Check Out Hammerjack Originated By Marc D. Giller Offered In Book

entertaining read with some interesting ideas but nothing that really made it great, While not a bad book, there were definitely sections that lost my interest possibly because of too much unexplained technobabble and they just jarred me out of the story.
If someone digs cyberpunk books, they may want to check this one out, but as for me I'm not going to bother picking up the sequel.
.out ofstars
Not Bad, Especially for a First Book
July,

After reading the Author's Note at the front of the book and finding that this was the author's first published book, I was a bit worried.
That worry evaporated as soon as I started reading the text, It's a fine book with a decent plot and an interesting theme that follows along in Gibson's cyberpunk footsteps, My only problems with it are:

The characters are a bit inconsistent in their personalities and behavior, It's odd, but it feels like the characters devolve throughout the book instead of evolve, I found them somewhat more interesting at the start and a bit flatter at the end,
The pacing is OK, But, the "action" scenes fights are a little too drawn out,
There are a few direct references to current pop culture which I doubt these types of people in a distant future would know or care about.


All of those things are fairly minor, Because of them, I'm bit leery of giving the book a fullout ofrating, Really, I'd like to give it,stars. But, since I can't do that, I'll be charitable and round up instead of down, A fairly good book. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel: Prodigal, While the plot is clever enough in its own right, it left me with the feeling that it was a Neuromancer ripoff in some regards.
When I picked up Hammerjack at the local library, I was expecting true, cyberpunk noir in the style of "Neuromancer, " However, what I got was something that I would warn people against reading,

To be fair, Hammerjack has a detailed world that's full of grime and filth, There were even some nice touches with Giller's "street species, " However, even a solid plot couldn't save this book from the major problem I had the way it was told,

I love metaphor, as anyone that's read any of my own work knows, But the metaphors in Hammerjack get tortured so badly that I often wonder what the hell it is he's talking about after a sentence or two.
It got to the point where I was skipping description just to keep with the story's flow, This was problem number one, What earned it such a low rating though was how shallow and boring most of the cast was,

Our main character especially suffers from being blase, He's a spook without a purpose, a reformed hammerjack himself, and he's supposedly a name that strikes fear into the regulars, But we never really see him do anything to justify that reputation, nor do we see him use it at any point, It feels as if we're just supposed to accept this view of him, which really isn't played out in his own thought patterns, He feels very soft, and way too soft to be playing this kind of hardball game,



Aside from our lead though, everything felt like it was trying too hard, Avalon, the deadliest woman on two planets, feels like a parody of the super soldier, The cultish villains lack any real punch, and on the whole any real visceral content is lost in the data stream,

My suggestion, to make this a better book and something that would have been more engaging, would have been to focus more on the human aspects, and to view technology through them, rather than the other way around.
I thought I reviewed this but I guess not, This is a fun cyberpunk novel I reread frequently, It contains one of my favorite characters in the subgenre, Avalon, Unfortunately, Avalon ends up being a villain, and the two protagonists are a bit less than compelling to put it mildly, The book keeps introducing interesting and sympathetic characters, only to kill them or turn them evil to make way for really bland ones to take the spotlight.


I also take some issue with the portrayal of women, and that is not something I usually am offended by I'm a fan of Frank Miller if that tells you anything.
Of the important female characters, all but one of the villains Avalon is a source of blatant fan service, Avalon and the female lead are both in love with the protagonist, for literally no given reason I can't even say "It's because he's hot" because at no point is Cray Alden ever given any hint of a description, or even an age.
The other female, a computer program, is overly seductive for, again, no given reason, Lea Prism was so gratuitous and so perfect by the end that she put me off reading the sequel for a while, but her character actually improves drastically in "Prodigal.
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It is highly likely I will rewrite this review the next time I read "Hammerjack, " For now, I'll say that if you need a cyberpunk fix, this should do it, But I strongly advice going on to read "Prodigal," especially if you want more of Avalon, This did not age well, It's all vignettes of characters arguing obscure points with one another and flinging pseudoscience terms around, punctuated by bad fight scenes, And by bad fight scenes, I mean physics consistently getting the shaft, which would be defined in this book as a bowl of bionucleic EMC pulser speedtec jelly.


For instance, at one point a character kills a man by shoving his nose into his brain, which, true, that totally will kill a man, but the sequence is: palmstrike, nosebrain, and then the man falls into her arms.
Now, unless she has a clone or a fivefootlong wraparound arm, pulser jelly, A criminally under read cyperpunk novel with slick style, starting with it's tonesetting cover and continuing on through excellent prose, While setting could perhaps introduced more helpfully for the reader, Hammerjack deals with a seriously sophisticated set of ideas, and its setting includes all to real possibilities for the nearfuture: urban tribes birthed out of subcultures, the collapse of nationstates and the rise of corporate powers, the specter of uncontrollable AI.
The protagonist is a world weary exhammerjack hacker, more or less, the threat a worldconsuming AI, and the agent set to watch over our hero is suitably grim and terrible in her willingness to do anything to ensure her goal.
An absolute must read. Pretty awesome matrixlike thriller with strong female characters, The sequel is not as great, but tidies up all the loose ends, Good to read together Interesting ideas, but it took me forever to get through it, Lots of potential, but thin characters,

The story and themes were interesting, There were many sections that felt hasty, like he was trying to get to the action scene, I hope he keeps writing and matures, Some interesting ideas, but it was hard for me to get terribly invested in it, Perhaps a little too cyberpunky for my tastes, which I hadn't run into before, Parts were good, but felt like it would be a good movie, Soso. Awesome. Great writing ability. Giller really nailed the cyberpunk genre, High tech/low life environment with an interesting plot, Going to read his other books, Very fun and entertaining. In this dark, futuristic thriller, Marc Giller defines the cutting edge of suspense with a relentless tale of murder, technoterrorism, and a conspiracy one man is driven to uncovereven if he must undo reality in the process.


HAMMERJACK

They ride virtual waves of code and pirate hightech secrets to sell to the highest bidderthey are faster and smarter than your security system, and are only too happy to show you by how much.
They are hammerjacks, and the rewards of their profession are second only to the sheer rush of what they do, Cray Alden was once one of them, Now hes a corporate spook chasing down the information traffickers whove turned business into allout war,

But beneath the surface skirmishes lurks something darkerrumors of a biological supercomputer that threatens to shift the balance of power between man and machine.
Now Cray is caught in the cross fire between the corporate Collective and a shadowy fanatical antitech cult called Inru, With an assassin on his trail and a devastating secret locked in his mind, Cray must turn to the hammerjack whos been his most dangerous, most elusive quarry.
Together they are on the deadliest mission of Crays lifeto destroy the god that man made,


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