The first in a series, Ron Bender’s SHADOW’S FALL is a top-notch cyberpunk thriller set in New White Sands City, one of the megalopolises that emerged from the ruins of a collapsed America. I hadn’t read cyberpunk since the classic MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, and had a lot of fun with it.
Raven, a good-time girl and gun for hire, runs afoul of big corporate interests when she kills a man she later finds out is Shadow, a high-profile vigilante with widespread connections across the city. Accompanied by Brios, her loyal muscle, she goes on the offensive and eventually learns the truth about her identity and her past.
This is just good fun. Raven’s a bit hard to swallow, as she’s abrasive and erratic (with reason, we find out later), so while I still wasn’t crazy about her even after closing the covers, I’d totally fallen for the author. The action sequences are absolutely riveting, the secondary characters are all stand-out, and there’s enough weird future, high technology, and gun play to satisfy anybody who’s ever enjoyed or think they might enjoy a cyberpunk story.
His second novel, STREETS OF FIRE, is out, telling a different but connected story with some new and familiar characters, and I’ll be checking it out.
I was happy to be invited to contribute to author John Scalzi’s Big Ideas blog, in which authors describe the big idea behind their works. For ONE OF US, I was able to share the nonfiction idea behind the novel, which started as a misunderstood monster story and became a much more ambitious examination of prejudice.
STARBURST, a premier sci-fi magazine published in the UK, reviewed ONE OF US, writing, “It’s possible to read ONE OF US as a treatise on the corrosive consequences of intolerance, social exclusion and inequality. But it’s no less rewarding to treat DiLouie’s novel as a captivating, if sometimes harrowing, foray into a vividly evoked fictional world…”
Hard at work on the third episode of THE FRONT series with Timothy W. Long and David Moody–THE FRONT: BERLIN OR BUST.