The Immortality Game and Convergence Review

Here’s a two-fer!

Boy, this has been a great month for Indie Cyberpunk. For me, atleast. I’ve had this deep rooted affection for cyberpunk since reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. That love is nestled in my loins next to my affinity for peanut butter and cereal.
Though, not necessarily together. Unless we’re talking about Cap’n Crunch, but we’re not. We’re talking about awesome successors to the genre from a couple of debut authors.

One of my gripes in recent history is that cyberpunk kinda stalled out in the early 2000’s. Not sure why, but there was a glut of interesting concepts. Perhaps technology was growing too quickly for our imaginations to keep pace. Maybe cyberpunk died alongside zubaz and I just didn’t notice until decades later the carcasses started to stink the joint up.

Oh, god…the colors!

Anyways, great news everybody! Cyberpunk ain’t dead, it just found some tasty cat poop to roll around in for a bit. But now it’s back and I’m pretty excited.

Last month two books came up on my radar. Convergence by Michael Patrick Hicks and The Immortality Game by Ted Cross. Now, Convergence had been out for a bit and had a fair showing in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest for 2013, but for some reason I’d never noticed it until a couple weeks back. That’s the fickle nature of Amazon discoverability for ya.

The Immortality Game, on the other hand, was released a week before Time Heist and so it kept popping up on the sub-category charts every time I turned my head. The cover, which you can see below, is gorgeous and sports a pyramid which immediately drew my attention on account of the fact that I too have a pyramid on my cover… Er…back cover. Close enough.

My first thoughts were, “Hey awesome, that guy has a pyramid, too!”
Which devolved to, “Wait, is his pyramid better than mine?”
Which inevitably lead to, “That bastard’s pyramid is better than mine!”

So, Ted. You and I are in a fight cause I got some pyramid envy.

Anyways, I’m dealing with both stories concurrently here because both are great successors to the genre while dealing with interesting world changing technology.

The Immortality Game deals with the technology of the future in a more robust way, covering a whole slew of interesting concepts including the idea that the United States imploded when the vast majority of its population decided to start meshing, which is not some awesome new dance craze, but rather the willful decision to live exclusively within the confines of the inter-webs.

One of the main characters of the TIG (The Immortality Game as we’ll acronymize it for the time being), Marcus, was a former mesher and we learn about the devastation wrought in the wake of that particular movement through his eyes. This concept in and of itself isn’t much different than the premise of Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive where people are more or less living exclusively in the web, but I dig it because it’s one of those concepts that will become increasingly pertinent as our society moves towards greater and greater interconnectivity.

With smart phones, social media, and the like, we’re already knee-deep in technological reliance, so I don’t think sci-fi writers can hit that particular note too many times in the coming years.

Now, TIG had some great tech-adaptations, but my hat goes off to Michael Patrick Hicks who came up with one of my favorite drugs of all times in Convergence. In Hick’s story, people can record and share their memories/emotions via a small chip implanted in their skull. The protagonist, Jonah Everitt, is addicted to reliving the memories of people the instant before they die and their brain flushes them with a slip n’ slide worth of endorphins.

I love this concept because it opens up the question of how can people move on when they are tethered to the past in such a visceral way.

On a side note, I read an interesting article awhile back on the changing dynamic of break-ups. In the past people would break-up, divide their friends, and go their separate way. But with the advent of social media and that sticky interconnectedness issue, it’s nearly impossible to get away from our ex’s and insure any sort of legitimate closure. Convergence made me think alot about this which I think is one of those underbelly of culture things that is sneaking up on us without anybody really noticing.

Anyways, back to the stories.
TIG had some great concepts and interesting side-characters, but the main characters Zoya and Marcus didn’t really work for me. Zoya turns into a sociopath with a death-wish 3/4 of the way through the story, and Marcus devolves into a love-sick puppy.

Convergence, consequently, had an interesting cast of characters, and while I liked Jonah for the most part, there was inexplicably off about him. I think it might have had something to do with his motivation for sticking around California (which was invaded and now subsequently run by the People’s Republic of China).

By the by, I love that both Ted Cross and Michael Hicks had the United States more-or-less implode, but in both their stories Texas turns into this crazy right-wing religious territory state. Not saying they are wrong in that assessment, but the votes are definitely in for Texas.

Welcome to Texas, here’s your assault rifle!

So let’s extrapolate some of the similarities from both TIG and Convergence and see where cyberpunk is taking us in the years to come.

– nanotechnology is gonna be huge.
– people are gonna have data ports behind their ears. (Not sure how this works in practice, but I’m for it!)
– the word charnel is coming back. You might be saying, but hey, that word never truly left, but it did. Believe me it did.
– copying the human consciousness and transferring it to digital format is coming. Grab your floppy disks and be prepared.

Let’s wrap this up.

Overall I think Convergence had better character development along with a more gripping story, but The Immortality Game had the better exploration of tech and it’s effect on the world of tomorrow.

Either way, if you’re looking for great new sci-fi look no further than The Immortality Game or Convergence.

Ted Cross Blog

Michael Patrick Hicks Blog

Anthony