Category: Cyberpunk

Count Zero by William Gibson

Count Zero by William Gibson, Ace paperback from 1987

How does Count Zero, William Gibson‘s second novel, hold up more than 35 years after its publication? That’s what I was thinking about, re-reading the book for the first time in at least a decade. At the end of Neuromancer, Gibson’s first, genre-defining novel, something happened to the AIs and the entirety of cyberspace, something …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/15/count-zero-by-william-gibson/

Agency by William Gibson

Agency by William Gibson

Readers who made it through the first few unforgiving chapters of The Peripheral and went on to enjoy the rest of the book will find the beginning of Agency easier going, with the essential setup unchanged and many of the characters returning. In the main timeline sometime late in the twenty-second century, humanity has mostly …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/26/agency-by-william-gibson/

The Peripheral by William Gibson

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Like the protagonist of Neuromancer, William Gibson is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. In The Peripheral the first slightly funny deal is between some people in England who hire some other folks in a small-town part of Appalachia in the US. The English contingent wants the people across the pond to fly a …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/23/the-peripheral-by-william-gibson-2/

Alpha Omega by Nicholas Bowling

At about the 70% mark, I realized that Alpha Omega could slot very easily into the universe of The Matrix, serving as an entirely convincing origin story, so to speak, of that cyberpunk dystopia. The comparisons drawn between this book and Ernest Clines’ Ready Player One are poor: Mr Clines’ novel is a Spielbergian adventure …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/06/alpha-omega-by-nicholas-bowling/

Shorefall (The Founders Trilogy #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett

Ahhhh, so lovely to slip back into the genre-bending fantasy-cyberpunk world of The Founders Trilogy, like a nice warm bath for my mind. The first novel Foundryside was one of my favorite books of 2018, and I was ecstatic to be able to get my hands on an advance copy of the sequel, which begins …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/21/shorefall-the-founders-trilogy-2-by-robert-jackson-bennett/

An Interview with J. T. Nicholas, author of Re-Coil

Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did Re-Coil evolve? A. It started out as a horror novel. Well, sci-fi horror. Think Alien or Event Horizon. I just had this image of a derelict ship full of bodies. Maximum creepiness. But as …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/12/an-interview-with-j-t-nicholas-author-of-re-coil/

Re-Coil by J.T. Nicholas

Re-Coil is set in a future where humanity has spread to colonize the solar system, having achieved immortality via the use of coil technology, a hybrid of quantum computing with genetic engineering that means you only lose as much of your life as you neglected to back up in your secure file. Carter Langston is …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/02/re-coil-by-j-t-nicholas/

Never Deal With a Dragon / Choose Your Enemies Carefully / Find Your Own Truth by Robert N. Charrette

For my first review for the Frumious Consortium, I’d like to start with a bang, a triple play. Three books at once, all part of a trilogy inscribed in the same universe, all by the same author, and all uncommonly uniform enough in style and execution as to try and pass a single review as …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/02/never-deal-with-a-dragon-choose-your-enemies-carefully-find-your-own-truth-robert-n-charrette/