Reap3r, by Eliot Peper
26 Mar 2023The Book
Synopsis:
How far would you go to achieve your greatest ambition?
Nothing is what it seems in this speculative thriller about a quantum computer scientist, virologist, podcaster, venture capitalist, and assassin coming together to untangle a twisted enigma that will change the course of future history. Everyone has something to hide, and every transgression is a portal to discovery.
Taking you on a whirlwind journey from the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant shores of the Galápagos, Reap3r is a propulsive adventure that grapples with the price of progress and how technology shapes our lives and world.
My Review
Disclaimer: My rating may vary from what the whole team decides for score. This review only represents my personal POV.
Reap3r is a near-future sci-fi proposal, a thrilling story with a really diverse cast of characters, written by Eliot Peper. I'm reviewing it as part of the SPSFC2 semifinals, being one of the members of Wayward Stars.
A cruise organized by Sansome, the leader of Humans Capital, brings together several brilliant minds, leaders in their investigation fields, and Devon, the podcaster who coordinates the financially struggling Rabbit Hole, who has joined this cruise trying to close her sponsorship with Sansome.
Her investigative nature will bring her to two figures that have been decisive in certain advances in science, both with hidden secrets that threaten to destroy all that Sansome has built. And they become the target of hired assassins through an app, Reap3r, as Devon invites them to uncover the truth.
Probably, the strongest part of this novel is the characters, as each one of the guests on the cruise gets a big spotlight to know them, even those that end up not being relevant to the story. It feels kinda lackluster the amount of preparation that we get for such a fast second part, where our characters get persecuted by those assassins, while still trying to show their message to the world.
The pacing is fast, especially because this is a relatively short book. While I don't mind it, I feel the story might be benefited from some more pages; but still, it maintains you hooked during the whole story.
Reap3r is a great technothriller, perfect for those that like stories with a mystery to uncover while having a tense situation. If you liked Glass Onion, I would recommend you to try this book.
The Author/s
Eliot Peper
Eliot Peper is a novelist based in Oakland, CA.
He is the author of Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0, and his books have earned praise from Seth Godin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Malka Older, Cory Doctorow, Tim O’Reilly, Amal El-Mohtar, Robin Sloan, and Ev Williams, as well as the New York Times Book Review, BBC, Popular Science, Businessweek, San Francisco Magazine, Every, Newsweek, io9, Boing Boing, Publisher’s Weekly, Polygon, and Ars Technica.
His writing has appeared in the Verge, Tor.com, Harvard Business Review, the Boston Globe, OneZero, NEO.LIFE, TechCrunch, GEN, Terraform, Future, Techdirt, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has given talks at Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Comic Con, Niantic, Future in Review, Qualcomm, Interintellect, SXSW, and the Conference on World Affairs.
Eliot is the co-creator of the award-winning True Blue website and the critically acclaimed game, Machine Learning President. He publishes a blog, sends a monthly newsletter, and tweets more than he probably should.
When he’s not writing, Eliot consults for technology founders and investors. He pursued graduate studies in international affairs, survived dengue fever, translated Virgil’s Aeneid from the original Latin, worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture capital firm, and explored the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Mustang.