Kerry Allen

Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough
Mass market paperback, 278 pages
ISBN: 9780441015382
Available Now
Retail price $6.99
Second in series 

The world may have relegated the gods of Olympus to mythology, but they’re still around and on the cutting edge. That’s right, all those badass immortals and their misbegotten, inbred descendants have gone digital, plugged into their own magical, mystical network called the mweb.

Mixing magic with computer code has changed the way my family works at every level, merging hacker with sorcerer, and forever scrambling the logical and the irrational into one big WYSIWYG mess. I’m sometimes tempted to agree with the traditionalists in the pantheon that all this newfangled computer stuff is a royal pain. Then I actually have to perform a spell, and I’m reminded just how much less dangerous magic has become since the advent of the mweb and the birth of digital sorcery.

Doesn’t “digital sorcery” set your interest all atingle? Makes me want to use big words like “juxtaposition.” Smashing the modern and the arcane together has made for a train wreck in less capable hands, but McCullough turns it into the most mind-bending joyride I’ve been on all year.

In WebMage, intrepid demigod and hacker extraordinaire Ravirn saved the universe but in the process pissed off pretty much everybody who’s ever set foot on Olympus and was disowned, stripped of his name and redubbed Raven (which he hates), and saddled with a new destiny in which he has zero interest and does his best to ignore.

He has more immediate problems at the start of Cybermancy, namely retrieving the soul of his girlfriend’s webgoblin from the underworld to atone for getting her killed in the first place—without getting eaten by Cerberus or caught by Hades or otherwise trapped in the land of the dead with no escape route. Not enough pressure? Ravirn apparently didn’t think so, so he swore a blood vow; therefore, if he fails to free Shara from Hades, the Furies are going to hunt him down and subject him to 33 flavors of slow, painful death.

Ravirn’s not big on planning, since the variables invariably blast big, smoking holes in the best of plans, so his M.O. is to rely on his wits and the occasional intervention of dumb luck, remain flexible, and be prepared for everything to go tragically wrong.

The rescue is going unusually smoothly, until Persephone catches Ravirn hacking the Lord of the Dead’s computer. She’ll keep her mouth shut and even facilitate the rescue, but she wants a favor in exchange. Dude, that is never a good thing, but respectfully declining isn’t exactly an option.

Ravirn’s feeling pretty confident after getting Shara and himself out of the underworld, until it becomes apparent that “tragically wrong” has come to pass. While he was affecting the daring rescue, the mweb became corrupted and dangerously unstable, causing some degree of upset within the mystical community, and guess who’s taking the blame?

Ravirn has to find out what’s going on in order to clear his name before his death warrant is issued. He has to fix the problem because, aside from the inconvenience and dangers of losing the mweb, without it, what’s a master hacker to hack? And through it all, he must also deal with a wisecracking webgoblin, a three-headed dog with multiple personality disorder, an all-star cast of unfriendly deities, relationship woes (the woman he loves doesn’t seem to fully reciprocate, while one of the Furies has a crush on him but will crush him the minute he’s marked for execution), and his pesky new destiny, which he must embrace in order to survive.

Just. Freakin’. Awesome.

And now for some pointless rambling:

I never realized what a cutesie, romanticized version of the Hades/Persephone story I’d been fed. The one presented here is a lot more realistic… and a whole lot uglier.

I’m no computer whiz. I can perhaps use more programs than the average man on the street and do some minor troubleshooting, but I can’t write a program or hack the Treasury Department (or even straighten out my own web site…). My ignorance in no way diminished my enjoyment of this tech-heavy book. I may even be the ideal reader because if the tech logic is flawed, I wouldn’t know, and I’m able to roll with the unknown.

Perhaps it’s the familiar frame of the Greek pantheon being navigated by a young, leather-clad misfit that makes it so accessible to me overall.

Because the events in Cybermancy are largely set in motion by and frequently reference those in WebMage, I strongly recommend reading the latter first. Actually, I recommend reading it because it’s a damn good book, but I think it’s pretty necessary background to guide you through  Cybermancy. I foresee much lostedness for those diving into Book Two without some existing familiarity with the players and the worldbuilding.