Book review: Singularity Sunrise 1: Edenet, by Kit Sun Cheah (Author)
A Cyberpunk Espionage Thriller
I got this one out of the Based Book sale a few years back (and it’s in the current one, too). Kit Sun Cheah has already delivered some great reads. So I figured it was time for me to give it a shot.
The Story
In the 22nd century, we have the Cyberpunk apocalypse. Not quite Blade Runner, but very similar to Deus Ex. There’s, Cybernetics, genetic engineering, and mass surveillance and social credit still exist. There are full body cyborgs and nanoscale engineering. Of course, there’s AI. Edenet is the next generation of, well, the Internet. Designed by the Anatol Corporation, it make supercomputers for every user all around in the world. Edenet is run by a cutting-edge artificial intelligence. And its lead scientist has disappeared.
Anatol corporation hires psychic contractor James Morgan to track down our scientist. Anatol’s Eligia Ogrod is attacked to him as a tech specialist.
And when the trail leads from Warsaw to Hong Kong, tracking a missing egghead goes from doing some legwork to waging a full scale counterintelligence operation.
To anyone who has read Kai Sun Cheah in the past, you already know Edenet is going to be an awesome novel. It’s fill with his usual blend of thoughtful plotting and professionally cautious characters, and of course, all the martial arts he can cram in. The only determining factor is whether or not you enjoy Cyberpunk. I’m someone who generally doesn’t, but I breezed through this in a few days.
Edenet starts like the teaser for a Bond film, and we spend the first half of the book investigating the disappearance—from examining parts of the company she works for, to putting her life under a microscope.
About the halfway mark, Edenet becomes a pure thriller, with melee combat, chases, staying one step ahead of the hunters, and putting together a rescue that Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp would appreciate. (I still find it amusing that even in the next century, a Glock still needs aftermarket parts.)
Edenet also has some interesting musings on “the singularity,” and the possibility of where AI can go. It’s what Star Trek used to do.1
There’s also a twist along the way featuring the MacGuffin, but I’m not sure if Kai Sun Cheah meant for us to realize it ahead of time or not. If he did, he played exceedingly fair with the clues.
Between the deep world-building, the vivid character building, and the fast-pace plot, I can wholly recommend Edenet.
The Characters
Most of the book is from James Morgan’s point of view. He’s thoughtful, occasionally deeply philosophical, and a badass in a melee. His psychic abilities were not natural, but the result of a head injury. He’s pretty Christian in his meditative moments, and probably in his very strict policy on nonlethal force—but he also treats it as a purely pragmatic matter as well. He’s overall interesting. But if you’ve read any of Kit Sun Cheah’s other books, that’s not a surprise.
Eligia Ogrod is also interesting in her own way, especially when Morgan has to teach her body mechanics—as a fullborg, she can download all the Kung Fu she likes, but nothing is a match for experience.
The World
Edenet has a very well fleshed out world, but nothing is particularly overwritten or overdeveloped. We get just enough to carry us through … granted, that’s still an awful lot of world building, since the world is the background for our main leads. Edenet goes from Los Angeles, “Capital of the State of Aztlan,” to Poland, to China. So there’s a lot of world to build.
We have augmented people, cyborgs, full body conversions to metal, psychics.
The only thing worse than the People’s Republic of China is Cyberpunk China.
Politics
Our antagonists are good authoritarians who run a society on social credit. So unless you’re a really big fan of the People’s Republic of China, Edenet has no political elements that stand out.
Content Warning
There is someone who literally gets his head blown off in the opening scene, so there’s blood, but even that wasn’t particularly gory.
Who is it for?
Take the espionage and action of a a Gregg Hurwitz Orphan X novel, throw in some tactics of Vince Flynn (RIP) Mitch Rapp novel, and then land it in a cyberpunk setting, and you’re ready to roll.
Why buy it
An action-packed thrill ride of the type we don’t get that that often.
To be specific, Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” (S2, E9). It was good enough that my father the philosophy professor used it as an exam.