Author Nowick Gray’s PSYBOT is a pretty loopy cyberpunk noir, and the narrative is a stream-of-consciousness crazy train that just seems to want to lose the reader at every stop. One minute, for instance, the narrator is at a football game, and the next, he’s on a space station. This is a novel designed to question many things, among them free will and the very nature of reality itself in this hypothetical post-digital age. Translation: this is not light reading.
But the prose style, while certainly quite confusing at times, is also kind of beautiful. A few examples: “Do unseen overseers monitor all, on the electroencephologram of the cosmic brain? Monitor once more is porthole, keyboard but a console component. I scan the heavens and work the controls. Martinson, Harrison; Scanlon, Hart… Who are these overseers, and who the objects of scrutiny? Who are the thieves and where are the souls they have stolen?” “Is my path unwinding to a suspect destiny from some spideristic or superviral central control and command center? Or is it ratcheting up toward the reigning fisher-king who hauls me in for my day of judgment?” It’s the sort of writing that’s hard to gauge on any merits other than its own: it is, for better or worse, somewhat unique.
While PSYBOT can be lauded for its blurring of genre and literary fiction, fans of the former should be warned: this is not really a thriller, at least in the classical sense. The big revelation of the brain-computer-virus, which as it is happens relatively gradually and late in the narrative, does not produce any Jason Bourne-style action. This is not really that kind of book: instead, after the big reveal, much of the rest of the narrative is space for pondering the aforementioned implications to reality and free will, a little like Solaris, if one were looking for a precedent in science fiction.
PSYBOT is an experimental sci-fi novel that really wears the “experimental” part quite proudly. Its experiments might sometimes come off as more confusing than they are innovative, and the prose might carry a heavy either-you-like-it-or-you-don’t tag, but such are the risks of pioneers.
Reviewed by Charles Baker for IndieReader