davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
David Gillon ([personal profile] davidgillon) wrote2015-03-31 04:42 am
Entry tags:

Squee

The inarticulate squeeing from my direction this afternoon was me discovering that the first seven chapters of the next Rachel Peng novel by K B Spangler are out as a free sample,

For those who don't follow the series, they're near future techno-thrillers/police procedurals, Rachel is the liaison to the Washington DC Metro PD for the Office of Advanced and Complementary Emerging Technologies, which mean she's not just a Fed, she's a Fed who's a cyborg with a quantum chip in her head that allows her to make any database anywhere sit-up and beg, gives her reception across the complete EM spectrum, near telepathy with the other OACET agents, and so on. She's also half-Chinese, gay, and blind - the only reason she isn't the Federal poster child for diversity is the fact she's blind is a secret among a handful of her friends, the chip lets her mostly pass, though she has trouble with the simplest of things - reading and faces.

The first two books in the series are Digital Divide and Maker Space and the new one is State Machine, which involves a murder at the White House and a missing maguffin (I figured out what it is very early, though the narrative hasn't quite confirmed that yet), and as a side arc that'll likely please a few people around here, three of the secondary characters are now in a poly relationship.

And of course K B Spangler also draws the A Girl and Her Fed webcomic which shares a universe with Rachel, in fact she's in the current story arc, which is interesting for letting you see the author's imagining of her.

jesse_the_k: harbor seal's head captioned "seal of approval" (Approval)

[personal profile] jesse_the_k 2015-03-31 10:50 am (UTC)(link)
OooooooH! Comic is gr9! Will track down books. Just what my brain needs.
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)

[personal profile] rmc28 2015-03-31 06:10 pm (UTC)(link)
This sounds like My Kind Of Thing, thank you for the rec :-)

I got my preordered copy of the latest Fangborn book yesterday, which is another series I picked up thanks to your reviewing, so thank you :-)