Part one of the Bridge trilogy. I bought it because I wanted to read Idoru, the 2nd part, because of a reference in a talk to ‘nodal points’ as coming from that book. Virtual light is triggering your optical nerve and brain with visuals directly without photons. The Bridge is the Golden Gate, since encrusted with people’s habitats. Gibson uses the word Thomasson to describe it. The US has splintered. In this setting a bike courier steals an object from what turns out to also be a courier, who is killed for losing it. A rentacop is brought in to find the bike courier but follows his conscience. A Japanese anthropologist who is on the bridge to observe (and hunt Thomassons), and references to a big earth quake in Tokyo which got rebuild by nanotech form the bridge to part two.
Tag: cyberpunk
36 Streets by T.R. Napper
Bought October 2023, came across it on the website of Fantask, my favourite bookstore in Copenhagen. Originally published January 2022. Set in Hanoi, Vietnam it is a very gritty cyberpunk novel based in a near future where China is occupying northern Vietnam. Memories, altering them, pushing them on you, how far can you go before you are no longer human or capable of human feelings? Enjoyed this one by T.R. Napper very much.
Virology, Ren Warom
This book picks up a month after Escapology, and forms a whole with it. Virology is a cyberpunk novel in which your avators turn out to be created from essential parts of your identity, so when someone locks them all up in the Slip, a VR internet, you feel amputated. The protagonist has a biological piece of software taking over its implanted harddrive and then his brain and body, while chasing down the antagonists with his gang. All ends well, just knee deep in gore. There’s something in Warom’s writing, an edginess and friction that keeps me reading.
So I bought her other published work and read that too.
Ren Warom hasn’t maintained her own online presence, other than Twitter, after 2018 it seems, and her Instagram account since the spring of 2019 (though I did take a few reading tips from the book images she posted there before).
Escapology by Ren Warom
Enjoyable cyberpunk novel that I came across through Alper’s blog. Escapology by Ren Warom was published in 2016, and there’s now a sequel Virology which is up next.
(I used to add Amazon affiliate links to my book related postings, but decided this week I should stop doing so.)