystopian VR-heavy story in the vein of Cory Doctorow, but with characters that are believable as people and not just mouthpieces for ideas. The hero is Mal, a teenage war orphan crowded into an apartment building with a bunch of other similarly traumatized people, working odd jobs in between immersive MMORPG sessions. Like most people involved in the game, Mal is obsessed with tracking down appearances of the elusive avatars of heroic SecOps NPCs who are known only by their numbers, but when they turn out to be the key to a political conspiracy, Mal has to decide between staying safe or revealing the truth.