I very much enjoyed the dystopic SF caper-thriller of The Heist of Hollow London, a new book by Eddie Robson. It starts off slowly, as the viewpoint protagonists (third person past tense) find their daily lives abruptly falling apart, but several of the characters are engaging from the start, and the events they’re undergoing become increasingly tense and exciting. Everyone’s plotlines get woven together really well, with just enough backstory and worldbuilding that surprises seem natural once they’re revealed through action and a few brief flashbacks. It’s an entertaining heist story that can be raced through in a few hours (288 pages), but it also has some deeper themes to consider.
In the near-future corporate dystopia of Eddie Robson’s The Heist of Hollow London, there are two basic types of people: nats (naturals) and mades (clones). Mades are generally created from engineered templates by corporations and designed/conditioned to fit certain worker classifications, expected to work as assigned until they pay off the debt of their creation and raising (which doesn’t happen often); however, some mades are cloned from specific donors who are high-up corporate executives, which raises the mades’ status slightly but means they’ll be slated for organ harvesting if their donors face medical difficulties.
Arlo and Drienne are two fashion/brand promoters for Oakseed, a giant multinational corporation. Loren is an “assist” who does technical help (and coding), Nadi works as a security guard, and Kline works in Human Resources, all for Oakseed, and all of them are mades. However, Arlo has a specific human donor/progenitor, so when he’s ordered to a hospital, he figures his life is over. However, it turns out that a new life is starting for him, because Oakseed is going down and getting broken up, and a nat scientist formerly betrayed by the company is planning to take advantage of the chaos by using Arlo in a substitution plot to steal some company assets in London (the city itself is getting broken up for reclamation and repurposing, hence its hollowness). She knows they’ll need help, so she’s putting together a team. Arlo suggests Drienne, and the rest get pulled in, one by one.
Naturally, there’s some friction among these disparate people, who all have their own styles, methods, and priorities, and mostly don’t have much reason to trust or care for each other. However, they have a great motivation to cooperate and succeed in this heist: The planner has promised to free them all from their debts, with cash bonuses, if they succeed. So they figure out ways to infiltrate a company plant by turning the bureaucracy against itself and help smuggle a camouflaged data drive out of the building.
I enjoyed the twists and turns of the plot, along with the character development that several characters get: growing self-confidence, learning to find one’s own goals, and a slow-burn romance. The setup is good, and the payoffs in the last half of the book, as the heist goes down, and goes wrong, and gets salvaged in unexpected ways, are really rewarding. If you want a fun caper novel that has some points to make about the ways the world seems to be going, this is certainly a good one to try.
I’ve written about labor issues and contract-worker slavery before, in my Jo Clayton retrospective and my review of Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter (which references other works as well). Exploitation, particularly commodification, of workers is an increasingly common theme in science fiction (and sometimes fantasy). This story pretty much takes corporate dystopia for granted; people complain about it, and scheme to survive and possibly thrive in spite of it, but the book doesn’t spend time dwelling on economic theory. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting addition to a growing body of related work in this subgenre, and one that’s quite enjoyable despite the dystopic background and some tragic plot points.
The Heist of Hollow London, by Eddie Robson, will be published on Sept. 30 by MacMillan. I haven’t encountered anything by Robson before, but he’s written Doctor Who spinoffs and scripts for British sitcoms, along with journalism and criticism. His previous works are Hearts of Oak (2020) and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words (2022).
Content warnings: Body horror, violence, deaths (including named characters), brief mentions of offscreen sexual servitude, corporate dystopia.
Comps: The Mercenary Librarians series by Kit Rocha, starting with Deal with the Devil (but there’s a lot less romance/sex here); Machinehood by S.B. Divya; The Peripheral (TV show; I haven’t read the William Gibson book that inspired it).
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
