Reality Testing is a change-up from previous works by Grant Price, and he continues to excel in imaginative and highly readable tech-fiction. If you’re looking for fast-paced futurism backed by a relevant and meaningful undercurrent, then Reality Testing won’t disappoint.
This gritty cyberpunk tale takes you deep into a uniquely-developed Euro-underworld, and will get you thinking about questions relating to the human condition, consciousness and the interface between mind and body, but not on such a deep level that it takes anything away from your enjoyment of the high-energy ride right up to its dramatic conclusion.
A brilliantly written and entertaining read. ( )

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: 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. ( )

Weird mix of anti-everything, apart from occasional pieces of technology found useful, but without any of the answers about how to get there, or how to bring everybody along with you. Mostly lacking is the understanding of how technology is interrelated, useful thing A requires B,C and D to have been developed and in use before it can possibly exist. Wailing against the evilness of D while still wanting A requires more nuance than is given here. Monbiot is acknowledged as an influence, which perhaps explains a bit. It's not a bad story though.

Mara is living a commonplace life in post Climate Prevention Act Berlin, scrounging a living just about, accruing personal carbon debit, but not prepared to commit to the full 'growther' corporate business as usual greenwash subverting technology at the expense of everyone else. Life has got harder and the story opens a few months after she'd taken the dramatic decision to temporarily leave her partner and spend a few months in the Link Tanks. In return for generous credits her mind would be used in gestalt to shape new possibilities. However she's woken up in a different body with a dead man at her feet. No idea how she came to be there, but with a few skills to help her get back home and find out what the hell happened.

Fleeing from the police ('bulls' a true germanism,) she heads out of the city to a rumoured enclave of technology rebels. Along the way she meets various characters, and sadly for the narrative a few of these get their own voice for a chapter or two here and there. It's a disruptive style choice and when they're sparsely given doesn't help the reader empathise or engage with them at all. The enclave is the usual hippy lifestyle - very hard work without many luxuries, and still managing to be dependent on outside resources. Here she final comes to terms with herself and what's been done to her, and contrives a plan of redemption. Everything is resolved by the end of the book, but there are hooks set for a continuation of the series.

It's somewhat of a mixed message regarding the climate action - cynical assumption that corporations will always subvert laws taken for the greater good. Or a cynical take that such laws were never going to be any good anyway and passed with honourable intentions in the first place. The consequences of carrying on as usual as are starkly given, but the warning seems not to be taken to heart. ( )