This book is a meditation on evil, and embodiment, and what it means to be human, and what it means to love. How can activists succeed against a totalitarian government when everything is networked and everyone is under surveillance.
It was published in 1996, and since then we have only stumbled (or been shoved and dragged) closer to the dystopian future it portrays.
It’s well written, swinging from immediate danger to philosophical conversations, from discussions of genocide to ordering takeout. The new technologies are well named and smoothly layered into the story with deft clues for the reader to follow along.
Recommended if you don’t mind horror mixed into your cyberpunk. I prefer to avoid dystopias for my fiction reading – I can read the news for that.
Coincidentally, Kate Nepveu post her notes on a ReaderCon 2025 panel about this book.
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