Ruslan Koryov is an aspiring street racer in Grim Cyberpunk World. But
after a major accident, it looks as though his career and life are
over… until he meets a mysterious benefactor who wants him to train as
a pilot…
This is a strange book. It's an example of
"LitRPG", the first I've read;
as I understand it that means two things, stat blocks occasionally
interrupting the story (mostly when Ruslan gets new cybernetics or
meets a new helicopter), and an emphasis on the protagonist's
improvement in those stats. OK, fair enough. (The stats don't seem to
apply to any actual game, at least not one that I recognise; they're
just a way of comparing capabilities.)
But I don't think it's being LitRPG that leaves this unable to decide
what sort of story it wants to be. Resistance and compromise in the
grim cyberpunk world? Well, pilots mostly have to buy their own
equipment and cybernetics. But no, not really, since there's no real
rebellion against authority except when they tell Ruslan he's not
ready to do something and he does it anyway (which achieves the
authority's goals at the risk of his life). It's sort of Top Gun
macho BS among pilots, but somehow Ruslan never formally joins the
military even though he seems to be under military discipline and
performing military operations anyway.
I was also disorientated by the gaps in the worldbuilding. We don't
seem to be on Earth; the City is "Artem", with walls around it (and
its supporting farmland) holding back monsters, and no mention of any
other cities; fair enough. There's cybernetic supertech. But the
helicopters are very conventional and tied to contemporary Earth, with
specifically named General Electric engines and GAU-18/A machine guns.
One has some of its stats blatantly copied from the Mi-26, and perhaps
from a specific page on Flugzeuginfo.net that gives its rotor diameter
as "104 ft 12 in" [sic]. Most of the training is for "Search and
Rescue", but the actual missions (which our hero casually goes on well
before he's finished training) are more about dropping squads into
dangerous areas, and supporting them with on-board guns.
Oh, and there are mages and elves and trolls, casually dropped in as
though there were nothing surprising about that. (And engineered
water-breathing humans, who are at least a bit more in-genre.)
So Ruslan goes through a bunch of standard hero's journey stuff, and
somehow with all the things that happen, and at over 250,000 words
(and this is only the first volume of a planned series!), the book
never really gets started. A thing happens and is resolved, a thing
happens and is put on hold for later, friends are gained, friends are
lost, external demands are answered as they pop up in a game of
narrative Whac-a-Mole; but Ruslan never initiates anything and there's
no sense of plot progression.
(Oh, and having acquired a trusted fellow-pilot buddy with a mutual
agreement that they aren't screwing each other and they're both free
to screw other people, Ruslan prevents her from actually doing so,
using "the morale of the squad" as an excuse. At this point I started
to wonder whether the author was even aware that this was a man
controlling a woman's sexual agency.)
It's not terrible in the context of individual scenes; each episode on
its own is fine (and I listened to an audio production in many short
segments, which helped). But it doesn't seem to have anything to say,
and it takes a great many words not to say it.