Russell Anders Books
July 23rd
Soulpunk
Soulpunk is a sub-genre of cyberpunk and contains all the same trappings and tropes: megacorporations with power that eclipses governments, crippling class divides, advanced technology that’s almost within reach; a world that’s five minutes in the future. It’s hi-tech, but much of the technological development hasn’t improved the people’s quality of life.
However, where cyberpunk features characters working within this system, soulpunk showcases characters struggling against that system. The world has gone down a grimy path. Life is harder, unfair, unjust, and soulpunk says this isn’t okay. This isn’t a world to adapt to or endure. It’s a world, a system, to fight. Protagonists in soulpunk stories take a stand and decide the system is unsustainable.
A key part of this struggle is magic. Soulpunk magic highlights some element of humanity that refuses to be commodified. It comes from our folklore and our instinctual understanding of the world and how it works. It is pre-tech, pre-industrial, from a time when we didn’t have the tools that separated us from the natural world and ourselves. Magic doesn’t work at scale. Magic can’t be genericized. Its practice is always personal.
Soulpunk is a call to remember what it is to be human in a system that wants to turn every element of self and society into a product. We can live rich lives in the information age, but not if we let the flood of financialization wash out our souls.
If you make a deal with the Devil,
don’t forget to read the fine print.
Three operatives find themselves on the run after a corporate sabotage job goes awry. Now, their predatory employer, a heavyweight weapons-tech firm, wants its elite A-team dead at all costs.
Jon is a smooth-talking charmer. Friedrich is a hacker prodigy. And Guion is the ice-cold tactician who keeps them all in line. Backs against the wall, the men strike separate infernal pacts to stay alive. They vanish into the urban badlands of New York’s Five Hives, vowing to lie low and figure out why they’ve become targets. Meanwhile, Jon suspects there’s an insidious evil possessing his friends, and he wonders if they all got more than they bargained for.
Amid an escalating war between local gangs and the firm’s private shock troops, the fugitives uncover a conspiracy that threatens to destroy everyone they know and love. But can they stop the destruction before their inner demons seize control?
Reviews
My Dogs
When my father consented to getting a dog, he handed me a massive book of every AKC dog breed and told me to research what we should get. I was 12 at the time, so what I noticed first was that the dogs got bigger the deeper into the book I went. So, naturally, I flipped to the back. That decision has rippled through the rest of my life, as you’ll see.
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