Review: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Title: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Series: Zoey Ashe #2

Author: David Wong

Genre: Cyberpunk

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, gore, violence, guns, severe injury, body horror (mild), bullying, misogyny, body shaming, animal cruelty (mentions), kidnapping

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits.

Back Cover:

In the futuristic city of Tabula Ra$a, Zoey Ashe is like a fish so far out of water that it has achieved orbit. After inheriting a criminal empire, the twenty-three year-old finds herself under threat from all sides as a rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life enemies think they smell weakness.

On the eve of the world’s most lavish and ridiculous Halloween celebration, a steamer trunk-sized box arrives at Zoey’s door and she is shocked to find that it contains a disemboweled corpse. She is even more shocked when that corpse, controlled by an unknown party, rises and goes on a rampage through the house. Speaking in an electronic voice, it publicly accuses Zoey of being its murderer. This is the kind of thing that almost never happened at her old job.

The city was already a ticking time bomb of publicity-hungry vigilantes with superhuman enhancements and Zoey knows this turn of events is unlikely to improve the situation. Now, she and her team of high-tech tricksters have to solve this bizarre murder while simultaneously keeping Tabula Ra$a from descending into chaos.

Review:

I had so much fun with Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, the first book in this series, that I was eager to get my hands on this one as soon as possible. But then I realized the smart thing to do would be to finish the library books that are due before getting more, and, well, at least I got to this one in the same year.

This book tries to rectify some of the issues with the previous book. Zoey’s characterization is still a bit inconsistent, but this book at least tries to explain it. There’s also a bit of a Thing (I’m not sure if I should call it a character arc or a theme or what) around how wealth separates you from others and prevents a lot of human connection – which I do agree with, but it’s framed in a “pity the poor little rich person” way that undercut it a bit. Regardless, Zoey did start to feel like an actual nuanced person, so overall I’d call it an improvement.

If you like hateable enemies, this is your series. Book one had a very hateable incel-type antagonist, and this book has a whole organization of Zoey-hating incels. The threat is bigger, so you get more of the suits in action, plus the kind of antagonists you just love to hate, even though I simultaneously felt bad for some of them.

Now for my main problem with the book: it gets frustrating. My favorite part of book one was the way the suits were always 3-5 steps ahead of everyone. In this one they often end up several steps behind because their opponents are different from the usual type, but they can’t let go of their preconceived ideas about what threats should look like to see what the current opponents are doing. As a result, fully 80% of the action that happens in this book was unnecessary and avoidable, and that was frustrating to me as a reader. Zoey even suggested early on that they investigate something that would have put them back ahead and avoided the unnecessary action but the suits brush her off.

I did not enjoy this one quite as much as Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, but it was still a lot of fun and a very enjoyable read. Book one just set a high bar that this one didn’t quite live up to. That doesn’t make it a bad book by any means – as I said, it was plenty of fun and I did enjoy it – I just think book one was better.

The Zoey Ashe series:

1. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
2. Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Review: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Title: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Series: Zoey Ashe #1

Author: David Wong

Genre: Cyberpunk

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, gore, violence, major injury, death of parent (mentions), death of animals, misogyny, toxic masculinity, incel-type ideology, guns, body horror, pedophilia, child abuse, human trafficking (mentions), racism (brief, by villain), sexual content, sexual harassment (brief, by villain)

Back Cover:

Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements.

An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move.

Mysterious, smooth-talking power players who lurk behind the scenes.

A young woman from the trailer park.

And her very smelly cat.

Together, they will decide the future of mankind.

Get ready for a world in which anyone can have the powers of a god or the fame of a pop star, in which human achievement soars to new heights while its depravity plunges to the blackest depths. A world in which at least one cat smells like a seafood shop’s dumpster on a hot summer day.

This is the world in which Zoey Ashe finds herself, navigating a futuristic city in which one can find elements of the fantastic, nightmarish and ridiculous on any street corner. Her only trusted advisor is the aforementioned cat, but even in the future, cats cannot give advice. At least not any that you’d want to follow.

Will Zoey figure it all out in time? Or maybe the better question is, will you? After all, the future is coming sooner than you think.

Review:

I have read several spectacular masterpieces of fiction this year. But it’s been a long, long time since I had so much pure fun with a book.

I read the first chapter of this book somewhere online, and despite the lackluster title, it ended up on my reading list when someone had to clarify that a serial killer was not in fact a pancake and I actually laughed. The rest of the book continues in the same vein. There’s blood and violence and torture and gore but told with such wit and humor that I could swing back and forth between serious bodily injury and unrestrained laughter and it didn’t even feel jarring.

The protagonist is Zoey – fat, dumpy, working as a barista, living with her stripper mother in a Colorado trailer park. She knows her absent father is a billionaire and hates him. Then she is targeted by a serial killer, at which point she finds out that 1, her father is dead; 2, she is the key to getting into his super-secure vault; and 3, every warring faction in the high-tech futuristic city of Tabula Ra$a has a bounty on her head. So Zoey is off to Tabula Ra$a, where the “suits” – the crack team her father assembled to do his dirty work – don’t seem particularly trustworthy, but they seem to want her less dead than everyone else.

That sounds like I’m writing a back cover, doesn’t it? I can’t help it, this book lends itself so well to being described like something you want to read. Want a cyberpunk hellhole? Welcome to Tabula Ra$a, where the skyline is always advertising, cybernetic enhancements are a thing you can get, construction and demolition is constant, everyone is constantly streaming their every move, and the highest priority is more viewers. Want a poor person suddenly rich? Meet Zoey, formerly living in poverty and now sole inheritor of her father’s many billions. Want to watch a well-oiled machine of morally gray experts work? The suits have you covered. Want some futuristic violence? With Moloch as the primary bad guy, you have all that in spades.

If you’re at all familiar with incel ideology, you’ll immediately recognize Moloch as the incel ideal. Toxic masculinity in human form, he believes that feelings are watering down the masculinity of true men and what men really need to do is kill off the weak men and put women back in their lesser, disposable place, and to do that all they need are physical strength, addiction to “the juice” (adrenaline, I think), and willingness to commit violence for any reason or no reason at all. He was frustrating without being too frustrating, and a wonderfully hateable villain.

In the first third or so of the book, I kept thinking about all the ways I would have done things differently than Zoey. I told myself that I would have settled into the world of the rich and powerful just fine. But then I realized that’s kinda the point. I grew up rich (my parents are literal millionaires) and I leaned how to make things happen from my mother, a thin rich white cishet woman who expects the world to bend to her whims and if it doesn’t will make it so. I may be broke and in debt now, but because of my privileged background, I would find it a lot easier to fit into that world than Zoey, who grew up with a single mom in a trailer park.

This book does have some interesting things to say about wealth and social class, even though it’s muddied a bit by the “good guys” be billionaires whose money came from human trafficking among other unsavory activities. Zoey herself is struggling to go from “trailer trash” (her words) to head of a multi-billion-dollar empire. Squatterville, an abandoned building where hundreds of homeless people live, is an important part of several plot events (although that message is undercut by the fact that the homeless people there are viewed more as pawns than human beings). I think it was trying to say good things, but they didn’t come across very clearly.

This book is not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. Zoey’s characterization flipped from terrified and cowering to brave and witty and back with no rhyme or reason, the one major character death felt cheap (and it took me a long time to realize it wasn’t part of a secret plan, they were actually dead and I was supposed to be sad), and if you think about it there are dropped plot threads everywhere. But if you think too hard about it you’re missing the point. This is not supposed to be a book you analyze and think critically about and whatnot. It’s supposed to be entertaining and fun, a bit of fluff reading for those who prefer their fluff on the bloody cyberpunk side. And at that, it 100% succeeds.

The Zoey Ashe series:

1. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
2. Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick