Auxiliary: London 2039 by Jon Richter: A Gripping Hardboiled Cyberpunk Read

Auxiliary: London 2039 by Jon Richter Kindle Edition, 224 pg. TCK Publishing, 2020 Read: May 1-4, 2020 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

TIM stood for “The Imagination Machine.”It hadn’t seemed like a game-changer when it had been quietly released by the Imagination Corporation twelve years previous, at least not to Dremmler. It was simply a logical next step, a “one stop shop”that brought together office applications, email, social media, an enhanced personal organiser that was, as the company’s marketing eloquently put it, “like Alexa on steroids.”Video gaming, on-demand television, information searches, holiday bookings, shopping, dating, movies, music: TIM was a single interface for the entire online, AR/VR experience…

TIM had become ubiquitous; the go-to OS for almost everything. It flew the planes. It drove the cars. It answered your queries when you contacted customer services. It controlled the robotic surgeons that performed life-saving operations. It filed your tax returns. It delivered your food. It selected your music. It read your children bedtime stories.

And it ran the AltWorld. Whatever you wanted to see, or be, or do, or feel, or [expletive]. Real life had been made obsolete.

In the obsolete “real life,” Carl Dremmler is one of the remaining detectives in the London Police Force (which doesn’t seem to be much of a presence). His days are largely filled with cookie-cutter investigations verifying that people has wasted away while immersed in Augmented Reality to the point they couldn’t notice their physical health had deteriorated—although he gets to break it up occasionally by something like a civilian attacking a postbot.

What brings Dremmler to our focus is a very different kind of case—maybe an impossible case. A woman has been killed—horrifically, I should add. Her boyfriend, the prime suspect, has been caught (very literally) red-handed, but insists that he tried to stop it from happening, but his cybernetic arm acted independently from him.

The problem with this is that the software that controls the arm is unhackable. There is no way for this to have been anything but the accused. Unless the impossible is a lot more possible.

Dremmler finds himself fighting pressure from above to close this case and his increasing conviction that the boyfriend is innocent. He just can’t explain how. The London of 2039 is a cyberpunk future—but not one so advanced that people living in it can’t remember what life was life before TIM was ubiquitous. Dremmler has a strong preference for, well, now—which makes him the perfect person to want to believe there is a problem in a perfect OS.

I’ve always found that the best cyberpunk, seemingly paradoxically, shared a lot of characteristics with early 20th-century noir. This novel is a shining example of that—it’s actually been a long time since I’ve read a cyberpunk novel that’s embraced the noir-ness as much (or as well) as Auxiliary: London 2039 does. Dremmler is as hard-boiled a character as you could want (haunted by tragedy, alcoholic, driven) and I was reminded of Nathaniel West’s work several times by the secondary characters and mores throughout the book.

At the same time, there’s a Golden Age of Science Fiction feel to a lot of the work—especially as it relates to AIs, the place of technology in culture (and how it interacts with humans), the role of escaping from Standard Reality into Alternate Reality, and so on. As often as I was reminded of West or Chandler, I was reminded of Asimov or Clarke (Richter is more pleasant to read).

I had a blast with this. It’s just the kind of mix of genres that appeals to me and Richter executed it all perfectly. Great, twisty plot; compelling characters; a fantastic setting; and enough implications to ponder to satisfy any reader. I strongly recommend Auxiliary: London 2039 to you.

My thanks to Overview Media for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials (including a copy of the novel) they provided.