Publisher – Tordotcom

Published - Out Now

Price – £6.39 kindle eBook

The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities — augmented and virtual spaces anchored in the weight of the real. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive.

Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He's been hired for a special job: stealing an unknown object from a reclusive tech billionaire. But when he finds out he's stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated.

Cyberpunk is very much a genre that seems to have a definitive style and sometimes very much captures a sense of a time of mirrorshades and ropey SFX. But is there still a place for it in the 21st century when the internet now feels more a way of life than a wild frontier. What can cyberpunk do for us now? Corey J White shows that there may be life in the old dog left in Repo Virtual.

The future is now dominated by Augmentd Reality that can overlay everything. In South Korea’s Neo Songdo the tattered city is hidden by a gleaning AR worldf; the night sky for many is a massive multiplayer video game starscape and in a shadowy powerful corporation a powerful project nears completion. JD works in VR as a Repo Man who retrieves property and spaceships when players can’t keep the bills up but their sibling Soo-hyun has a job for the cult that they are part of to infiltrate Zero Corporation and steal a brand-new technology. The heist initially goes to plan but soon Zero Corporation and deadly cultists are after JD and will stop at nothing and eventually the mysterious and deadly Enda is put on JD’s tail.

This is an extremely entertaining action-packed read. White has constructed a very intricate future world where the US has collapsed and still the world is filled with the rich and the poor. What I loved about the story is how White has taken the bones of a familiar cyberpunk story and it feels upgraded for 2020 with a diverse cast – JD is a gay lead character while Soo-hyun is their non-binary sibling and no one blinks an eye. That is the norm accepted by all and instead the focus is on the social inequalities that definitely still exist. We see a cult that is happy to exploit people for personal gain and should be surprised that a Corporation has created a game that has become a huge source of income distracting people from the world outside. White creates a beautifully scripted heist well planned, using new technology and old tricks to make the first half of the book really rattle along.

Then the second half is more the chase as Enda is reluctantly recruited by Zero to pursue JD and his team. Here White introduces a new non-human character and now we explore what AI may mean for te future. I really liked the flow of this section and it raises some interesting moral questions about choice and even socialism. Enda was a fascinating character with a guilty past; a desire to do the right things and general awesomeness in either detection or fighting people.

But I have a caveat. While I think it’s both a very entertaining and enjoyable story I did wonder as I read it if this is simply a refreshed version of an older story. It’s heart and head are in the right place but is that not simply what I should expect a modern SF tale to be? What else is this story adding to the genre? I didn’t find anything stretching the genre more than it should be in the 2020s. It’;s a great solid piece of SF but in terms of do I think this wowed me and deserves best place. I’m not feeling it. Readers should pick this up if you enjoy good SF though.