Steven Kotler

Devil's Dictionary

Fraser Simons

Lion Zorn is an empathy tracker. Think Will Graham from Hannibal, only more focused on moods and macro, cultural patterns. We come off the last book, in which Zorn has leaked details of a drug that more-or-less unearths or allows for more people like him to bond with animals, heighten their empathy, generally. I didn’t actually expect the continuation of that book, because that’s quite an order. 

Happily, this book maintains the things that worked about the first book and adds a healthy dose of interesting speculative science into a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller model. It’s still fairly gonzo and steeped in pop culture references, and it’s again a mystery formulated in such a way as the reader would never figure it out on their own, I think. But I like those things about it. It’s chaotic, Zorn is masculine but not alpha male or archetypical. He makes mistakes. His core is literally about being empathic. He’s played more often than he’s the mover and shaker. He isn’t always trying to get laid. Conflicts are resolved usually in atypical ways. And there’s a diverse cast that’s pretty well fleshed out, fairly diverse in terms of representation, and often are at odds with Zorn. Sometimes for reasons he’s completely unaware of. 

Really, I think the holdup readers will have is the core conceit around empathy and the play against type/trope this book does while being a cyberpunk book. Readers of the subgenre are, to my mind, notorious in their subjective definitions of what a CP story is and ought to be. Usually people like realism in their CP. So do I, and this still won me over; twice now. 

The em-tracking is a novel concept and it’s not used as a magic marker that constantly works to his advantage. Most of the time it’s a disadvantage having empathy when others do not. Especially when they know how to use that knowledge like a weapon. As long as readers can roll with the quirky arrangement of cyberpunk, action thriller tropes and subversions, there’s plenty of love about this book.

Devil's Dictionary

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