Seth Haddon’s sci-fi debut Volatile Memory (out July 22, 2025) is one of the best novellas I’ve read in a while. The book follows Wylla, a trans woman, as she tries to live her life as a scavenger. She, like other scavengers, goes after bounties and searches for important items to sell in order to earn credits. In this world, each person has at least one mask made by VisorForge that they wear that gives them some sort of ability associated with the animal the mask is based on. Wylla’s go-to mask is a Rabbit: good for finding hidden threats and for always being on the lookout. Other masks include Ox (for superior strength), Chameleon (for camouflage), and Rattlesnake (for poisonous attacks). When our story begins, Wylla has just received a summons, along with other scavengers, to some backwater planet for an unheard-of mask. It’s a fight to get to it, but what she finds on the body of a dead woman is a mask she calls Hawk. Wylla has never seen or heard of a mask like this before, and trying to keep it might just undo everything she has ever done to become the person she knows she is on the inside.
This novella is compared to This is How You Lose the Time War in its description, but I think a more accurate comparison would be A Memory Called Empire. Inside the Hawk mask is the consciousness—or the mimic of one—of a woman named Sable who died with the mask on her face and who sent out the communication that Wylla picked up. From the moment Wylla puts it on, she finds herself talking to Sable, and Sable makes a home inside Wylla’s head. Sable is to Wylla what Yskandr is to Mahit. Much like Yskandr and Mahit, Sable and Wylla try to piece together just what happened to Sable to kill her because Sable cannot remember. I adore A Memory Called Empire, so I knew from the first chapter that I was going to adore this too. There is something about the genre of weird science fiction where someone is stuck with another person’s voice in their head that I just love, and this is another story that I can safely put into that pile.
The point of view works great. It’s almost a first person/second person hybrid, kind of like Harrow the Ninth, where we’re getting Sable’s perspective of everything Wylla is going through. Sable alternates between using the “we,” “I,” and “you” pronouns to describe the events of the story, and the shifts in perspective work really well. I wasn’t sure how the romance was going to work, but Haddon does a spectacular job setting up who Sable is now and who Wylla has worked so hard to become; it’s basically meant to be. The world here is huge, but Haddon’s might be one of the only novellas I’ve read recently that benefits from the short length. This story could have been so much longer and so much bigger, but focusing on Sable and Wylla’s relationship and who they are as people more than anything made it feel like 133 pages was just right. I couldn’t put the book down. It’s everything I wanted it to be and more, and it’s so fast-paced that I finished it almost before I was ready. There is a big focus on revenge in this piece, and I was rooting for Sable and Wylla every step of the way as they worked so hard to achieve it. I really don’t have any critiques on it! This was a story made for me, and I adored every second of it. I hope Haddon writes more science fiction in the future.
Trigger warnings for: lots of death, underage marriage, assault, talk of fertility, gruesome murders, suicide, and some dysphoria.
