Set in a cyberpunk future of Vietnam, author T.R. Napper brings a new sci-fi vision to the gangster thriller with 36 Streets.
When a mysterious tech mogul, responsible for the creation of Vietnam’s most controversial virtual reality game, goes missing in Hanoi’s lawless 36 Streets, an eccentric British billionaire turns to the local gangland leaders who run the streets to find him. Recruiting their most dispassionate enforcer to play detective, Lin Thi Vu must try and unravel the mystery of the disappearance and collect her payday, without inciting a gang war.
In his debut novel, Napper has created a deeply textured vision of the future, where race and nationality still play heavily into prejudiced systems of justice and culture. Filled with Kill Bill-style flashback training montages and complex geopolitical plot mechanics, 36 Streets is brimming with new and inventive ideas on how to deliver a gripping sci-fi thriller.
In the world of 36 Streets, tech implants and memory-wipe technology are commonplace, with some characters experiencing cyborg levels of body augmentation. We get body-shock imagery and graphic violence akin to Mortal Kombat, but with the memory-wipe concept, Napper smartly side-steps the unreliable narrator trope and instead finds inventive ways to subtly explore the impacts of playing with memory and reality, pulling at that thread with the methodical pace of a traditional detective thriller.
While the mystery of the disappearance is what provides the motivation for the story, it’s the background and world-building that ensures 36 Streets stands out. Napper intelligently injects references to the historical events of the real Vietnam war and misdirects both the reader and the story’s characters with manipulations of this collective history in an almost Mandela Effect way. Ever present, but lurking in the background, are unsettling political machinations that corrupt Lin Thi Vu’s world and subconsciously influence the choices she must make. Characters are twisted by circumstance and opportunity, their humanity warping with every turn of the page.
For his sci-fi novel debut, Napper packs in a huge amount of ideas, and successfully condenses them into a cohesive story. While there are points where the story starts to feel unfocussed and baggy, these digressions provide the kind of tangential texturing that begs you to live in this world a little longer. A futuristic noir detective thriller that is as far from Blade Runner as possible, 36 Streets is laced with melancholic brutality that shines a light on war-weary people, dissecting layered motivations with fresh perspectives from an unfamiliar eye.
36 Streets is out now from Titan Books. Read more book news and reviews from SciFiNow here.
