There is nothing better than curling up with a cup of coffee or tea when it’s -46°C and hiding from reality with a good book. When it’s this cold outside, I like to pretend I live just about anywhere else.
Even a high-tech, low-life dystopian future society where I’d probably be lucky to last an hour in… because that’s longer than I would last outside today.
To those of you fortunate souls who don’t live on the the bald-ass, howling-wind, frigid wasteland of the Canadian Prairies, I commend you for your clearly superior life choices. But I bet there are things you’d like an escape from, too.
We all do. Right? Right??
Of course we do.
To this end, I offer you todays Indie Feature Friday Cyberpunk Book Review The New Prometheus by Andrew M. Dobell!
The New Prometheus by Andrew M. Dobell
The Blurb
Attacked and left for dead, she wakes up in a cyborg body, and a corporation is hunting her down.
In world of massive inequality and slums filled with millions, society is dominated by cruel corporate rule.
Working a dead-end job, living in a dingy apartment, Frankie is always behind on rent. But knowing there are those with less, she spends her free time in the slums, helping those who have nothing. When a Jacker Gang attacks, Frankie is shot, and left for dead.
She wakes up in a body that isn’t hers.
Her life was saved by a back alley cyber doc, who implanted her brain into a cyborg body.
Frankie has barely woken up when the corporations attack, kidnap the doctor and force Frankie to flee.
Pursued by corporate operatives, hulking mechs and deadly cybernetic agents, Frankie is lost in the slums in a body that’s not hers.
She must deal with endless attacks and find allies she can trust if she’s going to survive.
My Take
Some books are just begging to be made into blockbuster action movies. This is one of them.
Frankie is an eminently likeable character. She’s tough and strong-willed, and has a heart of gold. But she’s far from invincible.
That is, until she is shot and a back alley cyber doc transfers her brain into a massively overpowered cyborg body using tech that he designed and stole from the friendly neighbourhood megacorporation.
Frankie must save the doctor who saved her life; she might just want to strangle him herself.
I loved the parallels between this story and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As a lover of literary fiction this little detail really tickled my fancy. But the comparisons between The New Prometheus and any lit fic pretty much end there.
This is a relentlessly paced techno-thriller for readers who like non-stop action, epic firefights, mech-battles, and cyborg brawls. There isn’t quite as much introspection as we find in Agent G (you can read my reviews for Infiltrator and Saboteur here!) but Frankie is a fantastic character and it’s a pleasure to see her come into her own as she transforms from a young philanthropist to a weapon of mass destruction.
I quite enjoyed the dynamic between Frankie and Detective Gibson, and look forward to seeing how this develops. The good doctor himself is a complicated character, and part of me really wants to see him get what’s coming to him… but maybe after he fixes that one little problem with Frankie’s new body (I’m not telling what it is, but I’d have killed him for it).
If you enjoyed Ghost in the Shell or Alita: Battle Angel, you’ll have a blast with Frankie as The New Prometheus.
If you’re on the fence, Dobell has two free prequel novellas available for download, so you can dip your toes into the series.
The first, The Prometheus Awakens, tells Frankie’s story before the events that occur in The New Prometheus. The second, The Prometheus Dawns, tells the back story of Detective Gibson.
In order to claim these free titles you must sign up for Andrew M. Dobell’s newsletter, but you can unsubscribe at any time, and he’s a super cool guy so you will probably want to stick around. He’s got lots of books!
All in all, this is a great cyberpunk flavoured techno-thriller and I look forward to the rest of the series. This is an older series that Dobell is currently rereleasing, so if you are a fast reader looking for a new series to binge, this is a great one to check out. A new book is being released every week until all five books are out, and they are all available in audiobook on Audible as well as Kindle Unlimited. [Note: If you sign up for your free trial using either of those links, I will get a small commission from amazon at no cost to you! It’s win-win! UK Readers click here for Audible and here for Kindle Unlimited.
Discussion
What are you hiding from when you escape into fiction? Work/School deadlines? Family drama? Miserable weather? Life in general?
What are your favourite kind of books to escape into?