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Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (2013)

by K.B. Spangler(Favorite Author)

4.39 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0984737545 (ISBN13: 9780984737543)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

AGAHF

series

Rachel Peng

review 1: Just a couple of chapters in: Loving the setting (my home turf, Washington DC) and the protagonist, a woman, cyborg, POC, ex-military, police liaison. Can't wait to read more.Finished: This was really excellent. Tight cyberpunk mystery, well executed. It could have used a quick and dirty copyedit, as I found some typos in the Kindle edition, but they're easy to ignore in a book this good. I'll dive into the second one posthaste. Do like.
review 2: As someone who makes her living off writing, I don't have a lot of time for leisure reading, like maybe a new book squeezed in every 2-3 months. So when I do make the time for a fresh story, I'm hoping it will be good. I'm praying it'll be worth my time.DIGITAL DIVIDE is that good.I was already familiar with Spangle... morer (aka Otter) and her work through her webcomic, A Girl And Her Fed. While the artwork started out literally sketchy (she has been slowly updating the original archive of pages with her much-improved new style), her overall story, plotting, characterization, setting and sense of humor have all been engagingly good in the webcomic. So when she released DIGITAL DIVIDE (blame my editor on making me type book titles in all-caps), I took a chance on it and paid the $5.00 for a .pdf version that would work on my Nook.Worth every penny...except for the last two, which I'll toss in here:Because she has a dayjob and a webcomic to update on a regular basis, it's going to take Spangler a while to come up with the next Rachel Peng novel...and the wait is going to suck. But that's my two cents' worth.In her ebook, Spangler dives the reader straight into her take on an alternate universe in which various bright, young members of various branches of the government were given cyborg implants that would give them access to anything electronic that could communicate. But in the world of AGAHF (discussed enough in the book to understand what's going on, but more fully fleshed in the webcomic which has the greater backstory), the Agents were tricked. It was given to them by those who wanted the technology, but not the moral imperatives and values of the biological components needed to run the new machinery. After five years of attempted brainwashing and personality breakdowns, the Agents finally cast off the shackles of their electronic oppressors and went public.This is where DIGITAL DIVIDE picks up, with the story of Rachel Peng, former Army specialist on a fast-track to West Point, and now after five-plus years of hell, OACET Agent liaison to the Washington, D.C. P.D. She's finally free in her own head, with great power...but as Uncle Ben reminded us, it comes with great responsibility. Public opinion is divided on what she and her fellow Agents can do, and even the police at First Metro aren't sure if they can trust someone like her. Worse, if she crosses the law even once, the legal sharks will devour not only her, but all her fellow Agents...those that survived the last five years, that is.Of course, it wouldn't be a good book without an antagonist to poke and prod at our protagonist, and the set-up is fantastic: Muggings, beatings, and a murder all point to the cyborg Agents, because while the eye-witnesses report one side of the story, all the security cameras and electronic evidence point to a completely different side, one that paints cyborg tampering as the only possible means.Fortunately for the good guys, and unfortunately for the bad guys, the Agents have a few tricks up their digital sleeves. They might not always know what is going on--Rachel and her fellow Agents are still very human at the end of the day--but they are determined to take this technology they cannot remove from their heads and do good with it.Since the murder, beatings, and electronic surveillance tamperings are only the tip of the iceberg that Rachel, the police, and her fellow Agents have to face, they have a steep hill ahead of them. Spangler's witty, colorful writing makes it worth the climb.At least, I found it worth the climb. Not only on a first reading, but on a re-read, too. less

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