Cyberpunk: written in a time when AI and implants are real. A near-future cyberpunk thriller of corporate power, algorithmic surveillance and four ordinary lives caught at the end of the world-for readers of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. People matter, and choices are tangible things. Akureyri City is a monument built from sweat and industry, raised in a system where those who built it suffer most and take least. A skyward hive of consciousness where money and power are not always what is important. The stories of the many soak into its tarmac like oil: trodden on, climbed over, forgotten.
The lives of four strangers intersect there by chance, meeting at the unseen precipice of the world's collapse. Through their choices, their survival and the concerns of their unfolding world, they become the unwitting architects of each moment. None of them is a hero. In a city that feeds on people as fuel, the lines between crime, necessity and obligation have worn thin enough to see through. A debut novel written by passion and people. The Binary Butterfly is Richard Peall's debut novel, grown out of a long-running tabletop roleplaying campaign; its events, its characters and its ending emerged at the table between friends before being fully rewritten into a coherent novel. Richard built the world, its themes and its shape; the people who played in it made the choices that became the story.
For readers of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and for anyone drawn to the argument now happening in public about what technology is doing to us. A dystopian speculative science fiction novel with a human-oriented moral centre that looks forward at a world we can almost already see.
