James Nicoll Reviews

Makana Yamamoto’s 2025 Hammajang Luck is a (thus far¹) stand-alone science fiction heist novel².

Former aspiring criminal Edie has spent eight long years in Kepler System Penitentiary contemplating what happens when you trust the wrong person. Unexpectedly paroled, Edie soon discovers that time invested considering misplaced trust was time well-spent… but perhaps not as useful as one might expect in charting Edie’s post-prison life.

Angel and Edie used to be as close as siblings, but when Angel had to choose between prison time or flipping on Edie, Angel chose to betray Edie. That makes Angel’s current offer of a job a bold choice on Angel’s part.

While Edie was in prison, Angel reinvented herself. Today Angel is a respectable citizen, one of Kepler Space Station’s well-to-do. In fact, she is chief of security for interstellar oligarch Joyce Atlas. Impressive, given that it was an attempt to rob Atlas that led to Angel turning stoolie and Edie losing almost a decade in the pen.

It’s no accident that Angel works for Atlas. Angel has a plan even more flawless than the previous abject failure, for stakes even higher. Angel’s proposed trillion-credit heist requires a very special team, starting with Edie.

The smart move would be to refuse the offer. That’s certainly Edie’s first instinct. Prudence further says to avoid parole violations, find a regular job, and use the paycheck to help support Edie’s family: pregnant sister Andie, possibly-terminally-ill niece Paige, and the rest.

Unfortunately, someone powerful has put Edie on a blacklist. It’s no good knowing that the only prudent course of action is stay on the straight and narrow if no legitimate employer will risk pissing off whichever rich and powerful person has it in for Edie.

Edie has no choice but to sign on with Angel’s plan, trust that this plan is a lot better than the last plan, and hope that Angel isn’t leaving out something important. Edie also has to hope that Angel’s handpicked crew of experts is as good as Angel needs them to be, and most importantly, that nobody betrays anyone this time.

Given that System Security Administration, Financial Crimes Division, Special Agent McKay is offering Edie a deal to flip on Angel, betrayal is a very real possibility.

~oOo~

Futuristic space novels usually reflect the era in which we live. For example, this is by no means the only SF novel featuring a cartoonishly malevolent techbro oligarch that I have read recently³.

Worldbuilding stuff nobody but me (and perhaps the author) cares about: the Rock around which Kepler Station orbits has breathable air and complex life (at least to the point of having something analogous to trees), despite which it’s largely undeveloped. Why?

It was always cold on the trashy rock that Kepler orbited. Good for nothing but a few strip mines and a prison. There were haphazard banks of dirty snow strewn across the pockmarked landing pad, frozen solid from a dozen freezes, thaws, and refreezes over the course of the Rock’s near-constant winter. 

Basically, the Rock is Canada⁴. The sovereign nation of Canada is inhabited to a degree the Rock is not, which suggests to me that much nicer habitable worlds must be common. Indeed, the key to Kepler Station’s prosperity is because it is a convenient way station on well-travelled trade routes.

Not that Yamamoto seems likely to use Canada as an analogy, hailing as the author does from Maui. Readers might deduce that from the manner in which the novel draws heavily on the history of Yamamoto’s native Hawai‘i⁵, which was illegally annexed by the US in 1898. This extends to the book’s prose, which draws on Hawaiian vernacular.

Worldbuilding that the author clearly does care about: Kepler Station has trans people. Station culture is supportive of this in a neutral way: there’s no British or American-style persecution, but people are on their own as far paying for any body mods they might want.

What caught my eye about how transition is handled in this setting is that it’s such a contrast to other SF imagined worlds, such as John Varley’s the Eight Worlds. In the Eight Worlds, body mods are as cheap and everyday as going to the dentist. But in this novel, Luck, one has the sense that the author has a much firmer grasp of the practicalities involved. Verisimilitude matters.

The fact that Atlas hired someone as head of security who got caught trying to rob Atlas might seem like a bad decision. If so, it’s part of a consistent pattern on Atlas’ part. The logic seems to be that former criminals and dishonorably discharged soldiers and cops are more likely to turn a blind eye to Atlas’ egregiously dystopian, often highly illegal endeavors. Fair enough, but filling the ranks with brutes and criminals has drawbacks that the plot makes clear⁶.

At times I questioned Angel’s operational security, not to mention the wisdom of trusting anything Angel says. Then it dawned on me that this was characterization: if Edie and company made good decisions, they probably wouldn’t be the protagonists in a novel about a trillion-credit heist from a vindictive man who for all they know will spend decades hunting them down and unpleasantly killing them. A certain level of poor judgement is required.

The slang-laden prose is clear; the characters may not be the wisest but they are believable. The infiltrations and exfiltrations are fraught and the oligarchs unlovable. The author had a clear idea of the novel they wanted to deliver, and they delivered it.

Hammajang Luck is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Thus far. The plot does not rule out sequels and the cover’s blurb ​“How come one last job never actually means that?” strongly suggests that it won’t be.

2: Hammajang is Hawaiian creole for ​“all messed up.”

3: If SF authors want to spend decades writing about thinly disguised Elon-Musk-inspired villains the way they did with Senator Proxmire, I’d be OK with that.

4: Which would make its station the local analog of Toronto.

5: Specifically, Maui, which experts agree is the best Hawaiian island.

6: Given that Kepler Station has a life support system whose failure would surely doom everyone within it, I really hope there’s a vast middle layer of employees between the corrupt, malevolent elite and the criminal underclass, a layer that can be trusted to do their jobs.