Repo Virtual

Repo Virtual by Corey J. White
Published by Tor.com on April 21, 2020
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 352
Format: eARC
Goodreads

The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities — augmented and virtual spaces anchored in the weight of the real. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive.
Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He’s been hired for a special job: stealing an unknown object from a reclusive tech billionaire. But when he finds out he’s stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated.

First things first (I’m the realest). Sorry, whenever I say that phrase, that lyric from Fancy always pops into my head. Anyway!! My point was I first wanted to focus on the premise – a heist? An AI? Yes. Two of my favorite things. I went into this book being pretty sure I would love it. Sadly I didn’t quite LOVE it, but I still did enjoy it a lot.

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Major Plot Arcs

The book is split into three parts, but I would say the split is more like two main arcs. The first is the heist part, which lasts about the first third of the novel. The second is the post-heist, the investigation of the heist and exploration of the AI.

Arc One – meh

I thought for sure I’d be hooked by the beginning – I mean, it’s a heist! I love heists. But it draaagged and I wasn’t that invested!! I had a hard time connecting and feeling anything for the characters. The world was also super interesting, but confusing! As the book went on I kind of got more of a feel for it, but at the beginning I was confused and couldn’t picture it well.

Arc Two – YES!

However, the second part felt TOTALLY different. I LOVED it. The main difference was that there was the introduction of two characters – Enda and the AI – who really made the difference for me. I love them both. Enda is a badass bitch and takes no shit and is totally awesome – and flawed in a way that is realistic and makes her interesting to read about. The AI character is also great. For one, because I just love AIs. But two, because since you get to read from its perspective, you get to literally watch it develop a personality. That was honestly so interesting and cool to read.

Also, the pacing in the latter 2/3 felt much more even, and I wanted to keep reading to know what happened. There were more pieces and it was more complex than the simple beginning heist, and I think that made a big difference in it just being more interesting. As I said, the world also became clearer, probably just because of having been immersed and reading about it for longer.

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A Note on the Characters

I think my main issue with this book that prevented me from loving it was really the characters. As I said, I only really connected with Enda and the AI, and they don’t show up until at least a third of the way through the book! That makes a large part of the book hard to enjoy.

I also want to talk about one particular character, Soo-hyun, who is nonbinary. Having that sort of diversity and representation on page is great, however what isn’t great is that I felt like this character didn’t have much agency of their own. They seemed to exist to only be used by other characters, namely one of the antagonists. This isn’t a good thing for any sort of character, but it makes me especially uncomfortable when it’s the one nonbinary person.

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In Summary

I think many people will be able to love this book, and I’m sad I’m not one of them! But as I said, I still did enjoy reading it and I do want to try more from this author!