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frasersimons
find my other reviews at www.consumingcyberpunk.com
Akuba, like most cyberpunks, has a rough life. Oh, it has some of the generic cyberpunk tropes mind you; the larger problem to be dealt with rooted in capitalism, new terminology for not-so-distant technologies, and cool, ineffable names ascribed to those on the fringes of society.
"Most of this crowd is wearing knock-off blurred style. The kind of clothes that look like they should block facial recognition and drone tracking like the good stuff, but are much cheaper and don’t do a damn thing. Repeating patterns made from the pics of the lips and chins of celebrities."
But in these short 148 pages, Livingston exceeded my expectations. Rooting the story in Akuba's debt was a nice foothold. Having it described in flashback sequences to her earlier days was effective for me to latch onto. She is not the typical love to hate protagonist. And she has an actual backstory. Huh.
"Watch batteries gleam in the center of dark flowers. Henna painted with conductive ink, waiting to be turned on."
Here's the skinny: Akuba is a kid who used to be a skimmer, someone who combs through e-waste (in her particular case, in Agbogbloshie) in order to procure enough valuable parts to get by; barely. Nowadays though, that's behind her.
Kind of.
"back when they were kids together clambering over the hills of e-waste outside of her old town in Ghana. He was two years older, much bigger, and known to throw fits when a smaller kid found a decent bit of scrap. More than once Akuba had hidden herself deep in the piles of old PC monitors and stereos to keep a nice coil of copper wire for herself. Metal was money, and she wasn’t staying in Agbogbloshie forever."
One of the other skimmers, nicknamed Shakey, has imprisoned her in a sort of hell. When she was young she needed a loan to get out of the slums. Ever since then, she's been under his thumb. The narrative's main premise then is when this goes sideways. No more time. Akuba has to pay Shakey back in one week; or else.
"It’s an open secret that the sneakernet is used for a lot more than moving a few dozen terabytes more quickly than you could across the lines. The kids — "chucks" in local argot — pick up your external drive and walk it to wherever you want to send it. Along the way they add on a few other jobs, like grabbing prepaids from some chick and delivering them to the person she owes. Most of the industry uses them."
The only thing that gets in the way of this fast-paced, fun little post-cyberpunk romp then, is kind of the pacing. Livingston can turn a phrase and I think wrote Akuba very well. I have not read much cyberpunk where male authors do great jobs with female protagonists — it's a plus. She's a PoC, she doesn't let Issac the well-meaning, mansplaining, helpy-helperton tell her what's what. And the dialogue has a purpose; telling us about her not him.
"You had better fucking believe I get top-shelf. Life is going to kill me tomorrow. I’ve got to enjoy what I’ve got before it’s taken from me. And if you’ve got a problem with that, then leave me alone."
If the scenes had more time to linger or it just felt like more time had been passing, I think it would have been to its credit. As is, though, it's really enjoyable. I liked the terminology, I liked the new tech, mostly revolving around a cycle of debt (and some stigmatism around it), the bombardment of advertisements; the confluence of drones, surveillance, and the globe-trotting aspects. I liked that it was not set in America but in a multitude of other places. In fact, adding in detail about these unique and interesting places, perhaps with some additional prose, may have really added to the enjoyment.
"Don’t you talk to me about debt. You think you know what debt is? Debt is an abusive husband. Everyone says ‘why don't you just leave him, why don’t you be strong’ but you can’t. He’ll follow you and make it worse. He shows up at your work drunk and angry. He calls your family in the middle of the night and tells them lies about you. He’s in your finances. He’s got your passwords. He threatens your friends to find out where you are. Until you’re up four nights straight trying to build up the strength to check your email, I don’t want to hear another word out of your fucking mouth about debt."
It's better than average, has something to say, is actually cyberpunk, and has a solid female protagonist with cool tech and abilities, though. Worth an afternoon read, no doubt!
"tomorrow I’m gonna get a call from the bank that they made a mistake about some fee and now I owe them five. What do you think that does to people psychologically?"
Akuba, like most cyberpunks, has a rough life. Oh, it has some of the generic cyberpunk tropes mind you; the larger problem to be dealt with rooted in capitalism, new terminology for not-so-distant technologies, and cool, ineffable names ascribed to those on the fringes of society.
"Most of this crowd is wearing knock-off blurred style. The kind of clothes that look like they should block facial recognition and drone tracking like the good stuff, but are much cheaper and don’t do a damn thing. Repeating patterns made from the pics of the lips and chins of celebrities."
But in these short 148 pages, Livingston exceeded my expectations. Rooting the story in Akuba's debt was a nice foothold. Having it described in flashback sequences to her earlier days was effective for me to latch onto. She is not the typical love to hate protagonist. And she has an actual backstory. Huh.
"Watch batteries gleam in the center of dark flowers. Henna painted with conductive ink, waiting to be turned on."
Here's the skinny: Akuba is a kid who used to be a skimmer, someone who combs through e-waste (in her particular case, in Agbogbloshie) in order to procure enough valuable parts to get by; barely. Nowadays though, that's behind her.
Kind of.
"back when they were kids together clambering over the hills of e-waste outside of her old town in Ghana. He was two years older, much bigger, and known to throw fits when a smaller kid found a decent bit of scrap. More than once Akuba had hidden herself deep in the piles of old PC monitors and stereos to keep a nice coil of copper wire for herself. Metal was money, and she wasn’t staying in Agbogbloshie forever."
One of the other skimmers, nicknamed Shakey, has imprisoned her in a sort of hell. When she was young she needed a loan to get out of the slums. Ever since then, she's been under his thumb. The narrative's main premise then is when this goes sideways. No more time. Akuba has to pay Shakey back in one week; or else.
"It’s an open secret that the sneakernet is used for a lot more than moving a few dozen terabytes more quickly than you could across the lines. The kids — "chucks" in local argot — pick up your external drive and walk it to wherever you want to send it. Along the way they add on a few other jobs, like grabbing prepaids from some chick and delivering them to the person she owes. Most of the industry uses them."
The only thing that gets in the way of this fast-paced, fun little post-cyberpunk romp then, is kind of the pacing. Livingston can turn a phrase and I think wrote Akuba very well. I have not read much cyberpunk where male authors do great jobs with female protagonists — it's a plus. She's a PoC, she doesn't let Issac the well-meaning, mansplaining, helpy-helperton tell her what's what. And the dialogue has a purpose; telling us about her not him.
"You had better fucking believe I get top-shelf. Life is going to kill me tomorrow. I’ve got to enjoy what I’ve got before it’s taken from me. And if you’ve got a problem with that, then leave me alone."
If the scenes had more time to linger or it just felt like more time had been passing, I think it would have been to its credit. As is, though, it's really enjoyable. I liked the terminology, I liked the new tech, mostly revolving around a cycle of debt (and some stigmatism around it), the bombardment of advertisements; the confluence of drones, surveillance, and the globe-trotting aspects. I liked that it was not set in America but in a multitude of other places. In fact, adding in detail about these unique and interesting places, perhaps with some additional prose, may have really added to the enjoyment.
"Don’t you talk to me about debt. You think you know what debt is? Debt is an abusive husband. Everyone says ‘why don't you just leave him, why don’t you be strong’ but you can’t. He’ll follow you and make it worse. He shows up at your work drunk and angry. He calls your family in the middle of the night and tells them lies about you. He’s in your finances. He’s got your passwords. He threatens your friends to find out where you are. Until you’re up four nights straight trying to build up the strength to check your email, I don’t want to hear another word out of your fucking mouth about debt."
It's better than average, has something to say, is actually cyberpunk, and has a solid female protagonist with cool tech and abilities, though. Worth an afternoon read, no doubt!
"tomorrow I’m gonna get a call from the bank that they made a mistake about some fee and now I owe them five. What do you think that does to people psychologically?"
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Taipei in an alternate near future.
Mei: without; pronounced “may.”
You: to have; pronounced “yo.”
Cyberpunk has roots in horror. The loss of agency is supposed to evoke a sense of terror such that we give pause about the technological advances. Want subverts this. Climate change is arguably too far gone in Taiwan. There’s dense pollution that strips away one of the most heralded benefits of technology: the advancement of the human life span. People in Taiwan in the future now can only hope to live to 60. Hope. They breathe in pollution, their apathy literalized in the fiction. Killing them. The anxiety we should have around climate change is the focus rather than the technophobia of the late 80s and early 90s. Unless you’re rich, of course.
The disparity in the wealth gap has gone rampant. No more middle class. It’s just the haves and the have nots. The super-rich traverse the city in gilded cages. There are galas and events. The biomod trends of the week flaunted by dilettantes at fancy events are confined to indoors, away from the pollution. Outdoors, they navigate life in 20 million dollars suits that feed clean air and create proprietary, insulated, social networks.
“She was pretty in a way I wasn’t used to. Not like most you girls bowing to the latest beauty trends, indulging in temporary body modifications from reshaping their noses to plumping their lips, or hips, or rears, depending on what was in. You boys kept pace with pec implants and by buying new, chiseled jawlines. But fads came and went, and the yous altered their looks as often as the seasons. The meis, lacking the funds for such drastic changes, resorted to painting their faces in bright colors, using semipermanent tattoos, and dyeing their hair.”
This too is a subversion. Where cyberpunk usually has a microworld navigated, invoking the “new world” notion of Westerns, this instead turns the trope on its head, moving past the microworld exploration. Considering that’s a very western perspective that also comes along with colonial aspects you see in cyberpunk, it’s a very important and satisfying subversion.
There is essentially no physical connection for those people living their lives in these suits and this extrapolates out into the fiction to communicate the lens of the super-rich who miss what is happening to the majority of the population in the city. They compartmentalize their lives such that they can be apathetic about the troubles that don’t affect them directly. Their long lives and voluntary isolationism are meant to augment their lives parallels the current anxieties regarding technology and the ways in which people now are using social media networks to isolate ourselves into specific groups. Curating the content we consume so that we can dismiss anything we are not interested in.
“This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.”
It’s in this world that Zhou and his crew hatch a plan to save their city by way of radical action. He kidnaps a young woman (with the “richest” suit), ransoms her, and uses a “sleep spell” drug to erase this memory. After pulling off this kidnapping he infiltrates high society with their newly garnered 300 million. New apartment in a highly sought-after building. New suit; a new life. Using his purchased social status, he’s to gain the confidence of Jin Corps’ CEO’s daughter: Daiyu.
But…when he discovers that she’s the one he kidnapped and starts to play the part of the rich boy a little too well, things start to get complicated. The more time they spend together the more he finds out she’s not what he expected and begins to fall for her.
Zhou is not an anti-hero and he’s not anti-social. He does have a directly actionable plan against the major problem in Taiwan: Jin Corp. Which is in line with a lot of cyberpunk fiction. They manufacture the suits and without them the super-rich will have to confront the world they live in, ostensibly putting their resources into cleaning up the environment. The city’s economy is very much tied to this megacorporation, but the morality and ideals outweigh the possible economic problems for this group.
“…feathered wings, like swans, or transparent wings, gilded in silver and gold. The love for all things supernatural, fey, and demonic was the current rage among Taiwan’s youth, and the yous took it to the next level, surgically altering their physique, adding horns and tails, scaling their skin, be it mermaid or dragon. They were same-day walk-in alteratios at the physique surgeons, and the changes cast off in a week or two, replaced by some other trend.”
Not to mention, the destruction of the headquarters is more of a call to arms for everyone in the city than something that would actually destroy the company. But there is a tangible sense of hopelessness for the poor in Taiwan. Nothing can really be done, aside from making your life as comfortable as possible in a world where catching the flu could kill you because you can’t afford health care. It’s pretty solidly a group of punks trying to disrupt the status quo.
Interestingly, young adult fiction in itself is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs and tropes. It grounds this story in a different kind of emotion than those found in the genre if we generalize it. There is often anger that is directly implemented to hinder a corporation. But most of the fiction humanizes all of the characters, even the super-rich and this is not typical at all. Often the rich barely resembles humanity, and the anti-hero embodies some of those characteristics in order to have agency and strike back. Here, there is a palpable ignorance attached to the rich… but no sense that they’re evil for being born into privilege.
The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.
The romance weaved into the story also makes for a very different feeling fiction than most cyberpunk; it was very refreshing. There is a certain detachment in cyberpunk fiction that is usually associated with the isolationism we have anxieties about is contrasted well in this fiction with this notion that a young man puts everything on the line to blow up a company doing real evil to the world is conflicted because his socialization with people he has dehumanized his whole life no longer gives him that easy alibi of dehumanizing them. The natural way our own lenses are restricted in reality makes it easy to empathize and invest in Zhou’s experiences. His mission and his heart are at cross-purposes and that’s hitting a trope, sure, but it’s a satisfying one because it doesn’t come loaded with the other tropes you usually find with it. His target is no damsel in distress, for instance.
“Employees who would be out of a job if our plan succeeded. I knew that in order to bring about a revolution, not only would yous be hurt in the process, but many meis as well. It was something else I had to learn to live with.”
The dialogue is also great. The prose, especially surrounding emotional moments, are particularly great and memorable. The heist angle coupled with the YA tropes and subversions put me on my toes, never sure what might happen next as expectations were set only to be discarded. The closest thing I can think of in the sub-genre is The Summer Prince and that just makes me think I’d like to see more YA in cyberpunk.
“It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.”
What knocks it out of the park is the insertion of climate fiction anxieties. It’s relevant, interesting, emotional and in the news all the time now. It’s an emerging sub-genre. Ecopunk, solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-fiction, etc. There’s neon, stun guns, evil corporations, futuristic technology, pervasive pollution, and a pretty damn fun heist. I also have to imagine that it must have been more than cathartic for Cindy Pon to write characters that look like her in a genre that sometimes uses marginalized identities to telegraph edginess and dehumanization of societal structures. It turns out that life on the edge is just as riveting when the characters are believable and marginalization is handled from a non-white lens.
Granted, I don’t know much about young adult fiction… but I think that cyberpunk isn’t going anywhere. Of that I’m sure. Authors with the ability to connect some of the larger and more intrinsically important aspects of the genre in new ways will end up displaying how far the genre has come and its future. It makes a certain kind of sense that one of the more recent and thoroughly enjoyable additions to the sub-genre stems from this partnership with young adult fiction. Who else is a new kind of cyberpunk for than the younger generation living with old anxieties?
“Truth is, reality always crushes your ideals…Just wait and see.”
Mei: without; pronounced “may.”
You: to have; pronounced “yo.”
Cyberpunk has roots in horror. The loss of agency is supposed to evoke a sense of terror such that we give pause about the technological advances. Want subverts this. Climate change is arguably too far gone in Taiwan. There’s dense pollution that strips away one of the most heralded benefits of technology: the advancement of the human life span. People in Taiwan in the future now can only hope to live to 60. Hope. They breathe in pollution, their apathy literalized in the fiction. Killing them. The anxiety we should have around climate change is the focus rather than the technophobia of the late 80s and early 90s. Unless you’re rich, of course.
The disparity in the wealth gap has gone rampant. No more middle class. It’s just the haves and the have nots. The super-rich traverse the city in gilded cages. There are galas and events. The biomod trends of the week flaunted by dilettantes at fancy events are confined to indoors, away from the pollution. Outdoors, they navigate life in 20 million dollars suits that feed clean air and create proprietary, insulated, social networks.
“She was pretty in a way I wasn’t used to. Not like most you girls bowing to the latest beauty trends, indulging in temporary body modifications from reshaping their noses to plumping their lips, or hips, or rears, depending on what was in. You boys kept pace with pec implants and by buying new, chiseled jawlines. But fads came and went, and the yous altered their looks as often as the seasons. The meis, lacking the funds for such drastic changes, resorted to painting their faces in bright colors, using semipermanent tattoos, and dyeing their hair.”
This too is a subversion. Where cyberpunk usually has a microworld navigated, invoking the “new world” notion of Westerns, this instead turns the trope on its head, moving past the microworld exploration. Considering that’s a very western perspective that also comes along with colonial aspects you see in cyberpunk, it’s a very important and satisfying subversion.
There is essentially no physical connection for those people living their lives in these suits and this extrapolates out into the fiction to communicate the lens of the super-rich who miss what is happening to the majority of the population in the city. They compartmentalize their lives such that they can be apathetic about the troubles that don’t affect them directly. Their long lives and voluntary isolationism are meant to augment their lives parallels the current anxieties regarding technology and the ways in which people now are using social media networks to isolate ourselves into specific groups. Curating the content we consume so that we can dismiss anything we are not interested in.
“This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.”
It’s in this world that Zhou and his crew hatch a plan to save their city by way of radical action. He kidnaps a young woman (with the “richest” suit), ransoms her, and uses a “sleep spell” drug to erase this memory. After pulling off this kidnapping he infiltrates high society with their newly garnered 300 million. New apartment in a highly sought-after building. New suit; a new life. Using his purchased social status, he’s to gain the confidence of Jin Corps’ CEO’s daughter: Daiyu.
But…when he discovers that she’s the one he kidnapped and starts to play the part of the rich boy a little too well, things start to get complicated. The more time they spend together the more he finds out she’s not what he expected and begins to fall for her.
Zhou is not an anti-hero and he’s not anti-social. He does have a directly actionable plan against the major problem in Taiwan: Jin Corp. Which is in line with a lot of cyberpunk fiction. They manufacture the suits and without them the super-rich will have to confront the world they live in, ostensibly putting their resources into cleaning up the environment. The city’s economy is very much tied to this megacorporation, but the morality and ideals outweigh the possible economic problems for this group.
“…feathered wings, like swans, or transparent wings, gilded in silver and gold. The love for all things supernatural, fey, and demonic was the current rage among Taiwan’s youth, and the yous took it to the next level, surgically altering their physique, adding horns and tails, scaling their skin, be it mermaid or dragon. They were same-day walk-in alteratios at the physique surgeons, and the changes cast off in a week or two, replaced by some other trend.”
Not to mention, the destruction of the headquarters is more of a call to arms for everyone in the city than something that would actually destroy the company. But there is a tangible sense of hopelessness for the poor in Taiwan. Nothing can really be done, aside from making your life as comfortable as possible in a world where catching the flu could kill you because you can’t afford health care. It’s pretty solidly a group of punks trying to disrupt the status quo.
Interestingly, young adult fiction in itself is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs and tropes. It grounds this story in a different kind of emotion than those found in the genre if we generalize it. There is often anger that is directly implemented to hinder a corporation. But most of the fiction humanizes all of the characters, even the super-rich and this is not typical at all. Often the rich barely resembles humanity, and the anti-hero embodies some of those characteristics in order to have agency and strike back. Here, there is a palpable ignorance attached to the rich… but no sense that they’re evil for being born into privilege.
The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.
The romance weaved into the story also makes for a very different feeling fiction than most cyberpunk; it was very refreshing. There is a certain detachment in cyberpunk fiction that is usually associated with the isolationism we have anxieties about is contrasted well in this fiction with this notion that a young man puts everything on the line to blow up a company doing real evil to the world is conflicted because his socialization with people he has dehumanized his whole life no longer gives him that easy alibi of dehumanizing them. The natural way our own lenses are restricted in reality makes it easy to empathize and invest in Zhou’s experiences. His mission and his heart are at cross-purposes and that’s hitting a trope, sure, but it’s a satisfying one because it doesn’t come loaded with the other tropes you usually find with it. His target is no damsel in distress, for instance.
“Employees who would be out of a job if our plan succeeded. I knew that in order to bring about a revolution, not only would yous be hurt in the process, but many meis as well. It was something else I had to learn to live with.”
The dialogue is also great. The prose, especially surrounding emotional moments, are particularly great and memorable. The heist angle coupled with the YA tropes and subversions put me on my toes, never sure what might happen next as expectations were set only to be discarded. The closest thing I can think of in the sub-genre is The Summer Prince and that just makes me think I’d like to see more YA in cyberpunk.
“It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.”
What knocks it out of the park is the insertion of climate fiction anxieties. It’s relevant, interesting, emotional and in the news all the time now. It’s an emerging sub-genre. Ecopunk, solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-fiction, etc. There’s neon, stun guns, evil corporations, futuristic technology, pervasive pollution, and a pretty damn fun heist. I also have to imagine that it must have been more than cathartic for Cindy Pon to write characters that look like her in a genre that sometimes uses marginalized identities to telegraph edginess and dehumanization of societal structures. It turns out that life on the edge is just as riveting when the characters are believable and marginalization is handled from a non-white lens.
Granted, I don’t know much about young adult fiction… but I think that cyberpunk isn’t going anywhere. Of that I’m sure. Authors with the ability to connect some of the larger and more intrinsically important aspects of the genre in new ways will end up displaying how far the genre has come and its future. It makes a certain kind of sense that one of the more recent and thoroughly enjoyable additions to the sub-genre stems from this partnership with young adult fiction. Who else is a new kind of cyberpunk for than the younger generation living with old anxieties?
“Truth is, reality always crushes your ideals…Just wait and see.”
Weird, wild sci-fi with fantastic art and design.
The data stored in her blood can save a city on the brink… or destroy it, in this gripping cyberpunk thriller.
When college student Emery Driscoll is blackmailed into being a courier for a clandestine organisation, she’s cut off from the neural implant community which binds the domed city of New Worth together. Her new masters exploit her rare condition which allows her to carry encoded data in her blood, and train her to transport secrets throughout the troubled city. New Worth is on the brink of Emergence – freedom from the dome – but not everyone wants to leave. Then a data drop goes bad, and Emery is caught between factions: those who want her blood, and those who just want her dead.
Within a techno-thriller-like framework Implanted’s author, Lauren C. Teffeau, weaves solarpunk and cyberpunk themes into a rich setting. New Worth is structurally crafted to evoke a sense of the outside world after radical climate effects have occurred. The stratification of class is literalized, with the rich living high up, enjoying the sun and the best goods the city has to offer. The poor live in all but darkness and have society geared against them in that there’s more crime and the cleaning robots don’t come around that much in the lower levels, etc.. The layout of the entire city is meant to feel like a vertical urban sprawl with only the aesthetic or veneer of a green space, a neat take on an urban jungle.
Emery comes from the terrestrial district down below, with her parents working her ass off to get her in school and land a job that’ll eventually enable them to move up. She’s short, she’s brown, and she’s completely bought into the status quo. Almost. It’s immediately clear early on that she’s a trauma survivor who goes to a virtual reality arcade to hone her skills. A particular skill set that she uses to claw back some control or agency in her life by hunting down people who prey on marginalized people, usually women; removing their implants and selling them.
In her personal life, she’s closed off and secretive, slow to trust—focusing on her coming graduation and landing a decent, but boring job to help her family move up, literally! Of course, this isn’t to be. A corporation blackmails her into joining their ranks, cut her off from everyone, even faking her death, and trains her to be a courier. Porting important information around in her blood, co-opting her very body for their own agency.
“...humans are fallible. Fallible for putting all their trust into the network. Fallible for not believing what they see with their own eyes. And we at Aventine use that to our advantage.”
Importantly, she was close to fully synching with Rik, a person she plays the arcades with but has never actually met.
Implants are the heart of the high tech in this cyberpunk fiction. Everyone has one and it’s installed fairly early on, else they lose some of the higher functionality, apparently. It allows people to sync with one another, sharing their emotions and thoughts so long as they’re connected. All of society is built on this technology. Citizens’ identities and the way they interact is completely changed by their implants. Social structure and corporate structure is built on the idea that everyone has one. Except… not everybody does. The Disconnects are people who reject this idea, unwilling to trade their freedom and natural human interactions for a device that essentially keeps the populace under the city’s thumb. All the information that is disseminated from them is outright trusted. People no longer trust their own senses, they trust the information being fed them. Social interactions have gone “Online” even more, essentially.
“It's true connection has a cost...The messy infrastructure can barely keep pace with the demands of the implants place on it. Not to mention security risks., malware, and emotional bleed - the kind that incapacitates or breeds paranoia instead of bringing people together.
Drawbacks we blindly put up with in our search for efficiency and escape.”
Joining Aventine, the corporation that has blackmailed her, eradicated the one connection she was building toward having despite her trauma. It’s the ultimate way of letting someone into your life, as their presence would always be there with you.
Fast forward months later and a job goes wrong. The information she’s carrying turns out to be important enough that both the corps and the disconnects are after her and she has to risk finding and asking for Rik’s help, who thought her dead.
What ensues is a fairly typical technothriller structure. The slow lead up filled with infodumps and personal stakes followed by action as she has to use her knowledge of the city to navigate her way to any sense of freedom. It’s a cyclical and satisfying narrative that doesn’t feel bloated but does take a while to get going. Luckily, the whole thing is a fast read so it’s not a big deal.
There are some more interesting aspects to the story though, deviating from cyberpunk and the techno-thriller formula. The underlying feminism to the fiction was always nice, even if it made Rik kind of annoying sometimes. The agency of the story is always with Emery, which means when she screws up it’s on her; just as the bulk of the decisions are her own. Rik is a well-off white guy in the higher levels who is a fairly good blueprint for a good supporting character. He sympathizes with the disconnects and acts of as a lens to fill Emery in on the details of the New Worth she herself is unaware of. It works well. But he’s still a little wrapped up in his own privilege in the story, in my opinion. Which, I think is how it is meant to be.
“That takes me by surprise. To willingly give up your implant? They make modern life bearable.
"Don't look so shocked. Implants aren't everything. It's not a weakness to want to separate mind from machine."
Weakness maybe not, but definitely outside the norm.”
The story is all from Emery’s perspective. Usually, I don’t end up liking something written in this way but it’s pulled off nicely here. Emery is likable and well fleshed out and her voice, while very casual (the only meh part of it for me), ultimately culminates in good character work. There is less prose but the themes are worked in such that there’s a decent amount of emotional payout because of the perspective.
It’s also somewhat subversive. It’s less frenetic than traditional cyberpunk, which usually has new terminology and infodumps that take place during action that doesn’t relent much. This is decidedly more low-key, making it also more accessible.
It also feels solarpunk in that it’s not entirely nihilistic regarding technology or the future, in general, despite the ecological disaster. There are explorations of being responsible and not simply ignorant when trying to understand the outside world that this society looks forward to. Not doing so having real, lasting impact that’s detrimental to humanity. The characters have low points but even when the omnipresent corporations illicit very little hope, it’s disillusioned later. Emery isn’t looking to simply save herself, she has to consider what her actions will do to others; decidedly not traditional cyberpunk where the protagonists are anti-heroes. Which, I like a lot. This feels like a more relevant cyberpunk story because of this.
The city finding a new use for things is also present but… not in the way you’d expect. It’s a living, breathing thing aesthetically because it has technology to counteract the greenhouse effect of living under glass, but also has maintenance tunnels and spaces for sub-cultures that are used by her as a courier to get her job done, even when that job eventually becomes eluding everyone. It felt like a well-realized setting with a purpose beyond the overcapacity of humanity resulting, again, in a nihilistic narrative more indicative of cyberpunk.
She needs to integrate into a corporation. Dressing like them and doing as they say. There is not the normal freedom of expression found in cyberpunk here, that’s been taken from her and, though subtle, I thought was an interesting way to turn it around later when she’s running from the corporation using the tech and the clothes they gave her. Rather than cybernetics being the thing used to subvert power structures, it’s a more literalized repurposing. Pretty cool.
Implants are both good and bad. Therefore the “good”, the “bad”, and the morally grey are put squarely on the shoulders people. Which ends up getting rid of the technophobia trope, too.
“...humans are fallible. Fallible for putting all their trust into the network. Fallible for not believing what they see with their own eyes. And we at Aventine use that to our advantage.”
It’s also always great to read a female protagonist that isn’t sexualized. Her voice and thoughts make sense, both in just the case of being a believable character, but also in terms of being respectful of a trauma victim while not skirting the issue. She has internal things to work out as a result and the narrative is about that. It’s not only a blip of a character detail to make her sympathetic. It’s how you come to be able to empathize and understand her thoughts and decisions throughout the entire story.
Surprising, thoughtful, and good; Implanted, I hope, is the start of a distinctly feminist cyberpunk wave of literature striking out against the cyberpunk visual tropes pervasive in visual media today that people seem to be waiting for. People like me!
“Over-reliance on digital infrastructure. If you don't exist in the infrastructure, where do you exist?”
