CENTRICITY by Nathaniel Henderson: supercharged spy-fi that delivers a real tango in your temple!
CENTRICITY is an immersive and atmospheric novel that blends sci-fi, espionage and thriller elements. Henderson’s world-building is particularly impressive, providing vivid descriptions of a society coping with unchecked exponential technological growth and rampant global environmental deterioration. His masterful wordcraft adds an authenticity to how life would feel in a future world where augmented reality technology is omnipotent.
The action is based in the city-sphere of ’Naion’, a self-sustaining arcology protected from an environmentally damaged Earth. Humans possess immersive technology, ‘synts’, a brain-machine interface linked to the ‘Nebula’ file system, heightening their capacity to investigate, interrogate or flee.
Characters are thrust into a complex narrative that make for a challenging read. The dialogue, often amusing and witty, offsets the evocative technical discourse on Naion’s vanguard technology. There's action too, in the fight and flee scenes, described in exquisite detail and incorporating a heady mix of the senses - taste, touch, sight, sound and synt. This is a necessarily long novel as the main characters, Nik, Adasha, Voros and Rown methodically untangle the facts and sift through multi-layered leads.
In short, CENTRICITY has something for everyone.
It's by no means an easy read as the author develops multiple plot lines and multiple POVs in a world of spies and their unwitting targets. For me, this made for a rewarding experience, although a more comprehensive index of characters and organisations than the one offered would have assisted.
I strongly recommend this engrossing dystopian tale of the future. Readers of cyberpunk novels such as Gibson’s Neuromancer should thoroughly enjoy CENTRICITY. 5 Stars
Having previously read two children’s classics that are light in tone, I found Centricity to be too violent (which the author warned me of beforehand) and very technology-heavy. It took some time getting used to terms like “brainware,” “bandwidth” and “code tags,” as well as keeping up with the many character names and places in the beginning. But once I got to know the residents of the city of Naion and what they did for a living, I started to understand their importance in the story and even cared for some of them, most of all Nik.
Nik is a twenty-nine-year-old self-employed IT specialist, who, after having received a seemingly unimportant inheritance from a friend of his father’s, finds himself the target of many killers. Out of all the characters, Nik is someone I’d actually want to hang out with, despite his faults, as he is to me the most soulful character. While I did care for a few others, like Adasha, I feel as if the rest of the characters are all about their mission, showing as little emotion as possible.
In my imagination, the city of Naion is busy and overcrowded with people, machines and buildings—a city full of neon lights that I’m actually wishing the book cover glows in the dark (just like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan). In Naion, almost everything seems to be hackable and virtual, and your daily life can be easily exposed. I’d be extremely paranoid if I were living in this dangerous, chaotic world. It’s a scary future to live in, with disasters at every corner.
Centricity is my first cyberpunk read. The book is long and a little complex, but once I got used to the technological terms and familiarized myself with the names and places, the reading went by quickly because it got exciting and fast-paced. I wanted to know more about the inheritance and how it connects to all the characters. I especially enjoyed the different sides of the story through several points of view. Overall, the story felt like an action movie. I recommend this book to readers of spy thrillers and dystopian novels and to readers like me who’d love to experience a variety of genres.
“Dead ends were rarely dead; one must climb a wall, find a window.”
