Never Steal from Dragons: Pixiepunk #1 by Patrick DuganMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have an odd affection for cyberpunk (considering I dislike its typical dystopian setting and find a lot of its tropes ridiculous), and am a big fan of both sword-and-sorcery and heists, so this book, in which a mixed group of fantasy characters pull a heist with significant cyberpunk elements, looked like a good fit for me. It largely was, with a couple of reservations.
Reservation one is that the classic Neuromancer style of cyberpunk worked in its own time in part because hardly anyone understood how computers actually worked yet, and it hasn't aged well. Most of the cyberpunk jargon in this book is, frankly, nonsense, and how things work is definitely cinematic rather than realistic. For example, an AI warns the hacker that the tunnel he has into the system he's hacking "will collapse in less than a millisecond," which should take a lot longer than a millisecond to say; he then does several things that should take several seconds and gets communication from a colleague (outside cyberspace, so even if he is impossibly sped up, she isn't) that would take another five seconds or so, and meanwhile the tunnel has still not collapsed. There's a countdown clock at another point that, of course, gets right to the last second before it's beaten (and why have a countdown anyway, rather than just an immediate explosion?) You need to suspend your disbelief pretty hard at times, is what I'm saying, and just go along with the flow. The other related problem is that both the hacking and also the magic are not Sandersonian, meaning that we, the audience, don't know in advance what they can and can't do, so they can do whatever the plot requires them to. The author doesn't abuse this too egregiously, though.
Reservation two is that the pre-publication copy I got via Netgalley presents a remarkably complete set of common copy-editing errors, including not only excess coordinate commas, dangling modifiers, misplaced apostrophes, mispunctuated dialog, inconsistent and incorrect capitalization (such as for the names of the fantasy races and their places of origin), words left out of sentences, homonym substitutions, and missing past perfect tense, but at least one example of practically every other error I've ever seen as well, a total of almost a hundred. I could, if I wanted to, bring out a new edition of my guide for authors on avoiding mechanical errors, illustrated almost entirely from this book. If this is the pre-edited version, I would describe it as "rough, but salvageable with a lot of work by a good editor"; but the author's afterword suggests that it's already had a lot of work by a copy editor, in which case the original version must have been practically unreadable.
Leaving aside these reservations, this is an intricately plotted, fun heist full of noblebright characters from assorted fantasy races. Even though they're the usual ratbag lot of criminals you get in heists and cyberpunk stories, they're all good-hearted, especially the mage, and end up forming a tight team/found family. (view spoiler)
We get a fair amount of backstory and a lot of introduction to the characters, because the assembling-the-team part of the heist takes up approximately the first half of the book. I did feel this was perhaps a touch too high a proportion, and I could have done with one fewer character (probably the mastermind, who registered less with me than the others; I had to check back to remind myself who she was). On the whole, though, the character work was good, and I liked spending time with them.
It's set up for sequels, and I think I would read a sequel, even knowing going in that the writing mechanics might be poor and the suspension of disbelief would probably require some work from me. It's for this reason that I'm giving it a place in my Best of the Year recommendation list, albeit firmly in the Bronze tier.
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