KOIOS Author’s Edition by Paul Fitzpatrick

I often come across book offers on Instagram but I don’t generally click on them. However, when I saw KOIOS by Paul Fitzpatrick the blurb and, very unusually, the cover instantly drew me in. I made the instant decision, again very unusually, to get the book and waited for it to be delivered. I had a clear idea of what to expect, or so I thought, but it turned out I had no idea at all.

The Story

In 2029, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Romania and The Balkans have come together as the East Continental Alliance, effectively recreating the Warsaw Pact with one important difference. As much as they were concerned by the increasingly unstable United States and the NATO Alliance, they were determined to stand together against Russian expansion. By the time this book is set, 2067, the alliance is deeply embedded and almost entirely digital. Robots and increasingly powerful programmes oversee the East Grid where the book is set and society is becoming calmer, more efficient and is running increasingly smoothly. The Agency for Synthetic Regulation and Autonomy (ASRA) oversees the computer system, but one of their Enforcement Agents, Anya Kovacs, starts to realise that there is more going on than meets the eye, and she starts to dig. What she discovers will affect her whole life and force her to rewrite her own history. The problem is that the authorities know that she is starting to dig and she begins to realise that she might just have been given enough rope to hang herself. She doesn’t know who she can trust, and she finds out that she doesn’t even truly know herself.

Main Characters

ANYA KOVACS – The central character is a cynical agent who is accompanied everywhere by a drone called Nox who acts as a protector and provides her with something to bounce ideas off. Anya is the daughter of Janos and Aliwia Kovacs. Janos worked on a secret prototype called KV07 and was killed when something went wrong. She starts to suspect that Aliwia knows more than she’s letting on. Her colleagues treat her with a mixture of respect and wariness and the higher ups who deal with her on a regular basis treat her as something of a loose cannon.

TOMAS JELEN – Anya’s colleague and perhaps the nearest thing she has to a friend. He is diligent, logical and restrained, and those qualities make him a perfect counterpoint to the more headstrong approach that Anya tends to employ. Although he is nervous when he starts to discover anomalies in the system he is happy to help her where he can, even if it means putting himself at risk.

PAVEL ILLYN – The urbane boss in charge of the East Grid where Anya works, he knows what is going on at every level. This makes him very dangerous to Anya but potentially also very useful. He cannot be played like some others can be but his arms length approach means that he and Anya exist in a form of uneasy truce. However, the question is how far Anya can trust him?

DINA MARKOVIC – The Machine Logistics and Pattern Analyst has a similar breadth of knowledge to Illyn, but the smart and resourceful higher up seems happy to help Anya where she can, often smoothing her path and keeping her below the radar as much as possible. Is there a hidden agenda in Dina’s mentorship and if so, what is it?

My Thoughts

When I opened the book I was expecting a Blade Runner style dystopia. I definitely got that through Paul Fitzpatrick’s world building which was integrated seamlessly into the action. There was no massive exposition and at no point did you feel as though you were wading through details. The world that Anya Kovacs is living in sprang up around her bit by bit until, by about halfway through, you were able to picture the streets and the houses and the East Grid Docks where so much of the action is set. Was it a dystopia? Well that depends on the person reading it. For me, having the whole world smoothed out via algorithm sounds brilliant (!) but the cost in terms of people’s lives and freedoms that this necessitated definitely gave me pause.

What I also got was a 1960s style Cold War espionage thriller set in 2060s Eastern Europe, almost as if John Le Carre was trying out a new genre style. Double crossing, false trails and deliberately incomplete information were employed very cleverly to lead the reader and Anya into ever more complex webs of deceit and danger. I particularly liked the fact that the role of Anya and the roles of family and supervisors were kept deliberately opaque, meaning that the reader never got the whole picture until she did. I am not a great one for guessing ‘Whodunnit’ and the mystery here deepened and deepened to the extent that even when I did find that out I was no nearer the ‘Whydunnit’! This is a book that keeps you turning the pages and keeps you entirely invested in Anya’s fate, a fate that is never easy to predict even in the closing chapters.

In a sense it’s a slow burner of a novel, but it draws you in very quickly and keeps you there as the pieces are skilfully moved around the board. By the end I was fully invested in Anya’s fate and, to my surprise, the fate of Nox, her drone companion who transcended its AI creation to become a living, if not breathing, character. The similarity between that and ChatGPT and other digital companions was clever and hard to ignore.

You can get an idea of Anya’s world and story by clicking on the link below.

KOIOS

How to get the book

This book is published by Paul Fitzpatrick himself and he has 75 copies of this author’s edition available. You can only get a copy direct from him at the moment but I would genuinely encourage you to do so. Supporting independent authors in such a difficult marketplace is, I think, really important, and you can currently get it from the link below at the incredibly low price of £4. It’s clearly a labour of love on Fitzpatrick’s part, but as a reader you can do your part in making it a success.

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