Softbone: Down and Out in New Kowloon

by R Stone

The year is 2017, maybe 2045, but who is counting? Jake Long, a mild mannered husband to a ball busting wife and a soon to be father by an unknown gendered child, is held hostage by a world run by the feminist imperative. Life is an oppressive nanny state with SSRI's on tap. His only respite is New Kowloon, a hidden enclave of Caffeine and nicotine; where women look like women and men don't have osteoporosis from the overabundance of hormones.

And though a series of unfortunate events is forced to flee to the Ukraine and take part in a war that could end humanity as we know it via a weaponized vaccine taken to prevent a manufactured viral pandemic. He has to fight against drones infused with artificial intelligence that outdo humans in every way, in the most unique answer to techno camouflage ever seen.

It's Cyberpunk; high tech and low life. A warning about the present if trends continue. R A Stone ended up predicting current trends, as some things came true before the books release. It's not a pastiche of the tropes of the genre, but a whole new work. It's interesting, it's satire, and most importantly, it doesn't waste your time with exposition or worldbuilding.

It doesn't hold your hand.
It throws you into the deep end and you have to figure out how to swim from the first page.
It's the book that will get you into fiction again.

239 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2025

Reviews

[R A Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damnit, I accidentally clicked a ranking for my own book, this is the only way I know how to clear it is by leaving a review.
So, uh, hi.

[G.S. Richter]

There's a wild imagination in here. Ripe for dystopian fiction.
But the whole danged thing is so replete with typos and grammatical errors that it becomes very quickly impossible to read.
This book is in dire need of a line editor.