Early accessOur review is finished and published here ahead of time. Scion becomes our Book of the Day on September 16, 2026.

Scion by James Islington book cover for the Book of the Day science fiction book review

Our score

4.2/ 5

Excellent

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EDITION PUBLISHEDSeptember 2026

PublisherSaga Press

Genres

Fiction Science Fiction Thriller

Themes

Immortality bought by the ultra-richDebt and work under corporate controlBody modification and what counts as humanWho gets to end or extend a life

Scion

Name: Scion
Author: James Islington

James Islington

James Islington trades the sprawling fantasy of The Will of the Many for a lean cyberpunk thriller. Scion follows Azure, a licensed assassin of the ultra-rich immortals called lifers, on the one job he hates most: keeping a lifer alive. It is short, funny, violent, and sharpest in its final stretch.

The Review

Our take

Scion opens with Azure losing a fistfight to something that used to be a person. The thing across from him has been grown and grafted into a wall of engineered muscle, and Azure, heavily modified himself, has to work out mid-swing which of his own upgrades can take another hit and which will quit on him first. Islington offers no orientation. You learn this world the way Azure's body does, by finding where the limits are, and by the time the fight ends you know more about how money and flesh trade places here than a prologue could have told you.

The rule at the center is a nasty one. The very rich have bought their way out of dying, and the only brake left is people like Azure, licensed to kill them. He does it for a paycheck because he's buried in debt like everyone else below the lifer line, which gives every joke he makes a sour aftertaste. Then a contract lands that runs backward: protect a lifer. The job pairs him with an older woman who refuses to be impressed by him, and their bickering is the best thing in the book. Each of his sarcastic asides gets returned with interest, and under the banter Islington keeps pressing on the real question, what a life is worth once some people can buy more of it.

At 240 pages, it moves. The chapters are short, the first-person voice never lets up, and a second thread, a job that went wrong years ago and still nags at Azure, pulls the plot between set pieces. The compression has costs. Anyone who reads much cyberpunk will spot a couple of the turns well before Azure does, and the supporting cast mostly exists to hand him his next problem; two of the women closest to him deserved far more room than they get. The narration also leans on the same cheap jabs about age and weight more often than the joke can bear. Readers coming from the Hierarchy books should expect plot and attitude up front, with the tech sketched in rather than explained.

Why you should read

Readers who loved The Will of the Many and want a faster ride
Fans of Altered Carbon's class war over bought immortality
Sarcastic first-person narrators in the Murderbot mold
Assassin stories built around a bodyguard job

What to expect

Short chapters and a single first-person voice
Opens mid-fight with almost no setup
Worldbuilding sketched in rather than explained
An open ending that sets up a series

Then the last thirty pages arrive, and Islington reminds you why he's worth following into any genre he likes! A thread you'd stopped watching turns out to be holding the whole job together, and everything Azure thought he understood rearranges itself around it. I won't say how. The book stops on an open door rather than a resolution, with Azure standing in it, his jokes intact and a lot less certain about the work he's spent his life doing.

Review copyThanks to NetGalley, James Islington, and Saga Press for the advance reader copy. The review above is independent and all opinions are our own.

Reviewed by John · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.2/ 5

Excellent

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Common questions

What is Scion about?: Scion opens with Azure losing a fistfight to something that used to be a person. The thing across from him has been grown and grafted into a wall of engineered muscle, and Azure, heavily modified himself, has to work out mid-swing which of his own upgrades can take another hit and which will quit…
Is Scion worth reading?: We scored Scion 4.2 out of 5. James Islington trades the sprawling fantasy of The Will of the Many for a lean cyberpunk thriller. Scion follows Azure, a licensed assassin of the ultra-rich immortals called lifers, on the one job he hates most: keeping a lifer alive. It is short, funny, violent, and sharpest…