Zero Bomb by MT Hill

8/10

It's a new year and time for reading through a novel I could really criticise, or at least that is what I thought on first look. Zero Bomb is Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author M. T. Hill's mysterious and yet strangely prophetic novel for this year. Its themes of sci-fi, downtrodden people in a doom-laden future where machines can take over and humans are left jobless is an all too real scenario.

For Remi, life has been a disappointment, the loss of his daughter jaded his mind to a world that cared less to help him heal. There is hope but only after he finds out someone is desperate to kill him. This could be a bout of paranoia on his part but the truth is his daughter Martha is still alive. For Remi to get to see her, he has to obey the orders given to him by a rebel group.

Remi has had a different approach to coping with his grief, he leaves Joan without telling her where he's going making a new life for himself away from it all. It seems cruel of him at first, but we all deal with grief differently.

It's only a fox’s appearance one night that convinces him he isn't going mad and isn't in a game, that there may be hope for him after all. He has a lot to do if he wants to find his daughter is still alive. The fox in one way is there to tell him the truth about what he is experiencing. The fox is a survivor like Remi and proves that through the novel. Remi we see has gone through homelessness, depression and addiction and then the realisation the world is not the place he wanted to bring his daughter up in.

The inclusion of a radical 70's authors novel in here reminded me of L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology faith as being more destructive against the status quo. I like that the story could become true and yet also that if it were the population would be in serious trouble.