[book] Cyberpunk / Tech Noir Book Recommendation - The Other Kind of Life

Another post I made back on [email protected] and am cross-posting from:https://slrpnk.net/post/963170

I promise I'll write up some new posts soon - but I'd like to resume my weeklyish weird/less-known book recommendations and I'd like that to include these first posts. Hope that's okay.

I'm new to this community but I know we're still trying to work out the kind of content we want here. I really like discussions of cyberpunk settings, technologies, and their implications so I thought I'd submit my recommendation for a(n unfortunately less-well-known) story that has a lot of that. (I've got a few other recommendations if anyone wants to hear them.)

I'm biased here because I'm already a fan of the author, who passed away last year, but it's really, really good and I wanted to recommend it.

The Other Kind of Life is a cyberpunk noir detective story. It's thoughtful, well-built, and it never cheats the audience out of seeing how the protagonist pulls something off. The story and setting are cohesive, take no shortcuts, and build a very distinct world.

The elevator pitch about a con artist solving robot murders sounds pretty trite in summary, so I'll give you the cool parts:

1: It's set in a custom world, fantasy style, with no connection to our world, which gives the author a lot of freedom and neatly exposed how accustomed I am to seeing this in fantasy books with the slightest hint of magic, and how much it throws me when a hard scifi story exists in the same kind of place.

2: Everything about the AIs carefully considers how they would develop, rather than just writing mechanical humans. They're wonderful and alien in small, interesting ways. And the book is saturated with conversations about them, their drives and design challenges. It feels like a successor to Free Radical, one of his earliest books, but more polished.

[Future voice]: I wish Young had lived long enough to see machine learning AI really take off, I'd love to see what he thought of it, and how it influenced his future work. Also, just, like, in general, because he seemed like a really good dude.

3: This book takes no shortcuts. It shows you how the protagonist talks his way past people, plans his heists, and even how he finds and maintains his contacts. (Transmet for example had a habit of letting Spider summon up past contacts whenever he needed a lead, before burning them, making me wonder how he ever made those connections. It worked there, but this stood out in contrast.) I love stories about characters who are smarter than me, and this one shows him being smart. Every step of the investigation feels earned. As trite as the buddy-cop-robot-murder-investigation premise feels... for me, this might be The buddy-cop-robot-murder-investigation book.

Bonus stuff: There's a DM's fascination with how things got the way they are in the setting, from infrastructure to bureaucracy, to technology, to politics. An analyst's perspective that informs pretty much everything else. Young has a real knack for making careful analyses of situations and emotional states almost absurdly engaging, and he has a focus on workable AI designs that I really enjoy. His writing voice shows through in places in the novel's narration and dialogue, but it has the effect of making the characters seem more thoughtful and intelligent than you often get with this genre so I don't mind it. There's not much hacking in this one, which is a shame because he does it well elsewhere, but what's here is solid and believable, and the social engineering probably make up for whatever's missing. I'm probably overselling it, but if you enjoy scifi, I'd say it's worth it for the AIs and the world at the least.