I received this novella through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Volatile Memory is really unique story, told through a pov that I have never read before. I like how the mask played such a major role in the main character learning to embrace her gender identity.

The story was very interesting. However, I found it hard to lose myself in. There weren't any elements that I could relate to personally, and it does take a weird/interesting twist with the mask near the end that I was not expecting.

That being said, I think a lot of people would really enjoy this! For someone who doesn't read sci-fi a lot, the scientific information was easy to understand while still being detailed!

4.25 stars✨This is a scifi novella that packs a punch despite being a quick read - an exploration of identity/self in the throes of a tech dominated, capitalistic government.

I was stunned by how well the queer romance was interwoven into a story of female rage, revenge, and an intergalactic heist. Overall, this book was intriguing, unique, and a refreshing addition to the world of queer scifi!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy.

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**TL;DR**: This one didn’t quite land for me, but there were some great ideas here.
**Source**: NetGalley, Thank you so much to the publisher!

**Plot**: A scavenger finds a mask that will change her life, but it’s messy in so many ways.
**Characters**: We get a pretty one sided view of characters, and the fawning that our PoV makes over characters does it make it hard to get much as far as an accurate read.
**Setting:** As we spend most the time on the run this novella wasn’t super heavy on setting.
**Mystery:** There was little mystery here and little as far as tension. The small connivences really paved the way on this one.

**Thoughts:**

I was so very excited for this. I really was, but ultimately this missed the mark for me in a big way. Volatile Memory is about a woman who sets out after a Mask - a type of high grade equipment that almost everyone uses. This mask is new, unknown, and possibly worth a lifetime of money but things go haywire.

I had two main issues here. The first is that this is incredibly bleak and the characters are so beat down. The story is about rage and revenge, so I can see why but instead of feeling invigorated or cheering for the characters all that came across was… depression. My second issue was that for such a powerful tool the two went after what felt like such a small fry in the bigger picture. There was so much the Mask could do with it’s power but they went to after a small, sad man.

This just didn’t work for me. Could this have worked as a longer novel? Perhaps? But ultimately it is what it is and there will be other revenge stories I can try. Give this one a shot if you don’t mind the bleak and angry with very little hope or joy. Otherwise it might be a skip.

An absolutely gorgeous work of complex character-building and worldbuilding. Packs so much punch for a novella-- brutally and beautifully efficient.

Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and This is How You Lose the Time War, Volatile Memory is a whip-smart, wildly creative sci-fi novella that just might have the best sapphic pairing of 2025. Scrappy scavenger Wylla thinks she’s stumbled upon the score of a lifetime, only to find herself cornered by her fellow outlaws, the Corporate Federation, and VisorForge, an experimental biotech developer. In her scramble to free herself from dire financial straits and get a leg up on the competition, Wylla discovers Sable, a woman as clever as she is and many times more deadly.

By the nature of their relationship, these characters luxuriate in an intimacy that surpasses anything achievable in a human-to-human connection. They crack each other open, literally and metaphorically, exposing tender hearts and killer impulses. Seth Haddon lovingly explores Wylla’s identity as a trans woman, as a creator marveling at his work, and the incorporation of the AI masks was such a delicious addition to the overall character work.

High Level Summary.
In a future where humans wear high tech masks swapped like animals we follow Wylla, a Trans woman who is a scavenger in space looking for tech to sell. Wylla comes across an murdered woman and a high tech military grade mask shaped like a HAWK. When Wylla puts the mask on she finds that Sable the dead women’s consciousness is now part of the mask. Wylla and Sable embark on a journey to find the man who discarded both the dead woman and the mask.

My opinion.
This novella caught my attention right off the bat and never let it go. The story deals with themes of gender identity and gender roles as well as what it means to be human. Can technology have a sense of humanity? I mean lets be honest, even some humans do not always have a real sense of humanity. I truly enjoyed it this read. Its fast paced but will leave you in deep thought for a long time after you finish reading it. I enjoyed the quick glimpse into this world and hope to see more from it.

I loved the first 90% of this book. The pacing was punchy and I was gripped in the second person POV. However, I thought it was leading to some sort of twist or reveal that would explain the POV. I still loved the book, but I wouldn’t comp it to Ex Machina.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Tor on July 22nd, 2025.

What if your body was both your battleground and your revolution? In Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon crafts a searing, speculative exploration of transness, surveillance, and techno-corporeal resistance through a love story between two women—one flesh, one memory. In this futuristic world, humans wear animal-inspired masks that biologically enhance their bodies—granting speed, strength, or heightened senses—to better survive in a hostile, corporatized galaxy. When scavenger Wylla discovers an experimental HAWK mask on a supposedly barren planet, she doesn’t just find salvage—she finds Sable, the disembodied consciousness of a dead woman trapped in the mask with no memory of how she died. What follows is a breathtaking journey through grief, rage, and reclamation, as the two reckon with the systems that tried to erase them.

This is a book that pulses and bleeds. Haddon’s prose is intimate and gorgeously lyrical without sacrificing momentum. With an eye for political nuance and emotional devastation, Volatile Memory delves deep into the violence of state-backed conformity, where bodily autonomy is criminalized through data and surveillance. Wylla, a trans woman haunted by her pre-transition self, is a striking protagonist—sharp-edged, vulnerable, and deeply principled. And Sable? Sable is unlike any narrator I’ve encountered: possibly a ghost, possibly an AI, definitely a woman, and achingly human in her desire to be a part of the world.

The worldbuilding is chilling and precise: a galaxy ruled by the Corporate Federation, where every citizen’s genetic identity is logged from birth. Tech is intimate, exploitative, and inescapable. Yet amidst this dystopia, somehow, love blooms—as both romance and care, rage, and mutual protection between two women who refuse to be erased.

Haddon doesn’t just tell a story—he builds a body out of language, memory, and resistance. Volatile Memory is for the girls who survived, the ghosts we carry, and everyone still trying to make a home in their own bodies. It’s what happens when Murderbot meets Time War, with more tenderness and an A.I. spin. I can’t stop thinking about it.

📖 Read this if you love: trans protagonists fighting the state, poetic sci-fi, queer speculative fiction, or stories that ask what it means to reclaim your body and your history.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy & Trans Embodiment, Surveillance Capitalism & Oppression through Data, Memory, Ghosts & Digital Consciousness, Queer Love Against Corporate Fascism.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Violence (severe), Gore (minor), Injury Detail (minor), Blood (moderate), Gun Violence (severe), Transphobia (minor), Domestic Abuse (minor), Suicide (minor).

I really enjoyed reading this, it had that element that I was looking for and thought worked as a great scifi concept. Seth Haddon has a strong writing style and was a great debut from them. I was invested in what happened and am excited for more from the author. Everything worked well in the world and that the characters were everything that I wanted from this type of book.

I’m struggling to review this. I barely found myself smart enough to read it, I certainly don’t have the words to do it justice in a review. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This felt important and beautiful. I teared up many times from the poetic way Seth wrote about identity and feminine rage.

The second person pov took some getting used to, but it worked for this story. I’m glad it was novella length. It packed a punch, but left just enough of the story up to the interpretation of the reader. Everything was so intentional, and I’m very impressed with Seth’s writing.

beyond excited to see this books hit my inbox- this is one of my most anticipated books of 2025 and i will be sure to post my review on all retailers!! 💞

This book was amazing!!! 5 stars for sure. Definitely along the lines of This Is How You Lose The Time War - the tech in this is trippy and cool, but easy to understand once you get a few chapters in.

A beautiful exploration of queer identity and female rage. I loved the trans rep, and the relationship between human/AI was extremely well-depicted. It's told in 2nd person, which is rarely done, but it worked very well for this book. A fantastic short story!!

🌈Queer rep: trans woman main character, bi female main character, FF main relationship.

I needed to sit with Seth Haddon’s Volatile Memory after I’d finished it, because it left me feeling surprisingly unsettled by its violence and vengeance, the dysphoria of the characters, the intensity of the situations they go through — the book never stops, lurching from one crisis to another, so that the shock of one event never fully catches up to the characters before the next hits them.

The characters are both queer and both messy and, I guess, “problematic”. Wylla isn’t the perfect transwoman, Sable’s not the perfect… well, let’s not get into spoilers. The point is that they turn to violence, they roil in fear and indecision, they rush into things, and you root for them anyway while knowing they are making some awful choices. (Knowing, too, that there aren’t any better choices, because that’s what their society does, the hands they’ve been dealt.)

I found the narration really well done: it begins as second person POV, addressed to Wylla, but the speaker also resolves into a character who starts talking about themself in the first person as well. Still, the tone is intimate — this story is being told to Wylla, in a sense. It makes it all feel very immediate. The story doesn’t try to explain itself too much: you have to get on board yourself and figure things out — and I found that it all fell into place beautifully, without too much of a pause for exposition.

This was so intriguing! I really enjoyed it, and I loved the descriptions of the technology that was featured. Space travel and sci-fi are always fun, and this was very well told.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the e-ARC!

I really loved this one - Volatile Memory is an action-packed and emotional story of vengeance and connection in the bleakest of life's circumstances.

The setting itself is incredibly dystopian and Wylla, one of our main characters, faces systemic discrimination as a trans woman who chooses her own life over conformity, and HAWK's backstory explores misogynistic violence.

And yet, I would describe this as hopeful. Wylla and HAWK find each other and they find their rage at a system that has tried to squash them down - and together, they might just have a chance at revenge.

I loved the masks in this, I loved the characters, and I loved the action. <i>Volatile Memory</i> explores a lot of painful topics, but also gives power back to the characters.

Comps to The Locked Tomb series feel very apt, and especially to Harrow the Ninth for reasons I hesitate to specify because of spoilers. Very highly recommended to lovers of queer and weird sci fi.

I'm on the fence about Volatile Memory. While I loved the technology and the masks, the rest of the story fell flat for me.

I loved Wylla. I loved her background, what she represented, her reactions and her emotions and her empathetic heart, and her painful need to put herself first. I loved that she was trans in a future where you can do all of the augments until your physical body was perfectly in line with your inner self; and (for the sake of the narrative only! Trans people deserve joy and selfhood and lives free of transphobia) I appreciated that the corporate overlords still viewed Wylla as “undesirable”. It shows a perfect trajectory of how capitalism will still continue to fail people forever and ever.

However, the rest of the book didn’t really land for me. I don’t think the narration style worked; it felt weird and kept Wylla and Sable at a strange remove from each other as well as the audience. Sable was a little too single-minded, pushing the plot without really explaining how we got there (like, how did she suddenly know how to do all kinds of AI things as soon as it was convenient for the plot?). And we didn’t get enough of an overarching “so what” - I mean, we always support getting revenge on abusers, but the last 5% throws in a very sudden, much larger conflict that pretty much came out of nowhere. And honestly, I would have loved to explore it more.

I think rather than two novellas, this should have been a novel. It would have benefited greatly from taking more time with worldbuilding (inter-company politics, a caste system, the general history of humanity, some more characters?) and not rushing through a half-baked revenge plot

Loved the premise, the tech (the masks are SUCH an interesting idea, I really liked how the author described and used them!), the sapphic relationship, the beginning, and Wylla! I found there were lots of interesting elements in this novella that had me wanting more because the ideas are so good, and I didn't have enough time with them.

I wish there was more time spent on the background of the world, I felt I didn't really understand how everything worked outside of the masks and some parts of the Scavengers' jobs and social standing. While I enjoyed the action scenes, having the story told so much from the mask's perspective took me out of it, and we hear so many internal thoughts and observations of the mask I didn't feel like there was truly time to have built a romance between the characters. I do love how they come together for revenge and help one another face their pasts and traumas, especially how transphobia is discussed and pointed out throughout the story.

Although this wasn't entirely for me, I think the author has a very fresh style and this is a unique novella that I know will connect with many folks. Thank you to NetGalley and Tor/Forge for the ARC!

Bright and vicious and occasionally brutal, this is a story that’s as much about the nature of consciousness and personhood under capitalism as it is about its interstellar manhunt. The worldbuilding was fascinating and unique and the sapphic romance was shockingly tender, but more than anything, this is a feral scream of a book: it’s about queerness and gender and feminine rage, about autonomy, and about bloody, merciless revenge. I did feel like by the end its themes started to feel too aggressively overstated and spelled out for my own personal taste, but I still really enjoyed this story in spite of that.

Two words of warning: firstly, this is not a queernorm setting, as the current slate of queer sci-fi tends to favor. The trans MC faces significant transphobia. I thought the exploration of transness was perfectly married with the book’s worldbuilding, which hinges so heavily on body alteration and the struggle to hold onto any sort of freedom or self-actualization under a system that wants to grind you down into a perfect tool to perform labor.

Secondly, this is not a standalone. It doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but the story is definitely not finished. Be prepared!

When I heard this comped to ‘this is how you Lose the Time War’, I was immediately interested. I think this book is incredibly atmospheric and does a great job with its sci-fi elements. The masks? The technology? I really liked learning more and more about that system. The characters, however, fell flat for me. I think it relied on known talking points vs fully fleshing out characters and their motivations. The pacing is really slow and I can’t hide that I struggled to pick this back up multiple times. I’d encourage anyone to give it a shot, but for me, this wasn’t my favorite.