Lock In and Head On by John Scalzi

Lock In and Head On

3/5. Mystery near future thrillers about a pair of FBI agents solving crimes related to people who have survived a flu strain that leaves them conscious but paralyzed, so they can pilot robot bodies or, rarely, a human with a compatible brain.

So the deal here is that the narrator remains ungendered, and there are two versions of each audiobook, one voiced by Wil Wheaton and one by Amber Benson. If only Leckie'd had those resources at her disposal with her debut, I tell you what. It works because the narrator is locked in, so exists to the outside world as a series of different robot bodies, and you can see how the nondisabled decide such a person is ungendered (and also desexualized). It's an interesting experiment, though the books themselves are about entirely different things. And it's an experiment worth doing, though it strains credibility if you've ever seen a cis person freak out over not knowing someone's gender, which I have way more often than I'd like. This is a thing that really upsets people, so the idea that everyone flawlessly refers to the narrator using neutral language doesn't really fly (and anyway, the narrator speaks with their actual voice, it is implied, so there's also that). But sure, if you dismiss those objections and just read it as nondisabled people eliding the humanity of disabled bodies enough to erase their gender and sexuality, which is a thing that happens without robot intermediaries, it works.

Anyway, I think the actual problem with these books is that the narrator is, uh, really dull? For a disabled FBI agent kid of a famous black athlete turned businessman, they're just . . . not interesting. Certainly less interesting than their partner, the furious and damaged lady agent. At a certain point, I have to suspect that de-gendering the protagonist removed a lot of Scalzi's characterization crutches tools, and well. Dull.