Shattered Minds Shows Us a Future in Which You Can’t Trust Your Own Body

Laura Lam pitches a near perfect game with Shattered Minds, a new standalone novel set in the world of last year’s False Hearts. Part futuristic sci-fi thriller, part mystery, and part psychological potboiler, it presents a frightening vision of a biotech future in which advances in science allow the human body to be manipulated without the subject ever being aware it’s happening.
Carina is a mentally broken—literally, a neuroscientist purposefully driving her to hit rock bottom via an addiction to Zeal, a drug that causes users to enter a dreamscape world realer than any virtual reality simulation. They say only those with a propensity for violence can become addicted to Zeal, and it is used by the government as an unofficial method crime control. While in her Zealscape, Carina is contacted by a former colleague and friend, Mark, to help bring down Sudice, the company responsible for the drug, Carina’s broken mind, and so many other reprehensible crimes, and he soon introduces her to the anti-Sudice group known as the Trust.

Lam drops us into this story mid-stride, allowing it to sink its teeth in an pull you along without stopping. Along the way, we learn fascinating details about this near-future setting—the United States no longer exists, replaced by a network of regional nation states—but we never lose sight of our focus on Carina and fight against Sudice. Books that refuse to hand-hold readers are a rare treat, and I enjoyed figuring out the inner workings of the world while following alongside Carina and her friends as they discover the depths of the dark underbelly of the nefarious corporation.
Lam follows this rage-against-the-machine narrative from a handful of point-of-view characters, each of them smoothly executed, with compelling voices that bring us into a new and dangerous world. This is arguably a dystopian novel, but it lacks the titanic stakes common to the genre. Carina is not a heroine for all of humanity. She’s just one of a few individuals working together in an effort to battle a single company that has gotten away with too much for too long, and swept too many secrets swept under the rug. The Trust hopes to bring those secrets to light, to wake people up to the crimes being committed in the name of greed and power. It is a scale we can relate, to and it makes for a potent story.
Shattered Minds is available now.