Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent's head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are "threeps," robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden's Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.Is it an accident or murder? FBI …
Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent's head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are "threeps," robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden's Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth--and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.
Hardcover, 335 pages
English language
Published Jan. 4, 2018 by Tor Books.
The first one in the series was better. I like the funny dialogue and the comical details, but this is mostly a detective story in disguise with some American politics thrown in for good measure.
I had had this one in the queue for a while and finally had a slot to read it in. The premise of this Scalziverse is 'police procedural in a world like our own except 3pc of the population run about in robots'. Scalzi has a lot of fun imagining how this type of thing will play out and we have a lot of fun following along with him. I feel, this series is maybe not his absolute best (Interdependency, Kaiju) but this is still damn fine entertainment. I thoroughly enjoyed this. No more really need be said. Recommended.
