"We are alive. We are alive when whole kingdoms and "Countries are gone. When Malaya is a morass of killing. When Kowloon is underwater. When China is split and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is nothing but starvation. The Empire of America is no more. The Union of the Europeans splintered and factionalized. And yet we endure, even expand. The Kingdom survives."

The Windup Girl is a cyberpunk, specifically biopunk I would say, where Thailand has arisen as a major power in the world due to foresight. When the world went to pieces because of viruses that eradicated food supplies , Thailand closed itself off and got above the curve. In this future, the oil industry has collapsed and scarcity is focused on food, so it is technically a dystopia. But decidedly there is hope, they are on a precipice yet, all is not lost. There is prosperity here.

"The ecosystem unravelled when man first went a-seafaring. When we first lit fires on the broad savannas of Africa. We have only accelerated the phenomenon. The food web you talk about is nostalgia, nothing more. Nature." He makes a disgusted face. "We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.”

Paolo's prose are completely beautiful and his world building is amazing. From colloquial terms, to food, to the thought processes of the various characters he inhabits as the narrative shifts. The pacing is perfect, with the climax shifting the narrative often and the beginning having long meandering thoughts that perfectly embody the characters. Every moment feels earned and the world feels real and often visceral.

“A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits.”

While I've heard some people find the characters unlikable, which is why it took me a while to read the book in the first place unfortunately, I disagree completely! Each one could be aspects of one fully fledged in it's focus, in fact I found it impossible to dislike one because each are trapped in their own circumstance with the only truly one transcending their nature, to which they were shackled more than any other. It's a beautiful exploration of ones sense with the embodiment of each targeting a radicalized circumstance.

"We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect."

The narrative is careful not to assign blame and allow the reader to discern the morality here. Though, the book is hard to read at times because of it's unyielding gaze at the depravity that humanity has to offer, specially for The Windup Girl, Emiko. If you have a hard time with fiction that has abuse and rape and dehumanization of people, specifically women, there will be some very hard parts to get through. You may consider passing on it entirely in fact.

"His words have the finality of true authority. Reflexively, Emiko starts to bow, acquiescing to his wishes. She stops short. You are not a dog, she reminds herself. You are not a servant. Service has gotten you abandoned amongst demons in a city of divine beings. If you act like a servant, you will die like a dog."

Ultimately The Windup Girl ended up specifically resonating with me because it masterfully wove a fiction that was captivating and was a significant exploration of the setting as much as the characters. This isn't all that common with cyberpunk, where the setting is a living breathing thing. There are social systems being examined but how the characters effected the city and how these systems made this unique place was interwoven in the perception of the characters, instead of the usual critical analysis of it that often comes with the genre. Usually a data dump, for example, is what establishes what we need to know about the setting. We are still learning about it until the end, more than anything I felt like the setting was a character in this story. I read slowly and savored every minute in the 500 page book.

“All is transient. Even bo trees cannot last.”

When you are driven from your home, or constructed by others to fit into what they think you should be. When you are owned despite coming from privilege. When you are unyielding in your views and your world was razed. What is the responsibility you have to those around you? How are you a product of your circumstances and what is freedom when we are bound by it. What responsibility do we have to ourselves despite them as well?

“I was asleep. All along, I was asleep and never understood.

But now, as he stares at the relic bo tree, something shifts.

Nothing lasts forever. A kuti is a cell. This cell is a prison. He sits in a prison, while the ones who took Chaya live and drink and whore and laugh. Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree. . . All is change; change is the only truth.”

This is centrally what I found the story was about, a commentary on change; both the freedom of it and the restrictions. As well as the responsibility we have to ourselves and one another and the agency we think we have; and how beautiful and terrible that is throughout the course of our lives. The architect of our own agency may only be ourselves -- everything else is a truth we must accept or we may well be destroyed.

5/5 for me. I could not put it down and I am sure I'll revisit it before the year ends. I can't think of any flaw, so, so good.

Amazing. The added context does make it better than the movie, which is also quite good. But this is a much more intimate experience and the tension feels much higher.The audible narrator was very good as well, one of the best I’ve heard.

It’s not a book you read for fun. The tone stays the same throughout. But what I think is really unique about this book is that Vanessa, the narrator is not painted with a typical brush.

The story does a great job of communicating the ways in which a man can violate a child in a non standard way. When the experience of victim doesn’t conform to how people think a victim should look and think and act, their stories are even more invalidated by society than those who act perfectly.

It’s a delicate thing to write a person this way while being unequivocal about the responsibility and guilt the purple traitor has. And I suspect the author did a lot of research about how abusers justify their behaviour because this guy pulls out all the greatest hits. But i would say is even more insidious, the author depicting grooming and gaslighting very well.

I had read that the author actually had started writing this when she was a teenager but hadn’t finished it until she was almost 30. The text certainly seems very well thought out when Vanessa is both ages, so that makes sense.

Had I not listened to the audiobook (fantastic narrator, great job) I would have highlighted quite a few passages. There a lot of beautiful prose that I found very apt and poignant. keep in mind that I’m a man and have no history with abuse so I would look to other reviews to see other perspectives on how it’s handled. I thought it felt deeply considered and respectful while being unapologetic and unforgiving when required.

“In all the complexity born of sheer duration…that’s what ultimately belongs to me, to anyone: beauty, and loss.”

Coming off some earlier cyberpunk works such as Mindplayers and Synners, Pat Cadigan’s Fools, while not placed in the Mindplayers series of books (labeled Deadpan Allie), feels like it takes place within the same world. The most exciting elements of Mindplayers can be found in it. Most predominate are memories as a commodity, the consumption of which comes with a high akin to drugs, so long as the memory is relatively new to the mind. Cadigan extrapolates societal paranoia and deliberately conflates it with individual, subjective memory. Years later Strange Days poses the same question: are you paranoid enough? Only in Fools, when you can buy memories along with the pop culture you’re consuming, it’s perhaps an even more terrifying thing to consider.

“How about you, madam? You may think you’re paranoid. But are you paranoid enough?”

The main character is at the crux of an intriguing exploration regarding a personal identity and how much of it is entangled in their memories. Especially if those memories do not belong to that person. Fools keeps the reader guessing. You’ll never be 100% sure who the main character actually is.
She may be an actress who downloads characters, embodying them for a time and then expels them from her mind. She could also be a memory junkie, addicted to the high. And, possibly, the actress is just one such collection of memories, a persona. While the junkie is the “real” person.

“What’s that old saying? Art is long. But life is short. And memory is my past that changed.”

Just when you think you’ve got a hold on what is going on the rug is pulled out from your feet. Again and again, with each part of the story as it unfolds, a new twist is introduced that brings into question what you thought you knew.

As the main character, as I’ll refer to her as, since who knows her real name or persona at any given time, is coming to grips with what may be happening within her own mind, she is also being pursued by people who have their own relationships to the people occupying her mind. It’s a very satisfying, twisting story that reveals more of what happened gradually. Introducing more complexity to the story at just the right times, so it is never overwhelming when it easily could be.

Fools navigates different areas of the city in riveting fashion. Surfacing each persona in the main character in a fish-out-of-water type situation that the reader can easily identify with. As she flounders, so do you. Personhood and embodiment are explored at a different angle than previous works. The reader taken along for the ride.

“You looking for truth?…Or just keeping a secret?”

Cadigan also continues to show distinction from other authors at the time by not putting poverty and marginalization tourism, as well as hyper-sexualization—things typically associated with cyberpunk during this time—at the forefront of her work. There is also no love interest central to the character. There is no giant megacorp with the boot of the neck of the impoverished for shock, either.
“People who mouthkiss are capable of anything.”

Instead, low life aspects feel more authentic and engaging. Each new notion regarding marginalization parallels a direct experience from the character. Even when one of the personas is an escort, and beauty is definitely depicted as a commodity being leveraged by those with power, it isn’t shown in a male gaze way. It’s merely a fact of life for people and something tied to the identity of the main character(s).

Cadigan occupies a beguiling, at times, intersection of cyberpunk because while she is often called “The Queen of Cyberpunk” and is sometimes in academia thumbed for not being directly feminist—she is also undoubtedly, never really invoking tropes typically associated with masculine authors in the genre. Her characters are competent. They are not defined by gender and are not sexually liberated and non-monogamous. Sex takes a back seat and never used solely to depict marginalization. The exploration of the idea is what matters principally in her cyberpunk works.

“Truth is cheap. Information costs. Can you afford information? Or only the truth”

Another device used to significant effect is the changes to how the text is presented. It is changed up to help the reader with the transitions from the different identities surfacing in the main character. Fonts change. Sometimes they are in bold; sometimes italicized. Even still, however, this is a much more complex narrative than the typical cyberpunk books. It will challenge you, as it uses these changes in the story to drive forward the plot at a much more frenetic pace. The changes also work to further ground the reader in the headspace. It’s clever and fun. The cadence of each character’s “voice” adapts to the textual switch ups, really driving home the differences in each one.

Unfortunately, some of my favorite elements of the plot need to be kept mysterious because they reveal some of the plot. Make no mistake, Fools is one of the most compelling cyberpunk novels. Even more so when you consider how unique it is for the year it was released: the same year, in fact, as the release of Snow Crash, 1992.

Ironically, Fools was another fantastic addition to a plethora of books that prove the sub-genre was just hitting its stride. Some of its very best contributions began just when the founders of the sub-genre declared the cyberpunk movement—not the sub-genre—was dead upon the release of the satirical, post-cyberpunk Snow Crash. At the time, it seemed to mark the commodification and absorption of cyberpunk into “mainstream” science fiction and pop culture. Read the two side by side, however, and you’ll find none of the elements in Snow Crash that were satirized.

In hindsight, various, typically more marginalized, authors met with limited commercial success at the time were already busy iterating on cyberpunk. Fools is illustrative of that fact, and appropriately titled.

“Funny how that works, how you can lose someone by finding her.”

more reviews @ consumingcyberpunk.com

I've just finished reading The Summer Prince for the second time. It's so good. If somebody asked me what book to recommend for cyberpunk, it would have been Altered Carbon a few months ago, now I'm not so sure.

It's almost the opposite of Altered Carbon, where the language is very aggressive and it drives to the heart of conflicts, prose, and themes with a clinical or cold outlook. The Summer Prince is just as elegant but with warmth.

Right from the get go it assume a lot about a futuristic world that is very inspiring. Women rule
Palmares Tres, pansexual citizens are the norm, not the minority. And those relationships are portrayed in the most organic, beautiful and loving ways that anything different would be so strange.

I've read reviews that really don't like the aspects of Brazilian culture in the book but it's cyberpunk, we are extrapolating now and adding a few variables and imagining what we get here, the religion demanding a sacrifice of a king is barbaric. But way less so than most cyberpunk fiction, it's also elegant and beautiful in its own way and mirrors an internal monologue of the main character, June.

The world is very well realized and I don't think I've ever read a book where I was able to realize the main character so well, the emotions and thoughts of June as she searched for meaning in her tragedy, as the city and its people also under went a character arc, was just captivating.

The use of technology through the authors eyes was more cyberpunk than most cyberpunk novels I've read as well. The introduction and the exploration of it and what it does and means to the people in the world was really, really great use of sci-fi elements coupled with the human condition.

The whole story feels alive and vibrant and warm despite some pretty dark thematic elements being explored. I know I'll be re-reading it yet again shortly, it's that good!