K. C. Alexander

(DNF at about 33%)

I really feel it's a shame that cyberpunk hasn't made more of a comeback lately. The genre's interplay of out-of-control corporations and technology that can track your every move provides a wealth of opportunity for commentary on modern society. Unfortunately, the only question Necrotech seems to be interested in exploring is "what if I made my Cyberpunk* tabletop campaign into a trilogy of novels?" The book does do a little bit of its own worldbuilding, but it mostly feels like reskinning of the game's underlying mechanics. The serial numbers are only half filed off. It honestly feels a bit ironic for something that's trying to portray itself as any kind of punk to say "forget being original or subversive, I'm just going to take the most commercial example of the genre and copy it."

This is annoying because it's lazy, but also because it means the book isn't saying anything actually relevant and feels really dated. About the only message it has is "capitalism sucks," which, sure, but I would argue that it sucks in a somewhat different way now than it did in the '80s. It was interesting to read this book at the same time as I was reading Song for a New Day, which is not at all cyberpunk in aesthetic but is very much interested in the intersection of capitalism and technology in a way that does feel informed by the current state of those things. '80s cyberpunk, for example, is (in my experience) more likely to have cutthroat competition between multiple corporations, as indeed Necrotech does. It is a significant plot point that the heroine was kidnapped and experimented on by a corp, but doesn't know which one. In the world of Song for a New Day, inspired by the monopolistic tendencies of the twenty-first century, you couldn't make a plot thread out of trying to figure out which corporation did something, because there's only one. (And I didn't even really like Song for a New Day, so the fact that I'm going "wow, that was so much better than this" is saying something.)

Additionally, the fact that the corporations of Necrotech's universe need an ID number (the series-titular SIN) embedded in an implanted chip to track your activities and serve you targeted ads and so on seems laughably naive for a recent novel. There's plenty of tracking happening right now that doesn't require an SSN or other national ID number to be involved anywhere along the line. It seems odd for a future dystopia to have a method of doing this that's both more convoluted and easier to evade. There's also not much of a sense that not having an SIN is inconvenient or limiting. Yes, it's illegal, but in practice that mostly amounts to a justification for random combat encounters in which our heroine can show off how badass she is. Otherwise she pretty much gets the benefits of being off the grid with none of the drawbacks. I didn't get the sense that this made it harder for her to communicate with people, for example, or to buy things, or to get around town, or any number of other things that I could imagine being an issue for someone in the present-day real world who wanted to avoid being tracked.

The book also has a strain of Orientalism and general tendency to exoticize people of color that I found uncomfortable, though I'm not qualified to comment on it in depth.

With all of this bugging me, about a third of the way into the book I checked out the Goodreads page to see if anyone else was complaining about any of these things, because I'm fantastically petty and I feel great validation when other people don't like books I don't like for the same reasons that I don't like them. This was not the case, but I did find someone saying that the book ends with pretty much nothing resolved and no questions answered. I might have been interested enough in the characters and plot to finish out this book, but I definitely don't have it in me to read the whole trilogy, so with the knowledge that book 1 doesn't actually have a complete plot arc of its own, I decided to cut my losses.

* As in the franchise that spawned the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077, not as in the genre.… (altro)

Alexander, K. C. Necrotech. SINless No. 1. Angry Robot, 2016.
Rico, a mercenary woman with an artificial arm that would make Robocop envious, loses her street cred when she is suspected of selling her girlfriend to a nanotech lab. Pursued by villains, cops, evil nanotech (a.k.a. necrotech), former friends, and corporate agents, she has to build a new team, break into a quarantined nanotech lab, and find out whether she is actually guilty of betrarying her girlfriend. Is Necrotech a fast-paced thriller? Yep. Would it get an R-rating for language, nudity, and violence? You bet. An example: thoroughly bisexual Rico has many dialogues with her vagina, which she never refers to by that term. Would I read the next one? Yes, with a shameful blush and a downturned eye.… (altro)