3.5 stars, rounding up.

This cyberpunk novella follows Kas, a third-wave scholar from Sentinel, and Zhi, a scavenger trying to survive by fighting in giant robot arenas on Old Earth. They meet when Zhi tries to scam Kas but they end up working together to, essentially, stick it to the man. Kas belongs to a lower class of people back at home and is desperately trying to prove her worth, whereas Zhi wants to live a life free of debt, danger and algae sludge.

My favourite part about Hard Reboot was actually the world-building which is dealt with a little superficially. The back story of Earth falling apart, people moving away to a place called Sentinel in waves, different waves of settlers having different privileges, the ways in which they prolong their lives or function in society, as opposed to everything that had happened on Earth and the consequences for those who were too poor to move away, all of it sparked my interest and pulled me deeper into the story. I would love to see this be made into a series where we'd find out more about this fascinating universe and its history.

The story itself is fun, fast-paced and enjoyable, and very little of the 160 pages is wasted on unnecessary details. The premise is not unique but Wexler manages to keep it fresh, and the characters are given enough personality in little time for the readers to root for them.

Some of the things I didn't care for were beginning in medias res, which made me very confused for at least 30% of the book. If this was a full-length novel, I'd welcome a little confusion at the very start for the benefit of it being a rich, fully-formed world, but in a novella it was a little distracting. I also wasn't a big fan of the pacing of the romantic relationship between the characters. The relationship itself is a cute, little, sapphic marshmallow, but after a very awkwardly-timed sex scene, I felt like it was going too fast just for the sake of inserting a sex scene.

I'd recommend this novella to fans of robots and battle arenas, as well as to fans of the type of science fiction writing that hovers in that cosy place between soft and hard SF. Hard Reboot is out today, May 25, 2021.

Huge thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan-Tor/Forge and Django Wexler for the advanced reader copy.

Hard Reboot is a short sci-fi novel (novella) you can read in one sitting, but it manages to have both a rich world and an exciting plot. It’s set in far future earth that’s been abandoned to its fate millennia ago and serves mostly as a curiosity destination for rich off-world colonists or as a research opportunity for academics. But people still live there, making most of the opportunities the world offers them—which aren’t much.

Kas is an off-world academic. She’s a third-wave colonist, and while her ancestors have arrived on her planet a thousand years ago, she’s considered lower class and it affects her chances in academia. She’s clawed her way on an academic expedition to earth as a data-archaeologist, determined to make the most of her chance, only to learn that instead she’s expected to help a lazy first-wave colonist (effectively an aristocrat) to conduct her research, or do it for her.

Kas’s visit to earth takes an unexpected turn, however, when she’s tricked into placing a huge bet on a robot fight by Zhi, the robot’s pilot. They’re huge humanoid robots operated from the inside; I imagined jaegers from Pacific Rim, but smaller and for one pilot. Kas doesn’t have that kind of money, but the system automatically uses the expedition’s funds, which puts her academic career in jeopardy. And that’s even though the fight goes for her, because she still owes the house’s cut.

To avoid paying, Kas tracks Zhi to where scavengers live under the city and learns that Zhi has another robot, one that Kas is dying to research. Zhi persuades Kas for a double or nothing dare: Kas funds the restoration of the battle robot (with the money that isn’t hers) for a chance to win big. Since she’s already neck-deep in it, she agrees.

For such a short book, the stakes are high, though unevenly so. Kas might lose her career, but Zhi will lose her life if things go wrong. The women are an odd pair, but friendship and even a romance form between them. And Kas ends up risking her life in the final battle too. The ending is satisfying and doesn’t leave the reader wanting for anything.

I came into this one expecting “Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em” mech battles combined with a bit of “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small”. The snark voice in my head was imagining the academics themselves fighting it out inside the mechs, because that would have been hilarious.

Also true in a very perverse sort of way. And possibly a whole lot of vicarious fun. It would certainly help some of my friends in academia vent some well-earned spleen on the whole subject.

But that’s not exactly what I got. Although it also kind of is – just not as directly as I was first thought. In a metaphorical sense, however, yes, very much that. And isn’t that just the way we think of academic politics?

What underpins this story about a hard-luck mech fighter and a young academic clawing up way up the ranks from the very bottom is a story about class and privilege, fought by two stubborn, scrappy underdogs against systems that are designed to keep both of them in their “place”.

Along with a thrilling high stakes mech battle. And love conquering all – even the dragons of academia.

Escape Rating A-: I was expecting the mech battle. I was also expecting the scrappy underdogs. I wasn’t exactly expecting the romance but wasn’t surprised by it either. What I was surprised about was just how often and how well the story manages to sneak in a whole lot about power and privilege and the way that the amount of both you think you have has a whole lot to do with your environment.

What makes this story work is the snarky, sarcastic, scared and ultimately defiant voice of Kas, a young scholar who doesn’t see herself as privileged at all. Because in the environment she comes from, she very much isn’t.

But compared to Zhi, that underdog, under water in debt, underground and under the radar mech fighter, Kas is both privileged and rich and initially seems like a mark that Zhi can exploit without troubling her conscience one little bit.

And they’re both right and they are both wrong – although admittedly Kas is quite a bit wrong-er than Zhi.

Because if this scheme goes pear-shaped, Kas will be sent home in disgrace, will lose her academic place, will probably be re-educated and will never get even a glimmer of a chance to be who and what she’s always wanted to be. But she’ll still have a roof over her head, she’ll still have plenty to eat, she’ll still have parents and a family that love her and will support her even if they are disappointed in her. And she’ll live to see more than one century in good health – and possibly even two – thanks to the excellent medical care that is her right.

Which doesn’t mean that she isn’t currently a third-class citizen – quite literally – in academic circles. And that the system she lives under isn’t set up to guarantee that she remains so.

Because it is.

But if Zhi loses the mech battle she will become an actual slave to the criminal “Houses” that run everything on old Earth. Or she’ll be killed as an example to anyone else who sets themselves up in opposition to the Houses – just like the friend who was helping her was killed as a warning for her.

And if she just barely ekes out a win, she’ll still be stuck on old Earth, still under the thumb of the Houses, still threatened with slavery or murder at every turn. While worrying every day about whether she’ll have enough to eat and be able to scrape together and defend some minimal shelter. If she isn’t murdered outright, she’ll die long before she reaches her first century, aged before her time, because there is no medical care for the scavs like Zhi on old Earth.

They have to not just win, but win really, really, really big, in order to make their dreams come true – but also to keep their nightmares at bay. And have a chance at keeping each other.

So I came for the mech battles. But I stayed for Kas’ voice and the relationship she develops with Zhi. That they managed to finally put one over on ALL of the people trying to keep them down and out was icing on a very tasty, if slightly metallic, cake.

Well this was a fun one! Giant fighting robots, far-future civilization, the balance of "pampered" scholar vs down-in-the-dirt worker, sexual tension, a sapphic relationship, high stakes / high reward...

I wasn't big on the big (relative to the length of the timeline) time jump, nor on the seeming lack of repercussions for Kas basically abandoning her job, but I was pleasantly shocked by the gruesomeness. I wasn't expecting it and it totally worked to raise the stakes (and provide an excuse for a great hurt/comfort scene). It's a novella, but it was great to see even the barest hints of Kas coming to terms with her privilege as an off-worlder on Earth, how she reassesses and overwrites her initial impressions.

Sometimes you just need badass robot battles - you know?

Far-in-the-Future Sci Fi backdrops a lighthearted fun and friendly romp "starring" mechanized "gladiators " on the stage of Old Earth, connecting a risk-taker con woman and an introverted research assistant wondering how a simple academic research trip has upended her life.

Hard Reboot by Django Wexler promised sapphics, cyberpunk, and giant robots, and it delivered on all of those things in a neat novella package. Having enjoyed work by Wexler in the past (Ashes of the Sun and contributions to the Silk & Steel anthology), I knew I wanted to pick this one up. While there were elements I absolutely adored about this novella, there were a few things that impacted my enjoyment in a significant way.

Starting off with the great: the worldbuilding. I wanted this to be a full length novel for the world alone. The glimpses we get of Kas’ privileged world back on Sentinel were so intriguing to me and I could easily read another novella set there. I’d also like to know more of Old Earth, the different empires, the House, and more. Often in novellas the worldbuilding veers too little or too clunky, but this novel struck an excellent balance. It was also a queernorm universe, with polyamorous and queer relationships of several kinds being mentioned.

For the most part, I also enjoyed the characters and the relationship. Kas and Zhi both struggle in similar ways to break free of restrictions put upon them, though the restrictions have vastly difference consequences due to the difference in their status. I’m always a sucker for the book smart/street smart pairing, and Kas and Zhi very much had that dynamic. The setup made it a fast track enemies to lovers situation and the trajectory was well and believably executed.

However, though I realize this is personal preference, the prose in this novel was repetitive and jarring enough to constantly distract me from the narrative. I have no problem with swearing and love a good f-bomb, but not 67 times in 160 pages a lot. Combined with 57 uses of ‘slag’, an in-universe swear, I was grinding my teeth. Zhi’s dialect being written out with every sentence ending in ‘yeah’ and containing ‘ent’ made her POV a particular struggle. I did read an advance copy so perhaps some of these were edited out, but in my version it was enough to be a constant irritation.

Additionally, I have complicated feelings about the pervasive thread of sexual references and subplots throughout this novella. While I appreciated the attempt to have an interesting dialogue about the differing social mores around courtship between the two societies in the novella, and I am all here for sapphic women owning their sexuality, it missed the mark in most cases for me. A conversation between Kas and a secondary female character (one with some importance to the plot) revolves solely around where this character can find someone to have ‘flesh’ sex with, only for the two characters to never speak again; this interaction in particular raised my hackles because I’m not fond of the defining aspect of a woman’s character in a text being her sexuality/desire.

My critiques are largely personal preference which means Hard Reboot may still be a delight to many. If you’re looking for a fast, fun read with a great worldbuilding, awesome action scenes with giant robots, and sapphic leads, I would still recommend this novella. If there are ever more entries in this universe in the future, I would be interested in exploring it more.

Thank you so much for allowing me to read this. I loved it so much. The only thing wrong with it was that it was so short, that I didn't get enough of the relationship between the two main characters building.
Please write more stories/novellas/books of them!!

"Scholar Zychtykas Three—Kas to her friends, of which she had none—had slaved, scrimped, and swindled to get the fourth spot on the team going to Old Earth. She’d pulled strings, spent the pathetic remains of her savings, contemplated blackmail, and come perilously close to having to fuck an associate dean, all to guarantee that her name would be at the top of Archscholar Grio One’s list."

And so the novella begun. It's initial tone indicated the dually witty and scientific writing style, the focus promted the reader on the futuristic setting and time, and the glimpse into Kas' background specified the high stakes involved in the proceedings. What it did not indicate was that Kas was only one of two perspectives.

The second female, Zhi, was far less academic than Kas and did not have her years of schooling or trained poise, but she proved just as willing to do anything in her power to obtain her desires. Kas' were to reach Old Earth and study the old tech there and Zhi's was to rebuild her warbot, Speedy, free herself from the debts tying her to the Drome, and escape to another planetary system. All of these plans went completely awry and their futures became entangled in each other's instead.

Despite the scant page count, this future setting felt fully-fleshed, as did the numerous tech inside of it. The two primary characters had distinct and likable voices. Their storylines were vividly explored and I felt the high stakes involved. I would have loved to see this become a full-length novel and for their diverse pasts, as full as conjoined futures, to also be explored.

Hard Reboot by Django Wexler, an interesting read. Not quite what I was expecting but with giant droid fights, interstellar con-people and lots of excitement, there's a lot for fans here.

Hard Reboot by Django Wexler, publishing day 25 May 2021. Kas is on a fact-finding mission to old Earth. She’s drawn to the battle-bot fights for scholarly interest, which then leads to her being drawn in much deeper – literally and figuratively. A sci-fi novella about friendship, diplomacy, love, and well-choreographed robot-fights. It’s amazing to see how well Wexler manages this story in only 150 pages! Also, great cover!

Actual rating: 3.5

For a subgenre I don’t typically read, I did enjoy this. It took me a while to get a feel for the world and language, but I was invested in mecha sapphics.

Kas comes to Earth on a research trip where she meets Zhi, a mecha pilot who’s deep in debt and tries to salvage everything by tricking Kas into a bet. When Zhi loses the warbot fight, she makes a run for it, but is followed by Kas. Zhi is working on another warbot from an earlier generation, and Kas ends up helping her make a plan to win enough money to cover her debt and get off Earth.

I tend to be more of a romance and fantasy reader, and the romance between Kas and Zhi worked really well for me. Or maybe not romance, but the relationship that develops between them while working on Alpha Zero’s code and spending time together. I liked how the cultural differences were shown because Zhi is used to living on Earth while Kas is from Sentinel where she has a neural interface that can communicate attraction and subtle clues across the net. Earth has a corrupted datasphere full of, basically, popup ads and malware, so Kas’ jacks can’t be used, which often leaves her floundering figuring out how to navigate Earth and interpersonal relationships.

This was definitely not something I would normally pick up but I’m a sucker for more sapphic stories, and this ended up being a pretty fun read. I think people who enjoy mecha and slightly heavier sci-fi books will get more out of it, but it was still a book I wouldn’t mind rereading or even seeing more set in this ‘verse.

Hard Reboot is a new novella from Django Wexler. It’s a cracking piece of science fiction, which mixes some great characterisation with an interesting universe in the background, and also some kick-arse robot fights. It’s a lot of fun.

The story is split between two viewpoints; a scholar, visiting the shattered ruins of Earth in a distant future, and a scavenger whose life has been described within those same ruins. They both have different senses of presence, of voice. Kas comes to us from a space of privilege, aware of her own opportunities, and of the limits that have been forced on her by those further up the academic hierarchy, limiting her due to her ancestry. Kas is clever, thoughtful, and acutely aware that she’ll always be regarded as a second class citizen by her peers. Zhi, on the other hand, is fierce. She’s determined to rise above her position combing the ruins of Earth for usable remnants, and if her physical circumstances are brutal, still, nothing is there to stop her rising as far as she can. Well, except for the crime syndicate which wants her to work for them. I do love the differences in voice - Kas’s careful restraint, sens eof rising dread, and startling bravery. Zhi’s energy, drive, and fury at the circumstances she refuses to let define her.


The two have a chemistry together which is undeniable, and a pleasure to read. The dialogue between them flows naturally; the sparks that fly always threaten to start a more personal fire, and their passion and enthusiasm feel real. Like people living their lives, with passion and joy. Well, those and more than a little frustration, banter and joy. They’re good people. They’re people that you can come to care about in a very short period of time.


They do this, in part, due to the world they live in. The scattered remnants of Earth are quietly sad and the desperation of its inhabitants, abandoned by those that left them behind out in the stars - it’s real. Earth is a corpse of metal and blood, what remains of its economy driven by ghoulish sightseers and research visitors who see it as equal parts museum and zoo. But there are treasures there too, technological wonders buried under meters of steel and earth, things that in latter days of a star-spanning history, are outside our reach.


There are also, of course, the aforementioned giant robots. And I’ll be honest, they do fight. And their melee is kinetic and vicious and will drive up your adrenaline and keep you turning pages. Each blade scoring against armour plating, each metal fist crunching into a cockpit, carries the threat and promise of change. And it works on its own terms, but you’ll care because of Zhi and Kas, and their clash with both each other and the forces arrayed against the both of them.


In the end, this novella is a fun story, with fast-paced action, an interesting world, and characters that’ll make you care about them even more than giant robot gladiatorial games. Go and give it a read, you won’t regret it.

When I first heard about this book, I was greatly looking forward to it.
Django Wexler. Mech Battles. Sounds like it could be fun.
Turns out, it was only a novella. That length took away some of the fun for me.
The story was good and moved along well with very few lagging spots.
The mech battles were great and I would have loved to see many more.
I’m hoping Wexler has plans to revisit this setting at some point.

Kas worked her ass off to get to go off-world with the Scholarium’s archaeology survey. The chance to go see old Earth and study some ancient mech programming code was a once in a lifetime opportunity for a third-wave scholar. She was expecting to be cut off from network connectivity while on Earth, thanks to the toxic malware datasphere surrounding the planet. She was expecting to spend her week there helping the first and second-wave scholars like Gneisin collect data. She was expecting to see mech pilots using the ancient combat suits they had come to study to do battle in the Drome.

She was not expecting Zhi.

Zhi caught her by surprise, tricked Kas into using the Scholarium’s credit line to place a bet on a mech battle she was competing in. The young pilot had debts to cover, and a rich-looking off-worlder was a perfect mark for her plan. Bet big, beat Custis and his shitty slow DreadCarl, and use the profits to get parts to improve her own mech. Nothing to it. It’s just that the House will force her to pilot mechs for them for the rest of her life if she loses this time.

Now Kas and Zhi’s fates are intertwined. Kas can’t afford to lose the Scholarium’s money, and Zhi can’t afford to lose her next fight. The two young women must pool their skills and knowledge, with everything hinging on a piece of technology that hasn’t functioned in hundreds of years. Winning against Custis and taking down the House will take everything they have, and they’ll not survive to get a second shot.

Hard Reboot is a fast-paced novella from Django Wexler, author of The Forbidden Library series. The worldbuilding is incredibly deep in a handful of paragraphs, with hints about what happened to the Earth in the intervening centuries. The mech battles have a weight to them that lets you feel each collision. The development of the bond between Kas and Zhi is spectacular, too, with neither of them knowing how to interact with each other at the outset. I raced through the book in a couple of hours and was left hungry for more.

Django Wexler’s Hard Reboot is available on May 25th. My utmost thanks to Netgalley and Tor.com for the eARC in exchange for a fair review.

I enjoyed this one! There were not as many mecha battles as I expected (and I could have certainly used more), but I ended up really liking the character relationships we get here. I found this plot to be pretty motivating overall. We have Kas and Zhi teaming up because both of them are in some not-so-great situations.

Kas is a researcher sent to Old Earth. At this point, Earth basically can't have the same tech levels as the rest of the galaxy, so it was really interesting to see how Kas adjusts to not being able to use everything that she normally uses. She comes from a lower class, so she does try hard to prove herself to the university. Zhi doesn't want to work for this House that's essentially in charge of the mecha operators because she wants her freedom. I loved this team up to build a mecha because it allows them to get to know each other more. Along the way, they have to confront assumptions they may have about each other and their home worlds.

This world seemed quite interesting as well. There's technology available to tell gender/personality preferences (if you choose to broadcast it), so this helped contribute to the overall feeling of diversity here. I thought it was entertaining to watch Kas attempt to tell if Zhi was flirting with her because that tech doesn't work on Earth. We do have some LGBTQ+ representation here, and I liked this relationship we get!

Overall, this was a really fun sci-fi novella that I'd recommend. I'd love to read more in this world!

My video review can be seen on my channel (around minutes 12:40-15:09 of this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZPo36qFMiA

An extremely fun sapphic cyberpunk mecha battle romance! (IMO this is more of a sci-fi romance than a romantic sci-fi -- which is to say, the plot supports and enables the main characters' romance rather than the main characters' romance being an element of the plot -- and I'm glad for it; it's my favorite genre, obviously, as it's also what I write, and means I can rec it even more highly to the people who follow my reviews!)

This has so many great things in it. Giant robot battles. Ancient earth history in a future space-colonist age. The natural outcome of late stage capitalism in the form of malware which affects cyberpunk-style jacks. <i>archeocoding</i> like archaeology but for ancient code. A mechanic and a programmer romance.

There were only two things that didn't quite work for me. First, I felt it could have used a slightly longer wordcount -- not because it needed more story, because everything fit into its frame perfectly, but because I wanted a little more meat on the bones, a bit more description, a little more lingering over the key scenes to really give them the weight and impact, maybe a scene from Zhi's pov at the climax so we didn't have to hear about it after the fact instead of seeing it in the moment. Second, there's some sort of narrative about class differences and seeing people as people first instead of where their grandparents' decisions from 1000 years ago made them end up now, but it didn't quite bear out where Gneisin was involved <spoiler> -- the difference between Kas and Zhi was bigger than that of Kas and Gneisin, but Kas wrote Gneisin off (when she hadn't actually done anything to Kas or even was really portrayed as looking down on her onscreen), and that never gets contradicted or brought up again</spoiler>.

But these are minor details, and I highly recommend this. A really fun read.

If you’re looking for a novella that you can devour in just a few hours, Hard Reboot is for you. At once a self-contained story, but that leaves you wanting more of the world, it’s a book I highly enjoyed reading.

The story follows Kas, a junior researcher come down to Old Earth, who ends up embroiled in a con by Zhi, accidentally betting a lot of money she doesn’t have on a mecha fight. When the mecha she bet on loses, she still owes, so she follows Zhi in an attempt to get out of it. Which, obviously, leads to them to go all-or-nothing on a second fight, to each get out of the debts they’re in.

(Which, also, I realise is a massively convoluted way of explaining the plot.)

I think what I liked best about this book is just how seamlessly the worldbuilding fit into everything. Obviously, novellas don’t have time to info-dump or to go in-depth into everything, but here I felt the balance between telling you some things and letting you pick up on the rest was perfect.

Add onto that characters that you can easily sympathise with, and who have a great dynamic, and you basically have yourself the best kind of novella. In fact, they’re sort of characters that you want to know more about. Django Wexler, if you’re reading this, how’s about a sequel?

I mean, really, in the end, if I had any issues it’s that it was only a novella and not a full-length novel. I suppose all I can do is go back to waiting for Blood of the Chosen now.

It's a far future universe where humans have spread to other planets and the Earth is basically a dump. It's still worth visiting if you're a historian or archaeologist, but you have to take drastic measures, like disabling your ability to access the network, and even physically covering up the jacks in your head, because otherwise they're likely to be targets for malware.

Kas, a scholar whose background may get in the way of her achieving her goals, gets the chance to go to Earth and watch mech battles in the Drome (and it took me an embarrassing number of pages before I fully clicked that this was short for hippodrome or similar). From there, things go exceedingly not well, from accidentally laying a bet to being chased to meeting people she's not meant to and getting on the wrong side of her boss.

Hard Reboot is fast-paced and exciting and a lot of fun to read. It flits between Kas' perspective and that of Zhi, a mech pilot struggling to make her way as an individual in a society dominated by a corporate-or-is-it-a-gang. The narrative reveals teasing bits of what has made human society the way it is, but there's still enough that's not explained that it remains a bit opaque, a bit mysterious. Kas and Zhi's interactions include an amusing level of banter, and the descriptions of the mech battles balance being precise in the mechanics with not going into the sort of boring detail that irritates me in some fight descriptions (my spatial awareness doesn't really let imagine what you're describing and also I don't really care).

Definitely another good novella in a string of such from Tor.com.

Giant robots!! I mean what do you want more. Of course it's a bit "big" and not the deepest story ever, but a truly fun and entertaining one that the fans of the genre will enjoy!! I had a lot of fun!

This was a short but fun read. A scholar gets a chance to head back to earth to study old earth and its relics. On her first night in she gets tricked into placing a bet with the university's money. Even though she wins the bet she's still on the hook for the thousand that the house wins as the loser (a scav, mech polite) has no intention (or the means) of paying her. What follows is a story filled with love, revenge, class struggles, and giant mech robots fighting in a coliseum. My only complaint is that the story felt somewhat rushed and that for a book that has giant robots on the cover we really only get two (fairly short) battles. I feel like the marketing for this book is somewhat incorrect. It probably would have been smarter to focus on the (queer) love story at the heart of it. 4 out of 5.