Daniel (@dungeondive) returns to book reviews after a long gap with Solis, a quintessential work of 1990s cyberpunk by the underrated A. A. Attanasio. He pitches it as Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip crossed with late-80s anime like Bubblegum Crisis — cyberpunk filtered through a Japanese-animation sensibility. The haunting premise: Charles has his brain frozen at death and wakes a thousand years later to find it installed as the wetware CPU of an asteroid-mining machine. His distress call is answered by Munk, an android whose bespoke “counter-intuitive programming” makes him a steward of humanity, and by Jumper Mai; together they ferry the brain toward Solis, humanity’s last city on Mars, through a landscape of suicide cults and warring techno-religious factions. Daniel frames the book as a two-act journey — action-adventure giving way to a spiritual trek across the Martian wilderness — animated throughout by cyberpunk’s favourite question: what is consciousness? He advises pushing past a wobbly prelude, and makes the case for Attanasio (of Radix fame) as an author well worth rediscovering.
Waking as the wetware of a mining machine, Daniel says, would be “worse than hell.” Would you ever gamble on cryonics anyway?