Thrill Switch [Book Review]
Cyberpunk by Tim Hawken.
TL;DR
I enjoyed not one but two fat shits out of Thrill Switch!
Thrill Switch by a fellow Substacker Tim Hawken is a darn good Cyberpunk. If the genre is your bowl of noodles, you should’ve added this book to your reading list yesterday, but since Tim is such a nice bloke, he’ll probably be chill with you doing it now.
The ingredients of a good sci-fi thriller
When I started Thrill Switch, I expected more of the aloof Aussie sarcasm I got used to while reading Tim’s The Apocalypse Will Still Have Coffee which is a very enjoyable read in its own right. What I found instead was a seriously solid, no-bullshit Cyberpunk novel.
It’s very well written. The characters are believable, scattered across the whole of the loveable to hateable spectrum. The non-stop action pulls in and absorbs you fully in the carnage across two worlds — the real and the virtual. There’s every ingredient to make a great sci-fi thriller, but one thing stood out for me, and drove it home:
A new spin on Cyberpunk VR
Ever since William Gibson’s Neuromancer cemented VR’s role in the genre, we’ve been treated to a million takes of it by multiple authors. However, they shared one common characteristics: VR is an alternative environment, used for entertainment, work, hacking, whatever as an added value to the real world.
In Thrill Switch, VR is a fully fledged world that majority of the world’s population chose as a default, while the real world is reduced to the role of a backup location — an awkward place where you go to get your tooth fixed.
The predictable social disasters when the balance of plugged-in and live populace is disturbed as well as the dynamics of real-world politics, legislature, and law enforcement being mapped onto the virtual one adds richness and realism to the narrative.
In all of this mess of two worlds — the definition of which one is more real depending on whom you ask — bleeding over each other, a huge conspiracy you don’t want to miss is underway.
Grab it now
I’m not going to repeat the “verdict” — this mini-review has started with one.
Thrill Switch on Bookshop, Amazon, Goodreads, Tim’s website.
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If you enjoy my writing, my latest book, Perfectopia is currently just 99c on Amazon (or free with Kindle Unlimited subscription). It's a near-future techno-thriller about good intentions gone horribly wrong. It’s dark, provocative, inventive, and is sure to make you uncomfortable.
