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Fiction » Literature » Drama
Fiction » Science fiction » General
| Format | Full Book | Sample First 20% |
|---|---|---|
| Online Reading (HTML, good for sampling in web browser) | Buy | View sample |
| Online Reading (JavaScript, experimental, buggy) | Buy | View sample |
| Kindle (.mobi for Kindle devices and Kindle apps) | Buy | Download sample |
| Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others) | Buy | Download sample |
| PDF (good for reading on PC, or for home printing) | Buy | No sample available |
| RTF (readable on most word processors) | Buy | No sample available |
| LRF (Use only for older model Sony Readers that don't support .epub) | Buy | Download sample |
| Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices) | Buy | Download sample |
| Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting) | Buy | No sample available |
| Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page) | Buy | No sample available |
Review by:
David Alexander
on Sep. 08, 2010 :
The book was well written, dialog was sharp, and descriptions were pretty much on-point. Ballard doesn’t hit you over the head with pretty prose or pages upon pages of description. There’s nothing pretty in 2028 Los Angeles. His prose comes off sharp, the characters acerbic. Though the physical action was minimal, the pace was kept up throughout the novel as things go from bad to worse. There were only minor quarks that tweaked my inner-editor. A couple of grammar glitches or repetitious prose here and there. No overt spelling or other major issues that usually turn me off from self published works.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)
Review by:
Scott Collins
on July 26, 2010 :
I was a little worried that I'd get lost in a book filled with technical jargon, but Mr. Ballard did a fantastic job of giving me enough information that I understood the premise without overwhelming me with techie speak. The fast, action packed plot kept me turning pages well into the night.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
brainycat
on June 16, 2010 :
This is a solid, but not groundbreaking cyberpunk adventure. Gary doesn't tread too far off the genre's beaten path, and for most of the book the action and dialogue (though not the vocabulary; sed -e "s/cyberpunk/SomeGenre/g") could be set in any noir story from Renaissance Europe to the far distant future. It's a quick read, and it's full of likable characters.
It doesn't suffer from the drawbacks typical of episodically published stories. Each installment flows well into the next, with no unnecessary recaps or useless cliffhangers: thankfully, this book reads nothing like Charles Dickens. The denouement feels like it's tacked on; almost like Gary lit a neon sign on a drizzly evening that says, "Second Novel: Here!" with a huge flashing arrow to the only plot point he left unresolved.
I like slimy, narcissistic antiheroes and Amoral Bridge delivers. He's not a total douchebag, he operates by his own moral compass that's tuned to a darwinian inspired nihilism I found myself relating to:
Everybody wants to do something nasty and vile to somebody else. Everybody! They're all fucking shitheels with disgusting, immoral, vicious desires buried in their tiny, miserable souls just waiting for an excuse to get out. The sooner it gets out and they all burn themselves up in a fiery orgy of self-destructive gluttony, the happier I'll be. Humanity as a whole is a miserable gaggle of self-pleasuring apes ready to crack you over the head and steal your fucking bananas.
This book is a great introduction to cyberpunk for people who might not usually read scifi, and for diehard cyberpunk fans it's a great way to spend a couple of nontaxing hours.
I read the smashwords edition, and it suffered from the usual deficiencies that all their epubs have, but was generally well rendered on my reader.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)