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

[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.

[James]

For a cover this unapologetically 80s, you'd think this would be the lovechild of Hardwired and Neuromancer. You'd think it would be machismo and high-octane low-life cyberpunk that kicks off from the start and doesn't let go until the end.

Instead, it's failed escapist entertainment that blares California leftism at 11, making it as inescapable as a black hole with the color and flavor to match.

To be fair, the ideas here are cyberpunk in concept. A public that's anaesthetized from the endless barrage of sterilized entertainment, widespread propaganda, and regular narcotics. Technology that grants wider access to the world while forming the bars of the gilded cage. Separation between the sexes and the loss of foundational humanity. Class schisms where only the outsiders are free. The author did his homework on the tropes that make cyberpunk work.

The problem is that none of it clicks as a whole. Jakob (or Jacob, depending on the page) is a product of his world, so he's not mentally tough or driven by something bigger than himself. He's a drug-addled product of the system, the same as any other person I don't have a reason to care about. He acts like he's trying to get away from it all, but I don't know why. He has a Ghost in his head, but I don't know what that is or why it matters. I want to immerse myself into the world that the chapter headings (which were quite clever, I'll give it that) assure me I'll enjoy, but I'm tripping over the cultural references at every step and being reminded of real-world insanity in my entertainment fiction. In short, the pieces are here, but the central unifying 'it' factor isn't, and it shows.

The absence of that unifying theme might have been harder to miss if it weren't for the persistent and regular typos on names and simple words, and sketchy formatting that screams 'indie and can't be bothered.' When I'm finding misspellings of the main character's name and the paragraph spacing to be a greater affront to my eyes than the California political references and widespread pronouns, I'd call that a problem.

All in all, very much of its time, a snapshot of a moment and place without the underlying concept to elevate it to adequately enjoyable entertainment. If there were a point to be made or the feeling of a soul behind the shoddy execution, I might feel different (or anything at all), but as it is, this comes across as a convenient cash grab targeted at a specific demographic for the brief window in which it will be relevant.

If owning the Libs at their own game is in your wheelhouse, if throwing their bad ideas at them while getting the same mud on yourself is what you want, then this might do it for you. If not, buyer beware.

[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.