Review of Someone to Watch over Me by Tricia Sullivan

At the pace of publishing in 2024, it's easy to not only miss good novels when they come out, but to lose sight of good novels released not so long ago. Chasing the new is a road to burnout and FOMO, and as such, it's good to sample books from throughout the history of fantastika. Published in 1997 was a little cyberpunk gem, Tricia Sullivan's Someone to Watch over Me.

Someone to Watch over Me drops the reader, on page one, into the speeding car that is the life of Adrien. And doesn't often take its foot off the gas. Experiencing a medical emergency, Adrien wants the technology in his head, out. The technology lets another person see and experience everything he does. What at first was easy money (people paying money to live vicariously through him) has become a burden, and what's more, it's causing shortness of breath, high blood pressure, and several other things. He needs help. Hailing a taxi on the streets of Zagreb, he begs the driver, a musician named Sabina, for blackmarket pharmaceuticals. And further down the rabbit hole of his own creation Adrien goes.

Someone to Watch Over Me is definitively cyberpunk. But it lacks the majority of visual cues the reader would expect. It's much more Pat Cadigan than William Gibson. (If you don't know who Pat Cadigan is, check out Mindplayers or Patterns—books also unfairly lost to the mists of time). Dystopia not front and center, instead, the individual uncertainty of existence brought about by invasive body tech is. Adrien's psyche does its best for some time dealing with another consciousness inside his head. But it can only hold out so long. The evolutionary leap is too big, and he implodes.

As the title hints, Sullivan plays games with Adrien's desire and lack thereof for human contact. The comfort of not being alone and of being connected is offset by the desire to be an independent individual, to have experiences that are his own, to be a singular identity. Cyberpunk is the perfect medium to explore such a dichotomy, and Sullivan cashes in by presenting a sympathetic view to all sides, a view that engages the reader for both its imagination and humanity.

In the end, Someone to Watch over Me is a well-paced cyberpunk drama (not thriller) about a man trying to deal with the loss of another consciousness inside his own. It's one of those books in which you've read 300 pages without even knowing it. It has the psychological edge of a Pat Cadigan novel, but is set in a cyberpunk world as fast paced as ours. And despite having all but disappeared from our 21st century cultural consciousness, this is a novel still worth seeking out as technology sticks ever closer to our bodies and we become increasingly dependent on being connected at all times.