A man stands in a category three storm, drenched, addressing a lion roughly the size of a horse. He is being extremely polite about it. He is also, at this point in the evening, missing a good deal of blood and carrying a severed hand in his pocket. The lion considers him, huffs, and walks away, which the man chooses to interpret as agreement. It is as good a summary as exists of what Scion by James Islington is doing.
The novel runs on absurdity delivered in a completely level voice, and it is only when the book stops joking, once, near the end, that the reader discovers what has been hiding underneath.
The Joke Is Load-Bearing
Azure narrates in first person and present tense, and his defining characteristic is that almost nothing reaches him. He watches people die, including people he liked, and registers mild inconvenience. He is aware that this is wrong. And he is not troubled by being aware of it.
What fills the gap is comedy, and the comedy is genuinely good. Most of it comes from Atti, the self-aware artificial intelligence riding in his ear, who is by some distance the most likeable character in the book and spends her time offering advice he ignores. A running gag about an elevator that lacks a voice modulator is the funniest sustained passage Islington has committed to print. A negotiation with a giant octopus in a sewer is a close second.
The flippancy is not decoration. It is a symptom, and the novel knows it. Every deflection is evidence in a case the book is quietly building.
A Government by Referendum, a Murder by Subscription
The worldbuilding is the second pleasure. Twelve megacities sit under an engineered lid called the Plate. Government is a rolling public vote administered by an entity named DeGov, which logs every transaction on a ledger anyone can read. Nobody starves; everybody gets a Basic income. Designer drugs are sold openly in licensed shops.
The invention that carries the plot in Scion by James Islington is a piece of legislation. Some seven thousand people, in a population past the billion mark, have purchased biological immortality, and a resolution has made killing them both legal and crowdfundable. Citizens pledge portions of their Basic toward specific contracts. A tower advertises the totals, with the faces of completed targets fading to greyscale and the word FULFILLED flashing in green.
It is satire, and it is sharpened by being played entirely straight. So is the genetic engineering underneath everything else, the modifications that make Azure faster and stronger and less able to care. Readers whose curiosity is provoked will find the WHO’s briefing on human genome editing a sober counterweight to a novel that treats the same technology as an action-scene enabler.
Scion by James Islington Is Not a Hierarchy Book
This needs saying plainly, because the cover carries a name that now means something quite specific to fantasy readers. There is no connection to that sequence. No shared world, no shared characters, no required reading.
There is also no shared method. The Hierarchy novels are long, patient and formal, and readers who loved The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few for their density will find almost none of it here. This is a book of roughly two hundred and thirty pages, with chapters that frequently run to three, built for speed. The author’s own acknowledgment describes it as something written for fun, between the serious work, without much expectation that anyone else would want it.
The honesty is worth noting because it explains both the book’s charm and its limits.
The Cast Deserves More Than It Gets
Islington populates Themis with people who arrive fully formed and then vanish. A red-haired dealer with a business built on other people’s oblivion. A functionally deaf technician living in the machinery above the city, who signs faster than she speaks and sees straight through the narrator in four exchanges. A greedy, entirely reliable document forger.
Each gets one scene. Each is better than one scene. The technician has a history with Azure that the book gestures at, uses, and abandons, and the loss is felt.
This is what happens when a novel is this short, and it is the clearest argument for the longer version of this story that does not exist.
What Scion by James Islington Does With Ten Minutes
There is a passage roughly three quarters through in which Azure, alone in a transit pod, takes a drug he has been carrying for most of the book. It does not blunt feeling. It restores it, entirely, for ten minutes.
What follows is grief, guilt, rage, shame and something like connection, arriving at once in a man who has felt none of them for years. It is quiet, unshowy, and it reframes every joke that preceded it. Then it wears off, and he wipes his eyes, and he is fine again, and the reader is not.
That passage is why the book works. A thriller this fast owes nothing, and this one earns it anyway.
Where It Falters
- The world arrives as explanation. Immortality law, government, drugs, engineered animals and genetic modification all need setting up, and too much of it comes in blocks of exposition rather than through action.
- A critical scene is staged badly. A long and important revelation is delivered by a character on a video screen while the narrator fights two monsters underneath it. Neither half gets what it needs.
- The stakes are muted by design. A narrator who cannot feel much makes it harder for the reader to feel much, and the novel only solves this once.
- The ending withholds. A genuine choice is set up, carefully, and then the final page closes without disclosing which way it went. It reads as a sequel hook, and some readers will find it a cheat.
None of it sinks the book. All of it explains why Scion by James Islington feels like a superb long afternoon rather than a novel that will be argued about for years.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
The nearest relative in tone is Martha Wells’s Murderbot sequence, which shares the short-book discipline, the reluctant killer, and the comedy built on a narrator refusing to examine itself. For the older ancestor, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? asks the same question about who qualifies as a person and answers it with far more melancholy and far fewer explosions. Readers who want more of the political machinery than the fistfights will find better company in our round-up of dystopian fiction, where the ideas get room to breathe.
Anyone interested in the science rather than the shooting will get more from a plain glossary entry on genetic engineering than from any novel, this one included.
A Note on the Copy
An advance copy arrived from S&S/Saga Press, given in exchange for an honest opinion rather than a favourable one. No contract was crowdfunded to secure this review, no ledger entry was falsified, and the publisher’s influence over the four bullet points above was precisely nil. In a book where every transaction is a matter of public record, it seems only correct to log this one.
Where Scion by James Islington Leaves You
The verdict is a straightforward one. This is a minor book by a major writer, and it is a great deal more fun than that description suggests. It is thin where the Hierarchy novels are thick, its cast is a parade of missed opportunities, and it declines to finish the thought it starts.
It is also inventive, properly funny, structurally clever, and briefly, unexpectedly moving in a way almost nothing else this fast manages. Scion by James Islington was written as a break from serious work. On this evidence, the breaks are worth interrupting the serious work for.