Book Review- BEHIND BLUE EYES by Anna Mocikat

BEHIND BLUE EYES by Anna Mocikat is something I stumbled on by accident. As a huge cyberpunk fan, I've been of the mind that the genre has been dormant for a long time. It's not that there's not a bunch of great novels produced for it but they don't get nearly as much attention as the books from the Eighties/early Nineties like Neuromancer or Snow Crash. It's as if fantasy began and ended with Tolkien and Robert E. Howard.

This book contrasts strongly against that trend because it's not only an indie novel but also something that manages to update the setting while remaining recognizably cyberpunk. After all, cyberpunk received its biggest mainstream success with The Matrix, and you can even state Ready Player One is a YA installment of the franchise. There's no reason it must remain trapped in the tropes of a cassette retrofuture.

Behind Blue Eyes has its protagonist, Nephilim, embody the cool sexy Carrie Anne Moss and Kate Beckinsale aesthetic of The Matrix but carry the horrifying backstory of someone like Molly Millions. One a cybernetic death squad called "Guardian Angels", Nephilim opens the book by slaughtering a group of refugees from the megacorp dominated Olympias City. Nephilim and her fellow Guardian Angels have no choice, their minds are enslaved to the system that operates them, but they have the "illusion" of choice.

One of the cleverer elements of Olympias City is that it operates on a Huxley-esque principle rather than Orwellian. It is an empire built on bread and circuses. You can have all the sex, drugs, and entertainment you like but absolutely no questioning of the social order. Elderly citizens are euthanized, and all your decisions are made for you with any social safety net removed. The poor simply vanish into the system, and no one cares because, well, they wouldn't be poor if they didn't deserve it.

The Guardian Angels are the top of the food chain in Olympias City but don't even realize they don't have free will because the system only influences their decisions while making them believe they are making the choices themselves. Nephilim discovers this truth after she's damaged during a mission and suddenly overwhelmed with questions she never bothered asking before. It's a fascinating premise and one that quickly becomes a game of cat and mouse as the discovery of this fact will lead to her death.

I was especially fond of the villain, Metatron, who manages to combine suave and cultured with utterly repellent. He reminds me a great deal of the "bad" love interests in urban fantasy, except Anna Mocikat doesn't shy away from how repulsive and controlling such an individual would be. His interest in Nephilim is far from professional and leads to several tense moments as his "patronage" is all that's keeping her odd behavior from being investigated.

Behind Blue Eyes has numerous twists and turns with a lot of subversions from these kind of "awakening" stories. Many times, Nephilim encounters characters she thinks she can trust only to find them treacherous and the story zigs instead of zags. I think if you're looking for a great sci-fi thriller or cyberpunk update then this is the book for you. I had to pick up the sequel as soon as I finished it.