Virology Is a Bigger, Bolder, Weirder Cyberpunk Sequel
Ren Warom’s Escapology took cyberpunk on a wild ride through a slick, stylized mega-city full of monstrous villains and Lovecraftian AI, providing a new view on a virtual world. But when a book ends with the heroes literally snapping reality over their knee like loose kindling, where does one go next? How do you revisit characters at the peak of their power? Virology‘s answer is simple: make everything bigger: multiple gang wars. Corporate chaos. Physical goddesses who can beat the most overpowered characters at their own game. Major metropolitan hubs in space. Warom makes serial escalation look effortless, standing by the elements that aren’t broken while expanding the dangerous, vibrant world of Foon Gung and its surrounding environs into the stratosphere for a sequel every bit as good as the original, and then some.
A few weeks ago, Shock Pao broke the world. In a titanic battle on the streets of Foon Gung, the Haunt and the freedom fighters known as the Hornets took on corporations, gangsters, and the group controlling the digital ocean known as the Slip, emerging bloodied but triumphant. Unfortunately, nature abhors a vacuum, and now that the Hornets have dismantled the Gung’s complex power structure, everyone from a trio of homicidal corporate climbers to a mad goddess and her army of brain-hacked zombies wants a place atop the pile. When a devastating strike on the Hornets’ hideout leaves them scattered and pursued, Shock and his allies must regroup, find a way to save themselves, and bring order to the chaos of their own making.
While Virology plunges Foon Gung and its surrounding environs into madness, to Warom’s credit, it’s madness with architecture—or at least, enough structure that it never gets confusing. Fight scenes are violent, messy affairs, and the main characters always on the run, but the lines of action remain clear even as the scene descends into bedlam. The chaos even makes the peril feel more realistic (Amiga comments that the choreographed bloodletting of the movies makes violence seem a lot slicker and cleaner than it is in reality), and there are some absolutely wrenching descriptions of the harm the characters inflict upon one another. The never-ending shuttle chases, narrow escapes, and to-the-death brawls are all the more visceral and dangerous for all that; the villains are deadly dangerous, and the heroes’ triumphs are hard-won, when every battle is an orgy of sound and fury that forces the combatants to fight smarter and still patch themselves up afterward.
Warom excels at building upon her existing mythology. Escapology established Foon Gung as a 700-mile megalopolis with gigantic city-sized ships coming in and out of port and an internet/collective subconscious humming along beside it, but the author is not content to have her heroes merely explore this massive playground a second time. Warom sends them into the Hubs, a series of orbital stations based on the world’s major cities, but transplanted into space, and escalates the plot with an insane goddess, Zen, kept locked up by the former Fulcrum corporation and desperate to break free. Paraderm, the corporation responsible for the events of Escapology, is once again trying to enact shady schemes to gain control of the Slip and get revenge on the Hornets who blew the entire thing wide open and merged it with the real world.
Virology takes the neon-soaked new-weird cyberpunk riot of its predecessor and turns the volume way, way up. It’s a chaotic flight through sprawling mega-cities and futuristic domed orbitals, ending in an epic struggle for the souls of humanity. With her debut, Ren Warom introduced herself to sci-fi as loudly as she possibly could. With its sequel, she more than earns that attention, establishing herself as one of the most unusual and kinetic new voices in the genre.
Virology is available now.