Neon Leviathan

Cyberpunk, which re-invigorated 1980s SF, very quickly became a set of clichés.....neon, rain drenched mega cities, corporations running the world, tech spliced into the human system.....so it takes a very talented writer to take on that genre in the 21st Century, this most cyberpunk of epochs. Fortunately TR Napper is that writer and his debut collection of short stories is quite brilliant. It's like if Black Mirror had an emotional core rather than a glib set of dystopian tropes endlessly shuffled to ever diminishing returns.

What we get is stories set in a near future where memory has become mutable, where events can be erased, reordered, changed to fit a new narrative; where war in the Far East is a constant background noise; where the State controls your every waking moment. Napper comes up with some great ideas, simply by extrapolating from the tech we use today. Exo-memory, for example, which is used to create a permanent record of events that the fallible human memory may forget. However, that exo-memory is vulnerable to state control. What happens when what you think you know is just what “they” want you to think?

It's a world of refugees, displaced by an endless, pointless war and Napper's background as an Aid worker imbues these aspects with an all too real truth. These are stories with an emotional centre, that can move you, make you feel something. The best example is probably the longest story here, The Weight of the Air, The Weight of the World, where memory tech is used to suppress, control and manipulate. It's heartbreakingly good.

The influence of Philip K Dick is strong, and Napper acknowledges that debt in the Afterword, but Neon Leviathan is written entirely in the author's own voice. It is one of the best collections of Science Fiction short stories I have ever read. It really is that good.

Very highly recommended.