36 Streets

Reviews / Votes

"36 Streets glows bright and hallucinatory as tropical neon, goes down smooth as warm sake, cuts deep as a nano-steel blade. Napper honours classic cyberpunk with fresh perspectives and hot genre recombinations, a nasty new future gleam, the proverbial new coat of paint. But there are more austere echoes here too, of Graham Greene and Kazuo Ishiguro, of a whole post-colonial literary heritage banging to be let in. In a genre stuffed with facile hero narratives, 36 Streets consistently chooses something else - messy humanity, grey moral tones and choices, hard-edged geopolitical truth. Raw and raging and passionate, this is cyberpunk literature with a capital fucken L. Get it while it's hot!"
Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

"Brutal, brooding, brilliant . . . an angry vision of violence wrapped around a complex meditation of memory, trauma and hegemony. This is cyberpunk with soul."
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, author of The Salvage Crew

"Intimately concerned with the little guy in a world of neon gods, Napper paints a prophetic and uncomfortably believable vision of the future. A fascinating interplay between advancing technology and wish fulfillment, 36 Streets is ambitious in scope while remaining deeply human."
Tim Hickson, Hello Future Me

"High-octane, immersive SF at its best. 36 Streets is sure become a classic in the field."
Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-Winner

"Napper has made a remarkable character in the form of his protagonist Lin Thi Vu, subverting to some degree the conventions of the world of male power and violence. It's a great achievement. The set pieces, the interludes, of performed mastery with weapons and skill, are well poised and set the scene with ritualised violence."
Stephen Teo, author of Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition

"An engrossing, intriguing action-packed duty tour of a tech-thick, violence-infused, neon-scorched near future gangland Vietnam, where unwinnable games run hot and wild. Highly recommended."
Cat Sparks, author of Lotus Blue

"A fun, frenetic journey of neon-blasted streets, sinister underworlds and oodles of brutal tech, rendered in cutthroat prose so tangible you can almost smell the grime and cigarette smoke. T. R. Napper's cyberpunk world is a feral, back-alley brawl of a novel with real blood under its nails."
Jeremy Szal, author of Stormblood

"Beautiful, shimmering, ghostly science fiction."
Anna Smith-Spark, author of Empires of Dust


Praise for T R Napper

"Haunting and iridescent - combines the paranoid weirdness of the best Philip K Dick, the chilly but cool-as-fuck future gleam of cyberpunk, and an achingly beautiful literary inflection reminiscent of mainstream heavyweights like Murakami or Ishiguro. T. R. Napper's futures feel at once gritty and vertiginous and close-focus human in the way only the best SF can manage. Whatever roadmap he's working from, I can't wait to see where he's taking us next."
Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

"Heartbreaking... it evokes the depth of Chinese history, the successive wars, the poetry that expresses both the love of the landscape and the pain of the soldier leaving home, perhaps never to return." (for Dark on a Darkling Earth)
Locus Magazine

"T R Napper's cyberpunk story is a standout [in the collection], featuring a download with the tension of a high-speed chase" (for Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang )
Publisher's Weekly

"The story is by turns blackly funny, speculatively impressive, and bleakly moving." (for A Strange Loop)
Rich Horton, Locus Magazine

"wonderfully strange" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets )
sci fi review

"Darkly gonzoid" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets )
Locus Magazine

"The whole reads like a fever dream" (for The Great Buddhist Monk Beat Down )
Tangent Online

"Thrilling and Moving" (for Ghosts of a Neon God)
Rocket Stack Rank