Phantom Song by Kate Sheeran Swed: Cyborgs, a Vigilante, and an Opera Star in a Solid Follow Up Novella

Phantom Song by Kate Sheeran Swed Series: Toccata System, #2 Paperback, 179 pg. Spells & Spaceships Press, 2019 Read: February 15, 2021 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

Before I dig into this, here’s a warning—this is the second novella in a trilogy. I cannot talk about this in any understandable fashion without talking about a couple of the things from the first book. Most of what I want to say is no big deal, but one thing is a spoiler for an important revelation in the first book. If it were me, I wouldn’t mind knowing what I’m about to say when I started Parting Shadows Still if you’d prefer to be careful—you should just go read what I had to say about Parting Shadows and move on.

Are You Still Reading? Good.

So in Parting Shadows, we hear something about a vigilante running around Landry City—Astra speculates about that vigilante being one of the SATIS girls. Also, when Isabelle goes to the Opera in Landry City, something happens that rattles her—but other events are going on which makes that not such a big deal.

Phantom Song tells us about what happened at the Opera and about the vigilante. And that’s just the early chapters.

This book overlaps the events of Phantom Song but largely happens in its aftermath. We begin with a cyborg attacking a transport ship carrying a friend of Isabelle’s, Claire, and her mother. Claire is injured, but her mother gets her to safety. She wakes up as a cyborg herself—it was the only way to keep her alive. We later learn that it was SATIS who arranged for that. While she waits to see how raising an assassin goes, she has one constructed, too.

Claire spends her nights as that vigilante in order to find the cyborg that attacked her family (actually, she’s just hunting for the cyborg, the vigilante stuff is a side effect—but let’s not get into that). During the day, she’s the star of Landry City’s Opera.

Astra comes looking for the vigilante—to see if she’s right about the SATIS tie and to recruit some help in her efforts to stop Keyes. The two end up joining forces to take down the Cyborg first.

On Odd Prejudice

For a society so run by various AIs, there is a deep-seated prejudice against humans with cybernetic augmentation—no matter the reason for it. The prejudice is so strong that hospital staff—the same people that just saved Claire’s life through the implants—treat her with scorn because of them. It’s powerful but makes no sense.

Then again, no one said prejudices have to make sense. The ones that seem most prevalent in human society certainly don’t. So, spot on there.

Because of this hatred, Claire has to adopt a new identity and cover her cybernetic parts with long sleeves, dresses, and mask. Which works because of her new identity’s celebrity, but wouldn’t cut it in any other circumstance. That’s a nice touch—and the lengths Claire has to go to to protect herself paves the way for a very successful way to protect her double life.

So, what did I think about Phantom Song?

I know even less about Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera than I do, so I’m not going to pretend to be able to talk about this take on Phantom.

This is a short enough work—and so easy to spoil its own events, much less those of the prior book, that I feel like I’ve been unusually shallow talking about it. But that’s all you’re getting from me.

After doing all the heavy lifting in the first novella—setting up the rules of the world, the way AIs work, SATIS and her girls, and so on, Swed can just play in this novella. The story is more developed, she can sink deeper into the characters (having characters who have had a natural emotional development also helps), she can involve more characters and plotlines. In short, she can do more. Which leads to this being a more enjoyable read.

I don’t think this works that well as an entry point into the series—it’s a trilogy, that makes sense. But this is a great way to follow up on Parting Shadows and sets the stage for a big conclusion in Prodigal Storm. Which is exactly what you want in the middle book of a trilogy.

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