Niels K.

I am a big fan of everything that fits into the wide array of genres related to cyberpunk. Recently I came by across a book called “Necrotech” by K.C. Alexander. I am not only a reader but also a big fan of cyberpunk-role playing games1. One of the problems those games face is a way to limit how much cyberware, technological enhancements implanted into the body, a character can accumulate. In Cyberpunk 2020 the characters loose Empathy. And when people have too much cyberware in them they become mass-killing pschopaths and there is a special police force that hunts those people down. When you remove the cyberware and go to psychological counseling you can regain it. But at the same moment it leads to stuff like my assassin character to whom I gave an empathy of 102 so that I could put as much CW as possible into him. In Shadowrun people loose Essence. All in all it doesn’t make much of a difference for mundane characters how much they lost. If you reach 0, you usually die.

In Necrotech the author did something similar to Cyberpunk 2020. People who implant too much cyberware become suddenly owned by their own cyberware and then start going onto a killing spree. And thus become kind of a cyberzombie who can even loose parts of their body and still go on since the cyberware controls the body now and not really the brain. And through new developments in the book it becomes a crossover of cyberpunk and starting zombie-apocalypse.

The main character is a woman who is a tough mercenary who wakes up with memory loss in a tough situation. And when she gets back to her team, they are not happy to see her while they think that she betrayed them. An interesting set up with a female main character who isn’t that stereotypical with some nice ideas of a modern cyberpunk world which extrapolates technologies and ideas from the beginning 21st century instead of the usual 80s make it a fun read if you like action and/or cyberpunk. Give it a shot.

P.s.: I should write more often about the books I liked reading.