Tag: cyberpunk

  • The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

    The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

    The world in this book is extremely well-realized. Michel must have spent a ton of time putting together the details of it. You could carve a half-dozen dystopian novels from elements that this book treats as ephemeral. It’s a hellscape of corporate ownership, environmental disaster, body modification and surveillance. So much of the world building…

  • The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

    This was very close to a William Gibson novel (there’s even a character named Case, which is surely a callback to Neuromancer). It’s a rough book to start – the world is fully formed and a lot is left to the reader to figure out – slang, political alignments, technology and recent history for example…

  • Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

    This felt like a graphic novel – the vivid descriptions and wild action scenes unfolded in my mind like a comic book. But no comic book has writing like this: Autopsies aren’t as bad as people make out. There’s a stink, for sure. In fact there’s all kinds of stink from all kinds of different…

  • Counterweight by Djuna

    This book was all over the various places I read about books, to the point that I felt left out for not knowing about this mysterious Djuna character (only then to find out that this is their first book published in English). The Book Marks reviews are all ‘rave’s, but on clickthrough the praise is…

  • Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

    I liked the setting that Tidhar built here, but it took me about 100 pages to figure out that there was no plot, in a strict sense. The book is kind of a collection of loosely-threaded short stories, kind of a way of looking at the world from different angles. I wasn’t prepared for that, and…

  • Infomocracy by Malka Older

    This sure isn’t for everyone but it absolutely was for me. This book is like a collaboration between William Gibson and John King (the CNN election map guy). It’s really tough to get into – Older has effectively imitated Gibson’s sink-or-swim narrative style. The subject matter is incredibly current, and I kept wondering how the…