Cash Crash Jubilee

March 9, 2015
Debut novelist William reverses the outsider perspective of cyberpunk in this intricate tale of a digitally claustrophobic future. Amon Kenzaki works as an Identity Executioner for the main financial authority, GATA, hunting down and closing out the accounts of overdrawn Free Citizens. In a world where all actions, ideas, and bodily functions are priced (“Blinking is money”), bankruptcy is the only real offense. Amon believes in GATA and its copyright economy until he is forced to take down a personal hero, Lawrence Barrow, the chief executive minister of Japan. Seeking truth, he becomes caught up in the rivalry between the two richest sisters in the world. William creates a wraparound horror of a commercialized infosphere, the ImmaNet that pervades and monetizes everything, with InfoClouds in the InfoSky dropping InfoRain ads on pedestrians. Readers who can accept the awkwardness of the setup (Amon types phonetically because all imaginable strings of text have been patented) will get an immersion in a runaway capitalist landscape.

April 15, 2015

In a future Tokyo, everything about our lives has been monetized and the rights sold to huge corporations, requiring people to license every function deemed voluntary such as walking and talking and even breathing deeply. If you outspend your earnings you might cash crash, and liquidators such as Amon Kenzaki will come for you, sending you to bankdeath. Amon gets a string of high-profile crash cases, but his unquestioned loyalty is tested when it becomes clear that someone is tampering with his targets' bodybanks. VERDICT Darkly cynical, this debut overdoses on slick descriptions, trying to overwhelm the reader with the minutia of every visual of this Blade Runner-esque world. The author also tends to use an "infodump" methodology to describe the workings of his grim universe.

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