Matt discovers that This Machine Kills Billionaires…
and possibly your remaining faith in the future too!?
T. R. Napper (Doctor of Cyberpunk)
Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)
This Machine Kills Billionaires lands with all the subtlety of a cybernetic fist coming through the reinforced window of a private space yacht, and it demands your attention!
As a fan of TR Napper's work including Neon Leviathan, 36 Streets, Ghost of the Neon God, and The Escher Man - I was excited to get my hands on his new work: a collection of cyber tech-revenge fantasy…
This is a book that will burrow into your brain while you are enjoying the story, then start quietly rearranging your synapses.
At the black heart of the collection is The Hidden God, in which philosopher Izanami ‘Izzy’ Jones is employed to teach ethics to Huldo, the world’s first genuine Artificial General Intelligence. Because apparently the ultra-rich have finally decided that creating a digital god capable of transforming civilisation might require somebody to tick the morality box before unleashing it.
Good thinking, lads. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Izzy approaches the job with the weary resignation of somebody who knows she has largely been hired as intellectual window dressing. Her employer does not really want an ethical machine; he wants his machine officially declared ethical so he can own it, monetise it and presumably stick a subscription tier on human destiny.
So what if removing one person could save thousands? What if that person knowingly profits from suffering? What if the machine can prove not only what they have done, but what they will do next? It’s a fun premise!!
This is where Napper really gets his augmented claws in. The premise could easily have become a cold exercise in cleverness, with Ethicsbot presenting Trolley Problem 2.0 while various humans stroke their chins and look concerned. Instead, it becomes an increasingly tense collision between moral theory and actual blood.
It is exhilarating, horrifying and guiltily satisfying, because Napper knows exactly where the reader’s sympathies are likely to go when the targets are obscenely wealthy men whose fortunes rest on misery. Then, just as you start becoming a little too comfortable with the arrangement, he twists the blade.
Napper writes cyberpunk without treating it like a fancy-dress party. There is no desperate need to keep pointing at the neon, polishing the chrome or announcing that somebody has a cool coat. The punk matters here. The anger matters. This is fiction about who gets crushed beneath technological progress and, more importantly, who owns the machinery doing the crushing.
Highway Requiem takes us onto the Australian roads with a truck driver and his dog, Roxy. It is quiet erosion of somebody’s livelihood, dignity and place in the world. While automation rarely announces itself as an agent of the apocalypse, it’s just replacing us and the road will continue to be travelled without you.
Burned Like Coal is furious and tragic, following young people who have concluded that polite protest is simply another noise the system has learned to ignore. There is an AI, there are explosives, and there are choices being made by people who feel the future has already been stolen from them. This is a future on fire and you’ll be left with scorch marks :).
Then Jack’s Fine Dining delivers something different again: community, hunger and human decency surviving in the cracks of a brutal society. Napper understands that feeding people can become a revolutionary act when the system is designed to let them starve.
That might be what holds the collection together. Not simply artificial intelligence or dystopian technology, but resistance in the classic high tech / low life vibe. Who gets labelled a terrorist while somebody destroying entire communities is described as an entrepreneur? When the existing rules protect only those who wrote them, what exactly does ethical behaviour look like?
Napper does not give easy answers…
The result is compact, angry, thrilling and worryingly plausible. I have been a fan of Napper’s work for some time, and had the joy of chatting to him on Hosts in the Shell recently (which only confirmed that he is indeed the real deal when it comes to cyberpunk!!).
AI evangelists promise liberation while corporations calculate how many humans they can remove from the payroll. Climate catastrophe accelerates while the people profiting from it buy increasingly elaborate bunkers. The people building our future often appear to be precisely those who should not be allowed anywhere near it. Sounds a bit familiar yeah?
This Machine Kills Billionaires is excellent cyberpunk of the highest order… Whip smart without being smug, loaded with political thinking and packing tasty violence too.
Napper has not just built a machine that kills billionaires but one that probably already knows what you are thinking.
COMPLY?
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
(5 - Revolutionary cyberpunk that engages the brain, the conscience and more...)
Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...
