Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ #1)
by
Rachel Aaron
286 pages
Published
November 9th 2018
by Aaron/Bach
ASIN: B07JWFDM2F
Edition Language: English
Series: DFZ #1
BLURB: The DFZ, the metropolis formerly known as Detroit, is the world’s most magical city with a population of nine million and zero public safety laws. That’s a lot of mages, cybernetically enhanced chrome heads, and mythical beasties who die, get into debt, and otherwise fail to pay their rent. When they can’t pay their bills, their stuff gets sold to the highest bidder to cover the tab.
That’s when they call me. My name is Opal Yong-ae, and I’m a Cleaner: a freelance mage with an art history degree who’s employed by the DFZ to sort through the mountains of magical junk people leave behind. It’s not a pretty job, or a safe one—there’s a reason I wear bite-proof gloves—but when you’re deep in debt in a lawless city where gods are real, dragons are traffic hazards, and buildings move around on their own, you don’t get to be picky about where your money comes from. You just have to make it work, even when the only thing of value in your latest repossessed apartment is the dead body of the mage who used to live there.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
my bookshelves:
scifi-and-fantasy,
post-apocalyptic,
magical-practitioners,
mage,
ai-inteligencia-artificial,
cyber-enhancing, magia,
deidades-y-dioses,
cyber-punk,
fantasia-urbana,
fantasy-and-sci-fi,
w_mercenary
Esta es una serie nueva de Rachel Aaron situada en el mismo universo de su serie de dragones Hearstrikers donde un meteorito cayó a la tierra y despertó diosas y espíritus elementales y un monton de seres mágicos de leyendas aparecieron por todas partes. Pero no es necesario haber leido esa serie para comprender que pasa .
Dicho eso, el DFZ (Detroit Free Zone) desafia un solo género, asi que aparte de magia aqui hay tecnologia de punta (que no sé porque sigue funcionando porque siempre en otros universos los dos hechos no funcionan ejem en teoria ), y NO HAY LEYES. O sea cada negocio ilegal que se imaginen, excepto homicidio y robo (sobre todo robarle al espiritu vivo de la ciudad) es delito. Los humanos que no poseen magia son 60% de la población, asi que varios deciden aumentar su valia usando implantes ciberneticos en mayor o menor medida, todo lo que no es magico ademas es automatico y manejado por AIs (inteligencias artificiales) por eso es que yo lo tacho de CYBERPUNK + MAGIA.
La historia es acerca de Opal Yong-ae, con ascendencia coreana, quien a pesar de tener titulo de artes trabaja como "Limpiadora" de lugares que por deudas se subastan al mejor postor, es una apuesta a ciegas de departamentos, bodegas y demases, todo lo de adentro pasa a ser propiedad del limpiador que debe vaciarlo y vender lo que encuentra para ganar dinero.
Opal ha tenido una mala racha, esta en deuda, pero esta a punto de la bancarrota cuando se encuentra limpiando el departamento fuertemente bloqueado de un hechicero y para peor con el sujeto muerto adentro. De ahi empieza la aventura por recuperar su dinero mientras mucha gente anda detras de lo que supuestamente dejo atras el hechicero.
Rachel toma unas decisiones muy bobas, y a pesar de saber que esta comprometida, no hace caso y sigue adelante. No me simpatizo mucho.
Por otra parte, Nik que no resulta grato tampoco de primera impresion porque es el encargado de desalojar gente por deudas, empieza a hacerse notar y termina ayudando por razones economicas a Opal. Él es bastante más interesante que Opal, aunque tampoco su historia resulta demasiado original.
-Me cargó el AI (Sybil)
-Es un libro bastante predecible, si bien entretenido.
-La idea del espiritu de la ciudad es interesante.
But the DFZ was born from humanity. She’s the sum of all our conceptions about what the DFZ is. That’s why she’s able to move buildings around like puzzle pieces instead of relying on geological forces like other physical spirits. She’s god of both the physical city and our ideal of the city. When you shove the physical and the conceptual together, you get an area of overlap, and that place is the Gnarls.
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MY ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Cyberpunk plus magic.
Opal Yong-ae works as Cleaner in the magical version of "Storage Wars". They auction the content of houses or units when the rent is unpaid; only in this case the riches are magical artifacts or rare books, and the place could be warded or booby-trapped by nasty magics. A hazardous, but mostly profitable work. But Opal is now almost broke and need desperaly money to paid a debt. Her sidekick is an AI named Sybil in her googles that irritated me since the beggining.
Though this is an spin-off of the Heartstriker series, there is only the location to link it and a few mentions of the Peacemaker Dragon of Detroit. DFZ is certainly a big protanist here - a heavely magical No-law zone managed by a Spirit who change skycrapers and highways at random (or so it seems) . There is undergrounds, and tunnels, hotels and passaways created by citizens with no-regulations at all. Escher-alike style. All kind of shady business prosper and tourist spots, but beware to no enrage the spirit of the city or the others gods to inhabited there.
Also, since only 40% of the humans have some magic, the rest scramble to compensate with cyber enhancement of all kinds. AIs controls cars and stuff, and all without magic is automatic.
Cars couldn’t even drive on the streets down here. It was just an ocean of people surrounded by a neon- and LED-lit canyon of closet casinos, souvenir shops, vending machine bars, single-use joy parlors, and card-operated VR brothels. There were pawn shops with human organs for sale in the windows and pet stores full of animals that were banned everywhere else in the world. There were fight bars, topless bars, drug bars, bars where you paid interesting people to pretend to be your friends. The whole place was a chaotic, unregulated, booze- and drug-soaked nightmare of greed, hedonism, and reckless ambition. It was simultaneously the worst of humanity and the height of human ingenuity and creativity as shopkeepers fought to one-up each other
That is one of my problems. Magic and Tech... they can work together? Fandom wisdom teach us that is a big no-no; with the exception of very very few technomages in another fandoms cof Bab5 that never explain' actually.
Even Nik -the other Cleaner along for the ride- is exceptic, but never is exceptic, but Opal character brush all aside with the justification that she is a mage equivalent of a sledhammer (just brute force) with no knowlege of the finesse spell work after all those college years and tutors... what?
The bleeding was not intentional,” I said, or thought I said. The ringing in my head was making it hard to keep track of words. “It was… I didn’t properly account for… force it would take to break through steel.”
That halting explanation definitely wasn’t my greatest, but it seemed to satisfy Nik. Sibyl, however, was another matter entirely.
“You didn’t ‘properly account’ for anything!” my AI screamed in my ear. “You didn’t even look at the metal! You just grabbed whatever was slightly less than the amount of power needed to kill yourself and used that! You are seriously going to turn your brain into mush if you keep pulling stunts like this!”
The plot is straitghforward, with no big surprises, I can predict all very early /SPOILER--->including the AI traitor and the blood tracking spell, because all the clues were out there<---SPOILER/ Personally I think Opal was sloppy and a fool. /SPOILER--->I would have discarded to the AI (specially one that can read her thoughts!) when she knows of the hacking. Srly! :headesk:<---SPOILER/
But it was entertaining and I would read the next one.
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