Two soldiers declare a fight to the death, and give each other a year to plan. One starts a mercenary troupe, the other starts a domestic terrorism cell.
Meanwhile, a paralyzed billionaire invents robot bodies and becomes a cyborg. He tries to share this technology with disabled people everywhere, but instead his tech becomes a global arms race between those two soldiers.
It’s deadly serious, almost mythical, but half of the action of the novel is over-the-top action sequences like something out of the Heavy Metal movies or Terminator 2. It starts in mundane modern reality, but each chapter is a shocking escalation of action and stakes and technological transformation. The particular “over the top” style is almost like… post-ironic? Like, in a world where we can’t take anything seriously anymore, where everything has to de-fang itself with self-critical irony, this acknowledges your skepticism and says, “This is happening.” It’s also a commentary on violence, through violence, by giving you the “action” (violence) that you want, but it turns out to be evil. Action movies embrace some ideology to transform violence into cool action, and this is a commentary on that. I don’t want to spoil anything else.