Genejoke wrote:
i love cyberpunk stuff but it is a very 80s genre.
Especially Gibson.
Continuing my cyberpunk odyssey, next of the rank was…
Dome City Blues.This was highly recommended on Amazon…It wasn't very good though. Truthfull, I only got it because it was decently long and very cheap.
-Lot's of homage/influnce from Gibson's Necromancer. Brands are mentioned a bit and the book's name is an obvious homage- the first chapter of Necromancer is “Chiba City Blues”.
The main problem with this book is that it's a very obvious formula detective story (in the old noire style), bolted onto cyberpunk.You might think that'd make a good story but bolting is a horrible way to mix genres or settings. It's clunky. And because it's formula you can accurately guess 10 steps ahead past what the author intends.
The other issue was that this was a first time novel. The writer, Jeff Edwards, is much acclaimed for his naval based military fiction apparently (big thriller stuff I think, you know, “dad” books). This cyberpunk novel was something he had lying around and released almost 20 years after he'd written it with almost no changes. The inexperience is palpable. He obviously wrote it when he'd left the navy and was just starting out as a novelist, but could never get a publisher to take it up back then, so now he has some name recognition he's giving this old thing another go…
But it wasn't alllll bad. Amidst the dodgy predictable stuff he writes some entertaining action sequences, he really DOES know enough about weapons to make the mechanics of them work well and believably in the story, even though they'd fictional they “work”. And the final denouement, even though you knew exactly what was going to happen and there was no mystery at all to it, was engagingly written enough (because of the action), that I read straight through and enjoyed it.
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OK, next book is…
Snow Crash.This cyberpunk novel is even more highly rated than Necromancer. Certainly a lot more than Dome City Blues.
So far it's started off VERY much like a scifi alternative comic from the pages of Heavy Metal magazine, so it was very cartoonish and because of that pretty hard to get into… But that's seemed to have faded a bit and it gets a nicely hyped up vivid funkiness as you go on.
This one looks extremely promising!