The Inru are being aided by a hammerjack dubbed Heretic, aka Lea Prism. Also in the Inru's employ is a fierce ex-soldier, Avalon, a warped survivor of the plague that wiped out mankind's Martian settlements. By book's end, Alden is merely software (sharing his digital existence with a synthetic personality named Lyssa), Lea has been co-opted by the Collective, the Inru are temporarily stymied, and Avalon is still loose.

The new novel takes up the tale fairly soon after this point. Lea Prism is now a Major in T-Branch, the special assault forces of the Collective. Cray's presence in a quarantined segment of the Axis is her little secret. Lea is sent to the Ukraine to investigate the latest Inru plot, and finds the victims of a strange form of biomanipulation that seems intended to supplant the Axis with mental powers. She tangles with her nemesis Avalon once more.

Simultaneously, an expedition to Mars—the first in 10 years, since the Mons plague—is underway. Nathan Straka, computer expert, descends to the planet's surface with some fellow crewmembers and finds six cryonic chambers holding the last living survivors of the Mons plague. Against his advice, Capt. Lauren Farina brings the capsules on board. Little does anyone know that these mutated revenants will soon threaten all life on the home planet—at the same time that the Inru mount their attack.

Can Lea and Alden save the day? Maybe only with Avalon's deadly help.

A child of Gibson and Sterling

I'm not quite certain any longer what generation of cyberpunks are currently sprouting. The third, the fourth, the fifth? Or have the clades come so fast and furious, the various "releases" of new cyberpunk writers overlapping and blending with each other so tangledly, that it's now impossible to denominate the different strains with any precision? In any case, we can still confidently assert that the potent and far-sighted Movement of 1985, 20-plus years down the road, is still vibrant, albeit somewhat rigidified and codified. Writers like Mark Budz, Richard Morgan and Elizabeth Bear now work the familiar territory hewn out of the wilderness by the Mirrorshades (1986) crowd, sometimes incrementing the original vision of a wired world, at other times merely taking the old toys out for another spin.

Marc Giller proves himself a respectable newcomer to the canon. While he doesn't really add any fresh twists to this consensus streetwise future—you could mash up vintage Shiner, Kadrey and Maddox and pretty much attain the same results—he plucks all the old chords deftly for an audience probably unborn when Gibson first bestrode the world. Corporate venality, cowboy ethics, the allure of virtuality, gutter cynicism, information as coin of the realm, posthuman impulses—all the standard tropes of cyberpunk and the stock characters that necessarily embody them are put through their paces here with real enthusiasm and brio. Giller's writing is muscular and well considered, although sometimes his dialogue relies a bit too much on canned phrases. I could have done without seeing the martial-arts wisecrack "Let's try that again" employed not once but twice, without irony, in two separate fights between Avalon and Lea.

Oh, true, the information density of the current cyberpunk novel has been steadily diminished. Consider Lea's mission to the Ukraine, which occupies 50 pages, or an eighth of the novel's total. Sterling would have accomplished what needed to be done here in about a page and half. I made this same observation about Elizabeth's Bear's trilogy.

When form becomes paramount, divorced from novel content, the urge to ornament is always close to hand. It's a condition of any late-period art form.