Tag: Cyberpunk

** This book was provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review **

Claiming de Wayke is not a normal science fiction novel. There, I got that out of the way. A hodge-podge of Fight Club, The Matrix, Neuromancer and Trainspotting; Mr. O’Shea has created a marvelous semi-dystopian world where the divide between those who immerse their lives into the Scape, and those who despise those who spend their time in the Scape is very very real. Our protagonist, Mr. Tayto, just wants to spend his days doing the least amount of work necessary to stay jacked into his halo as much as possible.

Then someone approaches Tayto in the Scape: someone searching for Tayto’s brother and the amazing technology he supposedly has invented and liberated.

From there, our adventure begins.

The thing I loved the most about this book was the world and culture building. Mr. O’Shea, very smartly, starts the book out with a note about how the voice and language of the book is going to progress. One narrator, the one in the Waykean world, is in the first-person voice of Tayto: a mish-mash of Southern Irish slang with a lot of invective. The other narrator is the voice inside the Scape, Tayto’s voice (in proper English) in second-person. I found the difference very refreshing and definitely set the sterility of the Scape apart from the gritty reality of the Wayke.

Claiming de Wayke is a book you have to pay attention to. It is not a casual read, nor something you can merely skim to work through. This, however, is a benefit and not a detriment to the novel. The rich details, and wide variety of life experiences Tayto runs into in his weird journey really elevate his humanity: despite him trying to always escape it. I, as a reader, really felt for Tayto and the really really outlandish situations he has the misfortune of falling into.

Though mostly in the “real” world, I’d definitely have to put Claiming de Wayke on my quintessential cyberpunk reading list if nothing else than for being a fresh approach.

** This book was provided to me by the author in exchange for a fair and honest review **

It’s funny how one doesn’t realize how much they miss a solid slab of cyberpunk until they have one under their nose. Mr. Price absolutely owns the genre with Reality Testing. It’s got everything a good cyberpunk novel should have: dystopian future, techno-bio-enhancements, specialized slang, and massive classist conspiracy.

The story opens up with our protagonist, Mara Kinzig, waking up to having apparently murdered someone she does not know. Mara had signed up to basically have her dreams harvested (oh yeah, and that’s just the tip of the techno-weird iceberg for this amazing world), but now is apparently in this situation.

Mara then does the only thing she knows to do and heads out for the tiny apartment she previously shared with her girlfriend. Here’s where it starts to get weird. Mara, apparently, isn’t Mara. It’s her brain and personality, but it’s been all decanted into a different body.

Then the real trouble starts. Mara is hunted by the law, and a lot of bad things happen forcing her to seek out the Vanguard: a sort of utopian semi-terroristic cell of outcasts trying to change the current plight of the world.

That’s all I’m going to share because this story is very very hard to describe without diving deep into the spoilers.

Mr. Price definitely excels at creating a very gritty and highly polarized world where the divide between the haves and the have-nots is utterly massive. This dystopia is an absolute chef’s kiss of “wow, everybody got fucked really badly.”

The twists and turns of Reality Testing are what really make it a winner, though. We meet characters who, despite all odds, still find faith in humanity in a world where people are rapidly removing bits of what makes them human. We have a transformed Berlin where the “old ways” of building/living/working/polluting are looked down upon with such disdain that it basically becomes criminal to exist. The darkness set up in the first part of the story is so palpable that every small step towards the revealing of answers seems like a herculean task.

This book is really really fun, but, at the same time, Mr. Price tricks the reader into thinking about what is going on in our own world through acid-etched carbon nantotube silica lenses. Don’t sleep on this book