Just a heads up; but if anyone's into Cyberpunk, I've just published my first book on Amazon. Also... aaaaAAAAaaaa... I have a freekin' book on the Internet! Anyway, it's been laying around in a finished state for a while but I didn't really know what to do with it afterwards. Cyberpunk, or sci-fi, is incredibly hard to have published in the traditional way with agents and publishers and such. It was actually mum who suggested self-publishing as a friend of hers had recently gone through with it with their own work. I don't expect much to come of it (like quitting one’s day job and hanging out on a yacht with bunny girls,) it's just nice to see it out there. New Phoenix: A Cyberpunk Story http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MSZ3SEK
And purchased; I'll let you know what I think once I've read it - re-reading Hyperion just now so it'll be a few days.
First off - if anyone hasn't read it, don't read what's below. I'm not putting it in spoilers, it's a wall of text and easy enough to avoid and hard enough to read without it being inverted! So; the good - it scans very well, it's not a struggle to read and rewards you as you go along without needless repetition or derailment. The bad - there are still quite a few typo's in there, whether they be missing letters, missing words, or whatever. The ugly - "mini-comp" it just gets on my whatsits, can't explain way but that's a purely personal thing. Going a bit further; I don't think it's so much of a cyberpunk story as a post-cyberpunk story, there's a flavour of Simon Morden in there, the Hero, who's both a hero in the digital environment and a hero in the physical environment. Alexis is very much a Hero - he may be a bit unwilling - pushed forwards purely by his search for (the) Electra, but he's a Hero nevertheless. And he's good at it, either having everything he needs, or easily sourcing/scamming it, and someone will always provide the favour/service he needs. It makes him seem very well connected. It makes him feel like a fixer with street deal [11]! Added to that his skills in combat both on and off the net/space - Combat Sense [11] and Interface [11] - and we find ourselves with a bit of a superman complex. Petrovitch gets the smeg smashed out of him so much and so often he's on the slippery slope to full 'borg-hood!. He tends to have more luck in the digital and cerebral parts of Mordens novels, but even then things go wrong, badly. I like the fact that you don't fall into the trap of "meat space," "slow time," or any of the other terms many authors make net/space heavy characters use, it always feels like a clumsy way to try and illustrate an us/them divide. Having just read Hyperion, Brawne Lamia's chapter has a section which is very heavy on this, and Dan Simmons is obviously using it as foil not a serious device. This is underlined by the myth of "Cowboy Gibson," but even there used in near parody it feels clumsy. Your individual spaces feel believable; the wind, the snow, the wet, the lights going off - just for a couple of seconds before the battery backups kick in, the glare of the lights hiding the cheep fit-out, the columns, the space the characters inhabit all excellent. However, the city as a whole feels vague I know it has a mall, and a dockyard, a canal, and an abandoned subway (etcetera) but there's no overall sensation, is it tall - masses of skyscrapers vying for light, pedestrians down below in shadow or artificial illumination. Is it sprawling and loose at the edges like London with a tight central core, is it crowded beyond belief like Bombay, are the streets clean or dirty? There's auto-trafic and pedestrians in rush hour, and there's quiet back alleys where you can hack, be accosted, take out a corp-assassin, you've got ubiquitous advertising attacking two senses, there are a lot of places, but I find myself with no emotional feel for the city. If I say Chiba, you (I) can partially feel my self in Gibsons world, sky the colour of static on the TV, smoke stained domes, the grit under-foot. New Phoenix? It's on Mars, it's cold, and it has artificial gravity - which is a nice touch. But with the title and the city being synonymous, it should be as (or more) fleshed out as the rest of the characters and scenes within it. The samurai battle in cyberspace flows very well - having people talk over the fact that the simulation imposes rules and the AI has to work inside them is good. However, the speed and force with which it destroyed the first two (three?) nodes attacking multiple simulations (or existing within multiple simulations?) undermines the good ground work you laid in making the punk/AI battle a physical simulation rather than lines of code. Couldn't it be attacking elsewhere in the same node simultaneously? If not, why not? I didn't get any impression of there being anything to limit it in this one node more than the others, apart from the increased number of bodies involved; but why would they all be concentrated in one simulation within the node rather than spread out across the whole, or were all other sims shut down so that there was only one running leaving the AI with a single target? To me this is both one of the strongest and weakest parts of the story, and just a little bit of tightening up and it'll be a pretty good example of human/cyberspace/AI interactivity. Sasha feels too sure of herself in the last few of chapters, I know they're net/space heavy whereas her uncertainty and damsel-in-distress moments were all in the physical, but the dichotomy just feels to strong. Give her time to grow into herself in your future works. The crows gathering together the distorted ship (Electra?) as an allusion for defraging? We're to presume that it's the data Gabriel has given him, this is good and obvious, but the crows confuse the issue a bit - are they a fragment of the destroyed(?) AI, it using crows to mark its progress earlier, or are they simply a random bird choice - and if so could they be something else? It's a beech simulation, black headed gull? Albatross? Tern? I don't know, something. Ugh - there's probably more, I'll have to re-read it...
Thanks for the feedback, I should have responded earlier but I was kind of unwell last week. I pretty much agree with the points and should address them in a new book. Ironically, in the first draft there was a more detailed description of the city as well as Alexi having a few broken bones. The former was paired down after a few people who proof read it complained that there were too many descriptive words and not enough story. It's one of the harder things to do, describe a functioning city when you've spent your life living in the county. I was also worried about overreaching myself or writing myself into a corner. Sasha and Electra should be expanded on in a follow up story. I did start to expand on the latter, but it felt too contrived at the time. The mini-comp... yeah, should probably have changed that. I needed people to use mobile devices without dating the story by calling them tablets or smartphones (this is also why no year is mentioned.) As with a few other elements, such as the airships, I went with a historical reference; namely this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer Having subsequently re-read Burning Chrome, I prefer the way Gibson deals with mobile devices. I guess it could be easily changed for another story though.
Hey your name is Neil too! Cool. I'll be buying this when I've transferred money to the UK. Congrats on getting published!
You Sir, have done something many of us wish we will get around to. One day... Good on you, seriously, good going mate
Thanks dude. So yeah, about that. I was just going to put my first and surname on the cover, but decided to have a quick Google first. Turns out there are a lot of us; musicians, boxers, sfx technicians... and a Neil of Garland County who was arrested on a prostitution charge. I figured I'd throw in my middle name.
As someone who took 18mo off 'to write' and now has two 250k drafts hanging around but is again too busy to finish the cursed things off I have to say.... CONGRATULATIONS ! I have indeed purchased but it could be a while before it's read. But bloomin' well done
