Review: The Extractionist

The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this author's previous book, Nucleation , which, like this one, I had as a pre-publication version from Netgalley. I noted on that one, and will note again, that the author (despite her degree in English/Writing) has a poor grasp of basic mechanics, as the unedited version reveals; it's full of comma splices, there are a good few excess hyphens and coordinate commas inserted because she's only learned half of a rule, a number of sentences have words dropped out (or occasionally repeated), the past perfect tense goes missing frequently, and there are a smaller but still significant number of other errors. Worst of all is her use of pronouns. Not infrequently, there are two female characters being discussed in a sentence, and "she" or "her" will be used to refer to both characters, often in alternation, with no clear signalling as to which is which. At other times, the gender of a pronoun is simply wrong for the person it's referring to - not, as far as I can tell, for any deliberate reason; it's just a mistake the author is prone to making.

All of this may (and, I hope, will) be cleaned up by publication, though as usual I will note that having a great many errors in the unedited book is a strong predictor of having more than a few in the edited version, since editors are human and miss things.

It isn't a sequel to Nucleation, and can be read as a standalone, though if you enjoy one I think you'll also enjoy the other; leaving aside the mechanical issues, this is a strong piece of writing, with excellent pacing and tension. It makes William Gibson's Agency look like the proverbial pile of puke, in this regard (or rather, Gibson managed to do that himself). The cyberpunk premise, while still a bit handwavey, is better justified than average, too. The idea is that (using quantum computing as a sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic) people are able to write out versions of themselves, known as "personas," into the "Swim" to transact business on their behalf. If the persona encounters too much of a paradigm shift, however, writing them back into the original person is tricky, and this is the niche skill that the protagonist has. Unfortunately, mysterious parties are opposed to her completing her latest contract, and are willing to use strongarm tactics to get her to leave off. She herself, using an advanced and experimental brain-computer interface that she built herself, interfaces directly with the Swim, which makes her vulnerable to events occurring in it.

While it does suffer from the usual cyberpunk issue of overliteralizing the interface metaphor in some of the action scenes, that didn't do too much to hinder my enjoyment of a well-structured story that rises beyond the cliches of the genre, while still honouring its key tropes. It comfortably makes it onto my Best of the Year list, though low down the list, because I suspect there will be a residue of those many mechanical issues in the published version.

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