Antanas Marcelionis’s MASTER VERSION 1.1 is startlingly ambitious science fiction. It is the near future, and the war in Ukraine continues. Master is a Lithuanian volunteer who flies drones. After being seriously injured in a Russian attack, he is invited to America to receive revolutionary medical treatment—including a prosthetic and a brain-computer interface that allows him to control his drones directly via brainwaves. Armed with these tools, he searches for soldiers lost in a no-man’s-land where artillery is prohibited and soldier-streamers compete for views while trying to kill or capture one another. A sort of Battle Royale—or Fortnite—for the Twitch set.

The chapters are short—sometimes a page or less—and interspersed with black-and-white, AI-generated images of soldiers in urban landscapes that add little. The language is demotic and studded with pop culture references. The ideas flying around are interesting and relevant, but the set-up is thin; Master’s rehabilitation happens simply because the plot requires it. The tone is inconsistent, too. Part of the problem is that this work appears in translation—the original was written in Lithuanian—so some nuance of feeling is inevitably lost.

But the main drawback with the novel is that it never quite decides what it wants to be. There is an obvious pro-European tinge to it; as one would expect, author Antanas Marcelionis is fervently anti-Russian and puts the boot in wherever possible. As pro-Ukrainian or pro-European literature, this story is undermined by its science fiction element, which rapidly lifts the reader out of the post-2022 reality of the war. Tonally, the work bounces between genres. For example, a reference to “Eaton Tusk,” the richest man in the world—who also owns a corporation experimenting with brain-computer interfaces and supplies Master with the bodily improvements he needs—is such a thin pseudonym for Elon Musk that it seems to suggest a satirical intent that’s not really on display anywhere else.

Marcelionis’s ideas of what war on social media might look like in the future raise some prescient questions. In fact, drone footage of combat in Ukraine is trivially easy to access today (several subreddits are festooned with it); and while monetization of the sort Marcelionis discusses has not (to my knowledge) occurred, it is, for a capitalist society, a logical end. The gamification of warfare alluded to is where the narrative starts to veer away from what the war can or will look like, which makes the reader wonder why the action was set in Ukraine at all; a fictional war set in the near future would be a far more effective setting. Some tightening up of the plot and editing would significantly improve the novel as well, but it’s still worth reading overall.

Antanas Marcelionis’s MASTER VERSION 1.1 engagingly tackles some fascinating and prescient subjects, though its confusing messaging and thin set-up can make for a difficult read.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader