The Iron Children

Asher has been training her entire life to become a Sor-Commander. One day, she'll give her soul to the gilded, mechanical body of the Sor & become a commander to a whole battalion of Dedicates. These soldiers, human bodies encased in exoskeletons, with extra arms, & telepathic subordination to the Sor-Commanders, are the only thing that's kept the much larger Levastani army of conquest at bay for decades. 

But while on a training journey, Asher & her party are attacked, & her commander is incapacitated, leaving her alone to lead the unit across a bitterly cold, unstable mountain. Worse, one of the Dedicates is not what they seem: a spy for the enemy, with their own reasons to hate their mechanical body & the people who put them in it. To get off the mountain alive, Asher & her unit will need to decide how much they're willing to sacrifice -- and what for.

°°° 

Rebecca Fraimow embraces this generational rage in The Iron Children, where characters struggle for literal survival in a military-dominated society. Rebecca explained to me, “I really wanted to write something in which the problems are societal/institutional, created by decisions made by previous generations, & not solvable by any simple gordian knot methods that our protagonists could achieve like Winning This One Battle or Killing That One Guy.” 

Like Rebecca, as a reader & a writer, I find I’m increasingly interested in how to actually change things—like when you find yourself in an argument about whose fault something was for a good half hour before someone finally interjects, “okay, but how are we going to solve this?” I’m thirty-five; I’m cognizant that even now my own generation is becoming the perpetrator of the problems. — Yume Kitasei @ Lithub