In aftermath of The Great Fall, as depicted in O, Wow, the United States become "Untied" and in a riverside remnant of old New Orleans known as Nola, a young tech struggles to unravel how he came to be condemned as a recog to the ANX penal lattice.
“Recogs would accommodate whatever was on offer.They picked up trash for the city.They chased tourist tips.They served the wealthy and powerful as personal body servants called grooms. Or they pandered farther down the social scale, availing themselves to sate any appetite.A few especially clever ones managed to contrive elegant cons or otherwise exploit wayward opportunities to scam any soul or system.“
Actually, recog Penn Hebert is an unjustly convicted felon leashed within a virtual prison lattice by an ANX brain implant that renders him physically unable to defend himself. But Penn is virtual master of the XR mixed- reality that feeds hallucinated thrills across Snake Zone networks to serve notoriously salacious lucid dreem cabarets run by Nola underground Queen of Sin, Claire “Mamma” Latrice. Nikki Brite, a young dancer turned therapeutic dreem sponder to escape actual flesh pits of the Zone, enlists Penn’s help to fend off an online predator that threatens her budding career. In fighting her stalker the duo also disrupt best-laid plans of a ruthless politician, a deranged multi-billionaire, his conniving grandson and a newly-arrived political sentinel who discovers that her own best interests, along with those of Penn and Nikki, converge onto startling new options for transhuman evolution.
Jones’s plotting and worldbuilding tends toward the density of hard SF and cyberpunk, the story powered by daring, sometimes upsetting ideas and grim conclusions about the trajectory of society and humanity. Learning not to struggle means Hebert passes the time as a virtual reality voyeur. His not-quite-a-life is upended when he’s enlisted to help Nikki Brite, a “clinical sponder”—someone who networks into the dreams of troubled people to help heal and unravel what’s confused—handle Randall Privy, the rapacious stalker who disrupts her dreams and client sessions.
Nikki believes Hebert didn’t commit the crime he’s being punished for, and together the duo face an assortment of the powers that be in a fallen America: corrupt politicians, underground madams, religious figures associated with white nationalists, and the tech geniuses pushing humanity toward something other. The rich, vivid storytelling can be a challenge to keep up with, especially in the early chapters, as Jones introduces complex tech and its surprising uses, on top of daring visions of the future; language touched by poetry, coding, and advanced mathematics; and a zeal for planting mysteries, surprises, and prankish revelations. Seasoned genre readers will feast on this irreducible, resistant-to-summary novel, alive with “dreemshares” and mysterious A.I. data agents, while casual fans who stick with it will be thrilled by Jones’ bold imagination, moral outrage, and devilish sense of play.
Takeaway: This SF vision of a fallen U.S., brain-implanted felons, and “dreemshare” therapy is bold, challenging, and at its best thrilling.
Great for fans of: Samuel R. Delaney, Neal Stephenson.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A-
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
