Dealbreaker (The Bounceback, 2)

Beckett, L. X. Dealbreaker. The Bounceback No. 2. Tor, 2020.
Set 20 years after Gamechanger, Dealbreaker stars Frankie, who was a child in the earlier novel. Much of the action involving her takes place on alien space stations humans call Sneezy and The Dumpster. Humanity has moved out into the solar system and through some borrowed alien technology into the edges of an interstellar culture. But most daily life is carried on in a systemwide holographic environment called the Sensorium. There are artificial intelligences, uploaded consciousness, and people whose consciousnesses have been downloaded into printed bodies. Some people are “botomies,” who have no will of their own. There are also several alien cultures, some of whom have show more rigid ideas about intellectual property rights. It is quite a world, but I am not sure I always followed the story that was set in it. It was sometimes hard to tell whether events were happening in meat space, in the sensorium, or in some other virtual environment. The problem was compounded because characters might have different instantiations of themselves. Finally, I have never read a story so full of pop technobabble. It is all very imaginative but often hard to follow, and it was annoying to have so many words associated with a hashtag or trademark symbol. To make it work, Beckett would have to be as good a stylist as Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. As it stands, the book was a bit of a slog. It gets a B-. 3.5 stars rounded up for effort. show less

Liked the 1st in the series, couldn't get into this