Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Cyber
Punk
Description:
“ThreadBare is a debugger. He’s property, one of the Imam’s vast pool
of implanted servants. He lives in a smelly, greasy garage on the boundary of
the battlefield known as Delusion. All he wants is to complete his tasks,
exceed his rival BullHammer, and stay alive. Possibly get a promotion.
When an atypical chore brings Thread into contact with Sandfly and
HardCandy, things get complicated. Day by day and task by task he struggles
with the life he’s always known. Ideas plague him, brutality vexes him, and
women distract him.
Then there’s the list of offline debuggers, those who’ve quietly
disappeared. Through datamixes — dreamlike records of their lives — Thread
tries to uncover the truth. Where did they go? What does it all mean? And what
can one forgotten debugger do about it anyway?”
Author:
“Kerry Nietz is a refugee of the software industry. He spent more than
a decade of his life flipping bits, first as one of the principal developers of
the database product FoxPro for the now mythical Fox Software, and then as one
of Bill Gates's minions at Microsoft. He is a husband, a father, a technophile
and a movie buff. He is the author of several award-winning novels, including A
Star Curiously Singing, Freeheads, and Amish Vampires in Space.”
Check out Mr.Nietz’s website or follow him on Facebook.
Appraisal:
I read and enjoyed Mr. Nietz’s A Star Curiously Singing. If you
enjoy snappy cyberpunk writing, I definitely recommend that read. Frayed had a
number of similarities in style and in the worldview, so I was looking forward
to another trip to the author’s extraordinary hi-tech future world run by
powerful Imams. I wasn’t disappointed.
Written in the first person of a debugger, DR23, nicknamed Threadbare,
much of the story involves the internal struggles of this “implanted” human
when he is faced with the actions of a ruling class of “freeheads” (humans
without implants). They abuse their powerful positions to run roughshod over
not only Sharia Law, but also human decency.
Exposed to their moral corruption, Threadbare is under constant threat
from the internal “stops” programmed to prevent him (through pain) from even
thinking about disobeying Sharia Law. An attractive concubine further tests his
“stops,” and causes Threadbare to confront the hypocrisy of a system that he is
programmed to obey.
Frayed is the first book in the Dark Trench Shadow
series. The series premise of a secret project and a list of debuggers who have
somehow broken free of their internal programming is foreshadowed throughout.
My only complaint is the cliff-hanger ending that left me feeling that this
installment hadn’t been cleanly finished in its own right.??
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Original review posted September 7, 2016.
Format/Typo
Issues:
Very few.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: Pete Barber
Approximate word count: 80-85,000 words
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