10-ish years in the future, young Flynne, poor and living in the America’s south, takes on a job her brother is meant for: Piloting a ‘copter as security through, what she believes to be a game. She becomes a witness to a crime that powers beyond her comprehension take an interest in, putting her in the middle of a titanic struggle. Bodies start dropping and what she thought was a game is actually something completely different.

Gibson is an aquifer taste. At least, for me he is. He has a predilection to overuse commas and insert a lot of verisimilitude in dialogue. The result can really bog down the momentum and create a methodical pace the reader has to abide by. He’s great at co-opting words in current use intuitively, for worldbuilding the ten-second future-scapes. And he does all this with purposeful information design that generally feels overwhelming for the protagonist, who is usually fish-out-of-water perspective for the reader. As a result, he always feels like a singular literary and genre mashup. There’s frenetic pacing and hardly any interiority, 80% dialogue and reiterative conversations. You learn about the characters purely as they do things and you project their interiority as a reader.

This can all really gel, or really grind. I’ve had to acclimate, and I’ve glad I have. The plot is always worth it; despite the omnipresence puppeteering things, I always like the reveals and the speculative ideas embedded in the fiction. They do feel like wheels spinning sometimes in the start, and I’d prefer a lot more interiority and painting of scenes, so they generally never quite hit 5 star reads for me. This, in particular, feels very prescient and the most interesting take on certain spoilery notions, only now becoming more predominate in scifi.

If you’re wondering about the adaptation on TV, I’ve also seen that. Apart from the characters been same or similar, and the concept of the technology and timeline, notion of the jackpot, etc.. it’s all fairly different in the show. It’s not as good in my opinion, but much of this book, frenetic as the pacing may suggest, doesn’t have That much plot. It’s more about placing all the pieces on the board and seeing short moves that result in a checkmate—rather than episodic content that has a very different information design, and wants showy technology and/or a fight sequence every couple episodes to keep people watching. The show has a different antagonist and is clearly on a far different plot sequence, judging from the beats. The relationships between characters are different and character arcs are pretty drastically altered.