Full disclosure: Elly is my friend, and I think she's one of the coolest people I know, so take that into consideration when I say that UNITY is fucking amazing and I'm so glad I read it. Even with covid-related-attention-deficit I finished it in a single day. It made me feel so many feelings.
The setting is feral and fresh and upsettingly plausible, while still somehow featuring a Mad Max-esque warlord-torn Arizona that nearly gets eaten by nanobots after a cold war between competing submarine states in the Pacific goes hot. All of that is in the book! and I haven't even mentioned yet the high-tech brain augmentations that allow people to bond with other people into a superhuman telepathic hive mind. It's vivid and innovative, and yet I was never confused about what was happening because the storytelling is clear and deliberate. Elly knows what she's doing.
You can tell from the technological innovation in the text that Elly knows things about science and history and so on (and I know that because I've talked to her at length about nuclear war scenarios and how to survive that particular apocalypse), but what she knows best is the human heart. These characters are weird but incredibly human and relatable. The central struggle, which is, I think, how to go on living after making the wrong choice, is the struggle of how to be a human, warts and all. UNITY left me with an aftertaste of resolve to make the world better, which is my favorite kind of story aftertaste.
Seriously, read this. You won't be disappointed. Here's the link to order it: Unity at Tachyon Publications
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