Hollow Coin, S.T. Cartledge

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language: English
country: Australia
year: 2021
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 12.7.23

the concept of S.T. Cartledge’s Hollow Coin is very good: a distant cyborg / biologically manipulated future where most people have only a single eye (and seventeen fingers on each hand), cloning celebrities from the distant past is common, memories can be transferred to coins for storage (and viewed/experienced by anyone in possession of the coin), and these coins are used as currency in a capitalist economy that deprieves the working class even of its self-identity.

unfortunately the execution leaves much to be desired. the protagonist, Josephine Quinn, is a cop assigned to investigate the murder of Gerard Méliès, one of the inventors of the coins and so one of the richest men in the “Ringwood” area (if not the world). this leads first to a black market trade in lurid memories of murder, hate crimes, and sexual violence and then, on the other side, to revolution: something called the “Hollow Coin” is being used to erase coins — and so to destroy the basis of wealth in this capitalist future. the revolutionaries believe that if they can destroy the coin technology they can remake society.

this is, for starters, obviously wildly idealist: burning a bunch of dollar bills — even thousands or millions of dollar bills — does nothing to change the structure of the capitalist world-system. but I could live with it within the symbolic register if not for the clumsy revelation that Quinn was herself part of this revolutionary conspiracy and gave up her entire identity — including her husband and child — to take on a new identity as a police detective. unfortunately for Cartledge it was obvious / inevitable from very early in the book that Quinn was involved, which undercut the impact of the big reveal.

once this is revealed, the book turns almost completely away from the conspiracy and instead, inexplicably, towards the restoration of Quinn’s nuclear family, as she tries to figure out how to rebuild or reinvent her relationship with her husband and her son. it literally ends with them all settling down to watch some old family memories on a projector — Quinn, her husband, her son, and her mother-in-law. for a book that sets itself up as explicitly anticapitalist, it’s curiously uninterested in the logistics or politics of its revolution.

its other flaw is the ethos it tries to establish for Quinn. it reminded me of Murderbot if instead of simply being kind of boring Murderbot were actively abrasive and constantly smugly denigrating the present-day reader for their presumed inability to comprehend this far future (actually it was pretty straightforward, I found). there were some weird and un-followed-through metafictional points as well that just fell flat. there were also some small but jarring continuity errors, most egregiously that Quinn’s supervisor is explicitly described as not having a coin slot for memories and then like ten pages later is described as placing a coin in their (or possibly his; the pronouns are inconsistent but not in a way that felt intentional) coin slot.

I had high hopes after the first book I read published by filthy loot (Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin’s Wax and Wane, which was excellent), but this unfortunately was nowhere near as good. it felt like it was trying very hard to shock me, but it failed to do so at basically every turn.

moods: dark, mysterious, polemic


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