36 Streets by TR Napper

I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Published – Out Now

Published – Titan Books

Price – £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook

Lin “The Silent One” Vu is a gangster and sometime private investigator living in Chinese-occupied Hanoi, in the steaming, paranoid alleyways of the 36 Streets. Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, everywhere she is an outsider.

Through grit and courage Lin has carved a place for herself in the Vietnamese underworld where Hanoi’s crime boss, Bao Nguyen, is training her to fight and lead. Bao drives her hard; on the streets there are no second chances. Meanwhile the people of Hanoi are succumbing to Fat Victory - a dangerously addictive immersive simulation of the US-Vietnam war.

When an Englishman comes to Hanoi on the trail of his friend’s murderer, Lin’s life is turned upside down. She is drawn into the grand conspiracies of the neon gods - of regimes and mega-corporations - as they unleash dangerous new technologies.

Lin must confront the immutable moral calculus of unjust wars. She must choose: family, country, or gang. Blood, truth, or redemption. No choice is easy on the 36 Streets.

Cyberpunk is a fascinating sub-genre one that started to glimpse where the web and digital world would get us and then the world has now moved. In a world of crypto and evil corporations surrounding us what has cyberpunk got left to say to us? In TR Napper’s new novel 36 Streets we get a good attempt to show us cyberpunk is not yet short of ideas but I’m not sure it needed to honour it’s past as much either to be fully successful.

In the near future Hanoi is occupied by the Chinese Army but there are areas of the city that belong to the criminal gangs and the unwary do not try to take over the 36 Streets where various gangs vie for power. Bao Nguyen is one of the most feared and under his influence is part time gangster part time detective Lin Vu. She gets hired to help find the murderer of a computer game designer and discovers the dangerous game of Fat Victory sucking in many Vietnamese into a virtual reality take on the US-Vietnam conflict of the 20th century. Lin finds herself in a maze of hidden intrigues, counterattacks and violence where memories cannot be always relied upon and danger gets closer.

I enjoyed reading this tale. Napper has a visual fast flowing style. Future Hanoi seems an interesting mix of old and new worlds where technology can translate other languages and record memories;  but also the endless delights of food, fighting and bodies are also easily on sale. It’s a grimy, neon shadowy world where life is cheap. We move through the various factions of gangsters and govt officials and discover it is hard to tell which has the most honour and which can be trusted the least. Napper moves from scenes explaining the politics to action fight scenes and VR trips skilfully creating this world and its rules that we as newcomers need to explore. I love the idea od VR games being used as subtle propaganda tools and the concept of memory becoming something that be edited and rearranged is compelling and I wish had been explored in more detail.

With Lin we have a female character who is only just realising that the various games going on around her need her to play various roles. Intelligent, brittle, reckless and fierce and hiding her family secrets in many ways this story is Lin’s origin story as she becomes someone to be reckoned with. But I didn’t think her story arc really worked for me. The central arc is supposedly Lin learning she needs to let go of her earlier self but we don’t see a lot of her life before she meets Bao until very late in the day. She is already a hard closed off character and by the end of the book she is pretty much the same. I would have loved to see more of Lin’s inner conflict being explored as wishes balances hr life. Lin’s relationship with her sister is flagged as important but she has very little time on the page for us to get to really know their dynamics

But I think my biggest issue with the tale is that this story feels very very familiar. Despite the exotic setting we still just have a tale of someone finding out life with gangsters is dangerous and leads to more intrigue, double-crossing and violence. I may be feeling my age but I didn’t see what has changed from the cyberpunk stories I read in the late 90s and early 2000s. Lin comes from along line of female badass characters in SF who play just as hard as the guys. I never though really saw her more than a plot device and I wish we got to see the internal decision-making she experienced as her life drastically changed. My other observation is how the other female characters all fall into typical noir roles of moll, good girl or even prostitute and I wish that we could have had a bit more diversity in terms of gender balances. I’m struggling to believe that women would not in a few decades have also got more firmer positions in a life of crime and could itself have led to some interesting dynamics. Even the mystery of Fat Victory doesn’t feel that well explored as a concept. This is one of the few times I wish we had a few more chapters to help flesh this world out and not just race to final confrontation scenes

I had fun reading this book and suspect many more will do so but ultimately, I got a sense of an author that knows cyberpunk very well and wished to ensure the beats of such tales was honoured; but I never found it had something more radical to say to push the genre into the 2020s. Napper though I suspect is a name to watch and I hope future novels stretch their ambitions for cyberpunk; but for now this is more for me a promising start than a total success. SF fans though wish to explore this just to refresh their memories of what this genre has to offer.