Madeline Ashby's new novel, Company Town, starts out like your average futuristic novel about a ninja bodyguard hired to protect unionized sex workers on a city-sized oil drilling platform off the coast of Canada. Then it starts getting weird. I'm talking time-hopping, artificial superintelligence weird. Serial killers with invisibility suits weird. And I haven't even gotten to the part about the traumatized children of K-pop stars. If you like your science fiction kaleidoscopically strange yet infused with astute observations about where current technology might take us, you need to pick up a copy of Company Town right now.

Our hero, Hwa, is a martial arts expert with a weakness that turns out to be her greatest strength. A neurological disease has left her face disfigured, which means that she is rendered virtually invisible on the ubiquitous augmented reality systems that everyone wears. She uses this to her advantage, becoming a kind of ghost in the surveillance machine as she protects women in the sex workers union. As long as the oil keeps flowing, business is good for the ladies, and all Hwa has to worry about are drunk johns who refuse to pay. But when a mysterious fire destroys one of the oil rigs, Hwa loses her brother—and a new company called Lynch, Ltd. steps in to buy out the struggling city. That's when things get complicated.

Ashby's novel isn't just a simple tale of good guys and bad guys. Almost immediately, Hwa's loyalties are divided and it's never clear whether she's on the right side of justice. Because of her unique skills, the Lynch security team wants to hire Hwa to protect the company heir, Joel. It will mean a considerable boost in salary and room to move up, but she'll have to leave her working-class community behind. Plus, the sex workers need her more than ever, because a terrifying serial killer has been picking them off one by one. Hwa is torn, especially when she discovers that Joel is actually a good kid who wants to help his family get into the alternative energy business. It's not Joel's fault that the family is being targeted for destruction by AIs from the future. To top it off, she kind of has the hots for Lynch security chief Daniel.

One of the delightful elements of this novel is how off the rails it gets. Ashby isn't content with setting up a noir thriller about megacorporations and murder. She's got to throw in time travel and cyborgs and conspiracies within conspiracies. Sometimes the author drops one of the many plates she's juggling, but for the most part she'll delight you with white-hot action and zippy dialogue.

What ultimately sells Company Town isn't its crazy plot, however. It's Ashby's mastery of the small technological details that make her world feel utterly real. When she's not writing dark science fiction, Ashby works as a foresight consultant for tech companies, advising them about possible future uses of emerging tech, and her expertise is on full display here. One of my favorite scenes is when Hwa is trying to get surveillance footage from a bar where one of the murdered sex workers spent the last minutes of her life. It turns out the best view she can get is from the bartender's augmented reality contact lenses, where he's using facial recognition algorithms to identify all his customers and track which of them ordered first. He then switches to an infrared mode to determine whether each chilled drink has reached the desired temperature. These mundane uses of augmented reality feel completely plausible, giving the novel the grounding it needs to succeed as a narrative.

Like Ashby's previous novels in the Machine Dynasty series, Company Town can get intensely violent at times. But rather than reveling in gothic horrors as she does in her Machine Dynasty books, Ashby has a lighter touch here. Things are ugly and dystopian of course, but there's a kind of jaunty, action-movie humor at play. Hwa's disturbing relationship with her mother, a former K-pop star obsessed with her lost youth, reads like pitch-black satire. The result is a novel that feels like a bizarro mix of tropes that somehow fit together to form a tapestry of what our future might really look like. As I said earlier, the book sometimes suffers from overreach. But even when it stumbles, our hero Hwa drives the story onward into scenes of gripping originality. You won't be able to put this one down until the end, which is more insane than a Bruce Lee movie and twice as mind-blowing.