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frasersimons 's review for:
purple west
by Jonathon Trosclair
In this 10 seconds in the future novel, very much feeling and navigating like a contemporary piece, we follow Bushra Batal. An analyst for a middle tier corporation, doing data projection. Above menial labour… but not by that much, seems to be her standard of living. When her immediate supervisor is fired because she stands in for a meeting, she is promoted into a company she doesn’t understand, nor really know how to navigate. It is intimated that her title and money is contingent on her become complicit in she-doesn’t-even-know-what.
As it spirals, fixers purporting to be authority figures show up. Her former supervisor and friend dies under suspicious circumstances. Another company seems to be trying to poach her. The boss can’t be found. A shadow figure is giving her task lists and circumnavigated emails with odd language. The city has protestors that break into riots, as the job last handled enters a crisis that sparks the powder keg of the city.
This is one the more interesting, what I would call new wave cyberpunk, novels to come out in recent months. It’s not commercial fiction, but neither is it literary. I’d say it’s upmarket, subversive and innovative of genre fiction. It isn’t concerned with frenetic pacing or creating a foreign lexicon the genre is somewhat known for. Instead, it targets well known short falls and corrects them. The main characters are marginalized, privilege is established immediately. There isn’t any sex and drugs and gun fights to stoke the pacing, it’s simply about Bushra attempting to figure out what the heck is going on.
In a world where you can trust no one—especially corporations. And every figure that enters your life seems to eventually yield information that recontextualizes what you thought you knew about them, and your an immigrant, disconnected, low paid, high skilled worker, the dissent, or “punk” aspect is navigating to a point of not being complicit and implicated and scapegoated. Forget about storming the megacorp and taking it down. Who is the actual bad guy? Who are my best interests aligned with at the moment?
A significant portion of the book is Bushra simply trying to get to a location, using the only ride share program still running. Getting rerouted and caught up in the microworld formed by cops versus protestors, acting as a small boot camp for the ways in which authority reframes what is happening to manipulate outcomes. All the while she is just trying to get someplace self.
A.I, or AGI, cyrpotocurrencies, or blockchain, also are in the limelight, somewhat. In a nuanced and interesting conversation about who is using blockchain for what. The possibilities, the pitfalls. Right now, if you’re like me, you probably just know the financial aspects. It’s fascinating and great at onboarding the reader to its tech aspects.
Plot wise, overall, it’s a significantly quieter story than most cyberpunk, and that’s what makes it exceptional. The ending is perfect and elevated it from a 4.5 rounded down, to up. I think it does a great job of depicting and embodying the marginalized when lots of cyberpunk has white people fetishizing the marginalized in often laughably inauthentic, bombastic plot lines. This is the opposite. It’s organic and well written.
Though, does still feel like a debut. There is some connective tissue, particularly around the behaviours of side characters that feels a bit too hand wavy. The only person you’ll ever really end up knowing is Bushra. The prose work vacillates between getting the job done to quite well done descriptions that are sparse and also fleeting, leaving you wonder about time and place is one of the few times the seams show. Dialogue ranges to the realistic, with verbal pauses, ticks, etc. range to annoying verisimilitude, but that’s just going to depend on taste. I prefer a more tonally cogent, rather than archetypical blow-off-valve humour characters in a really rather serious plot. Again, speaks to taste.
Otherwise, I really liked this and think it’s one of the more intelligent offerings in this intersection in some time. Absolutely recommend. It’s a pocket book found at Carona Samizdat, 375 pages long, not including the introduction.
As it spirals, fixers purporting to be authority figures show up. Her former supervisor and friend dies under suspicious circumstances. Another company seems to be trying to poach her. The boss can’t be found. A shadow figure is giving her task lists and circumnavigated emails with odd language. The city has protestors that break into riots, as the job last handled enters a crisis that sparks the powder keg of the city.
This is one the more interesting, what I would call new wave cyberpunk, novels to come out in recent months. It’s not commercial fiction, but neither is it literary. I’d say it’s upmarket, subversive and innovative of genre fiction. It isn’t concerned with frenetic pacing or creating a foreign lexicon the genre is somewhat known for. Instead, it targets well known short falls and corrects them. The main characters are marginalized, privilege is established immediately. There isn’t any sex and drugs and gun fights to stoke the pacing, it’s simply about Bushra attempting to figure out what the heck is going on.
In a world where you can trust no one—especially corporations. And every figure that enters your life seems to eventually yield information that recontextualizes what you thought you knew about them, and your an immigrant, disconnected, low paid, high skilled worker, the dissent, or “punk” aspect is navigating to a point of not being complicit and implicated and scapegoated. Forget about storming the megacorp and taking it down. Who is the actual bad guy? Who are my best interests aligned with at the moment?
A significant portion of the book is Bushra simply trying to get to a location, using the only ride share program still running. Getting rerouted and caught up in the microworld formed by cops versus protestors, acting as a small boot camp for the ways in which authority reframes what is happening to manipulate outcomes. All the while she is just trying to get someplace self.
A.I, or AGI, cyrpotocurrencies, or blockchain, also are in the limelight, somewhat. In a nuanced and interesting conversation about who is using blockchain for what. The possibilities, the pitfalls. Right now, if you’re like me, you probably just know the financial aspects. It’s fascinating and great at onboarding the reader to its tech aspects.
Plot wise, overall, it’s a significantly quieter story than most cyberpunk, and that’s what makes it exceptional. The ending is perfect and elevated it from a 4.5 rounded down, to up. I think it does a great job of depicting and embodying the marginalized when lots of cyberpunk has white people fetishizing the marginalized in often laughably inauthentic, bombastic plot lines. This is the opposite. It’s organic and well written.
Though, does still feel like a debut. There is some connective tissue, particularly around the behaviours of side characters that feels a bit too hand wavy. The only person you’ll ever really end up knowing is Bushra. The prose work vacillates between getting the job done to quite well done descriptions that are sparse and also fleeting, leaving you wonder about time and place is one of the few times the seams show. Dialogue ranges to the realistic, with verbal pauses, ticks, etc. range to annoying verisimilitude, but that’s just going to depend on taste. I prefer a more tonally cogent, rather than archetypical blow-off-valve humour characters in a really rather serious plot. Again, speaks to taste.
Otherwise, I really liked this and think it’s one of the more intelligent offerings in this intersection in some time. Absolutely recommend. It’s a pocket book found at Carona Samizdat, 375 pages long, not including the introduction.