Eco-cyber-punk in a crouch – review of the book “Sybirpunk”

Smoky like a post-apo

NeoSybirsk is a monster city. Always hot, full of heavy, acrid air, saturated with the effects of the work of coal mines and chemical factories. There are air-conditioned skyscrapers in the center, offering a good life for a lot of money. There are tenement houses and blocks of flats in the suburbs – they’re actually slums. Dearest to my heart, dangerous, ugly as misfortune. This is the world of Sasha, a forty-year-old survivor and a private detective (if the license has not expired yet).

The main character of Siberpunk would get along with Norbert, who lives in Warsaw with Hel-3Grzedowicz. They both yearn for a golden past when you could eat meat and other natural products. They dream of urban greenery. About sunny mornings, when the air smells fresh. At the same time, Sasza is much worse than a citizen of Warsaw – federal food is various soy miracles with sawdust, bio food is extremely expensive, at least a filter mask must be worn for a walk, if not a full protective kit with gloves and a thick layer of insulation. How Fremen runs in a jacket that cools the body and recovers water from sweat. For comfort, he has his old, reinforced Mercedes and a real (!) Dog. There will be no other end of the world, Gołkowski followed the classic, nothing exploded, it just got hotter and dirtier. Poor.

When it comes to fashion, Federation society has yet to come to terms with Mad Max. Maybe because the biggest modifications are not the clothes, but the bodies. Prostheses, lens implants and cognitive enhancements adorning citizens’ faces are the order of the day. You should have at least some LEDs in your fingers. On mine, NeoSybirsk resembles Borg, even has a collective voice embodied by the President. Fortunately, this is politics for now, not total assimilation.

Where is money?

A private detective and a hard-working specialist gets a very lucrative job: you have to find a guy who owes money to the principal. This is quite a debt according to Sasha, small, but honorable according to a great businessman. The task seems simple, the debtor is a famous character, so the detective hopes to find time to walk the dog and cooperate with dealers. However, things inevitably get complicated. Someone will try to kill Sasha and the people he can talk to. An unbelievably beautiful woman will arrive, so you will have to find time for dates in the hipster pubs. Yes, there are many good ingredients in this book. This is a page-turner , thanks to which you will know the future of Russia very well.

The matter of unpaid money will turn out to be complicated and dangerous. You will need the help of a “guy in a chair” who knows inside not so much the Internet as its federal counterpart. Sasha, being a decent hero, will assemble a team. She will be eclectic, from the guys under the beater to the very secret genius of organic chemistry.

I promised Siberpunk is full of action. There will be shootings, written quite realistically for my completely unaided eye, with choreography that can be “seen” at once, supplemented with strategic considerations by Sasha. There will also be injuries and fractures that, in the perspective of a few chapters, will give the reader the stupidest, most charming joke of this book. Right out of Wilq .

Postcards with different edges

Gołkowski very accurately collected and developed our ideas about a crouched Slav drinking water and living, to put it mildly, in a muck stuck together with electrical tape. He did it brilliantly, even touching. He is a good writer, he can show that there are strange, funny and difficult to understand people behind the stereotype. Orbitowski’s prose shows a similar sensitivity when he bends over the characters lurking at the gates and sneaking into shops for something cheap.

By the way: it’s quite a politically incorrect book. The narrative is first-person, and Sashka is no hippie or Buddhist. He doesn’t like yellow, and chooses white in general (like alcohol). He does what he can and has no respect for those who cannot. He is conservative. He was a military man, he fought in Africa, which also did not increase his tolerance to otherness. You will hear it all loud and clear.

Sasha will travel outside of NeoSybirsk several times. This is another exercise in longing and loss. You will see the desert in the place of a thriving city, but also the last scraps of forest. There are still nice places in the world of Siberpunk , but it is not known for how long. For an inhabitant of a city surrounded by coal mines, they seem to be completely detached from reality. In fact, he doesn’t believe them, even sitting in the last acres of grass. And I think he actually finds a completely different world outside the metropolis. I hope he will come back to him in the next volumes.

The latest book by Gołkowski, the beginning of the next series, is a cyberpunk dystopia at its best. He draws from classics and stereotypes to distil them into a highly saturated world that is, in its probability, terrifying. Maybe it would be nice to have a cyber arm, but not to inhale toxic air. I have a suspicion that for the time being it will be enough for us as a moral from Siberpunk .