Kip Cassino’s SUPPLICANT is a dystopian SF novel with an interesting premise. Five hundred years into the future, the world is ruled by a few hundred people. Each of them is centuries old and kept alive through the healing power of prayer (discovered a few hundred years previously). Cassino is disingenuous when he states that the efficacy of prayer has a factual basis, but it’s an interesting flight of fancy on which to base a sci-fi novel.

The elite in this dystopian future rule over their territories, their health bulwarked by the machinations of orisopoli—in which specially bred humans pray for their overlords. Wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the conurbations, while the rest of the world lives in poverty. It sounds perfectly hideous, and it is. In Cassino’s imagining, humans are gene-edited for combat just as for prayer, and life is cheap. Worldbuilding is enthusiastically embarked upon, but is at times inserted somewhat unsubtly into the narrative. A full description of the world’s political economy appears almost one-third into the novel, and asides on the fate of Antarctica in the future and the various smaller states to emerge out of the USA (this last conveyed by almost a page of bullet points) do slow down the story a bit.

The novel’s focus is on KAX (the all-caps presentation is deliberate), a supplicant who was left alive after the assassination of one of the elite, and her son Palido. Both of them end up getting tracked by cyborgs. Before long, a move to destroy the orisopoli (and therefore the elite themselves) is afoot.

The plot is serviceable, but the tone will put off many readers. There is an enormous amount of suffering on display in the novel’s opening quarter, almost all of it gratuitous. Bodies are ripped apart, shot, stabbed, or eaten alive by animals. Soldiers are tortured. Descriptions of KAX’s imprisonment, during which she is repeatedly and regularly group raped (it is explained that she has lived for twenty-six years, but presents as a seven- or eight-year-old due to gene editing), run for three pages in a chapter titled “Working Girl.” (That title is a rather distasteful choice, to this reviewer’s mind; surely one does not quip about such horrors.)

Cassino is obviously not in favor of any of this, but has nonetheless chosen to show it in words. If there were a legitimate reason for depicting it, one might conceivably see the point; but there isn’t, making it a highly questionable editorial choice. SUPPLICANT is not torture porn, to be sure, and the principle on which Cassino’s future society—the weak are meat, and the strong do eat—is understood. But readers will need a strong stomach to negotiate their way through the opening.

Kip Cassino's SUPPLICANT benefits from an intriguing central idea, but gratuitous violence and some unsubtle worldbuilding may not appeal to all readers.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader