In 2040 California, VR designer Blaise Pascal is an employee of The Cloud, a tech corporation that practically runs the world. He is assigned to tweak a game which contains an addictive drug that controls The Slags, the lower classes. As he ascends higher within The Cloud, he is made aware of the company's nefarious schemes while he is torn between two women: Mitsuko, his ambitious supervisor and Kristina, a member of the Resistance against the Cloud.
The book is excellent at capturing the futuristic world from the oligarchical structure to the little details like wardrobe, slang terms, and recreational activities. Rivenbark put a lot of care and effort into this world.
One of the ways that he accomplishes this is to portray each character as representations of their world. Mitsuko represents The Cloud: narcissistic, cold, artificial, and dehumanized. Kristina represents The Slags: selfless, warm, authentic, and completely human. Blaise is both, a former Slag who worked his way up to The Cloud and now is compelled to fight against it.
The Cloud presents a world that is so caught up in technology, that only a few remember a world without it. It is those people who will rebuild society when the technology is gone.
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FULL REVIEW:
Spoilers: It's always a treat when I read one book, then I read its polar opposite. I read two books set in the 2040s, Mark Richardson's Malibu Burns and Robert Rivenbark's The Cloud. Both are set in California, both after times of political and environmental unrest and both have worlds in which technology and AI have taken over. However, in execution the two books go in opposite directions. Malibu Burns doesn't concentrate on the futuristic world so much as it does on the mindscape of its lead protagonist. The Cloud does involve interesting characters but it concentrates more on how this futuristic world affects them. Malibu Burns is strong on character and The Cloud is strong on setting and world building.
Blaise Pascal is a VR designer who works for The Cloud, the tech corporation that practically runs the world. He is currently working on Gilgamesh V, the latest game to appeal to The Slags, the lower classes who aren't connected to The Cloud (like Blaise once was). His director, Minsheng is impressed with Blaise's work but wants him to tweak the game to include an addictive drug which will control The Slags. As Blaise climbs higher in the corporation and spends time with the Slags, he begins to see the corruption, dehumanization, and mass murder that his superiors are planning. He is caught between the luxurious technology driven world that he wants and the honest connections of the human driven world that he needs.
Many of the characters are well written, Blaise in particular, but mostly they serve as microcosms of the society in which they live. They are shaped and changed by the universe around them and we see the strengths and weaknesses of the world because of how it affects them.
Blaise is the person in the middle. He came up from the low tech Slag world leaving behind a missing father, a mentally ill and deceased mother, and intense poverty to move to the high rise Cloud world. He hooked himself up to the devices that monitor his actions and created VR simulations for the people that he was once a part of.
While Blaise is a huge part of how the Cloud works, he is not exactly enamored with his surroundings. He is a military vet who has seen his share of bloodshed in the name of the corporations and governments who pulled the strings. He also is mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter, the last people he felt connected to. Now he buries himself in work and a sardonic attitude. While his remarks are humorous (for example when his immediate supervisor, Mitsuko gives him an order, he remarks, "I ignored you the first time."), they reveal a cynical detachment for a lifestyle that provided him with creature comforts but little else.
Blaise's only relief is the downtime he gets when he goes to the Slags towns, perhaps his only means of any type of companionship and the only time that he can be himself without being spied upon. It is here that he meets Kristina, who is part of a resistance group against The Cloud. She tells Blaise some important information about his mother and what his role is to be in this revolution. As Blaise starts to see the Cloud for its true colors, as a dictatorship, he becomes an active participant in ending it by being the revolution's inside person and saboteur.
Unfortunately, Blaise's new role as rebel coincides with his promotion through The Cloud and his involvement with his supervisors, Mitsuko and Minsheng and the shady directors behind them. The threats and underhanded deals that collapse the lower classes are made all too real. In one chapter, Blaise is nearly tortured by mantises, cybernetic insects which inject their victims with a painful venom. He then watches in horror as those mantises are then used on people including many of the rebels.
Blaise becomes involved in a love triangle between Kristina and Mitsuko. While normally, I don't like love triangles because I find them cliched and often unnecessary with The Cloud, I will make an exception because of what each character represents.
Mitsuko represents The Cloud. She is a narcissistic ambitious person who uses many that come near her. In her world, relationships can only be made on a superficial shallow level. Because of this, terms like "friends, "family," and "lovers" are mere words. Because they are just words without feeling around them, those terms can be redefined however they see fit as Mitsuko reveals during one of the few times when she displays some reality beyond the materialistic driven persona that we have already seen. She is a woman who has been hurt in the past, knows what it's like to struggle to get to where she is, but doesn't care. She lost her humanity and compassion for others and sees the people around her as allies for or obstacles against the company that she reveres and even worships. She represents the worst that Blaise could be.
Kristina represents the resistance, the rebels that are still in touch with their humanity. They have technology in that they were able to build a functioning self-sustaining community, but all of their technology is used to benefit a larger society, rather than controlling it. They, particularly Kristina, haven't lost who they are or the love for those around them.
Kristina cares about her fellow rebels and family. Even though she is in love with Blaise, she isn't afraid to call him out on the actions and the people behind The Cloud's actions.
Kristina has a strange ability to read into other's souls. This ability opens up possibilities that when society heads further into progress and science, what was once considered magic could be rediscovered.
It also gives Kristina deeper insight into people. She sees beyond the surface that Mitsuko sees. She sees into Blaise's past and how he really feels. She makes a real connection with him, a connection that Blaise thought was lost.
The Cloud shows us a world that becomes so intertwined with its technology, that only the very few remember what it means to be human and it is them who will rebuild the world once that heavily technological superficial world is gone.
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