n a dark future world controlled by a group of corporations called the Collective, computer superhackers called Hammerjacks roam cyberspace, called the Axis, seeking to steal corporate secrets to sell to the highest bidder, while anti-technology terrorists from a secret cult called the Inru seek to undermine the Collective's plans.
Cray Alden is a former Hammerjack, now working for a corporation as a special agent for a shadowy corporate executive named Phao Yin. Alden is assigned to retrieve a data runner named Zoe, who works for a Hammerjack code-named Heretic, and has stolen information of immense value to the corporation. Alden catches Zoe, but not before she manages to kill herself seeking to protect the information implanted in her body. He takes her body to an underground cyber-laboratory to seek to determine what Zoe was carrying. Before work is completed, Yin sends Alden on another assignment to resolve a crisis involving an experimental biological supercomputer named Lyssa that has taken over its corporation's massive research center and killed all of its inhabitants.
While seeking to resolve the crisis with Lyssa, Alden once again finds himself under attack, and barely escapes with the able assistance of a young woman named Lea Prism. They make their way to a secret hideout on one of the energy-generating platforms in the Atlantic Ocean, where Prism reveals that she herself is the famous Hammerjack known as Heretic, and a former member of the Inru cult that is secretly working to keep save traditional humanity from corporate attempts to transform at least some of the human race. Her hardware expert accomplice discovers that Alden's body also now contains the secret data that was contained in Zoe's body, and it is slowly transforming him into something more than human. Prism proposes that they work together to thwart the Collective's scheme to change humanity.
Working together, Alden and Prism engage in a dangerous mission that involves Alden interfacing with Lyssa, facing an unstoppable gene-modified female agent named Avalon, and penetrating Yin's secret hideout located deep under the Eiffel tower, all while Alden continues to be transformed from inside.
Non-stop cyberpunk action
Hammerjack is Marc D. Giller's debut as an SF author. It's a novel firmly in the cyberpunk tradition begun by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and other authors in the 1980s, and continued today by such neo-cyberpunk authors as Neal Asher and Richard Morgan. But Giller's noir non-stop cyber-thriller seems more influenced by such movies as Blade Runner, the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report.
All of the main protagonists feel like stock icons from these various cyberpunk movies. Hard-boiled cyberjocks, high-tech hardware geniuses, badass femmes fatales, slimy corporation executives, ruthless corporate mercenaries, street punk cult members and other stock characters populate Giller's dangerous, dark and sleazy high-tech future world. The action is non-stop and extremely visual. Much of the novel appears to be describing impressive visual effects and astounding action sequences from a movie that has yet to be made, all moving too fast to allow the reader to think too much about whether it all makes sense. There's a lot of eye and mind candy here, but not much really new.
That being said, Giller clearly loves this subgenre of science fiction, and shows considerable skill for a first novelist in keeping his speeding action thriller from ever totally derailing. Cyberpunk fans will probably find Hammerjack to be just the kind of fast-paced noir future thriller that they can't get enough of.
