best part of this book is the nonbinary character only appearing to wreak havoc and commit arson. it's what we deserve

I was recommended this after I said on Twitter that cyberpunk was dead, as the best example of current cyberpunk writing. It's a good enough near-future tale set in Korea's model smart city, Song-do, but as a researcher in this area, it was all too obvious to me what the author had been reading, even down to specific articles and it lacks the cool of early William Gibson or the politics of Bruce Stirling. The plot, featuring a virtual heist and an emergent AI, is almost a complete remix of Neuromancer with a dash of Robert J Sawyer's WWW Trilogy thrown in for good measure. And while it's great to see queer and trans characters to the fore, you can't help thinking that they appear to be written in a way that only a cis-het white guy could write them. Not the future of cyberpunk then...