Book review – CrashCourse – Baird, Wilhelmina (pseudonym of Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelmina_Baird
Last year I bought a armful of science fiction novels from the used bookstore. I have been slowly reading my way through them. This was one of them.
This wasn’t a terrible book. It is very much an echo of the resonating waves of cyberpunk content I the 90’s that emanated from William Gibson blowing the lid off with Neuromancer and Burning Chrome in the 80’s. And in that sense a product of its time and place.
It is the first of a four novels set in a dystopian near-future London. For once I randomly bought a book that was the first in the series.
The characters were fairly well written with the protagonist, Cass, being built the best. You were rooting for her.
I liked the combination of thieves and artists in the underground parts of society – because artists always end up slumming when they pursue their work.
The bad guys being a near-future-dystopian reality TV syndicate was spot on and ages well!
The dialogue was intended to be noir-ish and cycber-punky but ended up being confusing to read. It was hard to stay in the action of the story when you had to pause to reread something, like Champollion trying to parse the Rosetta Stone in flight. It truthfully created a lot of friction when trying to stay engaged with the story.
Very good effort, especially for a debut novel. Worth the used-book-paperback price if you’re a cyberpunk fan.