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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
tense
fast-paced
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
I think it's a pretty good book for someone who wants to immerse themselves in the Cyberpunk 2077 world once again. I don't think it's a masterpiecie and it's pretty generic, but it's really fun.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I love cyberpunk, I love the video game and the universe... This book was not it. I think the writing style is what I really did not like, it kept switching the point of view every few paragraphs without saying who the point of view was. There was a whole cast of characters but it felt like someone took a cutscene and tried to just write that into a book without doing it very well. It had your usual players of corpos, Street kids, all the sorts. Stealing from the corpos, ragtag band of people who are not thieves banding together.... It was okay but I really had to push myself to get through it unfortunately
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Six strangers, dragged together by desperation and the promise of a massive pay-off, pull off what should have been an impossible heist. Steal a Militech container right out of the transport and turn it over to their black mailer turned boss. The job is messy, poorly planned, and may just cast this impromptu gang of stray ends into the bright light Night City legends. Legends or warnings to be forgotten all too soon.
There is so much for me to chew on with Cyberpunk 2077: No_Coincidence, just layers of character motivations and secrets and an absolute twenty car pileup of plots both within the Impromptu Gang and outside of it. Rafal Kosik does an excellent job of juggling his characters and plotlines, everything is quite neatly woven together. The fore shadowing is quite deft, especially regarding Zor’s dark and mysterious past, but without overplaying anything.
Zor’s backstory probably has the most development to it, which makes sense because I feel like Zor is probably the closest thing to a main character we have here. But it flows nicely with this sort of slow peeling away of layers, a set truth that becomes shaky and strange as the plot unfurls and his personal mission is revealed. Kosik builds this sort of hopeless revenge for Zor, this driving need to take out the person responsible for his family’s deaths that is balanced with the quiet awareness that there is no reasonable way for him to enact his revenge unless something massive changes. That need for revenge pulls him into a second job with the Impromptu Gang and then further into working with them as the unexpected hits. It keeps him from fully investing in caring about Aya because he just cannot get past his previous failures. It keeps him in line and focused on his mission with flash backs to the day he failed the people he loved, flash backs that feel just a little too timely. It is brilliantly done.
And, for the most part, the other major characters have similar treatments that are similarly well done. Like Aya, the exotic dancer who’s entire draw is that she does not have any chrome, no mechanical enhancements, we get drips of a mysterious other job that she has, bits of her body failing her as she misses those jobs in favor of working with the Impromptu Gang. We have the ripperdoc, Ron, who wants so badly to do good but something went wrong for him, leaving him stuck with chrome that is a bit too old to be nearly as functional as he needs it to be. He sort of drives the whole Impromptu Gang thing, pushing everyone to go for a second job with the idea of how much it could fix for them all, it is solid if not as well done as Zor and Aya.
The other members of the Impromptu Gang feel much more minor. Zor and Ron both have their own enemies who are following them and getting in the way of their goals. Aya has her little sister to take care of. But Milena just sort of feels like she is there to facilitate other plotlines, which is hardly an issue, you need those characters in a book. Albert, the teenaged netrunner, feels like he should have been in a different book entirely though. I got real tired of Albert and his constant thoughts of getting past the Blackout Wall to meet the AI that haunt the vast majority of the internet, his thoughts about how he is so above other people. It functions well enough, again Albert facilitates plot lines happening more than he really does much for himself. But I did get really tired of him when he cropped up, if only because there were so many things he might have noticed if his focus had not been entirely on breaking through the Blackout Wall and going beyond the successes of past netrunners.
All of this character work and then we get an ending that is entirely the only ending that No_Coincidence could have had. I mean this both in that the ending is the only thing that could work for the flavor of cyberpunk No_Coincidence is, but also that Kosik has built the story so carefully that any other ending would feel incorrect. I just want to chew on all the ways the foundation for this ending was built up, everything that lead to it, the almost perfect way the antagonists played our protagonists. It is fantastic.
And that is sort of where I land on this one. The character work was really solid. The antagonists were well used, if not a little overly omniscient regarding some aspects of the protagonists. The tone of the book was solid, a sort of underlying hopelessness that permeates near everything even as the protagonists fight against it for themselves. Militech is this big looming threat, so far beyond the gangs that our protagonists find themselves facing that there is not even a comparison, and it does that just sitting there and operating as it does every day. I want more of just about all of it. No_Coincidence gets a five out of five and I am definitely going to keep an eye out for more of Kosik’s writing in the future.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review has previously been posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2023/08/17/no_coincidence/
There is so much for me to chew on with Cyberpunk 2077: No_Coincidence, just layers of character motivations and secrets and an absolute twenty car pileup of plots both within the Impromptu Gang and outside of it. Rafal Kosik does an excellent job of juggling his characters and plotlines, everything is quite neatly woven together. The fore shadowing is quite deft, especially regarding Zor’s dark and mysterious past, but without overplaying anything.
Zor’s backstory probably has the most development to it, which makes sense because I feel like Zor is probably the closest thing to a main character we have here. But it flows nicely with this sort of slow peeling away of layers, a set truth that becomes shaky and strange as the plot unfurls and his personal mission is revealed. Kosik builds this sort of hopeless revenge for Zor, this driving need to take out the person responsible for his family’s deaths that is balanced with the quiet awareness that there is no reasonable way for him to enact his revenge unless something massive changes. That need for revenge pulls him into a second job with the Impromptu Gang and then further into working with them as the unexpected hits. It keeps him from fully investing in caring about Aya because he just cannot get past his previous failures. It keeps him in line and focused on his mission with flash backs to the day he failed the people he loved, flash backs that feel just a little too timely. It is brilliantly done.
And, for the most part, the other major characters have similar treatments that are similarly well done. Like Aya, the exotic dancer who’s entire draw is that she does not have any chrome, no mechanical enhancements, we get drips of a mysterious other job that she has, bits of her body failing her as she misses those jobs in favor of working with the Impromptu Gang. We have the ripperdoc, Ron, who wants so badly to do good but something went wrong for him, leaving him stuck with chrome that is a bit too old to be nearly as functional as he needs it to be. He sort of drives the whole Impromptu Gang thing, pushing everyone to go for a second job with the idea of how much it could fix for them all, it is solid if not as well done as Zor and Aya.
The other members of the Impromptu Gang feel much more minor. Zor and Ron both have their own enemies who are following them and getting in the way of their goals. Aya has her little sister to take care of. But Milena just sort of feels like she is there to facilitate other plotlines, which is hardly an issue, you need those characters in a book. Albert, the teenaged netrunner, feels like he should have been in a different book entirely though. I got real tired of Albert and his constant thoughts of getting past the Blackout Wall to meet the AI that haunt the vast majority of the internet, his thoughts about how he is so above other people. It functions well enough, again Albert facilitates plot lines happening more than he really does much for himself. But I did get really tired of him when he cropped up, if only because there were so many things he might have noticed if his focus had not been entirely on breaking through the Blackout Wall and going beyond the successes of past netrunners.
All of this character work and then we get an ending that is entirely the only ending that No_Coincidence could have had. I mean this both in that the ending is the only thing that could work for the flavor of cyberpunk No_Coincidence is, but also that Kosik has built the story so carefully that any other ending would feel incorrect. I just want to chew on all the ways the foundation for this ending was built up, everything that lead to it, the almost perfect way the antagonists played our protagonists. It is fantastic.
And that is sort of where I land on this one. The character work was really solid. The antagonists were well used, if not a little overly omniscient regarding some aspects of the protagonists. The tone of the book was solid, a sort of underlying hopelessness that permeates near everything even as the protagonists fight against it for themselves. Militech is this big looming threat, so far beyond the gangs that our protagonists find themselves facing that there is not even a comparison, and it does that just sitting there and operating as it does every day. I want more of just about all of it. No_Coincidence gets a five out of five and I am definitely going to keep an eye out for more of Kosik’s writing in the future.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review has previously been posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2023/08/17/no_coincidence/
Unfortunately this book has the same issue as the Edgerunners show - a fantastic world populated by flat, cliche characters, without any interesting plot to save them. A dancer who would never stoop to sex work like those other icky women? A hacker who is grossed out bodily functions because they aren't "clean" like code? With all the sarcasm in the world - groundbreaking.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
a bit confusing, ngl
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes