Revenant Sun

(3 customer reviews)

Description

Stanley Gabrels has been online for most of his life, living in a makeshift paradise hovering above those left behind for the sake of progress, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of others like him, working nonstop, guided in everyday life by the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence.

As passionate as he is for the latest technology and augmentation, he also longs to escape from the constant barrage of information that is stripping away his humanity. When offered to crack a code that could make him a fortune, he becomes involved in a deadly game of cat and mouse that will forever change him and the world as he knows it.

3 reviews for Revenant Sun

  1. Ryan Pascall

    As a teenager,I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer which led me to play and run the Role Playing game Cyberpunk 2020 (I’m still waiting for my set of rippers thank you) and ever since I have loved the Cyberpunk genre.

    The problem is, it is really hard to write good Cyberpunk as all too often I come into a story expecting great things and end up finding that the setting is used purely as an excuse to throw in flying cars, cyborgs and big guns but wholly lack a realistic world for them to exist.

    I find that the genre has, ever since GIbson, lacked a world-building like Tolkien is to Fantasy and Lovecraft to horror and so I admit that I fully expected the same here but thankfully, for once, I was mistaken.

    This is not a book for action fans,let’s get the out there straight away. Don’t come into this expecting flying car chases, gunfights in Zero-G or Cyborgs punching holes through walls, this is more like a mix of Minority Report and Gibson’s fantastic short story Johnny Mnemonic (with a bit of Winter Soldier thrown in for good measure).

    The story is based in a world not unlike where our own is slowly heading. Our day to day lives are automated through Adam, an AI that we speak to via a technology-aided mental link through whom we manage our day to day lives and plays.

    In this world we find Stanley, a pretty normal man who starts to experience blackouts and finding himself in strange places and unusual, dangerous situations as he slowly begins to realise that someone new has set up home in his head and is beginning to wrestle for control.

    What begins is a journey through the shining world of the future, weaving through a city all too familiar at times both in its reliance on technology but also in the conditions that the different parts of a society exist, all while in search for an understanding as to what is happening to his slowly fracturing mind.

    With the aid of some unlikely allies, he comes to realise the truth behind both of the voices in his head and the larger implications it has for all of society.

    I admit that initially I was a little worried by the slow start of the story and felt this might be one of those books that takes so long to get going that, by the time we get anywhere, the story has ended. Thankfully, before too long the mystery began to unfold and it had its hooks in me good and proper.

    A dialogue heavy book with a wide-ranging plethora of characters, it’s a testament to both the writing and the narration that I was able to follow the story so easily and never did I find myself confused as to those involved, and throughout the narration was perfectly attuned to the story throughout.

    While I think that this book isn’t for everyone, again I have to highlight the lack of any grand action sequences, for those who prefer a rich world and deep, engaging story I can’t recommend this highly enough.

  2. John Pierce

    I couldn’t get past the narrator and enjoy the story. I’m going to try and read the text version.

  3. Richard C

    This book is full of ideas and very densely packed at times. I enjoyed the book but was sometimes a little impatient for it to move the story along faster. I don’t need car chases or anything, but the story did take its time getting to the point at times.

    I’ve read a lot of the classic cyberpunk books when they came out in the heyday of the genre in the 80’s. Some of which can be almost funny now with assumptions in technology progress. I think this book avoids a lot of this with keeping a lot of the tech vague but functional. I’m happy to view the book as a very good new chapter in cyberpunk and I will await other books from this author with interest.

    The narrator was very good and the voices were very clearly defined.

Add a review