Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a sci-fi cyberpunk novel set in 2153. From what we are told, a couple of decades earlier a cataclysm or war (it is not clear at the beginning) wiped out life on Earth. Humanity’s survivors built a city in Mongolia and covered it with a protective dome to keep the toxic atmosphere out. The city is ruled by the Family, who is an enigmatic group living on a space station in geostationary orbit suspended high above the city. In the city there is something called “the Lottery.” If you win it, you die seven days later. Why this is done, is never explained. Is it a form of population control? Is it a form of societal control through terror? Maybe both. The book starts when our main protagonist, Gerry Cardle, wins the Lottery. Except that he shouldn’t, because Gerry is a high ranking government official and one of the few who are exempt from the Lottery. When he goes to his old workplace to straighten things out, he discovers that he no longer works there. The security people beat him up and throw him out. While lying on the street and recovering, he is approached by a man named Gabriel who tells him that he can help him. He takes Gerry to see his partner Petal who is something of a computer hacker. We quickly discover that Gerry winning the Lottery is not a misunderstanding, but part of a conspiracy. Someone from outside the city is introducing sentient computer viruses into the city’s systems. Moreover, this mysterious someone has an accomplice at the highest level of government. Gerry teams up with Gabriel and Petal to save his own skin and to save his city along the way. To do so, they must travel outside the Dome. It turns out that the world was not entirely destroyed and there are people living in other places, although civilization fell into barbarism. The world now looks like “Mad Max meets Wild West” with cybernetic implants. This does make me wonder. The technology available to the people outside the Dome is rudimentary at best, and yet cybernetic implants and computer networks seem to be common. How come? As Gerry travels and survives the post apocalyptic Earth in search of the elusive mastermind behind the conspiracy, he realizes that a lot of his former life was a lie and that he himself is not such an ordinary person as he thought to be. He has a personal connection to the Family, and to the people behind the conspiracy. This is overall the plot of the book. The idea is not bad and the story had great potential, but the execution is very poor. The main problem with the book is that there is way too much action in it. Our heroes are constantly being attacked, attack someone else, or get into some sort of trouble. There is a lot of violence that is completely pointless and almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. The action is so fast paced and frantic that I could not catch my breath. I love action and energy in a story, but there should be moments when things slow down so that the reader can rest and the author can use that space to better detail the world and the characters. This book has very little of that. It is like watching an action movie where we get nothing but car chases, shootouts and fights, and then we start all over again. The book suffers not only because this non-stop action quickly exhausts the reader, but also because as a result there is little space left to flesh out the characters and the setting. Gerry is probably the only character that is well developed, at least compared to the rest. He is an ordinary man who finds himself overwhelmed by the events, but he quickly gets his wits together and does whatever he can to save himself and the city he loves. But neither does he suddenly turn from Joe Ordinary into Superman. He has doubts and is fallible. Gabriel and Petal are there mainly to fight, pull/push Gerry along and explain things from time to time. They are little more than underdeveloped clichés. The same can be about almost every other character. The plot also wastes a lot of opportunities. For example, Gerry finds out early that his wife is part of the conspiracy and that she was deceiving him the whole time. What a great opportunity for drama. Imagine the dialogue if these two could meet and confront each other. But they never do and the whole side story never goes anywhere. There are two villains in the book. I will not mention them by name to avoid spoilers. The two have formed an alliance. The one outside the city is quite well developed in terms of motivation, but the one inside the city gets at most a couple of pages of space and comes out as nothing more than a typical psychopath megalomaniac that we so often see in action movies. Had the author cut out half of the action scenes (which are superfluous and gratuitous anyway) and replace them with deeper exploration of people and places, the book would have been much better. Sadly, there is also the fact that the writing is poor. I am not talking here about the way the plot is structured or all that frantic action. The writing itself, the author’s “voice,” is bad. Sometimes I was getting the impression that I am reading stuff written by a teenager. It was as if the author had watched a bunch of cheesy, low budget, poorly acted, straight-to-DVD action movies and decides to write a book that is exactly the same. I am advising you not to read this book. The only advantage this book has is that it is free. (Well, it was anyway when I bought it for my Kindle.) If you like cyberpunk-themed stories and need something to read on a boring, rainy day, then this book is okay. Otherwise, stay away from it. I was planning to give it one star, but the book has some redeeming qualities and, believe it or not, I have read worse things, so I’ll be generous and give it two stars.