THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Getting augmented was cool - small implants weaved into your body so you could jump higher, think smarter, lift impossible weight, see longer distances... literally anything you ever wanted to do, you could do; assuming you had enough cash to buy the 'aug' for it. However, this dreamworld did not last long as dreams can, especially where technology is involved, turn into nightmares. Malware ravaged the augmentation servers and anyone who partook in the coveted 'Faster, Stronger, Better' mentality ended up dead and, worse, resurrected bodies, slaves to their digital counterparts, forced to kill augmentation-free humans for reasons they do not understand. Taking shelter in an abandoned robotics factory, and forced to wait in complete isolation for over a year, when John finds evidence of other survivors in New York City, he has a fateful decision to make; remain in the safety of his lonely isolation or risk venturing out, into unknown and hostile lands?

MY VERDICT:

I really, really like the premise of Faster, Stronger, Deader; in the not-too-distant future, augmentations - small machines that can be combined with the human body - have been developed in an effort to make people's lives easier. Seeing no inherent drawback to splicing their bodies with technology, consumers quickly buy as much of it as they can afford; those that are against getting these nanotech implants (effectively superpowers that can be bought off the shelves) are shunned, the outcasts of society. However, there was a downside, and a pretty big one at that - you became a Zombie. You see, somewhere along the line, things went bad and the augmentations people had installed got a virus - a computer virus that somehow become partially biological - and now, even your friendly neighbourhood gardener has become a flesh-craving Zombie. I mean, as concepts go, it's a whopper and something that would definitely be well-suited to a Westworld-style TV adaption. Unfortunately though, the novel simply fails to realise the great potential of its unique backstory and instead uses it only as a sort of meaningless backdrop to explain away the Zombies existence quickly before getting into a more typical 'lone survivor meets dubious other survivor group' narrative. I would have loved more in-depth analysis of the Zombies, more description about their appearance with augmentation (are we talking externally visible cybernetic enhancements or simple internal doodads?), why do the Zombies seem driven to kill living humans with no foreseeable benefit to themselves and, seeing as how they are often described as having grey, dead flesh, just how did they die? I'm not convinced even the author knows the answers as he often describes the 'zomb-augs' as different kinds of Zombies to the norm; able to think, reason and move with agility before correcting himself by labelling them as the regular brain-dead, shuffling ghouls we are all familiar with. In fact, the Zombies don't even get a mention for most of the mid-section of the book which is very annoying, the plot focusing on the lone survivor's tech-heavy ways impacting against the survivor group's distrust of anything technological. This does make for an interesting story, even if it is not the one hoped for, with enough small twists and turns to keep you reading as well as plenty of character generation. There is also an excellent section of combat where the narrative almost takes on an over-the-top 'grindhouse' feel, delivering a much-needed change of pace and convincingly demonstrating the awesome destructive power of unbridled technology.