“There are no jobs, there’s no fucking future,” he spat the words out, angrier than he’d meant, and Troy stepped back as though struck. “Why do you think I do this shit?” he said. He met Troy in the hallway between rooms. JD dressed quickly, smell of last night’s clothes filling his nostrils as soon as he was dressed. Ostensibly a thief, but with an interesting point of view, illustrated by a conversation he has with his ex: “I want to be with you, but the you that has a job, that gives a damn about his future.” This one goes a step further to describe a capitalism that has failed leaving countries, cities and people looking for alternatives. It's an interesting update too, with the first and second generations of this sub-genre really skewing towards rampant capitalism and showing the effects of that on people. It's about time someone did a good job at updating the cyberpunk genre for a more modern perspective. The job is to steal something in the real world from the apartment of the man who owns Zero Corporation (the makers of VOIDWAR).īut what JD actually steals isn't what he was told it was, and fairly soon he has Soo-hyun's cult leader after him as well as a retired covert operative employed by Zero Corporation on his tail, all while trying to make sense of what he's now in possession of. All of which makes an offer from JD's sibling Soo-hyun to make big money difficult to refuse. In the world of rampant climate change and political collapse an economy that's basically been taken over by robotic production makes it difficult for humans to make ends meet. In the city of Neo Songdo, a failed capitalist autonomous city-state that's located in Korea, Julius Dax "JD" makes his living in the real world as an on-call robot repairman and in the virtual world doing repossession jobs of digital property in a detailed online game called VOIDWAR. It's a perfectly fine choice for a convention-going fanboy who's looking for something to kill a random Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon but for the rest of us, you can go ahead and start the countdown from nine now, until we're ready for another astounding title from this high-volume publisher. To be clear, that doesn't make this a bad book at all indeed, that's precisely the problem, that it's just middlebrow decent enough that it will never offend anyone, but by definition will never be memorable to anyone either. This novel feels like White tore through the complete '80s work of William Gibson one summer, loved it and wanted to try one of his own, but couldn't come up with any original ideas himself, so just threw Gibson's books into a salad spinner until all the pieces came out in a slightly different order than before. White's Repo Virtual for a great example, part of that nostalgic retro obsession with '80s and '90s cyberpunk that seems to be coursing through the industry right now. The most frustrating thing about being a fan of a genre publisher, like I am with the science-fiction press Tor, is that for every amazing book they put out, we have to wade through ten mediocre ones, designed mostly for hardcore superfans who burn through a book a day and therefore have a much lower standard of quality than we do, essentially the literary equivalent of bingeing an entire season of Law & Order over a weekend because we're too lazy to get off the couch, and the show provides the barest minimal excuse we need to indulge ourselves. I would recommend this one to anyone wanting a diverse, gritty and humorous heist story with some excellent world building.ĭisclaimer: I received a digital copy from the publisher, Tor.com This book is definitely written as a standalone, but (for the first time ever) I actually found myself hoping for a follow up novel because I want to spend more time with the characters and world. These aspects of the story were never the focus, but simply included as normal aspects of society. Within this narrative, I found people of colour, ethnic minorities, non-binary people as well as gay and lesbian characters. I only wished this part of the story began earlier in the book so that I could have spent more time with the AI.įinally, I have to mention the diversity in this book. The narrative explored the ideas surrounding personhood in a thoughtful, and sometimes humorous, way. This perspective was written in such an interesting and unique way, which made for a very engaging experience. I think this would be an excellent book to recommend for fans of the new video game, CyberPunk 2077.Īnother one of my favourite aspects of the story was the artificial intelligence angle. I loved how the virtual reality overlay that obscured, but did not completely, hide the poverty and crime of the world. The world building in this one was absolutely fascinating. It’s always a great feeling when one of your most anticipated books lives up to the hype! Repo Virtual was exactly the futuristic cyberpunk heist I wanted!
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