Irreconcilable Differences

by James R. Strickland (Goodreads author!)

published

August 1st 2008 by Flying Pen Press LLC

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binding

Paperback, 312 pages

characters

Rachel Santana, Micki Blake

setting

United States

isbn

0981895719 (isbn13: 9780981895710)

description

Rachel Santana is thirty-six years old. She's an agent for Interpol Covert Services. Before that, she was an interrogator at the White Sands Reeducati...more

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other reviews (showing 1-4 of 4)

All ratings | 5 stars (3) | avg 5.00

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Michael S. rated it:

09/15/08

bookshelves: active, currently-reading, cyberpunk, fiction, speculist

Read in September, 2008

recommended to Michael S. by: James R. Strickland
recommends it for: Anyone who wants to see where cyberpunk might be headed.

James R. Strickland's sophomore effort for Flying Pen Press builds on the mastery, and creative bending, of established cyberpunk conventions he so skillfully demonstrated in his debut title Looking Glass. His latest work, Irreconcilable Differences, takes us even further into his dismantled, p...more

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James rated it:

08/20/08

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: Cyberpunk fans, Anime fans, Spy/Espionage story fans

My second novel. Naturally I think it's great, and everyone should read it. :)

Irreconcilable Differences is about a woman named Rachel Santana. She is an agent of Interpol Covert Services. She’s thirty-six years old, married, soon to be divorced, and an experienced undercover operator. They’ve taken a digital copy of her mind and personality, and implanted it in Micki Blake, a 16 year old hacker girl from rural Kansas.The mission: Locate the dangerous new player who is prowling t...more My second novel. Naturally I think it's great, and everyone should read it. :)

Irreconcilable Differences is about a woman named Rachel Santana. She is an agent of Interpol Covert Services. She’s thirty-six years old, married, soon to be divorced, and an experienced undercover operator. They’ve taken a digital copy of her mind and personality, and implanted it in Micki Blake, a 16 year old hacker girl from rural Kansas.The mission: Locate the dangerous new player who is prowling the rural hacker ecology. Destroy him. Take no prisoners. Leave no trace. Use Micki Blake and her life as a cover.

What this means for the copy of Rachel Santana is that she’s spending time as a sixteen year old again. She’s in high school again. Above all, she has to face some hard questions. Who am I? How did I get to be this person/ Where do I go from here? These questions and their answers are a matter of life and death.

When I tell people about Irreconcilable Differences, the question I get the most is,Why Kansas?

My wife and I used to drive a lot between Colorado Springs and Sheridan Wyoming. It’s a long, dull drive. You wind up playing games like Road Kill Bingo just to pass the time. We stopped in Douglas Wyoming. It’s a town of about 5000 people, mostly support for farming and ranching, mostly retail and medical. It’s also the home of the Wyoming State Fair.

So anyway, we stopped there at the combination gas station, convenience store, and Subway Sandwich shop, and we’re sitting there, eating our sandwiches, listening to the country music, when these two goth-punks walk in. And they were in full uniform: Leather jackets, piercings, tattoos, chains, makeup, hair, the works.

No-one batted an eyelash. Except us. We talked about them for some time once we were back on the road. They were more interesting than road kill bingo. You don’t expect to see that kind of big city culture in Douglas Wyoming. But clearly, it’s there.

That idea rattled around in my head a while, and it really took off during another long drive, to the other end of Kansas. You want to talk long, dull drives? There’s not much interesting scenery. Not even much carrion on the road. I’d been working on a followup book for Looking Glass, I was thinking about cyberpunk and thinking about how yes, cyberpunk culture and technology would penetrate even here.

I knew this. I’m from these big square states. I knew it’d be different, going more rural with it, but Cyberpunk doesn’t have to be about big urban sprawls slowly being made over in the image of Tokyo. I’ve set it in normal cities before. What hit me at that point was that cyberpunk doesn’t have to be in cities at all. By the time I got home, I had a rough idea of Micki Blake and her life going in my head, so I scrapped the novel I was working on and wrote this one instead.

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