by Dale Stromberg

Start with ravenous corporations mining minerals on asteroids out past Neptune’s orbit, give those corporations private armies of mech-suited Marines to battle over control of these resources, and for good measure turn each brutal battle into the 24th century’s equivalent of a pay-per-view fight, and what have you got? It’s called a Cold Rush, and your chances of surviving one ain’t good.

This is why Mint, formerly a star of the system, is so reluctant to get back into the Cold Rush game in Rohan O’Duill’s novella Cold Blooded (2025, Lower Decks Press), the follow-up to the first book in the Cold Rush series, Cold Rising. (Don’t worry, the novellas share a world but stand alone, so you can read them in any order.) This tightly focussed, pugnacious adventure tale has a clear love for the high-tech gear and enterprising pluck of Golden Age sci-fi (bone-crunching mech suit beat-em-ups!) but is also animated by a clear working-class consciousness, a modern awareness of identity and social justice, and an unflinching recognition of the insatiable exploitativeness of capitalism.

We get corporate intrigue in a libertarian hellscape with strong world-building, all cycloning round the characters of Mint and Bjorn. Mint is a randy, tough, foulmouthed fighter with neither the time nor the crayons to explain shit to you, but her uncomfortable complicity with the system forms a dichotomy with Bjorn’s ethically driven resistance to that system, a resistance both courageous and quixotic.

When meaningful resistance seems almost suicidal, what in the world can possible drive us to resist, apart from love? Mint might just find out what a love that powerful can feel like, but there is no guarantee of anything turning out as you’d hope in O’Duill’s hard-bitten world. You’ve been warned.