Anyone by Charles Soule

If you could be ANYONE, who would you be?

When a brilliant female scientist searching for an Alzheimer's cure throws a switch - and finds herself mysteriously transported into her husband's body, she will change her life - and the world - forever.

Two decades later, 'flash' technology allows individuals the ability to transfer their consciousness into other bodies for specified periods, paid, registered and legal. Society has been utterly transformed by the process, from travel to warfare to entertainment. But beyond the reach of the law is a sordid black market called the darkshare, where desperate vessels anonymously rent out their bodies, no questions asked . . . for any purpose.

Anami has her own reasons for using it, and they start with revenge.

Like BLADE RUNNER crossed with GET OUT, Charles Soule's thought-provoking work of speculative fiction takes us to a world where identity, morality, and technology collide.

There are HUGE SPOILERS in this review, I'm spoiling the WHOLE ENDING because I have to talk about it to explain how  I feel about this book. I'll put my general reactions first, then there will be a LARGE BREAK followed by SPOILERS. Be warned now.

This is a really clever, well thought out spec fiction story. Charles has thought through every aspect of how the new technology described in this novel would affect the world. Every chapter brought something that I hadn't considered, but made absolute sense within the novel. Even tiny details dovetailed perfectly.

However, the novel is told is two time frames, and there's no indication of when they are in relation to each other. Each chapter is headed with the physical location, but no time reference, and it makes it harder to parse what's going on in the future time frame - it wasn't until right at the end that I understood how much time separated the two story lines. It's important to note that I was reading an ARC and things may be different in the final product.

Now we're coming to the SPOILERS, so if you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading here with the knowledge that I really enjoyed reading this tautly written, exciting, thought provoking story.

LAST CHANCE

Right. As you read in the summary, the novel is about a new technology that allows people to be lifted out of their own bodies and into someone else's. Normally, this is done with the full permission of the person being taken over, who retains no memory of what happened while someone else was in control.

In the final moments of the novel, the inventor of the technology uses her understanding of it and the painstaking records of the company administering it to randomly switch everyone who's ever used it with someone else who's used it. There's a montage of people suddenly being somewhere else, surrounded by other confused people who may not speak their language or know where they are. This is presented as a triumph, because her vision of the tech was a world where no one could be judged on appearance, since you didn't know who was inside that skin.

This woman has just torn apart every family in the world, trapped adults in baby's bodies and babies in adults', killed countless people - there's less planes flying, but there's still some, and now the pilots aren't in them; power stations need monitoring and now there's no one doing that; at any given time there are thousands of surgical procedures happening, now they have no doctors attending, and that's just off the top of my head - but it's ok, because now people can't judge others by their skin, and she nobly sacrificed herself to do it! 

I really enjoyed the story. I don't want to seem like I didn't. But - just...ergh. Please tell me it's not just me?