Review: Warcross

Warcross by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really loved this, it kept me engaged and entertained the whole book. Nancy Wu did an excellent job with the audio narration.  This fulfills my cyberpunk reading prompt challenge.  It hits most of the requirements for cyberpunk. 

This follows Emika Chen, a brillian hacker turned bounty hunter because she has to pay the bills. She's been banned from computers after pleading guilty to hacking to save a friends reputation. At her center Emika is a good person, but she knows that the world is an ugly place, so she tries to catch some of the bad guys and make some cash doing it. Emika typically hides in the shadows of the internet, but when one of her hacks goes wrong she finds herself glitched into the opening game of the Warcross tournament. Her anonymous identity isn't anonymous any longer and the developer of the world's favorite game offers her a job. Hideo developed Warcross, and now everyone in the world plays, but someone is hacking into the game and messing with Hideo's code. He asks Emika to go undercover as a Warcross wildcard player and use her hacking and bounty hunting skills to find the hacker that is trying to destroy Warcross. Emika finds herself entrenched in the dark side of the game and trying to uncover a mole within her Warcross teammates. She also finds an unexpected connection with the handsome, yet haunted billionaire. As she uncovers more about what is going on with the hacker, she also uncovers more about Hideo and finds so much more than she expected.

I could have done without the romance. It was a bit cheesy and predictable. I also figured out the plot twist pretty much right away, so the big reveal at the end was no surprise to me. The one thing I do like about Lu's writing is her somewhat villainous characters. You think they are the good guy, then they turn out the be kind of the bad guy but they still have redeeming qualities and you still want to like them. This book is much more character and plot driven. I would have liked a little more cyber and techno babble, but I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea. I really like that stuff because I'm a nerd. I think the Warcross games that the teams played were described very well as was the technology itself, I just wish there was more focus on that aspect of the book. I really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

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Review: The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't care for this book, however Bacigalupi's writing and creativity is 5 stars. I loved his YA books, but I found this adult work to be be too slow paced for my taste. I didn't really care for any of the characters or the plot in the book which made it really hard or me to get through it.  I pushed through so I could complete the challenge for  book from a a genre/subgenre you've never heard of. This is considered cyberpunk.

What is cyber punk you ask? It is a subgenre of sci-fi set in the near-future. It typically features advanced technology and/or scientific achievements with a breakdown of social order. They are usually post-industrial dystopian societies that center their confict on AI, hacking, and megacorporations. In the case of The WIndup Girl it is more of a biopunk, yet another subgenre of cyberpunk. Biopunk is cyberpunk centered around biotechnolgy advances instead of computer based tech. The Windup Girl has megacorporations which focus on manipulation of human DNA and the gene hacking of the world's food sources.

The Windup Girl is definitely a dystopian, biopunk adventure set in futuristic Thailand and follows several main characters, Anderson is attempting to build a factory and gain access to the Thai seebank, more on that later. Jaidee and Kanya who are both "white shirts" a kind of military police force that monitor the imports, exports, and the calorie use. Many of the white shirts are corrupt, but Jaidee is known as being by the book and has many enemies, Kanya is his second in command. Hock Seng works for Anderson and is always bargaining with someone trying to get back to his status as a great shipping captain. Emiko, is a New Person, genetically engineered to be beautiful and perfect, and trained to serve. She was revered and loved in Japan, but her previous master abandoned her in Thailand where she is abused and used as the New People are hated and feared.

The world of The Windup Girl is violent and brutal. Food is limited to what big gene-ripping corporations can produce, each company trying to outsmart the next gene-plague and outbreak. Money no longer exists, people pay in calories as currency. Corporations are trying to develop disease resistant foods, but no one has been able to crack the DNA code to get there. Anderson is playing the political game with the major players to gain access to the Thai seed bank which may in fact hold the secret to new genetic material. Each of the stories of the characters progresses independently for quite some time, but as the book progresses they begin to intertwine until they are completely entangled. Emiko, who is supposed to be completely subservient, does something out of character and it starts an uprising. Anderson and the rest of the political players try to take advantage of the situation and overthrow those in power. No one really wins in the end.

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