Real Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up because I'll read the next one

Another day, another dystopia. SF loves its dystopias, almost as much as YA does. The reason I rated this one three-and-a-half stars out of five is simple: I like the lesbian lead. She is a cool soul, struggling to make sense of her life while living it in a Grim New World that won't ever let her up or give her a break...and she doesn't carry that weight like it's a burden. She wants better for herself and her loved ones, like all people I've ever known. Daniel, another PoV, wasn't to my liking when I met him but he was compelling, driven by understandable needs and wants. He grows into someone I never expected him to be.

Also terrifically effective was the worldbuilding's slow-burn sensitivity to the plot. Permaybehaps the hardest adjustment was to the mixed slang spoken throughout, a heady brew of Chinese and German and so on and so forth. It's well deployed but still requires effort from the reader. We're in a climate-changed Berlin, a place not hugely resilient or possessed of reserves of natural diversity even now. Technology, that savior of all saviors, is pervasive in this climate-stressed world; I'd even say rampant. Its "blessings" are, as ever, unequally bestowed and frequently mitigated to the point of not being helpful.

This dad read “Reality Testing (Sundown, #1)” by Grant Price. Set in dystopian Berlin, Germany “Reality Testing” fully immerses readers into a bleak future existence where the planet’s resources have been depleted and humanity is on the brink of self destruction.

Protagonist Mara Kinzig wakes up to find that she’s just killed someone, no idea who or how. Her only instinct is to run which catapults the story into a mysterious adventure thriller that kept me on my toes the entire time!

Set somewhere in the near-ish future, this isn’t your everyday apocalyptic tale. Price has done an amazing job of creating a world for his characters to live in. Gritty, dark and chillingly probable, the world has become a place where the divide between rich and poor has never been more palpable. In this version of the future humans and computers have become one – its commonplace to have surgical procedures throughout your body to make it more efficient, often with dangerous side effects. The earth has become so depleted of resources that one promising new program has found a way for men to bear children. With shorter birth cycles, enhanced DNA and none of the “messy” after effects, this new way is touted as the best way forward for humanity.

It’s actually quite challenging to lay out the plot anymore than that. I will just say that body Mara wakes up in isn’t one she recognizes, more people die in her wake and she might not be the only occupant in her brain. At first I found it a little difficult to download and keep up with the lexicon Price has crafted here. He’s created futuristic colloquialisms that work really well in-universe but take a few chapters to get used to.

The pace never lets up, right to the final chapter with a finale that left me wanting more. “Reality Testing” succeeds because while the future might look bleak, it’s still a fun ride. I look forward to seeing where these characters might go in book 2 in the Sundown series! 🧢 🧢 🧢 🧢/5 – recommend!

Side note: I can’t help but think how well this book could translate to a tabletop game, someone get on that!

Reality Testing (Sundown, Book 1)
By Grant Price

Genre - Fiction/Science Fiction/Cyberpunk
Pages - 289
Format - Digital (Kindle)
Publication Info - Down by Law Books, (January 6, 2021), ASIN: B08SNP5F34
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Reviewed by - William C. Bitner, Jr. https://booksinmylibraryblog.wordpres...

Move over Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Freejack, there’s a new contender in town and the name is Reality Testing. Mr. Price ticks off all the boxes of the cyberpunk subgenre with this well imagined, nonstop action packed futuristic dystopian adventure. I was mesmerized and on the edge of my seat reading each and every page of this masterfully crafted bit of science fiction. With page after page of nonstop action, along with some incredibly imagined characters and world building skills beyond our imaginations you will soon find yourself deeply immersed and unable to escape the murky landscape. At the book's end I found myself yearning for only one thing. . . more! This is my first read by this talented author. I am so looking forward to reading more of his work.

From the back page (synopsis) - Welcome to Berlin. Population: desperate. In the throes of the climate crisis the green tech pioneers are king, and if you aren't willing to be their serf then you're surplus to requirements.

Carbon credit for sleeping on the job. That's the offer a dreamtech puts to Mara Kinzig, and she jumps on it. After all, the city ain't getting any cheaper.

Then somebody changes the deal while she's dreaming in the tank.

Now Mara has a body on her hands, an extra voice in her head, and the law on her tail. Only the Vanguard, a Foreign Legion of outcasts seeking an alternative path in the dust between the city states, might be able to help her figure out what went wrong. First, though, she'll have to escape the seething streets of Berlin alive.

About the Author - Grant Price is a British-German author originally from Plymouth, UK. His first novel, Static Age, appeared in 2016. His second novel, By the Feet of Men, was published by Cosmic Egg Books in 2019. His work has appeared in The Daily Telegraph and various magazines and journals. He lives in Berlin, Germany, in the heart of the neon-lit sprawl.

Other work by Grant Price - Static Age, By the Feet of Men: A Novel.

This is a well written, imaginative dystopian novel. The characters are well drawn and the pace is kept up by a futurist equivalence of a road trip through the bowels of a once great city, and an escape to the country. Every dystopian novel is driven by its vision of a post disaster future and the combination of high tec and medieval levels of misery is an echo of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. high praise indeed.

Reality Testing satisfied my most recent crazing for science fiction writing. I appreciated that creativity that Grant Price brought to the page, and would recommend this book for fellow sci-fi enthusiasts.

Mara Kinzig is a mechanic who wakes up in the wrong body in the wrong part of town with a dead man before her. She has two choices: give herself up to the authorities or go on the run and make her way to a group of renegades trying to carve out a new life away from green growth and reliance on technology and relentless competition. Guess which one she goes for?

I often think that cyberpunk has a couple of tricks, and that once they've been exhausted, so has the narrative. What Reality Testing does well, though, is reframe the genre from the perspective of the climate crisis. This isn't a retro-futuristic version of the 1980s; it's an idea of what the world might be like if we tackled global warming on a wide scale while still trying desperately to maintain economic growth by all means necessary - the two contradict each other, and the book shows this - in between characters running around the streets of Berlin and elsewhere threatening each other with 3D-printed guns, that is. And that's the good thing about it: it's not like Robert Henlein's Starship Troopers, for example, where it often feels like you're reading an essay with a bit of story attached. Reality Testing is definitely all story, and the fears about the climate crisis occur organically.

The setting of Berlin is a novel one - it's like that Duncan Jones movie Mute, only Mute was terrible and this isn't. The city feels lived-in and alive, especially in the early going when Mara is wandering the streets trying to find out what happened to her. The middle third in the Vanguard camp is a nice change of pace, especially after so much action, and I enjoyed the descriptions of life in an anti-technology commune. Then, before it can become stale, we go back to Berlin, where the final third becomes a heist movie of sorts.

Favourite characters? Aside from Mara and her dual personality (gender binary commentary?), there's Daniel Van Morden, a kind of dashing gunslinger with demons of his own, Mia Warsaw, a laconic enforcer who has a withering comment for anyone she meets, and Abadine, who may or may not be Vasquez from Aliens.

A strong, modern cyberpunk effort.