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Book: “Scion” by James Islington
Publishing Info: S&S/Saga Press, September 2026
Where Did I Get this Book: ARC from the publisher!
Where Can You Get this Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | IndieBound
Book Description: My job, when you think about it, isn’t so different from a lot of people’s. I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I’m really only clocking in to try and crawl out from beneath my debts.
The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the ‘killing people’ part, I guess, but that’s a them problem: it’s been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realised they had a way to live forever—limited resources be damned—there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent. So someone’s got to do it.
And luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at it.
Still. This next job… I don’t know. It’s something I haven’t had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way.
I’m sure it’ll all go totally fine though.
Review: I was excited to jump into this book when I was offered a review copy by the publisher. I’d heard a lot of great things about this author, but hadn’t gotten around to reading his original series. So, instead, this seemed like a great entry point: a short and sweet sci-fi story in a new world. And, for what it’s trying to be, I had a lot of fun with this book.
A comparison that comes to mind when thinking about this book is Martha Wells’ “Murderbot” series. This is both a positive and speaks to a few of the negatives I felt reading this book. For the positives, the main character here has a unique, snarky voice that very much allowed the book to read at a snappy, quick pace, similar to “Murderbot.” The concept itself is fairly similar, too. While the premise talks about our main character being an assassin, they instead spent much more of their time as a bodyguard for a specific character throughout the story. I had fun with this idea, though I did wish we had gotten a bit more from the assassin angle that had been hinted at in the summary.
For the negative, while I think the voice of this main character was fun, by the end of the book, I still didn’t feel like I really knew much about Azure as a character. Instead, I felt like I knew a lot more about the character that Azure was tasked with guarding. Similarly, while the world was interesting, with hints of dystopian politics and cyberpunk stylization, there were a lot of little tidbits about how this world works that were simply dropped on the reader without much explanation. But, again, the comparison to “Murderbot” works well. There, too, the world and character are only briefly introduced in a short novella, but then the entire concept expands greatly as the series continues. I’m hoping that there will be a similar expansion here.
Like I said, this is a short read, and I did enjoy what we had here. But it did feel like a bit of an incomplete concept. There were hints of greatness in the character, hints of interest in the world, and hints of larger conflicts to come. However, as a self-contained work, it didn’t ever quite reach the highs that I was hoping for. That said, I think there is a lot of potential, and the story definitely ends on a high note with a wide-open door to future books that may expand on some of the weaker areas we had here. If you enjoyed this author’s previous work, I’m sure this will be a hit! And if you’re looking for something that could go the way of the “Murderbot” series, this also might be for you!
Rating 8: Fun, fast, and introducing a whole lot of potential, even if I was left wanting in a few areas for this specific book.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Scion” can be found on this Goodreads list: Best of Cyberpunk
The Library Ladies 