In a world in which people upload their minds into virtual reality, things sometimes go awry and they get stuck in “the Swim.” Enter Eliza McKay, freelance Extractionist. Highly skilled in navigating virtual reality, thanks to a combination of experience, native talent, and extensive implanted hardware, she’s the go-to specialist for difficult retrieval cases. Now she’s on assignment for a government agency, trying to preserve the investigation results of an agent’s digital persona gone missing in the Swim. One thing after another goes wrong, and soon she’s faced with a choice of pulling the agent out without what he’s learned or having to try ever more risky strategies. Then thugs break into her house and try to hack her cybernetic implants. And something dangerous is lurking in the Swim.

Like Unger’s debut novel, Nucleation, The Extractionist features vivid and highly imaginative hard science fiction world-building. I’m not a tech person or familiar with virtual reality, but the characters and situations were compelling enough to keep me reading, and eventually the internal consistency made sense to me. The story is full of fascinating details, like the need to replace neurotransmitter chemicals after a prolonged VR session. Unger writes with the ease of familiarity with challenging technical material, so that even if I couldn’t explain what was happening, I knew she could. The sureness of an author’s voice can carry us into worlds and situations we’ve never experienced for ourselves. Unger’s work is cutting-edge science fiction. I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with next!

No sé qué pasa este año que casi ninguno de los libros que estoy leyendo consigue atraparme. Por cambiar un poco de palo le di una oportunidad a The Extractionist de Kimberly Unger, un thriller cyberpunk correcto pero que tampoco es rupturista.


En The Extractionist, Unger nos cuenta la historia de Eliza McKay, una hacker freelance especializada en recuperaciones de personas cuya mente ha quedado atrapada en algún tipo de realidad virtual. El concepto resulta muy interesante, la posibilidad de proyectar tu consciencia en lo virtual y luego volver a tu cuerpo real con las experiencias adquiridas allí. Pero, según relata la autora, si en las experiencias virtuales la persona sufre algún cambio de paradigma ahí es dónde tiene que entrar en juego un profesional de la extracción. El trabajo de McKay, muy especializado, está un poco a salto de caballo entre borrar detalles escandalosos de famosos atrapados en situaciones comprometidas y la recuperación de personas dentro de la cultura corporativa.

Para poder tener esta tecnología de inmersión, es necesario un cableado interno y la presencia de nanobots que restauran las conexiones neuronales, así como la ingestión de precursores de serotonina y otras sustancias que se consumen en gran cantidad cuando la capacidad de procesamiento del cerebro también aumenta. Esta es la parte que más me ha interesado de la novela, aunque por desgracia la autora no se detiene demasiado en ella. También resulta muy realista la representación de la cultura empresarial, esa carrera desesperada hacia adelante para conseguir mantener el puesto, bien reflejada en la necesidad de ir adaptando el hardware del cuerpo a la última tecnología, sin reparar en las consecuencias que esto pueda conllevar.

Sin embargo, el desarrollo propio de la novela es demasiado acelerado y puede llegar a ser confuso. Unger no destaca precisamente por su prosa, y la representación de la Realidad Virtual, la creación de código al vuelo, la representación de los ataques software como algo perceptible con la visión gracias a la tecnología no me convence. Tampoco me ha resultado verosímil el tratamiento de las inteligencias artificiales porque no es consistente a lo largo del relato.

Quizá sea una novela de futuro demasiado cercano pero para mí no es suficiente, lo que la deja como un thriller entretenido con el que pasar el rato.

I enjoyed this author's previous book, <i>[book:Nucleation|59083689]</i>, which, like this one, I had as a pre-publication version from Netgalley. I noted on that one, and will note again, that the author (despite her degree in English/Writing) has a poor grasp of basic mechanics, as the unedited version reveals; it's full of comma splices, there are a good few excess hyphens and coordinate commas inserted because she's only learned half of a rule, a number of sentences have words dropped out (or occasionally repeated), the past perfect tense goes missing frequently, and there are a smaller but still significant number of other errors. Worst of all is her use of pronouns. Not infrequently, there are two female characters being discussed in a sentence, and "she" or "her" will be used to refer to both characters, often in alternation, with no clear signalling as to which is which. At other times, the gender of a pronoun is simply wrong for the person it's referring to - not, as far as I can tell, for any deliberate reason; it's just a mistake the author is prone to making.

All of this may (and, I hope, will) be cleaned up by publication, though as usual I will note that having a great many errors in the unedited book is a strong predictor of having more than a few in the edited version, since editors are human and miss things.

It isn't a sequel to <i>Nucleation</i>, and can be read as a standalone, though if you enjoy one I think you'll also enjoy the other; leaving aside the mechanical issues, this is a strong piece of writing, with excellent pacing and tension. It makes William Gibson's <i>[book:Agency|34943643]</i> look like the proverbial pile of puke, in this regard (or rather, Gibson managed to do that himself). The cyberpunk premise, while still a bit handwavey, is better justified than average, too. The idea is that (using quantum computing as a sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic) people are able to write out versions of themselves, known as "personas," into the "Swim" to transact business on their behalf. If the persona encounters too much of a paradigm shift, however, writing them back into the original person is tricky, and this is the niche skill that the protagonist has. Unfortunately, mysterious parties are opposed to her completing her latest contract, and are willing to use strongarm tactics to get her to leave off. She herself, using an advanced and experimental brain-computer interface that she built herself, interfaces directly with the Swim, which makes her vulnerable to events occurring in it.

While it does suffer from the usual cyberpunk issue of overliteralizing the interface metaphor in some of the action scenes, that didn't do too much to hinder my enjoyment of a well-structured story that rises beyond the cliches of the genre, while still honouring its key tropes. It comfortably makes it onto my Best of the Year list, though low down the list, because I suspect there will be a residue of those many mechanical issues in the published version.