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The Memory Hunter
By 2007, after the nuclear war with the Soviet Union, Japanese mega-corporations run America. In this dark never-future of hovercars, ‘droids, and Mars colonies, the oppressive corporations rule the overworked occupants of the mega-cities with an iron fist. And a mysterious disease called IDES is causing people to lose their implanted synthetic memories.
John Bishop makes his living on the fringes of the mega-corporate society that disgraced him and reduced him to a repo man of brain implants—a memory hunter. Bishop, with the help of beautiful dissident scientist Dr. Amy Alexander, unravels a conspiracy of corruption and horror, and in so doing he just may find the redemption that has eluded him from the bottom of a synth-alcohol bottle.
Mixing elements of classic science fiction, Chandleresque noir, and absurdist dark humor, the author of laugh-out-loud cult classics The Earworm Inception and Rumored to Exist creates a retro future world of classic cyberpunk. The clever twist of wry humor and science fiction predictions from the 1980s gone wrong offers a satirical look at a future that never happened.
John Bishop makes his living on the fringes of the mega-corporate society that disgraced him and reduced him to a repo man of brain implants—a memory hunter. Bishop, with the help of beautiful dissident scientist Dr. Amy Alexander, unravels a conspiracy of corruption and horror, and in so doing he just may find the redemption that has eluded him from the bottom of a synth-alcohol bottle.
Mixing elements of classic science fiction, Chandleresque noir, and absurdist dark humor, the author of laugh-out-loud cult classics The Earworm Inception and Rumored to Exist creates a retro future world of classic cyberpunk. The clever twist of wry humor and science fiction predictions from the 1980s gone wrong offers a satirical look at a future that never happened.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 2014
18 people want to read
About the author
Jon Konrath
37 books88 followersJon Konrath is an American author born in 1971. He grew up in Indiana and studied computer science and English at Indiana University. After college, he worked as a software developer and technical writer, but eventually turned his attention to writing fiction.
Konrath is the author of several books, including "Rumored to Exist," "Thunderbird," and "The Earworm Inception." His writing is known for its unique blend of humor, absurdism, and surrealism, often blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.
In addition to writing, Konrath is also an accomplished photographer. He currently resides in California.
Konrath is the author of several books, including "Rumored to Exist," "Thunderbird," and "The Earworm Inception." His writing is known for its unique blend of humor, absurdism, and surrealism, often blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.
In addition to writing, Konrath is also an accomplished photographer. He currently resides in California.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 28, 2015
What do you get when you take bits and pieces from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, The Man in the High Castle, and Jon Konrath's head, toss it all into a blender, and hit "Puree"? Well...
...you get a bloody, pulpy mess of paper wads and brain tissue, that's what.
Truthfully, this analogy would be more applicable to most of Konrath's other books, each of them a sickening slurry of story, whereas The Memory Hunter represents his first published attempt at "straight" fiction since 2000's Summer Rain. And as other reviewers have remarked, that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. If you count yourself a fan of his usual fare, then you really owe it to yourself to check out the range on display here, and if you tend to hate the kind of flash-fic he typically writes, then this full-length novel may be right up your alley.
In Konrath's vision of "future" dystopian Seattle (circa 2007), the teeming populace is divided into "Survivors" and "Cookies", the former born naturally in the years before 1992's nuclear war, and the latter gestated artificially in the age of infertility that followed. But when you're "born" from a lab tank at the age of eighteen, how do you go about acquiring a normal identity?
The answer is really quite simple, and totally in line with other retro-future devices employed throughout the story: Memory implantation à la disc burning.
"It’s all through the optic nerves. When you’re writing data, it transmits light patterns onto the retina, where they’re sent through cranial nerve 2 to the visual cortex of the occipital lobe. The brain does the rest."
Covering childhood through college, each person is implanted with memories appropriate to the vocation they've been created to fill. But not everyone stops there — many acquire additional implants to make themselves more skilled, intelligent, and charismatic, anything to give them the edge in an increasingly competitive world. And, as it turns out, quite a few of them wind up falling behind on payments.
Enter John Bishop, the titular memory hunter. Based on his description, he doesn't look much like Rick Deckard, but he does drive a hovercar. And it rains a lot in Seattle, even more so since the war.
In between the action and the intrigue (we get a fair amount of both), there are not-infrequent descriptions of driving, rain, and driving in the rain, actually, and there are paragraphs devoted to things like food and eating and other mundane stuff as well. All of this has its place in a normal, linear novel, however — the kind where it's the author's job to walk readers from A to B at an acceptable pace — and so I'm not going to criticize Konrath for employing the right tools for the job or throwing up a little window dressing here and there. Devoted readers will certainly notice the shift in style, but the market he's gunning for with this one will likely appreciate the heightened attention to detail. The upside for all takers is sure to be the seemingly effortless yet carefully proportioned world building, boasting imaginative renderings of an easily recognizable city and the larger planet/solar system it inhabits.
At once an homage to and a parody of the works of Philip K. Dick and others of that ilk, Konrath walks a fine line between innovation and imitation, but in the end he manages to serve up a fresh take on cyberpunk neo-noir, with just enough tongue-in-cheek elements to keep things somewhat light and never so much hard science as to make them overly heavy. As such, I was suitably impressed with this latest offering, a book that delivers what readers expect while at the same time pushing the author's boundaries. Let it never be said that the man was a one-trick pony.
And on that note, let me just say: After Konrath's introduction to the "Zooey" fetish, I'm pretty sure I'll never look at unicorns the same way ever again.
...you get a bloody, pulpy mess of paper wads and brain tissue, that's what.
Truthfully, this analogy would be more applicable to most of Konrath's other books, each of them a sickening slurry of story, whereas The Memory Hunter represents his first published attempt at "straight" fiction since 2000's Summer Rain. And as other reviewers have remarked, that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. If you count yourself a fan of his usual fare, then you really owe it to yourself to check out the range on display here, and if you tend to hate the kind of flash-fic he typically writes, then this full-length novel may be right up your alley.
In Konrath's vision of "future" dystopian Seattle (circa 2007), the teeming populace is divided into "Survivors" and "Cookies", the former born naturally in the years before 1992's nuclear war, and the latter gestated artificially in the age of infertility that followed. But when you're "born" from a lab tank at the age of eighteen, how do you go about acquiring a normal identity?
The answer is really quite simple, and totally in line with other retro-future devices employed throughout the story: Memory implantation à la disc burning.
"It’s all through the optic nerves. When you’re writing data, it transmits light patterns onto the retina, where they’re sent through cranial nerve 2 to the visual cortex of the occipital lobe. The brain does the rest."
Covering childhood through college, each person is implanted with memories appropriate to the vocation they've been created to fill. But not everyone stops there — many acquire additional implants to make themselves more skilled, intelligent, and charismatic, anything to give them the edge in an increasingly competitive world. And, as it turns out, quite a few of them wind up falling behind on payments.
Enter John Bishop, the titular memory hunter. Based on his description, he doesn't look much like Rick Deckard, but he does drive a hovercar. And it rains a lot in Seattle, even more so since the war.
In between the action and the intrigue (we get a fair amount of both), there are not-infrequent descriptions of driving, rain, and driving in the rain, actually, and there are paragraphs devoted to things like food and eating and other mundane stuff as well. All of this has its place in a normal, linear novel, however — the kind where it's the author's job to walk readers from A to B at an acceptable pace — and so I'm not going to criticize Konrath for employing the right tools for the job or throwing up a little window dressing here and there. Devoted readers will certainly notice the shift in style, but the market he's gunning for with this one will likely appreciate the heightened attention to detail. The upside for all takers is sure to be the seemingly effortless yet carefully proportioned world building, boasting imaginative renderings of an easily recognizable city and the larger planet/solar system it inhabits.
At once an homage to and a parody of the works of Philip K. Dick and others of that ilk, Konrath walks a fine line between innovation and imitation, but in the end he manages to serve up a fresh take on cyberpunk neo-noir, with just enough tongue-in-cheek elements to keep things somewhat light and never so much hard science as to make them overly heavy. As such, I was suitably impressed with this latest offering, a book that delivers what readers expect while at the same time pushing the author's boundaries. Let it never be said that the man was a one-trick pony.
And on that note, let me just say: After Konrath's introduction to the "Zooey" fetish, I'm pretty sure I'll never look at unicorns the same way ever again.
August 27, 2014
It's dangerous to get good at something, particularly as a writer, because people will often freak out if you don't keep doing the exact same thing you're known for. At the same time, people will complain if you keep doing what you're known for and say it's all you can do. That's why I love to see a writer step outside what they already have down and do something new, especially when they do it well. That's exactly what we have here in Konrath's new book "The Memory Hunter." We know Konrath can do wildly absurd from books such as "Atmospheres," "Thunderbird," and "Rumored to Exist," just as we know he can do soulful realism after reading "Summer Rain." Cyberpunk sci-fi mixed with gritty detective noir is something new, though. In "The Memory Hunter," the world is a recent alternate history where nuclear war did happen, the Japanese corporations did end up taking over, and human beings are little more than the data on their brain implants. The role they play corresponds to the class of brain implant they can afford, and many reach too high by financing. Then they can't make the payments and their data is repossessed by repo agents like the main character, Bishop, turning them into helpless children…presuming the spreading implant degradation disease IDES doesn't get them first and do something worse. Bishop is far from happy with the situation, but there's only so much he can do. Then he's offered a sketchy and dangerous repo from a corporation he hates more than most, one even sketchier and more dangerous than the repo itself. He's quickly in over his head. You'll have to read to find out what happens, but you'll dig it if you do. Konrath works in some entertaining absurdity in this one in a much more understated way than his wilder works, but the core is an engaging noir story in a vivid cyberpunk landscape. This may not be the sort of thing Konrath has made his name at, but "The Memory Hunter" makes it clear that he easily could.
December 2, 2014
Well, this was certainly a departure from the Konrath I've come to know and love. It's hard to describe, and I'm terrible at writing book reviews, so sorry in advance for this one.
It's set in an alternate reality Seattle where we didn't win the war, corporate greed and corruption are even more rampant than they are now, and the future is a bizarre mash-up of outdated technology that's somehow still relevant existing alongside technology that doesn't exist yet (like synthetic food machines, androids, and hovercars next to VAX mainframes, dot matrix printers, and monochrome CRT screens). People are farm-grown into adulthood with things like childhoods, educations, and social class pre-implanted, and actual children are a luxury for the rich.
Our protagonist, John Bishop, is a recall agent (think repo man for memory implants) who gets offered a job to find a missing corporate scientist. This job ends up being a lot more than it was presented as, with critical clues to understanding a new and terrible disease, IDES, at stake. He accepts the job, and madness ensues.
With some elements of noir fiction, sci-fi, social commentary, and, of course, his trademark absurdist fiction, this is a hard book to categorize. It still had its absurdist elements, but unlike past novels, it doesn't follow the This Hilarious Thing Happened, Followed By This Hilarious Thing, And Then This Hilarious Thing, The End; it had a plot. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out when I first heard he was going that route, but I liked it. A lot.
It's set in an alternate reality Seattle where we didn't win the war, corporate greed and corruption are even more rampant than they are now, and the future is a bizarre mash-up of outdated technology that's somehow still relevant existing alongside technology that doesn't exist yet (like synthetic food machines, androids, and hovercars next to VAX mainframes, dot matrix printers, and monochrome CRT screens). People are farm-grown into adulthood with things like childhoods, educations, and social class pre-implanted, and actual children are a luxury for the rich.
Our protagonist, John Bishop, is a recall agent (think repo man for memory implants) who gets offered a job to find a missing corporate scientist. This job ends up being a lot more than it was presented as, with critical clues to understanding a new and terrible disease, IDES, at stake. He accepts the job, and madness ensues.
With some elements of noir fiction, sci-fi, social commentary, and, of course, his trademark absurdist fiction, this is a hard book to categorize. It still had its absurdist elements, but unlike past novels, it doesn't follow the This Hilarious Thing Happened, Followed By This Hilarious Thing, And Then This Hilarious Thing, The End; it had a plot. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out when I first heard he was going that route, but I liked it. A lot.
March 6, 2017
When I was a kid, I was schooled in the ABCs of science fiction (Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke). I branched out in many fruitful ways with east European science fiction (Zamiatin and Lem, to name two) and the weird (Harlan Ellison’s Strange Visions and Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles, for example). Eventually, I burnt out on the genre, and stopped reading it for over a decade.
What brought me back to science fiction was the work of cyberpunk writers such as Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and, yes, William Gibson. The near-future stories that dominated the sub-genre featured technological advances that were actually being developed as I read, which gave them an immediacy that much older sci fi didn’t have for me. It helped that they were often breathtaking adventures written in creative prose.
That was around 30 years ago (Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984, although I didn’t start reading cyberpunk until the early 90s). If it ever was a literary movement (Sterling has argued that it wasn’t a movement so much as several authors responding to the same environment independently), a case can be made that its best days are now behind it.
Jon Konrath’s The Memory Hunter is Exhibit A.
Konrath has built an interesting world, an alternate 2007 where Ronald Reagan started a nuclear war with Russia in his third term, nearly wiping out the human race. The world was repopulated by genetic clones grown to adulthood and given memories of youth; it is now run by four massive Japanese corporations. Tech in this world is a mixture of the modern (computers and digital networks) and 1950s dream machines (hovercars and laser blasters). So far, so good.
The problems begin with the conception of the main character, Bishop. His job is to track down people who have had memory implants on which they cannot keep up the payments and destroy the partition that allows them to access that information. Why? Surely, since they involved digital implants, it would have been easier and cheaper to destroy the partitions by sending a command directly to the suspect’s brains through a wireless network. (I cannot be sure about this because Konrath doesn’t explain the mechanics of the memory implants in detail; sometimes they seem digital, sometimes they seem analogue, just an addition to our physical brains. Even if I am wrong on this point, though, the fact that there is this confusion is a problem in itself.)
Of course, this would have derailed the plot at its base, so it couldn’t have been. Still, Konrath should have at least addressed the issue. (And it would have been easy enough: explain that the networked recalls tended to destroy the minds of the people who were subjected to them, which caused a lot of negative press for the corporations that made them, so they voluntarily chose to have the recalls done manually instead.)
In addition, Bishop is described in the first half of the book as being somewhat shy in his dealings with his female love interest, Amy. He frets about how he should approach her and what lines would be the most effective in gaining her interest. On the one hand, I can understand that this is a way to make Bishop more interesting than the standard action adventure hero. Unfortunately, it isn’t integrated well with the action where Bishop is the standard action adventure hero. Worse, in the second half of the book, Bishop has completely lost the affectation, bantering with Amy in a Bond, James Bondian way that is at odds with his earlier behaviour.
If Konrath had been a little more careful about Bishop’s transition between the two states, he may have been able to make it work. In fact, this is something of a missed opportunity: Bishop was once a hotshot corporate memory hunter; when he earned the wrath of his bosses, his mind was reshaped to make him much less effective. This hesitancy could have been programmed into him at that time; his attempts to overcome that programming could have been central to the plot of the book.
There was an even worse missed possibility: towards the end of the novel, we find that Bishop has IDES, a disease that randomly affects people’s implants, giving them the physical shakes and an increasingly wonky memory. There is very little evidence earlier in the book that he has the condition, though, which is just poor characterization. The missed opportunity is the possibility of a detective trying to piece together a case who cannot trust himself to remember what is really important. Is he asking the right questions? Has he already asked those questions and been given the answers? Is he following a fantastic lead, or did he already discover it was a dead end? This is Phillip K. Dick territory. However, it isn’t The Memory Hunter.
Towards the end of the novel, Bishop’s character takes a darker turn. A hovercar chase ends when the hero tricks the villain into ramming a bus with innocent civilians; Konrath makes a point of describing their startled faces just before impact. This is a heartless act that makes Bishop seem like a monster. Not only does it seem like a complete break with what we had seen of him, but it completely alienates the reader because we really wanted to like him as a hero. (If Konrath had made him an anti-hero from the beginning, the reader would have had a much different relationship with the character.)
Given all of the above, I don’t feel generous enough to ignore picky details, such as the book’s inconsistent use of apostrophes. Is it “’net” or “The Net”? Konrath is consistent in having it both ways, but that’s just confusing. Again: “droid” or “’droid?” Both are used fairly regularly. In addition, Konrath uses an open single quote when the quotation mark used to denote missing letters is a closed single quote (don’t write don‘t).
To be fair, Konrath can be a funny writer. A battle in a gift shop late in the novel, for example, was droll, and nicely satirical. There’s a scene with laugh out loud funny dialogue earlier in the novel. However, the humour is infrequent and random, sticking out rather than being well integrated with the more serious elements of the plot. And, as is par for this type of writing, there are some sly references to other science fiction works. “With the click of a red button, the Ludovico specula pried open the man’s eyelids.” was a reference to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for instance. They're always fun.
Unfortunately, clever writing cannot make up for fundamental problems with characterization and plot. Fans of cyberpunk should return to the masters of the sub-genre and give The Memory Hunter a pass.
Originally published on the Amazing Stories Web site (http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2014/11/...) on November 11, 2014.
What brought me back to science fiction was the work of cyberpunk writers such as Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and, yes, William Gibson. The near-future stories that dominated the sub-genre featured technological advances that were actually being developed as I read, which gave them an immediacy that much older sci fi didn’t have for me. It helped that they were often breathtaking adventures written in creative prose.
That was around 30 years ago (Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984, although I didn’t start reading cyberpunk until the early 90s). If it ever was a literary movement (Sterling has argued that it wasn’t a movement so much as several authors responding to the same environment independently), a case can be made that its best days are now behind it.
Jon Konrath’s The Memory Hunter is Exhibit A.
Konrath has built an interesting world, an alternate 2007 where Ronald Reagan started a nuclear war with Russia in his third term, nearly wiping out the human race. The world was repopulated by genetic clones grown to adulthood and given memories of youth; it is now run by four massive Japanese corporations. Tech in this world is a mixture of the modern (computers and digital networks) and 1950s dream machines (hovercars and laser blasters). So far, so good.
The problems begin with the conception of the main character, Bishop. His job is to track down people who have had memory implants on which they cannot keep up the payments and destroy the partition that allows them to access that information. Why? Surely, since they involved digital implants, it would have been easier and cheaper to destroy the partitions by sending a command directly to the suspect’s brains through a wireless network. (I cannot be sure about this because Konrath doesn’t explain the mechanics of the memory implants in detail; sometimes they seem digital, sometimes they seem analogue, just an addition to our physical brains. Even if I am wrong on this point, though, the fact that there is this confusion is a problem in itself.)
Of course, this would have derailed the plot at its base, so it couldn’t have been. Still, Konrath should have at least addressed the issue. (And it would have been easy enough: explain that the networked recalls tended to destroy the minds of the people who were subjected to them, which caused a lot of negative press for the corporations that made them, so they voluntarily chose to have the recalls done manually instead.)
In addition, Bishop is described in the first half of the book as being somewhat shy in his dealings with his female love interest, Amy. He frets about how he should approach her and what lines would be the most effective in gaining her interest. On the one hand, I can understand that this is a way to make Bishop more interesting than the standard action adventure hero. Unfortunately, it isn’t integrated well with the action where Bishop is the standard action adventure hero. Worse, in the second half of the book, Bishop has completely lost the affectation, bantering with Amy in a Bond, James Bondian way that is at odds with his earlier behaviour.
If Konrath had been a little more careful about Bishop’s transition between the two states, he may have been able to make it work. In fact, this is something of a missed opportunity: Bishop was once a hotshot corporate memory hunter; when he earned the wrath of his bosses, his mind was reshaped to make him much less effective. This hesitancy could have been programmed into him at that time; his attempts to overcome that programming could have been central to the plot of the book.
There was an even worse missed possibility: towards the end of the novel, we find that Bishop has IDES, a disease that randomly affects people’s implants, giving them the physical shakes and an increasingly wonky memory. There is very little evidence earlier in the book that he has the condition, though, which is just poor characterization. The missed opportunity is the possibility of a detective trying to piece together a case who cannot trust himself to remember what is really important. Is he asking the right questions? Has he already asked those questions and been given the answers? Is he following a fantastic lead, or did he already discover it was a dead end? This is Phillip K. Dick territory. However, it isn’t The Memory Hunter.
Towards the end of the novel, Bishop’s character takes a darker turn. A hovercar chase ends when the hero tricks the villain into ramming a bus with innocent civilians; Konrath makes a point of describing their startled faces just before impact. This is a heartless act that makes Bishop seem like a monster. Not only does it seem like a complete break with what we had seen of him, but it completely alienates the reader because we really wanted to like him as a hero. (If Konrath had made him an anti-hero from the beginning, the reader would have had a much different relationship with the character.)
Given all of the above, I don’t feel generous enough to ignore picky details, such as the book’s inconsistent use of apostrophes. Is it “’net” or “The Net”? Konrath is consistent in having it both ways, but that’s just confusing. Again: “droid” or “’droid?” Both are used fairly regularly. In addition, Konrath uses an open single quote when the quotation mark used to denote missing letters is a closed single quote (don’t write don‘t).
To be fair, Konrath can be a funny writer. A battle in a gift shop late in the novel, for example, was droll, and nicely satirical. There’s a scene with laugh out loud funny dialogue earlier in the novel. However, the humour is infrequent and random, sticking out rather than being well integrated with the more serious elements of the plot. And, as is par for this type of writing, there are some sly references to other science fiction works. “With the click of a red button, the Ludovico specula pried open the man’s eyelids.” was a reference to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for instance. They're always fun.
Unfortunately, clever writing cannot make up for fundamental problems with characterization and plot. Fans of cyberpunk should return to the masters of the sub-genre and give The Memory Hunter a pass.
Originally published on the Amazing Stories Web site (http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2014/11/...) on November 11, 2014.
March 3, 2016
From my Amazon review:
I rarely review books...mostly because I don't know what to say a lot of the time. I'll preface this with the fact that I do happen to know the author. I also happen to enjoy his work - from the more autobiographical Summer Rain to the Mark Leyner-esque Rumored to Exist and others that follow. This was definitely a left turn from those. Imagine if Johnny Mnemonic, Blade Runner, and Snow Crash had a really wild party that devolved into an orgy with the androids from the Alien franchise running video. The Memory Hunter is the bastard baby that would probably result from that sort of nonsense.
You might think that means I don't like it. Quite the contrary, really. I found it to be a fast read and fun...it needed a little more Emacs worked into the antiquated technology, but other than that, I recommend reading this book.
I rarely review books...mostly because I don't know what to say a lot of the time. I'll preface this with the fact that I do happen to know the author. I also happen to enjoy his work - from the more autobiographical Summer Rain to the Mark Leyner-esque Rumored to Exist and others that follow. This was definitely a left turn from those. Imagine if Johnny Mnemonic, Blade Runner, and Snow Crash had a really wild party that devolved into an orgy with the androids from the Alien franchise running video. The Memory Hunter is the bastard baby that would probably result from that sort of nonsense.
You might think that means I don't like it. Quite the contrary, really. I found it to be a fast read and fun...it needed a little more Emacs worked into the antiquated technology, but other than that, I recommend reading this book.
September 14, 2023
A very good indie pick. This is interesting. I originally got this book recommended by an associate, and it turns out it was written by her brother. So I was naturally skeptical. I thought is gonna be just average, but no, it completely shattered those expectations. It's a nice simple story, that sort've reminds me of the bits of Dresden Files that I've read. The Furry part way a little odd, but it was given an interesting twist.
August 27, 2015
i loved this. very blade runner vibe to me. except i do not feel the same feelings for the protagonist as i do harrison ford. (not many people make me feel the way harrison ford does. le sigh).
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews