I am not sure if this ending is worse than the original... maybe on par with it? Pretty boring. I could have done without these last two volumes entirely, both dedicated to other side characters.

This book is fairly enjoyable and I would have given it 3 stars but for a couple things. I'm just a regular white dude who likes cyberpunk fiction a lot. But it seems to me that the character while diverging from "normal' or classic cyberpunk fiction (which is great), is pretty uneven. She's badass but always somehow manages to come off 1 dimensional. She always refers to her friends as her "bitches", she pretty much doesn't give a crap about any man save one, and then it's a hyper sexual focus on just that one person. Being a guy, from my lens, this reads off to me. Bringing me to my next point. It's ironic the author even mentions this plot thread in this manner:
"There was an organization trying to pit Mormons and Muslims against each other? It sounded like the obvious plot of a shitty B movie."

I'm sure later on this is unraveled to not be the case. However at 76% percent, I stopped reading. Why? Even more of a reason this didn't get 3 stars though is the double slam against Muslim faith. I get that it's a hot topic right now, but this is the future. Why is it so hard for people to get that Muslim faith is not synonymous with suicide bombers. We already know these people are not following that faith, but in this future anytime Muslim faith is brought up, it's followed by either suicide bombers or talk about arms. At one point Sue Zay, the main protagonist, is talking with one of her friends who is Muslim, and she just happens to describe a gun in complete detail. When asked how she knows this about the weapon the response is, "I'm Muslim!" This was a what the actual fuck moment for me. Then later on there's talk about bombing and someone else says:

"It could happen." Caleb shrugged, "but they would have to physically put someone on the train to plug into the terminal. Even if they got past the armed guards in the engine room, it would be a suicide mission after the train crashed." He shrugged.
"Suicide isn't outside of Muslim beliefs," Emma said with a shrug.

Annnnd I'm done. Part of cyberpunk is extrapolating what these things look like in the future and if you're going to be making light of any faith, you ought to contextualize it. But especially this need for American writers to work in the Muslim terrorist angles is just old hat, and it does not fit in a futuristic world, and if you want it to, explain to me what these religions are like - what they've become - whatever.

To end on a positive note though, I don't have a problem with the writing. It's vulgar, it's fun. The protagonist is a bit flat but can't be slapped into an ordinary default of male author characters. It's a good time, and especially the parts about biker gangs and the use of Asian colloquial terms for them, was neat. I liked that it was an all girl team that kicked ass on their futuristic bikes and I liked the racing sequences a lot.

"Funakoshi and I floated across the freeway for a handful of agonizing seconds, and the world seemed to suddenly become silent. The cars weren't around me, the freeway wasn't under me, and Hogan wasn't yelling at me. It was just Dad and I riding through the Sierra Nevadas on the back of Funakoshi, laughing. I had my arms around his muscular stomach, and he would tell me to squeeze tighter so he could go faster. I buried my helmet into his back and giggled when I felt the engine roar underneath us. Damn it, Dad. Why did you die? Then everything caught and snapped forward."

But in the end the above stuff did made me stop reading it. And for a while actually pissed me off. Maybe things get better with the next books, who knows.

I DNF’d at around 65% or so. I just don’t like humorous texts and the POV just seems like a device to squeeze it in more and more as it goes on. I like the characters and the weapons and the world were cool. It just became a bit formulaic and then the jokes grated on me enough that I didn’t want to bother continuing.

I couldn't get into it. This whole meta plot shtick and the bad guy being like superman because of his intelligence and mind over matter type stuff. This is just not the cyberpunk stuff I'm into. I'm all for post-cyberpunk explorative questions but this reads like what if General Zod was a cyberpunk villain. It appeared to be fairly well written for the couple chapters I took in, but yes, sorry - not my thing.

Although well written I struggled to make it through this book. There is a lot of problematic content in regards to YT. And worse, a lot of it is usually defended because of the tone of the book. However people justify it in order to enjoy it, I couldn't.

That being said, the story was enjoyable for me in so far as the overall plot about language being a virus traced back to ancient origins. That was pretty cool.

I'm a big fan of cyberpunk, but I prefer stories about the human condition so was left a bit unsatisfied. YT exists solely to support a divergent plot thread, it's a gonzo, balls to wall story that doesn't have a grander plot in mind. There's something to be said for reading a book that is just a thriller, but I was looking for more from it after all the praise.

Still, not bad. Maybe a victim of hype and sensitivity to some content that made me uncomfortable.

While I like the writing style this book was really frustrating to read. So many things don’t matter in this book it drove me nuts. The proclivity where actual important information is dropped casually and is often nonsense drove me bananas. Often times information the characters are privy to isn’t explained about another character until much later in the book. I think it’s supposed to wet your appetite until you get that information but it was done so frequently I just honestly didn’t care or was annoyed when dropped. Like hinting at Ernesto’s condition and then casually dropping it.

The plot felt really haphazard and there was basically no through line of themes, or they just didn’t hit and felt like they were tied into later, again casually and in passing. Made it seem like 75% of the book is just there for no real reason.

There’s lots of pop culture references and stylistic languages similar to The Magicians. Swearing and jargon and nerd references. But while Magicians does this to kind of ground the fiction in a way that says ‘this could be our world now and we wouldn’t know it’, there is no internal logic to this world at all.

There is some charm in how the world is expressed through the characters but it gets less charming and more frustrating about halfway in when it feels more like someone just wanted to throw some cool shit in without explanation, while swapping to the lives of the two main characters that, again, are pretty much just bloated with stuff that I GUESS would throw you off what the book is about and or headed? But instead just completely undermines any semblance of stakes or plot that the book attempts.

All this is to say, this book is not for me, apparently.

Well, to be honest right off the bat there's some pretty racist, which no doubt is supposed to be funny, depiction of an Asian. That made me put it right down. I'm not interested in laughing at "Engrish". Say they have a thick accent, say they aren't fluent. Say whatever you like but the last thing I want to read is something that reads like it's racist, if it isn't.

"If a paycheque could change your life, do you think they'd let you have one?"

Walkaway is a book about many things but fundamentally this is what it wants you to think about, the rest is a thought experiment viewed from a few different characters' eyes. On paper, this book does everything I want from a post-cyberpunk book, including callbacks to first wave cyberpunk books.

"Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes."

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza is feeling the woes of the generation gap when he and his best friend, Seth, go to a Communist party. Just as a rich, young future “zotta” (essentially boiling down to those people who are the rich 1%, controlling the world) by way of a hefty inheritance drops some millennial knowledge about how their generation is attempting to resist the system, the authority shows up and exercises excessive force to remove them from the abandoned premises; setting the trio on a path that has them walk away from society.

"I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done."

The book follows these main three, along with a couple more walkaways through a number of years of their lives, from their “schlepping” days, adapting to a lifestyle where people occupy the abandoned spaces away from what is referred to as default: the mainstream way of life folks typically go through across the world in this cyberpunk world that always feels not that far away. Sure, people have interface surfaces they intuit for computer functionality. Not yet a completely simulated reality but more of an augmented one, along with mecha and fabricating printers, the daily lives of people with technology has not diverted from ours. The day-to-day of the typical citizen is intact, creating a through line that the form of resistance everyone has in the structure of our civilization currently is held by everyone. The power structures come from the active participation in the citizens to abide and uphold it. The story reads like an ongoing thought experiment with this premise in mind, from young teens walking away to an even further future.

"Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals."

The “punk” in cyberpunk constantly needs to be reevaluated, because the punk movement has died does not mean there are no forms of resistance that would classify people as punks. Making the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk genre far from dead as some people posit. This text is great at showing this and does so with as diverse a cast of characters as I've read. For this genre in particular though, I would say it exceeds expectations. There is good LGBTQ+ representation, a wide variety of relationships, and from a large number of backgrounds.

"When I was your age, we didn't have an abandoned zones or free hardware designs. People without a place were homeless—vagrants, beggars."

Additionally, the text also explores simulated, digital minds that are simply called sims. They scan the person's mind and then attempt to run them on hardware. I say attempt because not all people take to being a digital human. This is also done well and explored more in-depth and in a more believable way than some science fiction. You can tell the author has been keeping up with current thinking on simulated selves and Artificial Intelligence.

"Backup. A Perfect, perfectly seductive name for the scan and sim."

As I said, this story has most everything I look for in a cyberpunk story on paper. In practice, though, I couldn't help but feel like all of the things I wanted were boxes being ticked. Although the character work is far from poor, some the LGBTQ+ characters don't feel believable in a lived in-and-experienced kind of way. Sometimes rather than people, they are merely a lens. A much-needed one, but the dialogue ends up feeling stilted because of this frame. I think this is also close to unavoidable when you're exploring so many high concepts and need a way to articulate each viewpoint. The dialogue becomes the vehicle for large info dumps, particularly in the first half 50 pages where it isn't so much a story as a few people at a party telling you what post-capitalism is and why it is bad.

"...we’re problems to be solved, not citizens. That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay."

Coupled with a couple reoccurring annoyances, this book ended up being one that I returned too without much enthusiasm despite its interesting themes. If I had to read “Hubert, etc.” One more time when no other characters last name was ever mentioned, for instance, I was going to throw the book against a wall. Luckily that's just for around 60 pages or so.

If you can make it through the info dumps, strange pacing, and the annoying cadence that I felt was there, you should end up being glad to have read it—as I am.

"No matter how hard you try, the little fuckers always generation gap you."