#jessa firebreak

[angelwiththeblue-box]

i spent all day listening to firebreak and i needed something to work on during so post ending fanart

(designs inspired by @layaart)

.

taglist: @joshkiszkashusband @thedrowningpoetofdionysus @thedragonemperess @genuine-possum @depressedtransguy @someguyiguess @blueskiesandstarrynights @ayraluv (lemme know if you want to be added or removed)

[aroaessidhe]

have a preview of some of my firebreak/archivist wasp character designs in meme form

[layaart]

ARCHIVIST WASP FIREBREAK CHARACTER DESIGNS part 6

mal & jessa, & their game avatars!

mal’s not super described, other than black clothes. same with jessa: other than a jacket covered in pins and patches, and fandom shirts.

I decided to go full neonpastel, which I feel like suits her personality, and is a contrast to mal. (I did make the shirt and shoes black though, because it was looking Too bright considering the tone of the book and also like, they're not exactly rich, mismatched clothes is gonna be a given.

for the game avatars: i know it’s like, more of a hyperrealistic military game but a) i’m already drawing in a cartoon style and b) it’s just more fun to make them cartoony fortnite vibes (note: I barely know any games). so giving them that kind of everyone’s-the-same-height-(tall) body shape

nycorix is basically as described, clothes-wise, (in hindsight, I think she probs has a tie? forgot that lol) & she’s holding the battery or whatever it is they get. (dee mentioned this is like a ghost jar........I’m gonna pretend that was intentional)

queenoftheraids: only thing that’s mentioned is two blasters (which I would have drawn bigger if the right hand one wouldn’t obscure so much), otherwise just upped the neon sporty vibes!

[rhetoricandlogic]

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed: Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed: Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed: Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed: Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed: Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak

Molly Templeton

Wed May 19, 2021 2:00pm

If you’ve not yet read Nicole Kornher-Stace’s novels Archivist Wasp and Latchkey, I’d like to strongly encourage you to do so. It’s not because they’re connected to Firebreak—to my surprise and delight, they are, though Firebreak is a standalone—but because they’re just so good. Immersive, dark, vivid, imaginative and eerie, they follow one young woman in a post-apocalyptic world where her task is two-pronged: survive, and catch ghosts.

Firebreak is set in a world not yet turned totally apocalyptic—but close. In 2134, two corporations run what used to be the U.S. Stellaxis and Greenleaf are in perpetual conflict, and citizens are regularly caught in the middle, leaving shattered cities and families. Mallory is one of those orphaned by the war. She lives in a hotel room with a handful of other orphans, all scraping together an existence from odd jobs and whatnot, counting the gallons of water they’re allotted each week.

Mal’s world is a bleak magic-mirror version of ours, an all-too-believable extrapolation from the climate, political and otherwise, we live in. But we don’t have SecOps, the immersive game in which Mal spends much of her free time. Players in the expansive digital world stream their gameplay, earning fans and sponsors and gifts from those who watch. If they’re really lucky, they might stumble across one of the game’s celebrity NPCs, the digital counterparts of real-life soldiers who are known, in life and in the game, only by numbers. In the real world, the numbered soldiers fight for Stellaxis—and serve as the face of the war’s marketing. In the game, finding an NPC can be a ticket to more viewers, more in-game gifts, more attention. More water, too.

Mal and her friend Jessa are low-level players and streamers. Jessa’s the chipper, outgoing one who talks with their viewers; Mal is less social, more focused on her game and on getting a glimpse of 22, the NPC who intrigues her. There’s nothing really special about Mal or Jessa, except that they happen to be the people who stumble on NPC 08, out in the middle of nowhere in game-space. And that action gets someone’s attention.

Firebreak is part mystery, part gamer-geek-out, part scream of rage at corporate culture and capitalist greed. Mal knows her world is a mess, but she’s never seen any hope of it changing—let alone hoped that she could change it. She’s deeply aware of how the lives of her roommates are marked by grief and trauma, that all of their families were destroyed by the powers that rule her world. And when she has a chance to act, to help people, she’s believably torn between fear and the certainty that the scary thing is the right thing to do.

I’m being specifically vague on plot here because part of the delight of reading Firebreak is unraveling secrets along with Mal, whose oh-shit-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into-now narration is immersive, endearing, and wry and, as things go ever further sideways, increasingly intense in a way that’s perfectly matched to the book’s video-game aspect. The intensity of the plot is carefully balanced by the strength and depth of the friendships among Kornher-Stace’s characters. “I’m committed to putting as many books as I can out into the world that treat platonic relationships with all the weight and gravity and significance usually reserved for romance,” Kornher-Stace explained on Goodreads. She’s not just committed to these relationships; she’s really, really good at them. Mal and Jessa play off each other’s strengths, find ways to keep each other going, and from the get-go their friendship feels lived-in and fleshed-out, familiar and true. The relationships with their roommates are less detailed, but we get a glimpse of each of them, an outline of personality and perspective that’s enough to convince me that Kornher-Stace could write another novel about each one.

But Mal’s interest in, and eventual connection with, 22 is something rarely seen: the friend-crush. The NPCs are celebrities, with merch of their faces, figurines, posters, you name it. They’re everywhere; they seem less people and more action figures. Mal’s attraction to 22 doesn’t involve the usual trappings, but is something deeper and harder to parse—and something that rings true and familiar. Haven’t many of us had that person we just want to be near, to get to know, but not in the way everyone else thinks? Or been attracted to a person in a way that you feel like ought to be romantic, but isn’t? That’s what Kornher-Stace puts on the page: a connection that rarely gets depicted, let alone as effectively as this.

Firebreak has been compared to Ready Player One, and if you have any kind of reaction to that, I understand. So did I. Both books involve an immersive, addictive video game that takes the place of a lot of “real life” for people in a broken future. But you will find no ‘80s references, no quests, no glib nostalgia here. The game feeds the plot, and it plays an important role in Mal and Jessa’s lives. But change needs to come to the real world, the world full of hungry, thirsty bodies at the mercy of corporate greed. What happens in the game matters, but on an entirely different level.

It’s difficult to talk about Firebreak without talking about how it connects to Archivist Wasp, though as I said before: This is a standalone novel, and you absolutely don’t have to have read Kornher-Stace’s other books to get completely sucked into it. That said, there’s a real reward here for those who have met Wasp and her world. The books work in tandem to tell a story about how systems of oppression and abuse replicate themselves, how the horrors faced by one generation may be the same thing later generations face, in different shapes and with different names. All three novels prioritize vivid,  platonic relationships, often between characters in exceedingly fraught situations—people fighting against forces that don’t really see them as people, and trying to retain their humanity in the face of incredible brutality.

Kornher-Stace sends her characters to underworlds, erases their realities, isn’t afraid to make death stark on the page, and knows how to show us horrible abuses without ever edging into gratuitousness or melodrama. Her heroine’s only superpowers are curiosity, stubbornness, and care—things we’re all capable of mustering up. This world feels real; this world is real, and not that far away. Firebreak reads like a warning, but one that’s simultaneously a gripping, affecting tale full of characters I hope we’ll get to meet again.

[nycorix]

His eyes are the only part of him that moves, narrowing tight in the beam of her headlamp. And maybe it’s that, or maybe the bruise-color swaths of shadow beneath his eyes, or maybe the ashy gauntness hollowing his cheeks: but for the first time since he arrived, he doesn’t look anything like the perfectly calibrated celebrity war machine he is. He just looks fucking exhausted. ___________ New vignette’s finally up! Feat. Jessa’s first POV (gods help us all) and 22′s exquisite suffering (copyright Stellaxis Innovations Ltd.)

[wearethekat]

February Book Reviews: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Loose prequel to Archivist Wasp, but also works as a stand-alone. A near future apocalyptic future where everything in America is owned by two warring companies, and the supersoldiers conscripted into battle are worshipped like pop stars. Protagonist Mallory scrabbles for a living streaming a video game based on the corporate war, until she gets sucked into a conspiracy about the previously mentioned supersoldiers.

I had rather mixed feelings about this one. Most of what I liked about Archivist Wasp was the fantastic worldbuilding. The world of Firebreak is grimly plausible and also very similar to at least five other books-- the rule by corporations, the forced scarcity of a necessity, the people living mostly in VR. It constrained the plot towards being mostly predictable. And Mallory seems curiously adjacent to the plot, with very little agency or personal power.

Also may I note that Mallory was rather unconvincing as a streamer good enough to live off of it, given that she was extremely introverted and seemed to keep her audience on mute and never interact with them. Although that perhaps just stands as testament as the strength of her partnership with Jessa, who’s the extroverted one. Their friendship is the high point of this book. 

[aseriesofvariousevents]

Firebreak

Firebreak was the science fiction story I didn't know I needed. Far too much of sci-fi is men just doing cool stuff with technology, but this story turned that all on its head. Mal was one of the coolest protagonists I've read, and she, with the help of Jessa (and others), stuck up for what was right, consequences be damned. The world in this story was capitalism on a terrifying scale and it was both fascinating and heartbreaking to witness how this had tremendously affected characters on both sides of the class divide. Despite Mal's interactions with SpecOps being brief (both digitally and in person), their stories were still so powerful and made the story that much more impactful.  The complex emotions of Mal and others felt very real, and, in some ways, this corporate country had deep echoes of our own. The characters in this book were captivating and the story was such an important addition to science fiction as a whole.

Favorite Quote: I’m not supposed to think sad things about the war dead. I’m supposed to think about how they died for free trade and liberty and American values, like they stood on the front line themselves and laid down suppressive fire on the enemy. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace

Note: I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley.

[bookish-brews]

Mood board for Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace 💥🤯

Book links: Review | Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop.org

Title: Firebreak Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press Publication date: May 5, 2021

Review preview & links below:

Action packed, anti-capitalist, compelling, well written, easy to follow, emotional, and tense.

Oh man, where do I begin? I really loved this book. When I opened it, I thought “man this is kind of long, I didn’t realize!” And then literally this book doesn’t slow down at any point. It is packed with amazing content. This is going to be a hard review, because it’s packed with so many different amazing things that I don’t know how well I can narrow it down! This book is easy to follow and fast paced, but delightfully anti-capitalist in a way that Ready Player One wishes it was.

Quick Summary: Firebreak follows Mal, who lives with her 7 roommates in an old hotel room, living by the rules of the mega corporation, Stellaxis, amidst a corporate war stalemate. Mal and her best friend Jessa are mildly successful at streaming the wildly popular war VR game modeled after the real corporate war — the war that the corporations have monetized. Everything changes for Mal and Jessa when they get contacted by a mysterious sponsor who tells them that the super human celebrities, that everyone knows Stellaxis grew in a lab, are not lab experiments at all. They’re real war orphans, just like Mal and Jessa. Continue Reading...

Click continue reading for content warnings, diversity representation & more!

Bookish Brews | Twitter | Pinterest | Goodreads

this post contains affiliate links, if you purchase through one of these links, I receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.

[whispersmith]

Maybe I disagree with the editor on some points: there were a couple sections too long. But Firebreak still has such incredible friendships (Mal and Jessa! Mal and 22!) And the pacing of the action: you can just tell how fast things happen in a way i adore about her writing.

Mal was prickly and a lot less awkward than she thought she was, or, at least, I find her silence punctuated by brash one-liners to be less sympathetically awkward, less personable, than Jessa's chatter. And aren't those often the types of people you find in fandom, albeit mixed and matched?

The revelation of the geography of AW/Latchkey too -- where before we knew the constellations and the unnamed places, now they're this city, these woods, that basement. Jessa knows street signs: Wasp knows constellations

[fredhandbag]

Do you like dystopian fiction with a side of virtual reality? In her new book, Firebreak, Nicole Kornher-Stace writes about Mallory - a girl who spends her days trying to earn enough water credits to stay alive. Mal spends most of her time playing SecOps on BestLife trying to rack up enough kills to get on the boards. A random encounter with one of the game's super-soldiers sends her and her friend Jessa on a side quest - one that uncovers information that the corporate masters want to keep hidden. And now the survival of Mal and her bunkmates is in jeopardy." Mal is a great character. She sucks at interactions with people but wants to do the right thing. There are many moments for her of "Why didn't I say that?' Aren't we all like that? This is a bleak society that NKS gives us. People always hungry and thirsty. Living on top of each other. Having to work multiple odd jobs just to survive. And never knowing when a drone blast might bring your building down. The story feels familiar if you've read any recent dystopian science-fiction at all. But the story is fast-paced. There are characters you can pull for. You'll want to keep turning pages to find out what happens. An unexpected messy ending from NKS but it works. This is the first book I've read from NKS but the writing has a great flow. Thanks to @netgalley and @gallerybooks for the advanced copy. Firebreak releases 5/4. #firebreak #nicolekornherstace #gallerybooks #netgalley #dystopianfiction #sciencefiction #virtualreality #bookstagram #bookshelves #booknerd #bookhoarder #bookworm #sodacityreads #bookish #bookreview #hardcover #novelsuspect #bookcover #bookhaul #literarycrimefiction #goodreads #homelibrary #fiction #crimefiction #thriller https://www.instagram.com/p/COaX5dtLcj2/?igshid=exf53ppkc9qc

[bookish-brews]

Book Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Book links: Review & Aesthetic| Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop.org

At a glance

An orphan of the corporate war, Mallory works streaming the popular VR war game, only to find out that the supposedly “grown” celebrity super humans (which are intellectual property of Stellaxis) are actually stolen children just like her.

💥 Dramatic Ending

💜 Nomance

😭 Emotional

🌺 Friendship Goals

Review & book info below:

Title: Firebreak Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press Publication date: May 5, 2021

Review:

Action packed, anti-capitalist, compelling, well written, easy to follow, emotional, and tense.

Oh man, where do I begin? I really loved this book. When I opened it, I thought “man this is kind of long, I didn’t realize!” And then literally this book doesn’t slow down at any point. It is packed with amazing content. This is going to be a hard review, because it’s packed with so many different amazing things that I don’t know how well I can narrow it down! This book is easy to follow and fast paced, but delightfully anti-capitalist in a way that Ready Player One wishes it was.

Quick Summary: Firebreak follows Mal, who lives with her 7 roommates in an old hotel room, living by the rules of the mega corporation, Stellaxis, amidst a corporate war stalemate. Mal and her best friend Jessa are mildly successful at streaming the wildly popular war VR game modeled after the real corporate war — the war that the corporations have monetized. Everything changes for Mal and Jessa when they get contacted by a mysterious sponsor who tells them that the super human celebrities, that everyone knows Stellaxis grew in a lab, are not lab experiments at all. They’re real war orphans, just like Mal and Jessa.

I have been reeling about this book since I finished it a few days ago. It was done so well, I’m really impressed. The first thing that I just can’t get over was how much action was packed into this book. Not just action, but how so much information about the plot was weaved effortlessly directly into the action. We learned everything we needed to know for the journey through VR battles, mysterious disappearances, rebellion and secrets whispered in the garden. It never slowed down, but it managed to give us so many intricacies of plot weaved in perfectly.

Continue Reading...

Click continue reading for content warning, diversity representation & more!

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this post contains affiliate links, if you purchase through one of these links, I receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.