Repo Virtual

By: Corey J. White

Narrated by: Stephen Walker

Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's Summary

Corey J. White's debut novel Repo Virtual blurs the lines between the real and virtual in an action-packed cyberpunk heist story.

The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities - augmented and virtual spaces anchored in the weight of the real. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive. 

Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He's been hired for a special job: stealing an unknown object from a reclusive tech billionaire. But when he finds out he's stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated. 

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor.com

©2020 Corey J. White (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Critic Reviews

"Cyberpunk's critical update, for these mixed-reality days of dark money, livestreaming cults, machine gaze and life lived on the razorwire edge." (Warren Ellis)

"Repo Virtual constructs a stunningly vivid cyberpunk world that blurs the line between illusion and reality, dripping with the neon panache of a technological juggernaut in an action packed heist that'll steal your heart with ideas that are as revealing as they are powerful." (Peter Tieryas)

Going ham with ideology

This book is unnecessarily jam packed with ideology far beyond what is called for. This is cyberpunk. So of course it is a hyper capitalist distopia. But the cliche socialist propaganda in this book was entirely too heavy handed. A good cyberpunk book makes those points by emersing you in the world and making you empathise with the problems of the character that emerge from their society. They don't beat you senseless with poorly thought out, bland slogans and stereotypes of pointlessly evil corporations that want everyone to be homeless and poor (because obviously homeless, poor people make the best consumers). Beyond that - out of the main characters, two are a gay couple, one is a non-gender specific demi-sexual, one is bisexual, two are lesbian, and two are maybe straight, though one of those two pretty much admits to being asexual. These are people with entirely diverse backgrounds who happen to cross paths. Nothing wrong with diversity, but again - especially in conjunction with the trite socialist-pesimism rethoric, it felt contrived.
Could've been a good book....
The narrator gave it a good try, but the ausie accent did not add to the book, especially given the protagonist was black (admittedly could have been ausie too).