false38666160981895719978098189571063Irreconcilable Differences
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3866616.Irreconcilable_Differences
640626James R. Strickland21852falseFri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008Thu Jul 24 18:49:03 -0700 2008Wed Aug 20 13:20:02 -0700 2008 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.