Extractionist, The - Softcover

Kimberly Unger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 161696376X ISBN 13: 9781616963767

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2022

Synopsis

“Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Next-generation science fiction.”
—James L. Cambias, author of The Godel Operation

In her breakout technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic, badass, cyberpunk heroine that you desperately need: Eliza McKay. McKay is disgraced underground hacker who is just trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life in both the real and digital worlds.

Eliza McKay is an Extractionist: an expert in the virtual reality space where people’s minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky—it’s McKay’s job to quietly extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous.

After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly. Meanwhile, the corporate executive she was hired to rescue from VR space is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted. Something is lurking in the Swim, and some very powerful people will stop at nothing to keep it secret. This job might be the big break McKay has been waiting for—if she can survive long enough to beat the hackers at their own game.

In The Extractionist, virtual reality and gaming expert Unger has created an unforgettable cyberplayground where the rich still make their own rules, but a skilled operator remains the wildcard.

• In this entertaining and edgy cyberpunk technothriller, Eliza McKay, a semi-disgraced hacker, discovers that a basic personality-retrieval operation is far more dangerous when IRL corporate interests collide with the virtual reality of the Swim


• Appeals strongly to the consumers of commercial thrillers, science fiction TV-series, movies, and games; and tech-based novels from Neuromancer to the popular Murderbot series (All Systems Red)


• Unger is a virtual-reality expert currently working on the popular Oculus VR gaming headsets at Facebook; she frequently appears on panels and at workshops on narrative gaming


• National marketing plan to include review mailings to leading trade, science fiction, and technothriller publications; ARCs available via NetGalley, Edelweiss+, and Goodreads; author appearances and virtual events at major venues to include tech companies such as Facebook and Google; San Francisco Bay Area bookstores, ComicCon, SXSF, and the SF in SF author series; custom cover-reveal app game (The Reveal); Instagram blog tour, podcasts, interviews, and guest posts

About this title

About the Author

Kimberly Unger is the acclaimed author of the virtual reality science-fiction thriller Nucleation and the 2023 Phillip K. Dick Award-winner The Extractionist. Unger made her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing, and followed that up with degrees in English/Writing from UC Davis and Illustration from the Art Center College of Design. Nowadays she produces virtual reality narrative-games, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC's master's program, and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race.

(Tl;dr - Unger writes about fast robots, big explosions, and space things.)

Kimberly Unger lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works in the future of VR on the Oculus platform.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 161696376X
• ISBN 13: 9781616963767
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290