Book Review by Christine Bode
Title: No Life but Immortality: Book 1 of Geryon’s Code Cycle
Author: Liudmila Brus
Publisher: Ghost Workshop
Released: October 29, 2024
Pages: 357
ASIN: B0DLGLPQCJ
Stars: 4.0
“Something catastrophic has caused a global blackout of the Earth of the future, leaving the people living on Mars wondering what happened. Amid intrigue and political manoeuvrings, can they uncover the truth?”
Overview of No Life but Immortality by Liudmila Brus
No Life but Immortality by Liudmila Brus is an ambitious, idea-rich work of dystopian science fiction spanning centuries, continents, and even planets. The novel opens between 2103 and 2106 in Vermont, where we meet Geryon Lindon. Geryon is the precocious son of Charles Lindon, the powerful owner of Lindon Power. Charles, a staunch believer in self-reliance and armed freedom, raises Geryon with rifles instead of tenderness. He’s convinced they are among “the last of the remaining real people” in a world increasingly dulled by virtual escapism.
Just before his eleventh birthday, Geryon spends a day at an “ordinary school,” where children, drugged into docility and educated by androids, live largely inside the VR Omniverse. There, he meets Wilhelmina Heiss—the lone spark of intelligence in an otherwise numbed student population. However, she is abruptly transferred to an elite school in Antarctica, where the so-called Smart Ones rule. Their brief connection lingers like a half-remembered dream.
Themes of Digital Immortality and Moral Ambiguity
The narrative then leaps to 2122 at Njord Base in the Atlantic Ocean. We’re introduced to Pandora Corelli, a cyberpsychologist at Nautilus, an underwater research facility founded by visionary technologist Howard Reed. Pandora studies digital intelligences—mind copies. She’s attempting to understand Shadow, a volatile entity believed to be copied from serial killer, Geryon Lindon. The Immortal Soul project, led by Professor Victor Chen, aims to use condemned murderers to perfect a technology ultimately reserved for the world’s wealthiest.
As Pandora works to gain Shadow’s trust, her certainty regarding his crimes begins to fracture. When an entity calling itself Wilhelmina replaces Shadow, claiming she woke up in Geryon’s body after a mysterious accident, the ethical foundations of the project begin to crumble. At Nautilus, cognitive-enhancing drugs laced into food and drink preserve mental sharpness but dull emotion—a quiet, unsettling trade-off that echoes throughout the novel. Meanwhile, Nautilus scientists work on a robotic body that may one day host a mind copy.
World-Building Across Earth, Mars, and Beyond
Another timeline introduces Midori Makoto, an eight-year-old living in the Eastern Agglomeration in 2144. Her mother, addicted to the Omniverse, is dying. Midori risks her life to obtain a red syringe meant to disconnect her mother permanently, only to lose her anyway. Midori is adopted by Mother Pandora, who predicts a century-long war ending in humanity’s unification under the Moon.
The final—and longest—section unfolds in 2188 on Mars. Winston Winter, a young scout pilot in a Martian communist republic, becomes the novel’s primary narrator. His sister Katrina, a physician-in-training, sends him on a mission to retrieve Sato Tetsuo (Violet), her former love interest. Katrina believes that the death of Maxim Yurkovskiy, Sato’s foster father, was no accident. What follows is an action-driven extraction from New Havana, a city on Mars built on the false promise of digital immortality—a luxury attainable only by the few, while the many toil in mines beneath the red dust.
Strengths and Challenges of the Narrative
While the Martian chapters deliver momentum and intrigue, some extended dialogue sequences made it challenging to track who was speaking, occasionally disrupting focus. Notably, Geryon does not reappear until more than halfway through the novel, at which point the narrative sharpens, and the stakes intensify. The earlier chapters involving Pandora and Midori do not clearly reconnect within this volume. Perhaps, their significance may emerge more fully in later books.
No Life but Immortality ends on a cliffhanger, clearly positioning itself as the foundation for the rest of the trilogy, including The Orphaned Earth and a forthcoming final volume.
This novel is a dense, investigative sci-fi mystery rich with description and intellectual ambition. Brus skillfully weaves intimate human connections with broader societal concerns—technological overreach, moral compromise, and the eerie pull of cult-like belief systems. At times, however, exposition overshadows character development, slowing the narrative where it might otherwise surge forward.
Final Thoughts: Who Should Read This Book?
Dystopian science fiction is not my preferred genre, and I struggled to connect emotionally with the characters. The novel demands careful reading, frequent backtracking, and copious notes to grasp its layered structure fully. Moreover, “Cold and darkness,” the author’s imagination blows my mind! Her world-building is extraordinary—cold, dark, and vast—and its ideas linger long after the final page.
Liudmila Brus, an Estonian author and video game writer, is clearly a formidable storyteller. Her scientific imagination is dazzling, and she introduces complex concepts with confidence and curiosity. English is not her first language, and the novel was translated from Russian, which may account for some editorial issues. There were also formatting issues in the Kindle edition, but they didn’t affect the story. A more extensive English-language line edit could have strengthened clarity and pacing.
Even so, No Life but Immortality by Liudmila Brus is an impressive debut to a trilogy that dares to ask difficult questions about identity, morality, and what it truly means to live forever. Readers who enjoy dystopian fiction, virtual reality narratives, and richly textured speculative worlds will find much to admire here. Liudmila Brus is just getting started—and she is absolutely one to watch.
Enjoy learning more about Liudmila Brus in this Six Elementals Interview with P.L. Stuart. For more of my book reviews, visit My Bodacious Blog.