4.5 stars. A nice dystopian sci-fi novel involving progression.
I was looking for a futuristic novel that involved the ideas of LitRPG or progression, and found it in Cyber Dreams.
The first book is named Electric Angel, and is about a young girl named “Juliana” who works a boring job as a welder. She has very little money and lives in subsidized “corpo” apartments. Corpos are basically the bad guys of the series – corporations.
One night, she witnesses a kidnapping gone wrong at her workplace. Through a series of questionable choices, she accepts an advanced (possibly illegal) AI personal assistant from a stranger before he is about to die. The corpo that created this AI would apparently kill to get it back.
And from that point on, Juliana is on the run. She has to give up her apartment, leave her job, stop talking to her one friend, and attempt to live a new life in the underground world of operators. She has to constantly hide her identity in public. Her new AI assistant (Angel) is quite advanced, and so she can take hacking jobs for money. She earns more from her first job as a hacker than she did in an entire month working as a welder.
Of course, the people she is working with betray her, and she has to go farther on the run. Along the way, she can upgrade her eyes, ears, and other body parts with the money she is earning from hacking.
Things I liked about the book series:
- Well written
- Great story
- Interesting characters
- Set in the future
- Involves AI
Things that took away from it:
- How easy she goes from being completely legitimate working as a welder, to being on the run doing illegal jobs
- One of her first decisions is to choose a “operator handle”. She can’t think of a handle so just uses her real name, Juliana. She’s supposed to be hiding her identity! She’s on the run at this point! She should choose any name – “tin can”, “pencil”, “motorbike” – than her real name.
- I haven’t yet discovered WHY her AI assistant Angel is so different than the others. Is there more that we don’t know?
- She has no friends from her old life as a welder? Barely one?
I enjoyed the book. The plot was interesting and I’m curious to see where she goes from here. She mentioned wanted to go off-world, and that will be fun when it happens.
There are a couple of more books, and I will likely read the next once I get back to some other series on my list.
