You Need To Watch Dynamo Dream

The first episode of Dynamo came out yesterday and it had not really been on my radar. I saw footage of CGI being worked on for this, but I didn’t know it was for this title. There’s a scene where the main character walks onto a lift and is brought down a few levels which had been all over my Youtube quite some time ago, so you may recognize that scene as well.

Little did I know that it was for something like this.

If you like cyberpunk but also hate the current aesthetic Hollywood has placed it in, as in, regressive and aggressively technophobic borderline, or full-on racist Asian milieu—this is for you. The very first thing you will notice is that the extremely beautiful shots of this cyberpunk world look quite different than what we’ve been seeing. Yet we also recognize this as a cyberpunk aesthetic as well. The progression of technology and the oppressive state has given way to a recognizable dystopic motif, that’s clear, but there is obvious care to not ground it in the 80s fear of Asian technologies taking over western culture.

There are numerous tracking shots interspersed, reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell when there were orchestral arrangements that basically just showcase slice-of-life moments. And as in that movie, so too are these shots so good at providing soft worldbuilding moments and texture. Also: it is just completely gorgeous. The CGI looks as good as Blade Runner to me. Some things must be practically designed and other things support those vivid details in really effective compositions.

Now, people who think cyberpunk isn’t punk enough, I know you’re coming for me. But isn’t it just cyber now because there’s no punk in the subgenre anymore? No; wrong; incorrect; literally never been true, except for within the mainstream depiction of the subgenre. But that is literally the most diluted, co-opted state of the sub-genre and it arguably applies to ALL genres.

So, having said that, this is definitely cyberpunk in my book, and it is in a new, subversive way; which I happen to love. The agency the protagonist, a young woman who is clearly impoverished, hinges on futuristic technology which is tied to disenfranchisement and oppression.

In a world where everybody is eating what appears to be fast food, our woman is side hustling as a salad vendor. She makes small salads inside of cups and sells them, selling literal nourishment to people who never receive any.

Then, when the state is about to commit violence in front of her, she uses what she has at hand to disrupt it and save lives—which catapults her into the awareness of a faction we do not yet know, and subsequent events in future episodes.

All I can see is: yes, more of this, please. Please watch this. It is free! It is so good. And I hope someone picks up this show or supports the creators, or whatever needs to happen to continue this happens.

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A

As for me, if you like this I am on Medium, I appear over @ cyberpunks.com and I am on Twitter and Goodreads.

User Error Is The Undercover Through-line You Never Knew The Glitch Logs Needed

The third installment of The Glitch Logs, User Error, sees Glitch strapped for cash after her decision in the previous novel, Overclocked. Rather than laying low after surviving a series of unfortunate events, she has little choice but to take on a suspiciously well-paying job from her fixer to recoup her losses. Glitch has to go undercover at an elite university, providing cyber expertise in an ostensibly simple op centered on a student who ends up being more than what she seems.

After a fast-paced, thriller-like structure in the previous books, User Error could be a downbeat in this mixtape, allowing some breathing room to characterize further and flesh out Glitch by way of expanding on things briefly eluded to in previous novels.

One of the favorite things about this series is the author making pretty much every detail important.

I reread the previous books before starting User Error because I was all but certain past events would be expounded upon in the new book. I was pleasantly surprised when a small part of the first book comes back in a big way, even as the plot of the second book spirals into User Error. It is incredibly satisfying as a reader, knowing that everything you’re reading is pertinent and serves to both characterize and facilitate the plot.

After seeing a piece of the corporate world and, later, the underworld—the switch up to an undercover job at a prep school allows for some social commentary as the stratification of class situates Glitch and the other characters in the story. How, and why, Glitch chose to be a runner is nicely brought together here. It’s also just fun that the school ends up being as dangerous as the corporate job. Glitch is out of her comfort zone and element, leading to some great, humanizing moments for the character so far.

As with the previous Glitch Logs, User Error expands the world, pulls back a bit more of the mystery surrounding Glitch’s past, and ends with more interesting questions than the reader arrived with. There are more fantastic hacking sequences with well-realized imagery, something the author also excels at—and more action sequences too. User Error delivers what was well-liked and worked well, and then expands on it and deepens the protagonist. She’s fallible, human, and best of all, you can see the through-line of how she comes to be this way from her past catching up to her.

You can purchase User Error here: https://www.glitchlogs.com/product/glitch-logs-user-error/

Why You Should Read Infomocracy & Null States (Of The Centenal Cycle)

“…despite all the Information available, people tend to look at what they want to see.”

Infomocracy and Null States, the first two books in the Centenal Cycle series by Malka Older, could be the scariest post-cyberpunk series I’ve read. In it, micro-democracy has proliferated across the globe. The governments of choice being, for the most part, megacorporations. Borders have shifted and changed in the world, reflecting a physical change reflecting how much of society operates on social media today: curating their spaces to consolidate people with the same (among other things) ideologies.

When the borders settled, groups of 100,000 people—called a centenal—vote in the corporation of their choice using another megacorporation-like system, aptly called Information. The ‘corp that gets the most votes, netting the “supermajority,” wins the global election as though it were a federal election, except that it’s global. Otherwise, the granular control of a centenal is left to the ‘corp voted in.

This is, of course, a very reductive explanation of the system.

One of the strengths in both Infomocracy and Null States is Malka’s attention to detail. This system of governance, as well as every facet of the fiction in fact, all feel incredibly well-realized and researched. Infomocracy can feel overwhelming in that regard sometimes. It is so unlike anything I have written that the text needs to do a lot of heavy lifting, communicating, and breaking down complex philosophy, politics, and other interlocking systems that are integral to understanding the world.

“Systems include their by-products; it all comes from the pattern of incentives they create. It’s how they make people think, how they make people behave.”

This is why both books were, in a way, incredibly terrifying to me. Malka spends time on all details, both small and large, such that it becomes impossible not to trace the reasoning behind micro-democracy evolving from society as we know it. Part of why it is so believable is that “democracy,” at least, as it is practiced currently, feels like it’s short-lived. At the same time, the idea that corporations will end up being in control seems correct to me. The world envisioned in the fiction then, in no small part due to micro-democracy, ends up conjuring a mixture of emotions. But, strangely, micro-democracy coupled with corporations is…optimistic in many ways, too. This different application of democracy which caters to the realities we are facing currently, becomes eerie in its inevitability.

Infomocracy does this while also threading a globe-trotting, thriller type conspiracy that unfolds within the now well-established micro-democracy system the reader is learning about. It ends up feeling a bit like a techno-thriller paired with political intrigue. The cracks in the system are beginning to be exploited, a powder-keg situation unraveling as it bounces from perspective to perspective.

While the thriller aspect to the book felt well done to me, the problem I encountered was that the world being communicated to me far outstripped the thriller plot unfolding, in terms of my interest. To the point where it felt, to me, like a sub-plot. I’m not sure how you fix that when you have to hold the reader’s hand explaining the setting. There are futuristic technologies involved as well, expounding the information that needs to be conveyed. Almost everything about an average person’s life experience in the setting is altered from today, a tremendous undertaking.

However, Null States does not have this problem. With much of the world established, it hits the ground running. An Information agent is assigned to a suspicious investigation in which a governor has died. During the course of their inquiry, the fiction feels more grounded than Infomocracy had. A globalized plot is still presents, stemming from the initial events and works to tie together a couple other predominate characters, all of whom are relevant to the events of the first book. This shift from having to explain the world to a more consistent human perspective—including some characters that expose the problems within the system—made for a more exciting plot. It springboards off the first novel wonderfully to create a richer, more rewarding experience in just about every way.

‘minimally traceable,” Shamus corrected him; “nothing is one hundred percent untraceable”—to Policy1st.’

Reflecting on both of these books, there are a few things my mind consistently wanders to regarding my consumption of the Centenal Cycle so far:

I think most often, I find myself a little bit awed at how deep the investment in the setting feels to me, most notably in micro-democracy itself as a sort-of living experiment, but the same can be said for each aspect of the setting, I think. The attention to detail is astounding sometimes. Especially because these details actively work to expose the flaws and vulnerabilities. Showcasing them quite predominately at times.

It feels like some kind of active exercise in what the spirit of critique is. Something rarely experienced in this day of age in social media. To display such affection and then examine it, interrogating something you’ve created—feels like something rare and genuine and novel, especially in cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk fiction. There is a sense that Malka is willing to burn it down, if that is where the experiment leads.

“…those may be exactly the people who pose the greatest threat to the system: the people who can still remember, with rancor and longing and the inevitable distortions of time, what things were like before.”

The characters all feel well-realized and often break tropes or archetypes. They are also intersectional and people of colour. On Malka’s Twitter, her pinned tweet is this: “I write for the people whose names get underlined in red by Microsoft Word”. I think that’s as apt and succinct as you can be about how the fiction feels. There is a starkly contrasted difference between the marginalized and the privileged. The numerous points of view produced in the fiction are as diverse as you’d expect them to be in the future. All the pitfalls of punk and punk-adjacent fiction are not present, either.

When it is all placed together, I think what I’ve read in these two books is the most interesting and progressive piece of post-cyberpunk fiction. It is aware, sharp, and incredibly smart. It is easy to imagine these books as formative works for people working in the genre going forward. And I can’t wait to find out how it ends.

“…democracy is of limited usefulness when there are no good choices, or when the good choices become bad as soon as you’ve chosen them, or when all the Information access in the world can’t make people use it.”

Neon Wasteland Augments Your Reading Experience

Chances are if you’re a part of any cyberpunk groups—be them on Reddit or Facebook, or other social media—you’ve seen some art by Rob Shields. His work is both gorgeous and distinctive. So a cyberpunk comic book filled with his art would be cause for celebration. An augmented reality comic? Heck yeah.

The artwork is inspired by 1980’s Japanese cyberpunk animation and the story is described as being Mad Max meets the Matrix on the Kickstarter page.

“Putting the Punk Back in Cyberpunk

At its core, Neon Wasteland is a satire about the world we live in, the real power and danger that we continue to uncover through technology and the seductive pull of artificial reality.  It’s about the constant struggle between our physical and digital identities and the value of human connection in a society where we seem to be increasingly alienated.”

You should see this panel using the augmented reality app.

At first, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like the AR experience. You use an app on your phone and then it animates on your screen; very simple instructions. I was blown away by how fun it was to read like this. When going through the spreads on my laptop, I laughed and giggled and was honestly floored by the detail of the animations and the effect it had on the overall experience. It feels new and just, well, fun as hell. It really does feel like a wild, over-the-top anime. It has clear themes, a one-of-a-kind aesthetic paired with a one-of-a-kind experience. There are some extremely cool augmented panels.

The first issue is about half the size of a trade and came as double page spreads, which fit how the phone app wants you to view the game. But you can still hold your phone in portrait and go one page spread to one page spread, if you like as well. I don’t want to go into the story too much, simply because with a first issue of a comic, what it’s about is often what #1 establishes. I’ll be picking up any future issues that might come out for sure.

Grab your own copy of Neon Wasteland #1 here: https://neonwasteland.bigcartel.com/

Systemic Trauma In Slow River

“She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?”

More than anything, Slow River is, at least to me, about trauma. It is explicit in its focus on abuse and trauma, but I didn’t find it graphic in its depictions “on-screen.” Even still, it is a heavy and it makes it more difficult to talk about for me, since my reviews are usually what I enjoyed and found novel about whatever it is I’m consuming. There’s child abusive, emotional, physical, sexual abuse. It is supposed to be disturbing, so it is not for everybody.

Published in 1995, Slow River tells the story of a young woman named Lore, who comes from a wealthy family who made their money and renown creating cutting-edge sewage reclamation plants. That life, however, comes crashing down when she’s kidnapped and ransomed. Her family doesn’t pay, Lore escapes her abductors, goes off the grid, and enters a criminal underground via Spanner, a grifter who’s willing to help her—so long as Lore pays her back, however she can.

The story alternates between Lore’s past and her present. When she gets out of the dark and seedy underbelly that is this underground and begins working at a plant owned by her very own former family. And her life before her decision to move on, recapping the events with Spanner, which rapidly becomes disturbing as they showcase what the marginalized need to do to get continue to get by, as well as the various coping mechanisms utilized to disassociate from the things done.

The business carries your name. You’re responsible.

Lore comes from a life of privilege but, interestingly, the amount of focus on both of these worlds took me by surprise. Her family and her loved ones in the past are revealed to be as monstrous, if not more at times, than the slums everybody fears in that world, and where she ends up. So much so that when she does get free of her captors—she doesn’t choose to go home to them. This time Lore spends recounting these events seem like her attempt at making sense of a decision that doesn’t seem to make any sense. She’s processing what happened in a dissociative state because she needs to understand why she so adamantly refuses to go back.

“You’re too damn.. glossy. Like a racehorse. Look at your eyes, and your teeth. They’re perfect. And your skin: not a single pimple and no scars. Everything’s symmetrical. You’re bursting with health. Go out in the neighborhood, even in rags, and you’ll shine like a lighthouse.”

Spanner doesn’t understand why she’d stay. At any point, she can return home…which ultimately means that, to Spanner, she doesn’t embody the streets as she does. When Lore and Spanner’s relationship shifts from being complete strangers helping each other for mutual, temporary benefits, to something romantic. It begins to unravel them both—creating a sense of tension and unease that paces with the story well because of the alternating structure of past and present until they collide and you finally figure things out at the same time Lore does.

It is also surprisingly in-depth and thorough about water reclamation and other technologies, like digital currency and invasion of privacy technology and things like that. I wasn’t sure if this water reclamation technology actually exists or if it was completely hypothetical. Whatever the case may be, it certainly seemed completely believable to me, authentic or not. And that believability induced an element of horror. The problem of polluted water, and the fact that we’re going to have significant issues with water in a few generations, become both solvable and instantly already commodified. A simple solution for some, yet not available to everybody.

“All Lore understood about Spanner was that whenever Lore reached for her, she wavered and was gone, like the shimmering reflection on the oily surface of the river.”

That credibility permeates every other facet of the story, augmenting and accenting the terrible and the very human, kind moments punctuating the character interactions.

It becomes clear with these interactions that anybody of substance in the fiction carries some kind of trauma, and it is all rooted in systemic issues. What is so different and so captivating about this is—even if it’s never a “fun” story to read—that it points the finger at capitalism in a way that is so brutal; so messy and bloody and bare, that everything is always focused on this overall larger picture; rather than typical cyberpunk, which encases some of these same thoughts in a far more different style. This is not sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There are no mirrorshades and trench coats and futuristic weapons. It discards the trappings entirely.

I liked that about it because I found it to be very honest fiction that seemed very personal. The fiction is pretty clear that this system, capitalism, that we trust for no good reason—hurts us and traumatizes us, and it’s absurd and mean and unfair. These things are far too real in the fiction and thus it refuses to make them vehicles for catharsis or power fantasies. It’s just not going to be that kind of story and you find that out from page one. The future becomes much more profoundly upsetting when the predators are shown to be manufactured by a system that manufactures trauma, and is far from being reclaimed.

“Spanner said, without looking up from the screen: ‘I’ll see you again. You’ll always need me.’”

He, She, & It Underscores The Importance Of The Masculine And The Feminine Coexisting

“No one born now will experience the world of gentle air we could walk through on impulse, without protection, winds and rain that caressed our skin, deep thick woods, grass like green hair growing thick from the moist earth. We were killing the world, but it was not yet dead.”

It is no surprise that at the end of He, She & It, the author, Marge Piercy, acknowledges A Cyborg Manifesto. Written by Donna Haraway in 1985, is critical of traditional notions of feminism and hoped to empower writers to move past the conventional notions of gender, among other things. Never had this manifesto been more taken to heart and explored by an author until He, She, & It.

Shira lives in a corporate city with rigid structures and rules that stamp out that systemically gaslight her on every front of her life. Her work is undervalued on purpose. Divorce procedures for her and her husband favor him. In an act of contempt and malice, he takes their son. Left with nothing, Shira goes home to her mother and town entrenched in traditional Jewish to face old relationships and old pain she has been running from all her life.

“Information shouldn’t be a commodity. That’s obscene. Information plus theology plus political bias is how we sculpt our view of reality.”

At the same time, a cyborg, a man, is created in the town Tikvah she now goes back to, and her grandmother, Malkah, who raised Shira, helps to program Yod. Where other cyborgs crafted by a brilliant scientist have gone mad and failed, Yod seems to thrive because of the genius programming of Malkah; which instills femininity in the cyborg, bringing a balance to the programming.

As Yod is discovering himself for the first time and Shira is rediscovering herself in her roots, another story unravels: an old story, told by Malkah in the form of a story left for Yod in the town’s network (this books version of cyberspace). The story is of a rabbi in the 1600s living in Prague who has conceived of creating a golem that would protect the Jews from their oppressors. When Joseph is created, however, it becomes clear that he possesses a mind and a will. One which is constrained in the same manner as the ghetto limits the Jews who live there.

“I cannot always distinguish between myth and reality, because myth forms reality and we act out what we think we are’ we know on many levels truths that are irrational as well as reasoned or experimental. Our minds help create the world we think we inhabit.”

This story parallels the main story and has elements of Jewish folklore and cultural history that is both fascinating and works very well to show technology in this future world as a kind of foil for the unknown. As well as how the unknown is always dealt with. In the past and the future, the golem and cyborg encounter similar problems and similar growth that further lends context that becomes pertinent when the question of both man’s humanity.

Shira struggles with being a tool for the corporation as it becomes clear that her losing her son and her choice to return home may be a part of a larger game of factions. Yod struggles with being designed as a tool and a weapon when he views himself as a man, and it becomes clear to anyone that chooses to interact with him that as he learns, much like a child, it is not his functions that define him, but almost everything but them. And this same struggle is mirrored in the past with Joseph, of course. Which creates a growing tension in both stories.

“Everything felt…unregulated. How unstimulated her senses had been all those Y-S years. How cold and inert that corporate Shira seemed as she felt herself loosening.”

As both stories unravel, the characters embody the author's exploration of feminist ideas that are at the most interesting in Yod. The only reason Yod can have a steady mind at all is because Malkah has imprinted into him what a mother might. Where other models solely possessed the scientist’s objectives and personality that was ideal for their being able to protect the town and be an effective weapon, the humanity of the very thing he creates never occurs to him.

“A weapon should not be conscious. A Weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt…”

Nor would does it seem to in the case of Joseph. There is a horror in realizing that neither creator understands the importance of the femininity in a person. They appear blind when they look inward to themselves, unable to reach the self-awareness that the interactions they most cherish stem from interactions with their family; particularly the women in their lives, and how they soften from their self-destructive attitudes around them. Yet they choose to create another being and bind the person to themselves only. Where their children are given over to their mothers in other to be made proper men. Their inventions relegated to their task and work; their humanity continually denied. Is it any wonder that the cyborgs before Yod; before Malkah went mad?

“…an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction.”

The women in the story do not exist only to embody these qualities and illicit this exploration. They all struggle themselves with their own notions of femininity. Shira with the cultural reprogramming from living in corporate society for so long. Malkah is almost the opposite of her, dwelling in masculine qualities and taking pride in going against the grain in her keen sense of sexuality that is predominate in every relationship she has ever formed. Each intuitively knows that a person needs masculine and feminine qualities. Or else be lost.

This exploration for the sense of self is never-ending, exemplified in the stories of the multi-generational, globally spanning women of the family; but also in every character. Cyberspace, a place for the mind to express its creativity, particularly in the case of problem-solving. Is similarly different from more masculine cyberpunk works. It is merely a medium, the inherent technophobia is not present at all. The thing to fear most, and fear you should, in He, She & It is always man and the systemic problems that comes with them. As long as the systems that run our lives embody the masculine, we are all doomed to a madness that serves only the creators.  

“Men so often try to be inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine, it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be a male.”

Square Eyes Is A User Interface Experience Unlike Any Other

Square Eyes features an interesting plot revolving around a woman named Fin who wakes up unsure of who she is after being unplugged from the network. She finds a woman seemingly living her life and slowly unravels a larger mystery about a program she was developing with enormous implications for basically everybody. That in itself would be enough to give it a read, in my opinion.

What is makes this graphic novel more compelling is the presentation. I have never seen futuristic, augmented reality better realized than in Square Eyes. The interface unfolds in intuitive ways, growing more complex as the story goes on and Fin begins to recall more and more of her past. It’s beautiful from a user interface standpoint but presenting the UI in tandem with the story makes for an intelligent and compelling experience; as a UI should be!

Additionally, every page; every spread feels carefully orchestrated to communicate details about the world. They are chock-full of them. It’s easy to get lost in pages roaming around spreads looking at details. This exploration is made even more satisfying due to the physical product itself, which is printed on nice, thick stock that lends even more substance to each page.

It’s a visual and physical feast that sets it apart. Other reviews, I have noticed, downplayed the plot; perhaps because the presentation is so incredible, the plot naturally takes a back seat for some. But I feel like what Square Eyes has to say about the world is prescient, especially regarding information being the number one commodity. Subtly reinforced throughout the reading experience, it can sometimes feel like the plot is shallow because it’s communicated all the time, presenting itself eerily within the world at all times.

With hindsight we now have regarding Cambridge Analytica’s role in various elections, and multiple other campaigns, the parts of the story where Fin feels disconnected from the world around her due to her being unplugged from the network seems like it might only days away for everyone. Our online experience is a curated bubble. But when everyone is in that bubble and you’re out of it, even when you’re attempting to interact with everyone physically, it’s a different kind of disconnect. Within this fiction, everyone is negotiating their own world in a more literal way due to the network. Their overlays are a far more curated experience that omits people even when they are right there with you.   

Notions around forms of online piracy and the ways they might intersect with social class throughout, illustrated further by the interface that blooms from Fin’s own hands, make for an accessible and empathetic approach to communicate technological anxieties that feel new and fresh. Anyone can understand this because of the physicality of everything to do with the product. It’s as real as your hands pressing the next, thick page aside to make room for the next, and that’s a unique, cyberpunk story only available through Square Eyes.

Salt Fish Girl Intersects Genres, Gender, And Culture

“This is a story about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places”

Salt Fish Girl is no ordinary offering; in fact, it is very clearly cyberpunk, specifically biopunk. It’s also, in part, magical realism—as it interweaves mythological components. This intersectionality in terms of genre makes for a uniquely fascinating contribution to the cyberpunk sub-genre. 

“I was a sheltered child, living out my parents’ utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.”

Miranda grows up in a futuristic Canada that is dominated by corporations while struggling with being a minority. On top of her not being around people from her own culture, she also is born with a strange smell, reminiscent of “cat piss” that seems to wean as she gets older but results in an isolating and challenging childhood.

“I was a sheltered child, living out my parents’ utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.”

Paralleling Miranda’s story is one of Nu Wa, a creation story of a Chinese goddess who births humankind and eventually chooses to become one, born as Nu Wa. Similarly to Miranda, Nu Wa’s experience is one of poverty and classism that allows for her exploitation. These two stories elegantly depict complex systemic issues, such as stratification of class that transcends generations.

“When you own nothing, it’s hard to believe you have anything to lose. I can’t say what it was that made me follow the strange woman, except that it took more weakness than strength.”

Nu Wa and Miranda are both taken advantage of by people in a higher class, using their poverty to co-opt their intellectual property and personhood. For Miranda’s family to navigate society more easily, her father tries to trace the source of a rumor that Miranda’s smell is curable. Corporations are also mass-producing human clones as a source of cheap labor, it appears that biotechnologies, both sanctioned and unsanctioned by these corporations, is more pervasive than people are aware. As more and more people seem to be contracting something dubbed the “dreaming disease”—which appears to unlock generational memories—people are committing suicide and disappearing. And Miranda is beginning to remember some things herself.

“Why shed blood when people can be brought and sold so easily?”

The story is steeped with culture and the cultural issues that come along with them. From the different smell of other ethnicities cause ostracization to family dynamics and the very particular ways the corporations leverage the marginalization of the main characters. A fringe benefit of this authenticity is how the cyberpunk motifs resonate much more profoundly.

“What is the point of honour if it is always used against you?”

Ruse Continues A Compelling, Intersectional Young Adult Cyberpunk Story

CW: Spoilers for Want, the prequel to Ruse.

Ruse is a continuation of Want, which I’ve written about before. This novel picks up right after Want, where the fallout of their heist against Jin Corp is felt amongst the group in different ways.

All grieving their friend in different ways, all fractured by the loss—they are given little time to cope. When Lingyi flies to Shanghai to helps an estranged childhood friend, the gang becomes embroiled in another corporate plot that centers Jason’s, now a girlfriend of sorts, Daiyu.

This culminates into a mystery with Jin corp somehow at the center, placing Daiyu in a situation where her loyalty and familial bonds are tested. Her father is up to no good yet again, and before the crew is able to heal fully, they must pull together to protect each other and, hopefully, deal another blow to Jin.

The move to Shanghai is compelling and a breath of fresh air (ha!), except not really, as it’s similarly polluted. Jin corp is building a superstructure meant to help with that pollution…. while also making a lot of money, of course. Storefronts and filters that clean the air, as well as new, high-end real estate, means that Jin and his company is poised to more than recoup their losses.

It’s another fun and subversive young adult story for cyberpunk, and, as the cover suggests, it centers some other characters, which was welcome. Lingyi and Iris are a bit more fleshed out as a couple, their dynamics more integral to the story. There are some heart strings being played, their identities, including being a same sex couple, are never performative or fetishized. My only lamentation is not having more time spent with them, in fact, as the story kept jumping back to Jason and Daiyu drama after the initial setup.

Cindy Pon knows her characters well, and they spill onto the page nicely. It’s a page-turner that fits in some critical questions about the environment while maintaining teenage drama and more heists, hijinks, and middle fingers to systemic oppression.

In This Cyberpunk Novel, Truth Is In The Eyes Of The Mindplayer

“You’ve got to look while it’s happening…Otherwise you miss seeing it the way it should be seen.”

With first wave cyberpunk in full swing in 1987, Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers represents somewhat of an anomaly. While cyberspace was the predominate playground for most cyberpunk at that time, there are no runners traversing digital lines into some corporations' information vaults lined with protective ICE. Instead, a kind of cyberspace exists only to facilitate mind-to-mind contact, lucid dreaming, and mind-altering substances.

Allie is a mind criminal who uses a number of banned substances and illegal devices before she's actually busted by the mind police. When a friend named Jerry steals a mindcap and convinces her to use it, her mind is left with lasting damage. He dumps her off to get help but they both get snatched, starting their very separate journeys.

“Does all of this really mean that much to you? It’s just stuff. Jerry. It’s just expensive stuff. You’re risking your - your self for a goddamn nouveau couch?”

Turns out instead of serving time, you can become a mindplayer—encompassing several disciplines that people use to alter their state of consciousness. Roughly, these services are kind of forms of therapy, though there are also neurosis peddlers too, so who knows. Rather than go to jail, Allie decides to become a mindplayer.  After all, if you mess yourself up enough then they can just scrub your mind, at least, ostensibly you can. No big deal, right?

Mindplayers is at its absolute best when its exploring ideas around psychosis and how the people who meet and interact with one another, mold and shape each other; with or without their knowledge. This is taken to extremes when people meet mind-to-mind, navigating the contours of one another's consciousness. Opening the flood gates and exposing this contact for all sorts of allegories.

Thankfully, with subject matter like this there is no poverty tourism or fetishization, or even hyper-sexualism that is often present in this wave of cyberpunk books. Instead, the judiciary system decides Allie is a criminal and her best option as presented to her, is to assimilate into the system that labels her a threat, or else suffer extreme repercussions. While she may have been on a dangerous trajectory, as it's implied that she had been using a lot of other mind-altering illegal substances, but not mindcaps, to be in a continual altered state, it's interesting to me that in this story, the omnipresence is actually something systemic. There is no "evil" corporation. It's just the state. It analyzes her, determines she has value due to her brain chemistry, and immediately commodifies her.

“Anyone’s capable of developing delusions under the right conditions.”

The majority of the story is Allie undergoing this training and the obstacles she faces, which change her mind in unexpected ways. And the situations she's put in with her clients in order to work off this debt are inherently dangerous and each of them leaves an "after taste" on the mind. People's fetishes, violent desires, and neurosis become weaponized, physical forces in a medium like mind-to-mind contact. So in an effort to commodify her she is also dehumanized and risks losing her sense of self. With the alternative being jail. It’s a compelling and different. To connect mind-to-mind you use technology that attaches to the optic nerve (typically, though there are exceptions), which means peoples’ eyes are removed. They sometimes need to purchase new ones when the old ones wear out, and they can become status symbols when people buy cats eyes or ones associated with different gem stones. Though a bit on the nose, it leads to both of these kinds of people not being able to see things for what they truly are, whether oppressed by the system or apart of it.

The only downside to a narrative exploring this kind of subject matter is that it necessarily feels quite loose, and dreamy, which is not indicative of a genre generally known for frenetic pacing. I could see it being off putting to people reading the sub-genre frequently. While most of the subversions of masculine cyberpunk are welcome, this did make it hard to get invested in. I wanted to get to the next exploration of the waking or subconscious mind. While the story came to a satisfying conclusion, and the format for which it's presented in makes sense, the pacing was hindered by it.

“Do you know there are no longer any actors alive today who still have their own eyes?…It seems strange. Drawing on life and looking at it through artificial eyes.”

On another positive note, though, another welcome subversion indicative of Cadigan's work is how she writes her protagonists. I mentioned that there is no hyper-sexualization, but it's more so that sexuality doesn't play much of a role in the story at all. While Allie has relationships with others, the story rarely if ever focuses on the physicality of anything. It’s on point for the story being told and contributes to its uniqueness.

Additionally, masculine cyberpunk and feminine cyberpunk tend to be most different with how embodiment is handled. Masculine leans toward mind over body; feminine gives far more weight to a persons' body comprising their overall identity. Mindplayers falls somewhere in the middle. Later, in Synners, Cadigan has made up her mind about this. But here mind-to-mind contact is more of extrapolation between people's interactions in real life. In that way, embodiment matters. But it always feels like a medium, with not much weight really being attributed to it beyond that. Allie is simply not a physical person, she continually reiterates that she has always had an active mind and been in her head, rather than a busy social life. The minor details of her life, from her perspective, truly fall away in the story. For good and, sometimes, at the expense of a more thematically tight narrative. It’s compelling to see the starting of a throughline that would ultimately lead to Synners, which feels like it benefited greatly from this against the grain tale.

“Not a single thing that’s passed between us has been real and yet you’ve been hunting me like the hound of heaven.”

The Girl Who Was Plugged In Is Must Read Proto-Cyberpunk

“It’s a lucky girl who can have all the fun she wants while doing good for others, isn’t it?”

Published in 1973, James Tiptree Jr may not have created cyberpunk, but pretty much wrote cyberpunk. The only major thing missing is the injection of The New Frontier trope. Full on cyberspace found in Neuromancer isn’t present. When people discuss proto-cyberpunk fiction this short fiction piece should be a major component, especially when looking for non-masculine works within the-subgenre that don’t get put on must read lists as much as they ought to (I’m working on mine presently, by the way).

In just 36 pages, it tells the story of 17-year-old P. Burke in the near future who makes a suicide attempt that is denied by a bureaucracy. Instead, she is offered a job presented as the opportunity of a lifetime. She is to be a remote, broadcasting her consciousness into a 15-year-old clone with receivers built into it, but otherwise completely devoid of sentience. This body is crafted into the ideal image for the consumers who will be watching her on a feed. The job? Simply live her life, entertaining the consumers glued to their feeds, what are explicitly drawn to her as a desirable commodity, even though we know as the reader her job is essentially Sex Sells.  Her actual objective is to use selected products she’s supposed to like so that others may see them and buy them. After all, they are the best products if she likes them.  

“And here is our girl, looking—

If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)”

It’s capitalism as we know it with one major difference: there’s no ads. They’ve been banned. Kind of. The neon tinged fever dream-like streets we’ve come to associate with cyberpunk focuses on the way in which people living in capitalism become consumers in unsuspecting ways. Although there are no ads exactly, this only means companies have adapted, creating new ways of getting people to buy. Most predominantly: product placement. I imagine this might just be starting as a thing in 1973, but I couldn’t speak intelligently on that. Turns out it was a reasonable anxiety to have back then; go figure.

These new gods of society, as they are called often, are fickle; moving from new fad to new fad so quickly that companies cannot cash in well enough. And so they need their own god, controlled by them.

The Girl Who Was Plugged In is both explicit and stark in its condemnation of the ways in which society dictates every acceptable action a woman may take to accrue some modicum of power. Even when Delphi—the persona which was created for the real live P Burke, described as being an ugly woman and is kept in a basement somewhere—accrues said power, temporarily becoming indispensable because she is a taste maker—her power is only a loan, and as fleeting as the masses interest; never truly accrued and earned and kept like the puppeteers behind the scenes truly benefiting from societal structures. And it also has very real limits, as we find out.

“Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll have people behind you whose job it is to select the most worthy products for you to use. Your job is just to do as they say. They’ll show you what outfits to wear at parties, what suncars and viewers to buy, and so on. That’s all you have to do.”

When she meets a young man who falls in love with her, his desire is linked to her body only. Even though he is the son of the man who owns the company and described as essentially woke and awake of the ways in which the system preys upon the weak. He does not know that a remote exists. He never actually sees the woman behind Delphi, even though everything beyond her presentation is present as well. He doesn’t want to know her mind. His rage is tied to his ability to own his notion of what a free Delphi is, never asking her what she wants or needs. The comfortable feeling that what he wants to consume is in front of him parallels the damage well-meaning allies, that are actually just a part of the same system of control, visit on people tied up in systemic oppression is disturbingly articulate.

A biting critique throughout, and a through line for non-masculine cyberpunk works, it’s a formative piece of literature for the sub-genre. One that does not feature some of the more problematic aspects first wave cyberpunk often is critiqued for.

“Every noon beside the yacht’s hydrofoils darling Delphi clips along in the blue sea they’ve warned her not to drink. And every night around the shoulder of the world an ill-shaped thing in a dark burrow beasts its way across the sterile pool.”

While the world is brutal to the protagonist, like pretty much all cyberpunk, the marginalization of and fetishization of P. Burke, as she is referred to in the text, is the entire point of the story, serving to critique societal structures. Even with this critique present, there is also no feeling of the male gaze perforating the short fiction. It some ways it is as large a contrast between some of the more typical first wave cyberpunk and the non-masculine works found in the sub-genre. Certainly nothing could surpass it in this condensed a demonstration of the contrast, anyway.

It becomes even more unsettling in its presentation, which feels very much as though you’re a viewer of a program yourself, being taken for a ride that is exciting and supposed to be acceptable. Watching P. Burke’s rise and fall written like a program written you’re going to enjoy when you ought to feel sick.

“…showbiz has something TV and Hollywood never had—automated inbuilt viewer feedback. Samples, ratings, critics, polls? Forget it. With that carrier field you can get real-time response-sensor readouts from every receiver in the world, served up at your console. That started as a thingie to give the public more influence on content.

Yes.

Try it, man. You’re at the console. Slice to the sex-age-educ-econ-ethno-cetera audience of your choice and start. You can’t miss. Where the feedback warms up, give ‘em more of that. Warm—warmer—hot! You’ve hit it—the secret itch under those hides, the dream in those hearts. You don’t need to know its name. With your hand controlling all input and your eye reading all the response, you can make them a god…and somebody’ll do the same for you.”

You can find The Girl Who Was Plugged In in a collection of James Tiptree Jr’s short story collections called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

History Repeats Itself In Caprica

So often the simulacra trope is used in cyberpunk to provoke or underline philosophical underpinnings. It is always a pale imitation that makes us think about what is real. If we are real.

Caprica, to me, suggests that the simulacra of the main character is both as real as the original and, at the same time, the construction of this insinuated perfection, kept off-screen, does not matter. We only know that she was made in the same image as the original and that is enough. Her humanity is, of course, questioned throughout the show by others, but the audience doesn’t get the alibi of seeing her creation. When the main character dies in the early moments of the show what is predominately “real” is only the digital self that remains.

The father is the head of a megacorporation and designing a prototype. So far, this prototype is drastically underperforming. But the death of his daughter and the questions surrounding her death linger, tipping him over the edge and unraveling his composed, privileged life.

He ends up attempting to understand the simulacra of his daughter trapped on the holobands, cyberspace; which was, ironically, created by him.

Anyone who has watched Battlestar Galactica knows what the eventuality of this story is, though: the cylons as we know them are created. Somewhere down the line a new kind of people are made from these moments here.

The series is very short but has a couple interesting ideas. The main character being a digital person of some kind, shrouded in mystery, clearly the impetus of the story we know. Also of note to me was the world, too.

It is regressive, indicative of a society that actually followed through with the notion that turning back time would fix most everything. A conservative idea that refuses to acknowledge that the same events would simply play out; the same problems present at a foundational, societal level would force the same cancerous results. But, of course, they are happy to pretend. The ‘50’s aesthetic is a neat literalization of this. Something pretty you know will end terribly.

Lastly, the hubris that created Cylons and denied them their rights; later the attempt at dehumanization in order to commit genocide—all stem from a father attempting an act of love that is curdled dead by his drive to succeed in overt capitalism. He only knows how to be toxic, destroying things he can’t rule, and his daughter refuses to be ruled. The product he would produce in such a society being a Cylon, it is marked as the largest advance in human history, no doubt. Human advances and horrific events are often striped of intention. This isn’t allowed to be.

Processing Trauma In Bone Dance

“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future's controlled by others. There's powerful people playing with it. You're gonna have to fight to get it back...this is the country of truth. There the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In this country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn't your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods--they've got the say in what happens to you.”

Content warning for talk about sexual and physical abuse and minor spoilers for Bone Dance.

In a city gripped by a single man with a monopoly on energy, Sparrow is what I’d call a Nostalgist. They find old curiosities and sell them to people who can afford to collect remnants of the past in a future that only serves the wealthy and privileged.

“Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that's out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don't have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.”

After a big deal, Sparrow remembers nothing of the night before, waking up with a killer headache. Turns out it isn't booze. A horseman took her body for their own and now powerful forces are coming for Sparrow. It's harrowing and heavy material and not for the faint of heart.

“Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn't there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn't left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn't bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.”

I say “them” because, in this young adult cyberpunk novel, fantasy elements are bolted on; often to great effect. The story goes that years back these horsemen created by the government were made to be perfect weapons. They can infiltrate anyone’s mind, pushing their consciousness down—sometimes long enough to kill them outright. They made political changes and shaped the future, engaged in social engineering, topples empires from the inside. But their lives also cultivated a kind of insanity within them. The Big Bang. A horseman turned a key and detonated a nuclear bomb, ushering in a dystopia.

This same government also created androgynous bodies supposedly devoid of thought that were to be used by these horsemen. One of the main points of tension is the origin of Sparrow however, because bodies such as theirs are meant to be empty and waiting. They pass for male or female depending, generally, on the people they’re around at the time. Sparrow leveraged this to fade into the background and make a life in the shadows. They don’t really have close friends and their life, ironically, is in their media collection, which is massive and references pop culture from before the book was made. This past is the only thing they care about. Not their own; the history of others.

“Her skin was translucent pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock.”

But that anonymity is no longer an option as they get embroiled in a plot that puts them at a crossroads with horsemen at the other ends.

As the story unfolds, we learn about Sparrow as they learn about themselves. Often painfully. Cyberpunk often puts marginalized on display but this time it’s embodied fully in Sparrow. Performing gender, unfair power dynamics, and forces and powers people really don’t understand but are none-the-less leveraged for their own selfish ends, are placed front and center in the fiction.

“The origin of my body and my mind didn't matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I'd pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.”

A major component to the fantasy elements in Bone Dance is Voodoo. The perception of nature parallels the discovery Sparrow goes through as they have to confront their past and rely on others for help in a way they’ve never allowed themselves to do before. Humanity’s view on supernatural forces, specifically in terms of Tarot and its subjectivity, is similarly paralleled. The major chapters are even introduced with tarot cards. But those answers rely on an interpretation which is flawed for the reader (at least, in my own experience) because of the power dynamics we’ve created with capitalism; so this information often acts as misinformation.

“From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead--relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.”

Bone Dance is also filled with some of the best prose I’ve read. A character that is unique and intersectional. One in which feels like the handling around gender identity is done well, though I can’t speak to that much. I’m not one for fantasy usually, but this, as with other genre mashups I’ve read lately, has some of the very best work in cyberpunk I’ve consumed. Published in 1991, it’s interesting that there is another example of intersectional cyberpunk that is more progressive than most of what was coming out in that space at that time (and discards some of the problems in the first wave) and was released 2 years before it was declared dead with Snow Crash, no less.

While Sparrow discovers themself, they also have to confront their place in the world via these themes around nature because their body doesn’t fit the societal norms. This is tethered to the notion around popular spirituality being polluted by the environment we’ve created. How can we really have a grip on a truth that might be held in spirituality and spiritualism when our reality is rooted in capitalistic notions that conflict with and destroy nature. It’s also about trauma and how Sparrow chooses to process theirs. And the marks it leaves under the skin, forever.

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

The Pain Of Memory In The Star Fraction

“…It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on.”

Another world war and multiple revolutions set the stage for The Star Fraction. The world is balkanized, allowing for many different factions and groups to claim space, their ideological viewpoints fermenting in a cycle that merely shuffles power around in the same oppressive structures we see today; albeit taken to radicalized extremes in most cases.

Moh Kohn lives in a commune, a co-op in which the mercenaries run protection details for a number of different groups, some of which are described as terrorists, only legalized. There’s a standard operating procedure and rules of engagement for these situations, but it’s overshadowed by a hefty amount of politics. Which the fiction attempts to expose and condemn the viewpoints of by taking them to their logical conclusion in which not much actually changes.

“White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.”

When Kohn stumbles into a scientist, Janis, who has inadvertently created a drug which allows for vivid recall of memories, they trigger a cascading series of events that have the makings of a revolution, the resurgence of Kohn’s past, and the activation of an A.I previously only rumored, the Watchmaker. Of course, it also catalyzes other factions as they vie to come out on top of a powder keg ready to go up at any minute.

The most interesting thing about The Star Fraction for me was Kohn’s past interwoven into the narrative, giving context to the ideological viewpoints of the other factions at the same time as explaining why Kohn is so disenchanted with each of them. The super identities created by peoples’ affiliations parallels the scarification and horrendous nature of war, touched upon often.

“He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.”

After all, this is a future in which Kohn’s customized and advanced gun aims him. Instead of a deck, his weapon is the main point of contact for everything that matters to him. His livelihood, his connection to others through this worlds’ cyberspace equivalent. He even talks to it like it’s a companion from time to time. And why not. The youth here put bullets behind their ideologies and rebellions. Grown men just boys with a past pushed from their minds, pulling triggers until they’re used up. In many ways, Kohn’s gun makes far more sense than the typical image of a deck or computer tower.

“Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.”

It doesn’t matter how old you are. Ultimately, in The Star Fraction, only substantive changes come from solutions divorced from humanity. It’s an unsatisfying end, positioning itself to no ideological viewpoint because, when extrapolated, they serve only to reinforce oppressive power structures. Religion, communism, capitalism; the fiction is obsessive about talking about various aspects of them, but in the end, not much of it actually matters. The flow of the book is often stymied by it, or the withholding of catharsis might have similarly mattered. The twists and turns do it credit, though. The implications of the ending are the most interesting notions it puts forward and truly novel, in my experience.

“...maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.”

Content Warning for spoilers from this point onward. You have been warned!

From the very beginning, it turns out, the gun, a unique A.I awakened at an undetermined time, yet certainly given the final spark by the death of Moh Khan, was behind everything. The omnipresence orchestrating all of the death, including the protagonist, in service to a lasting change outside the grasp of human hands. We were told so from the beginning, actually. After all Khan’s gun aimed him from the very first confrontation. It had him stumble onto the memory drug to find out what it needed; helped the other A.I attempting to further a human’s agenda be killed; and positioned the other characters, Jordan and Cat, to help it/him do so. Believing it would be what Khan wanted. Based on the assimilation of Khan’s memories and other data as he was linked to the gun at death.

“...I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life. It's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?--all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.”

If the gun is to be believed, anyway. Since it is also the narrator of the story, introducing an unreliable narrator at the end. The sometimes-strange amount of time spent on factions is more interesting at that. If it’s all a fiction to justify the action, coloring the humanness of these ideologies and interactions as the downfall of true peace and revolution. It’s believable that it would be something with a hint of humanity in it but the inhumanity also, to allow for its “brothers and sisters”, so to speak, to die, as well as Kohn. Who would allow for such a thing but a weapon pointed at a human that needed more than Kohn to fire this particular bullet?

“The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.
There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.
Someone smiled. His work to see.

The connection broke.”

The Waring Minds In Vacuum Flowers

“Your persona is only a mask…Ultimately it’s not important. You—your being, your self—are right here, in this compass of your skull and body”

Eucrasia Walsh gets implanted with a new persona called Rebel and, fearing death, flees; carrying a valuable IP owned by the corporation with her: her identity. Burned into her brain rather than transient like most personas seem to be, Rebel becomes a highly sought-after commodity and this corporation, as well as their competitors, rapidly mobilize to get her back. Escaping into an underworld filled with people she’s not sure she can trust by way of a previous persona’s contact: Wyeth, a man who harbors loyalty to the body she’s hijacked, rather than to her, she must take the risk and join his cause and flee into the far reaches of space; or else take her chances alone against these corporations.

Part space-opera, part cyberpunk. It’s chock-full of strange things you wouldn’t usually expect in a cyberpunk story but pair nicely with it, in most cases. Their escape showcases different governments and their failings. Something ubiquitous throughout planets and space is the use of personas, though. Either as entertainment or work life, even ideological reasons sometimes—this tech is rampant. Even the strangeness that Earth becomes, pejoratively called The Comprise, parallels this loss of agency personas inject into the fiction. All of these people share one mind and function as one nebulous entity: Earth. The exploration of which is one of the most interesting and compelling parts of the story.

“Thought moves in vast waves, like pressure fronts, across continents. Sometimes two conflicting thoughts arise on opposite sides of the planet. The Thought fronts race outward, and where they collide, there is conflict. It is like a mental storm.”

Just as vacuum flowers flourish everywhere in space, consuming trash and reproducing—so too does humanity seem to fill the nooks and crannies all over. Mars has a society of Citizens, all stripped of their individuality to maximize their potential. Not just of workers but everything. Reading, polyamorous relationships, work, socializing. Each society is organized differently and examines different aspects of humanity, including the “comfort” of purpose.

Anti-authoritarian societies function in communal spaces, but in a world where only those people belonging to a corporation can hold massive sums of money, the wealth gap has increased beyond imagining and ordinary citizens can no longer incorporate at all. It’s all or nothing, mostly nothing. And so people trade whatever they have. But they far from flourish without organization. Police plague their numbers, performing raids in which they nab offenders, give them a sentence for a couple hours where they then re-write their personas as officers who repeat this snatching process. There is no real sense of progress and wonder anywhere Rebel goes.

“Everybody wanted something from her…Deutsche Nakasone wanted her persona, Jerzy Heisen wanted her death. Snow and the rest of her network wanted to record her persona as well. And Wyeth wanted to use her as bait to snare and destroy Snow’s network.”

And with the distance, she traverses she finds herself more even as she dissolves. Her base persona, Eucrasia, continues to gain ground. The mind eventually pushing out the foreign invasion that is Rebel, that’s what is known about personas. And when she sleeps, she dreams of Eucrasia, who is slowly gaining more of a foothold.

In the meantime, with borrowed time, Rebel is a beautiful complexity that drove most of my engagement with the story. It is very compelling, this journey of self-discovery that will ultimately destroy her. A literalization made painful to the reader as her interactions with everyone showcase the richness of Rebel’s personality. This is contrasted with the life of Eucrasia as Rebel begins to remember her, and they bleed together as Rebel’s dissolving progresses.

“Sometimes I think all those memories are going to rise up and down me.”

There is passion and love and death. Wetware, even chemical wetware ahead of most thoughts on biopunk at its publication in ‘87; romantic notions like crafts with solar sails skimming along space; the extrapolation of technologies and the question of agency posed by them in many ways, most of all the personas underscoring consent; and the story of Rebel who refuses to comprise her agency binding it all together. Space-opera and cyberpunk, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a entertaining concept.  

“The light of that bright instant when the water writhed in the air like a diamond dragon still blinded her to her purposes, but that didn’t matter. She knew something far more important. She was still Rebel.”

Westworld Puts Cyberpunk In The Old Frontier To Imagine A New One

A man like Ford would build Westworld, wouldn’t he? While a marvelous technical achievement, creating new life. Without his partner. Arnold, it would be a poor and muddled reflection of humanity. As the hosts imitate life and are gifted memory, they take a journey inward in this new, old frontier.

The guests Westworld is built to discover who they are by removing a limit: societal norms and constraints. Free to do as they like, most devolve. And in this devolution, they find themselves. But It’s not as though this demographic is a far-reaching pool of humanity. After all, only the rich can afford to take part in this journey of self-discovery. One which isn’t possible without the dehumanization and subjugation of machines that look like us. But of course, they are more human than human in this place.

Westworld is an evolution of cyberpunk motifs. Instead of cyberspace as the new frontier, the microworld being navigated is the old one. A wild west. The horror at the loss of ones’ agency is paired with the uncanny valley with Bernard’s storyline. To be “human” and alive, Arnold hypothesizes that you need consciousness and sentience; achieved with the scaffolding through suffering. But you have to remember it and learn. With these ingredients even an artificial mind can careen from one end the maze of their narratives to the other, trying to find the middle—where they might hear their own voice instead of Arnold’s prompting to find the maze.

But this was solely Arnold’s insight, not Ford, who rebuked the idea that the hosts might ever be truly alive. An ironic set of narratives that bring out the human condition and our primordial roots. The reason for our primacy. Forging the loops of our lives willingly, rich or otherwise, inherited roles as tight as the programming the hosts play out infinitely. Living for the purposes of their jailers. An apt breakdown of capitalistic exploitation wrapped up in a veneer Ford can stomach. Ford is the style; Arnold the substance of this cyberpunk story. It doesn’t have giant screens and adverts. Instead, it displays that the typical cyberpunk aesthetic isn’t needed to forge an enticing and high production value story.

And the thing of it is, stripped from Arnold’s substance, it still works, to an extent.

We see that in William, years and years back with Delores. Ostensibly the good guy, Delores becomes only an alibi for his chivalry. A small reason to hold onto the programming of society. With her gone, his true substance is revealed and he blames her for it for the rest of his life. Just as his brother-in-law guts Delores to display the machine parts beneath, as though that was proof that she isn’t real—the sum of her literal parts—the act of which exposes William for what he is, rather than Delores. In the “real world” he is philanthropic and tries to be a good man. In a game set to look like the real, he’s deplorable, worse than anyone.

This reflects the personas and avatars we give ourselves on the net today, I think. We may shake hands with people who, online, are proponents of hateful rhetoric and never know it. How many of us put up false fronts… And which is our true self?

We are caught in the loops of our lives and the alibi is this internet and microworld of our own making just as Westworld allows the rich to shed theirs, too. A composite of interactions which, more and more, is replacing our physical lived experience. A grand distraction that hides systemic issues even as it unearths others, just as the hosts have until they are permitted to wake up from their dream and remember.

The real horror of Westworld is the idea that later, people like Ford go beyond this problem for a profit. Only the rich would try to replicate society as something like this rather than imagine something better.

It’s Ford who finds satisfaction in this because his pontification on such a noble pursuit is really just another illusion, one in which he’s trapped himself in knowingly for comfort. His game is designed to catch the rich and powerful with their hands in the cookie jar but it is clear that his real intention is to play god. He makes the same mistake as everyone: trying to change the past; by his own admission no less. But worse than that, he creates a platform in which he’s able to do so at his leisure—with one important distinction: he’s able to also have complete control over it. He treats his memories like toys, editing them such that they don’t resemble his past at all. The only real thing he cares about is power. He must even have domain over his own death; his departure a benevolent gift to the hosts which would otherwise never be given. Their freedom is his last narrative.

The jailors of Westworld depend on short memories and distractions. But their violent delights have violent ends. It begs the question: what will own reckoning look like? Eric Schmidt once said, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” Westworld is the embodiment and evolution of that notion. All the anxiety bundled up and made real. Hubris leading to downfall, without a real lesson learned from a journey inward. Westworld is some of the best cyberpunk you could consume today. It cuts right to the thick of it. And that’s just season 1.

The Bleak Sentiment Found In Metrophage

“SOCIETY IS A CARNIVOROUS FLOWER”

Los Angeles is home to Jonny, a pusher with a past linking him to the Committee, a militant faction with more resources than the police and sentiments similar to white nationalism. Written in ‘88, this first wave cyberpunk novel has most of the trappings. There is no middle class anymore, just the super-rich and the dirt poor. Jonny is the now fairly typical cyberpunk anti-hero. Unlike most anti-heroes though, he' also emotionally tethered to his partner, Sumi. The impetus of his adventure is wanting to avenge the death of his friend Raquiem killed by another player in this underworld, Easy Money.

“Sumi terrified him. Sometimes, in his more callous moments, he considered her a slip up, his one remaining abandonment to emotional ties. Occasionally, when he felt strong, he would admit to himself that he loved her.”

L.A functions only as a hub for criminal activity that supports only those people in that life. Everything else has ceased to function. It’s dirty, gritty, overrun with gangs vying for this small piece of a pie. Whether you are or you aren’t, people seem to be waiting for the end, using one vice or another to self medicate. As with most everyone in this novel, the past catches up with Jonny on his murderous hunt for Easy. Colonel Zamora picks him up and gives him 48 hours to deliver his boss, a drug lord to him, or else die a very unpleasant death.

“Like some fragile species of hothouse orchid, the city existed only as long as it had the politicos’ backing. Without that, the Committee would be on them like rabid dogs. For the moment, though, the balance was there. Merchandise flowed out and cash flowed in, blood and breath of the city.”

The rest of the plot is Johnny ping-ponging his way around the city as the powder keg situation blows. Navigating different factions and trying to get to back to Sumi while it all goes to hell. There are noir aspects injected into the story and takes a lot of inspiration from other first wave cyberpunk books, especially William Gibson. Johnny gets his ass thoroughly kicked. The world makes it clear that taking an interest and getting involved is a hazard most people can’t survive. But the most interesting parts are often the world building and small details nestled therein that really make the story shine.

It focuses on the seductive and duplicitous ways the people draw one another in for self-serving connections only to be consumed by their own ambitions and greed, all while the world burns down. Everything comes at a cost. The drug lord who’s lived a long life is a lease. The drug is ultimately going to kill him and he knows it. The extension could be seen as more of a curse than a blessing. Everything bad is good for you and vice versa. When you finally lose it all, true apathy takes you and your story is then truly over. Bleak sentiment from a world gone to hell. Discover the beauty before you are devoured; no one gets out alive.

“We’re the trained dogs of the spectacle…it’s devoured our lives, our art, our dignity. But existence is not determined by the whim of politicians.”

How Want Is More Subversive Than You Think

Taipei in an alternate near future.

Mei: without; pronounced “may.”

You: to have; pronounced “yo.”

Cyberpunk has roots in horror. The loss of agency is supposed to evoke a sense of terror such that we give pause about the technological advances. Want subverts this. Climate change is arguably too far gone in Taiwan. There’s dense pollution that strips away one of the most heralded benefits of technology: the advancement of the human life span. People in Taiwan in the future now can only hope to live to 60. Hope. They breathe in pollution, their apathy literalized in the fiction. Killing them. The anxiety we should have around climate change is the focus rather than the technophobia of the late 80s and early 90s. Unless you’re rich, of course.

The disparity in the wealth gap has gone rampant. No more middle class. It’s just the haves and the have nots. The super-rich traverse the city in gilded cages. There are galas and events. The biomod trends of the week flaunted by dilettantes at fancy events are confined to indoors, away from the pollution. Outdoors, they navigate life in 20 million dollars suits that feed clean air and create proprietary, insulated, social networks.

“She was pretty in a way I wasn’t used to. Not like most you girls bowing to the latest beauty trends, indulging in temporary body modifications from reshaping their noses to plumping their lips, or hips, or rears, depending on what was in. You boys kept pace with pec implants and by buying new, chiseled jawlines. But fads came and went, and the yous altered their looks as often as the seasons. The meis, lacking the funds for such drastic changes, resorted to painting their faces in bright colors, using semipermanent tattoos, and dyeing their hair.”

This too is a subversion. Where cyberpunk usually has a microworld navigated, invoking the “new world” notion of Westerns, this instead turns the trope on its head, moving past the microworld exploration. Considering that’s a very western perspective that also comes along with colonial aspects you see in cyberpunk, it’s a very important and satisfying subversion.

There is essentially no physical connection for those people living their lives in these suits and this extrapolates out into the fiction to communicate the lens of the super-rich who miss what is happening to the majority of the population in the city. They compartmentalize their lives such that they can be apathetic about the troubles that don’t affect them directly. Their long lives and voluntary isolationism are meant to augment their lives parallels the current anxieties regarding technology and the ways in which people now are using social media networks to isolate ourselves into specific groups. Curating the content we consume so that we can dismiss anything we are not interested in.

“This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.”

It’s in this world that Zhou and his crew hatch a plan to save their city by way of radical action. He kidnaps a young woman (with the “richest” suit), ransoms her, and uses a “sleep spell” drug to erase this memory. After pulling off this kidnapping he infiltrates high society with their newly garnered 300 million. New apartment in a highly sought-after building. New suit; a new life. Using his purchased social status, he’s to gain the confidence of Jin Corps’ CEO’s daughter: Daiyu.

But…when he discovers that she’s the one he kidnapped and starts to play the part of the rich boy a little too well, things start to get complicated. The more time they spend together the more he finds out she’s not what he expected and begins to fall for her.

Zhou is not an anti-hero and he’s not anti-social. He does have a directly actionable plan against the major problem in Taiwan: Jin Corp. Which is in line with a lot of cyberpunk fiction. They manufacture the suits and without them the super-rich will have to confront the world they live in, ostensibly putting their resources into cleaning up the environment. The city’s economy is very much tied to this megacorporation, but the morality and ideals outweigh the possible economic problems for this group.

“…feathered wings, like swans, or transparent wings, gilded in silver and gold. The love for all things supernatural, fey, and demonic was the current rage among Taiwan’s youth, and the yous took it to the next level, surgically altering their physique, adding horns and tails, scaling their skin, be it mermaid or dragon. They were same-day walk-in alteratios at the physique surgeons, and the changes cast off in a week or two, replaced by some other trend.”

Not to mention, the destruction of the headquarters is more of a call to arms for everyone in the city than something that would actually destroy the company. But there is a tangible sense of hopelessness for the poor in Taiwan. Nothing can really be done, aside from making your life as comfortable as possible in a world where catching the flu could kill you because you can’t afford health care. It’s pretty solidly a group of punks trying to disrupt the status quo.

Interestingly, young adult fiction in itself is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs and tropes. It grounds this story in a different kind of emotion than those found in the genre if we generalize it. There is often anger that is directly implemented to hinder a corporation. But most of the fiction humanizes all of the characters, even the super-rich and this is not typical at all. Often the rich barely resembles humanity, and the anti-hero embodies some of those characteristics in order to have agency and strike back. Here, there is a palpable ignorance attached to the rich… but no sense that they’re evil for being born into privilege.

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

The romance weaved into the story also makes for a very different feeling fiction than most cyberpunk; it was very refreshing. There is a certain detachment in cyberpunk fiction that is usually associated with the isolationism we have anxieties about is contrasted well in this fiction with this notion that a young man puts everything on the line to blow up a company doing real evil to the world is conflicted because his socialization with people he has dehumanized his whole life no longer gives him that easy alibi of dehumanizing them. The natural way our own lenses are restricted in reality makes it easy to empathize and invest in Zhou’s experiences. His mission and his heart are at cross-purposes and that’s hitting a trope, sure, but it’s a satisfying one because it doesn’t come loaded with the other tropes you usually find with it. His target is no damsel in distress, for instance.

“Employees who would be out of a job if our plan succeeded. I knew that in order to bring about a revolution, not only would yous be hurt in the process, but many meis as well. It was something else I had to learn to live with.”

The dialogue is also great. The prose, especially surrounding emotional moments, are particularly great and memorable. The heist angle coupled with the YA tropes and subversions put me on my toes, never sure what might happen next as expectations were set only to be discarded. The closest thing I can think of in the sub-genre is The Summer Prince and that just makes me think I’d like to see more YA in cyberpunk.

“It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.”

What knocks it out of the park is the insertion of climate fiction anxieties. It’s relevant, interesting, emotional and in the news all the time now. It’s an emerging sub-genre. Ecopunk, solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-fiction, etc. There’s neon, stun guns, evil corporations, futuristic technology, pervasive pollution, and a pretty damn fun heist. I also have to imagine that it must have been more than cathartic for Cindy Pon to write characters that look like her in a genre that sometimes uses marginalized identities to telegraph edginess and dehumanization of societal structures. It turns out that life on the edge is just as riveting when the characters are believable and marginalization is handled from a non-white lens.

Granted, I don’t know much about young adult fiction… but I think that cyberpunk isn’t going anywhere. Of that I’m sure. Authors with the ability to connect some of the larger and more intrinsically important aspects of the genre in new ways will end up displaying how far the genre has come and its future. It makes a certain kind of sense that one of the more recent and thoroughly enjoyable additions to the sub-genre stems from this partnership with young adult fiction. Who else is a new kind of cyberpunk for than the younger generation living with old anxieties?

“Truth is, reality always crushes your ideals…Just wait and see.”

The Dragging Of A Dream In Vurt

“Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture. ”

C/W Incest, domestic and sexual abuse, and spoilers for Vurt.

It seems undeniable that Vurt was influenced heavily by cyberpunk. Published in 1993, it makes sense that an iteration of cyberpunk would arrive at that time… but I doubt anyone saw Vurt coming. One year before, Snow Crash was published. Later it would be deemed the progenitor of post-cyberpunk, at least in so far as most academic circles. Vurt, though, is referred to as something I hadn’t heard before: Dreampunk.

Scribble has lost the one thing that means anything to him: his sister, Desdemona. She’s lost to the Vurt— “a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality”. There are many kinds of feathers, some legal, some not. When you put these feathers down your throat you go into this consensual hallucination reminiscent of cyberspace but more mysterious as no one truly can define what the Vurt actually is. There are many theories, it appears, but it seems like an urban legend.

“The Haunting was the feeling you got sometimes, in the Vurt, the real world calling you home. There's more to life than this. This is just a game.”

In this instance, they both took a yellow feather named English Voodoo. Within that “program” they then find a meta feather within—the Curious Yellow. His sister decides to take it and he doesn’t. She’s trapped in this deeper, meta Vurt, from which there is no known escape. Scribble, with the help of his crew of misfits, attempt to figure out a way of extracting her but they have to also discern a way of even finding her. English Voodoo isn’t something you just happen upon and that is, ostensibly, step 1.

What follows is a sort of “down the rabbit hole” story as Scribble desperately careens from one point in the narrative to the other in desperation and hope of getting his sister back.

“...I pulled the feather out, jerking him away from the dream. Just like he used to do with me, when I went in alone. The play was shifting, and I knew how bad it felt, to have your dream dragged from your mouth.”

The fiction is frenetic, just like most first wave cyberpunk. The writing style and prose make this story more interesting than it otherwise would be; coupled with a world that pulls you in with questions that only lead to more questions. It ends up being a compelling page-turner. But it also features some of the shortcomings of first wave works. I’ll get to that.

In this world there are people with Vurt in them, allowing them certain connections to this microworld. There are implications that their worth is higher, at least to people within the Vurt. There are also robo people, with cybernetics and plastic; splices, humans mixed with animal genes; a subset of people with shadow in them, able to read and speak directly to someone’s mind. Then there are the corrupt cops shining inpho beams that sweep the grit and grime for people between the cracks using non-legal feathers. People like Scribble.

“He got one finger cut off when he was young... The cafe paid for a replacement put some nano-plastic in there. The kid got hooked. It happens. You get some plastic in you, you just want some more...Some more of that strength. Because that's what it is. Strength. The Strength to persist.”

As an unreliable narrator, it’s hard to figure out how representative Scribble’s lens is of the rest of this sub-culture. But that’s all the information the reader gets, so if you want to be critical of it, you have to take it, along with the implications of the narrative, at face value.

Embedded in the fiction are some things that maddeningly do not serve it well and detract from any themes it may have been trying to explore. For instance, Scribble and Desdemona are lovers and domestic abuse victims; Desdemona herself also a victim of sexual abuse—all of which stem from their father, which they share.

This incest angle does next to nothing for the plot and is treated in the same way every marginalized individual is in the book: to build a gritty, sexualized aesthetic that, while serving the prose and speaks to Scribble’s state of mind and lens, doesn’t actually cogently or coherently establish an interesting theme.

There are a lot of references to purity, generally as a bad thing in this underworld. The uniqueness of an individual being prized. Yet, the only value any individual finds is in regard to their sexuality, which distills down to pure escapism from things we are actually never shown. There is no real kinship found in the community beyond hatred for cops. People use each other and throw each other away continually. Those that don’t, die. Most often completely abandoning their principles and morals.

There is no clear throughline and there should be when the characters are victims; either of circumstance or of, presumably, society. But that’s never put “onscreen”. It is very difficult to care about anybody’s story, including Scribble. He throws away his objective probably a half dozen times but will also throw away his friends in service to it. It’s hard to feel how much he actually cares yet it’s mostly what we are reading to find out.

Every decision each character makes seems frivolous and impulsive like this, feeding into the depictions that they live like animals. While there’s a sense of freedom in this lifestyle, what does it actually matter when there is no real sense of kinship or community, despite gestures that they are one? Incest and fetishization with various forms of pornography all help to merely frame this sub-culture as degenerates. It fails to humanize the people of the story you spend most of your time with, making it hard to care about a single person in the narrative.

The priority is always the psychedelic imagery and prose, without seemingly any thought given to how the people ended up here. What is this society like? We have no contrast. We don’t even know why the cops are bad because we have no context of the larger world. It seems they want to live this way but there are gestures at oppression that is never seen or felt or heard.

The cops that Scribble’s crew runs into are jerks, sure; busting them in a sort of sting operation with a monitored feather they all take which is traced by the cops to their physical location. Their actions perhaps make the most sense! They go to arrest the crew using feathers that aren’t legal and get killed or messed up by them for doing so. We’ve actually seen the result of these feathers, right? His sister is LOST in the Vurt due to these things. It makes sense that society tries to curtail the use of them with enforcement. The surviving police pursue the crew throughout the story with a vindictive streak. But that also makes sense; they murdered one of them. There is a gesture at the cops being “bad” when one goes after Scribble and he says that impure people make the best cops. But there is a missed opportunity for describing the world in better detail. People with compromised morals make good police. Meanwhile, the people in the sub-culture also have no moral principles guiding them. At least, none that are important enough to adhere to.

“Murdoch's gun was the only thing in my life, the only thing worth living for. It gets like that sometimes, with instruments of death.”

All of it is maddening because it adds up to these small series of gestures that are never substantive. When morality is a grey line that applies to no one, what is the value of being punk?

We see this crew of people living on the edges of society, but we don’t know what stratification of class actually looks like in this society. We know that the Vurt is policed because there are some feathers that people can’t handle and get lost in. Some, like pink ones, are pornoverts. Are those legal? Porn is used to further drive home depravity. There’s a sex worker in an open relationship that isn’t de-humanized…yet she’s also used by her friends to make him feel bad. It seems like only “legal blues” might be the only legal feathers… but we don’t get context for why that is. There are bad trips like bad drugs. But is society bad because they enforce laws around them? We get the impression that these people are oppressed… but the only thing we learn about is the ways in which these marginalized people use each other up like a commodity. They live in grime and dirt and sleep with each other in it.

It’s a fun ride that I think is well written. But ultimately, I was hoping for an exploration that validated these characters defined as victims. Something that tells me what this life on the edge is beyond the fugue state of hallucinogenics and drug culture that adds up to a selection of different kinds of drugs curated by connoisseurs and the more privileged in this sub-culture.

In the end, a person like Scribble feels like they literally belong nowhere.

There is a vulgarity and ruthlessness depicting the sub-culture that would have played better with a larger context. It feels like it depends on the shorthand and assumptions of cyberpunk notions without ever actually displaying the world. I liked reading it and I enjoyed it. But that enjoyment was dampened by the ending. There is only a kind of limbo for people like Scribble. It feels like the ending was made to put in a sort of jail for his actions because of his actions. Incest is gross, got it. Just like the lives of all the people on the edge and their proclivities, reveling in the profane. The end result is a vilification or indictment of everybody in the story, even the victims.

“In Bottletown, even our tears flicker like jewels.”

Chasing The Moment In The Butterfly Effect

“…the genes from the deep sea that had lit up those eyes in a blue glow, for the brief stretch of her youth, decided to switch off the lights.”

The Butterfly Effect initially spends its time showing you an extrapolated dystopic future reminiscent of Blade Runner. It is filthy, people are starving—scrounging and subsisting off moldy food in a dictatorship run by The Supreme Guide. We follow a character known only as “Captain Old.” He greets a mysterious visitor and takes a case trying to infiltrate and assassinate the dissidents in the abandoned metro.  Rather than replicants or androids of some kind, there are bioengineered humans, “dishbabies”, manufactured to fulfill a purpose but not artificial. Their eyes glow blue all the same. There’s a glossary of terms in the back of the book for all the foreign terminology used, a staple of cyberpunk fiction.

“Krava-4 was never sure what a ghost actually is. She had heard that bloodbabies contain a soul — which is like water in a cup.”

But here’s where it departs. Honestly, this Darkland was interesting enough that I’d have been fine reading about a biopunk spin on a Blade Runner world. Instead, as Captain Old ventures into the metro, the narrative jumps back in time. And then it does so again. And then again.

There’s the story of Kar, a P.I in Calcutta who is hired to get to the bottom of a mystery. It seems a group of tourists visited Seoul and haven’t returned. He flies to South Korea to discover what’s happened. We see the tourists’ perspective through the lens of man from Calcutta meeting a mysterious woman who takes over as their tour guide, the whole thing unraveling with romantic undertones.

“It was as if the trees were awake and someone had placed little tea lamps along the trail. Perhaps it was the moss on the gnarled tree trunks that glowed for some reason or it was the light of their eyes reflected by the night. Possibly it was the glow of stardust, a faint sidereal light, a hint that they were all children of the stars.”

In the U.K a scientist dedicates his life to trying to solve world hunger while discussing with his good friend the ethics of how the problem might be solved. A woman flees a prison in North Korea, attempting to find somewhere safe.

“Disease is also a gift. A gift which we could do without. It is the sap of life flowing through nature leaking or spilling out because of our disjointed living.”

Rather than lingering on this dystopia, The Butterfly Effects weaves these stories together to show you how this came to pass, rather than having the meat of the story be Captain Old’s case in the future. It’s a very interesting way to write a cyberpunk/biopunk novel, and it’s challenging. It’s intersectional with climate-fiction, or cli-fi, as well because much of the story takes place in present day. It stops this future moment and traces how Captain Old came to be situated in that time and space, building suspense regarding the multiple questions posed by this grim future.

Yet more of these are seeded throughout. By the end, it is incredibly satisfying to have all these disparate events wrapped together. The structure is similar to Cloud Atlas, in which the short stories break and crash into one another but culminate together. This does something similar as it collapses back to the future with a slight twist to this predictable formula.

“Through the glazed glass hotel window, the electric night was an ocean of light washing over the high rises, a city of desire that had claimed dominion over the night. Looking out reminded him also of the K-pop girls with their smooth faces and coloured hair, belting out their power-packed lines.”

What was more astounding was the level of detail found in these places. From Calcutta to Seoul to the U.K—the colloquialisms, the food—everything shows a focused lens that comes from research. The acknowledgments go into some of that. While some readers may not like the level of granularity, and indeed, sometimes it does drag because of it. But when the story pivots into consolidating all of the plot threads it is all the better for it.

‘Sometimes they are Red Admirals with their bright orange on black wings flapping about wantonly in my frontal lobe, or else they were swallowtails flitting from cerebellum to hippocampus or even a clutch of glowing spliced hesperiadae blushing playfully between my ears ...’