Brainycat's Occaisonal Reviews

Brainycat's 5 "B"s:
blood: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
boobs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
bombs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
bondage: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
blasphemy: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
Stars: 1
Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
Deggan's Rule: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
Gay Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]

Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.

The First Rule of Cyberpunk is:
You do not make asides to define your new terms
The Second Rule of Cyberpunk is:
You do not make asides to define your new terms
The Third Rule of Cyberpunk is:
If this is the near dark future, it had damn well better make sense

One of my long standing policies is that I will get through 10% of a book before I declare it DNF. It was difficult getting through this ten percent. Not because of typos, but because the writing was so bad. It felt like someone took a standard format script and removed the "character" column from the left side, leaving only lines of dialogue and stage directions floating around on the page unanchored by context. A number of characters were introduced - with some sort of physical attribute to differentiate them - and afterwords they were only ever referenced through dialogue. I had no idea who was saying what to whom. I've never tried to hide the fact that I'm not a very sophisticated reader, but I'm still smarter than the average bear and I've been reading since I was a wee lad. I feel very confident saying that my reading skills are not the weak link in this particular chain.

Secondly, the scenario made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Apparently, it's late Friday night and the most important experiment in the history of a multinational biomedical corporation gets started. RRrrriiiiigggghhht... Ever better, not just one, but two leading researchers independently and without each others knowledge each kick off a major procedure? WTF? How were these doctors able to staff both the surgeries in the same clinic at the same time without knowing about each other? This scenario makes no sense whatsoever. I can't imagine a management or fiduciary policy where running a lab in this manner seems plausible.

We're not even going to get into the nature of the procedure and why it doesn't even stand up to scrutiny under it's own logic. Nor will we get into the unnecessary and sometimes inappropriate use of Technological Terms. I will say that taking time out of the story (via footnotes!) to define and explain technological terms, rather than just showing the characters using the technology and trusting us to figure it out, feels like a slap in the face. Coupled with the pacing and characterization issues, this points to the dire need for some professional editing and a few more rewrites. I didn't see any new ideas in the few pages I read, but I did see a nonstop litany of amateurish mistakes.