Stick it to the trillionaires with the debut heist novel Hammajang Luck.
Makana Yamamoto’s sci-fi debut Hammajang Luck is the perfect escapist read for these trying times. Edie has been released from prison and comes home after eight years, determined to go straight, except something about their release is off. The partner who betrayed them to the cops in the first place is waiting for them, Angel Huang. Of course, Angel has a job for Edie—the biggest and last score they will ever need.
Edie says no and tries to find a job on the Kepler Space Station, but they’ve been blacklisted by the industry that controls the space station for all practical purposes. Joyce Atlas is a tech trillionaire with a thin veneer of philanthropy, but his neurologic tech is making people easier to manipulate, control, and harm. With no job or propsects, Edie is forced to turn to Angel, and the more they learn about Atlas and his plans, the more disgusted they are. The job quickly becomes personal.
Angel forms a crew of the best, from muscle to acrobatics to grifters. Edie is the runner in charge of helping them get in and out of Atlas’s secure vault. The space station is riddled with tunnels, but Edie still knows how to run through the space station’s guts while paying their respects to the station. It’s easy to die in these tunnels, and Edie has to deal with deadly electric discharge, dead ends, and venting atmosphere. While Angel’s plan seems solid, Edie wrestles with the guilt of possibly going back to jail and leaving their family in the lurch—their pregnant sister Andie and her two kids. But if Edie can help Angel pull off this job, then their money problems are solved forever.
The novel’s cover promises a sci-fi heist, and that’s what Yamamoto delivers. The sci-fi setting and focus on queer, underdog characters was a refreshing break from the often fantasy settings of other heist novels with perhaps one or two queer characters. Much like heist films such as the Ocean’s franchise, there’s an ensemble cast of characters to keep track of with all their specialties. Some of them become more multi-dimensional than others, such as Duke and Nakano, an older couple of queer grifters on which the plot hinges as they have to hook Atlas’s attention, but each character has a clear role to play in the story.
One reason the ensemble cast doesn’t get as much attention is due to the closer POV. At the heart, this is Edie’s story, and the reader sees Edie’s internal struggles as they try to piece their life back together after prison. Edie needs to reconnect with their sister and niece and nephew, and they feel sharply that they haven’t helped raise the kids or assist with the finances. Their niece Paige has cancer, and the extra financial strain has left Edie’s sister picking up additional shifts even at eight months pregnant. Because of the close focus on Edie, their family commitments are more fully developed than some of the heist characters, but the extra focus makes Edie’s internal struggles feel more intense as the guilt and fear of arrest weigh them down.
Where the novel shines is how queerness is woven into the story without being the center piece. It’s an accepted part of the worldbuilding, and Edie’s pronouns are never questioned, but rather recognized immediately. This acceptance doesn’t mean there isn’t injustice, but rather re-focuses the issue onto class. As the story progresses, the depths of Atlas’s disregard for the station’s impoverished people becomes evident, impacting how the crew chooses to proceed. The queer-friendly worldbuilding in a somewhat dystopic space station was an enjoyable addition to the story.
At the novel’s heart, it leans into the fun of the heist and away from the issues—such as class—that are brought up. Ultimately, I found the balance to be effective except in one instance: Edie’s rebound after prison. They spent eight years locked up, and some brief references suggest it was a pretty bad time. That being said, Edie seems largely unaffected by their time in prison other than missing out on the lives of their sister and her kids. While it’s clear Yamamoto chose to focus on the romp, it felt untrue to Edie’s character and the situation that a poor, queer person wouldn’t carry some trauma from the prison system.
In their bio on the back cover, Yamamoto says they love “imagining what the future might look like for historically marginalized communities.” This novel is a strong debut in that sense. One of my favorite parts of the novel was the inclusion of Pidgin. Including Pidgin and other cultural references to Hawai‘i in the far future is a powerful pushback against the homogenizing force of science fiction. I look forward to reading Yamamoto’s next novel and seeing how they continue to accomplish this artistic goal.
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Reference: Yamamoto, Makana. Hammajang Luck [Harper Voyager, 2025].
POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.
