Killing Adam by Earik Beann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
With nonstop action and a hella good storyline, this high tech scifi thriller definitely kept me engaged from start to finish.
Set in the not too distant future, our world runs on ARCs. No, not Advanced Readers Copies, but Altered Reality Chips. These chips, inserted directly into the brain, allow people to experience anything they want at any time. They are basically living in their heads in a virtual reality world.
People are so addicted to their ARCs, they are tuned in all the time and thusly, tuned out from our ‘real’ world almost completely. This makes goings pretty tough for the minority of humans who are ARC-incompatible. Our protagonist, Jimmy Mahoney, is one of those few. Due to a head injury he sustained during his career as a professional football player, Jimmy is unable to have an ARC and therefore unable to connect with pretty much the rest of society, including his wife Michelle.
Jimmy’s main interactions come from his time at a support group for other ARC-incompatibles. Here he meets Trixie, a mysterious woman who ends up recruiting Jimmy to join the fight against the singularity running the system behind the ARCs, Adam. This is putting it in the simplest of terms but basically that is how our main action begins.
Overall, I had a really great time reading this novella. It is short, just over 200-pages, and is packed with action and intrigue. The whole story takes place over only a couple of days. It would have been great if it could have delved a bit deeper into the world and the characters but I understand not every book can be 400-pages long.
There were a couple of cringe-worthy sexual comments/jokes towards the beginning that were a big turn off but I am glad I stuck with it because the story definitely deserves to be read. If you are the kind of reader who likes your scifi to be so close to the truth you could see the premise actually happening in our own world in 15-to-25 years than this is absolutely a book you should pick up. It was close enough to home and what is going on currently in our tech sphere that it made it not only plausible but creepy AF.
I would definitely pick up more books by this author in the future and want to thank him for providing me with a copy of this book to read and review. I always appreciate the opportunity to provide my feedback!