sissi

It's difficult to judge this book, reading it after actual years of being exposed to cyberpunk. I kept being reminded of its derivatives before reminding myself that it's the other way around!
I read this often at night before bed, and the fast pace and high amount of technobabble sometimes made it hard to follow. But despite that it was a very exciting and evocative read!

The first section was fine; very one-dimensional characters, excessively witty dialogue, but... fine.

In the second section we have, on the same page, a 7 yr old flirting with an adult and incredibly poorly written sentences like “she blew a cloud of white smoke as if she was ready to announce the next pope” – total tonal whiplash! I am also increasingly annoyed at the main character. Why is this child a genius?! No, his parents emotionally neglecting him is no reason for him to be the smartest, most reasonable 7 year old in existence.

Anyway I then looked the author up and am not confident in his ability to handle a story categorized as lgbtqia+.

too unhopeful on human nature for 2020

My expectations for this book were set by the foreword, which praises it for being a sort of return to form for Japanese mystery novels where the crime is a puzzle that the reader is given every possible piece to solve. So I got more and more disappointed as I read and realised this was not the case: from hidden relationships and the motivation for the violent acts of seemingly regular characters being that they are “psychopaths”, to handwavy explanations and inane planning ahead, a solvable mystery it was not. If I had picked it up expecting a thriller I would have enjoyed it much more, but as a mystery novel it left me rolling my eyes, shrugging and thinking of animes like Subete ga F ni Naru. If that's your thing, this is absolutely for you!

I got around 65% in. iI was enjoying the setting and general concept but it turned into a book about cops, way more than exploring how memory and the physics of time are connected.