Kyn – An Action Packed Cyberpunk Adventure

Cyberpunk is an interesting genre to me. It’s this weird mashup of insane ideas, tightly focused critiques of our world, and intense action scenes. My experiences with it are mostly with television and TTRPGs, and the books I’ve read have been a bit more theme heavy. Kyn swings hard in the opposite direction, and I had a ton of fun with it as a book that didn’t require too much dedicated focus as I crawl to the end of a school year.

Comparable Media: Assassins Creed, The Effaced, Ajin

Elevator Pitch:
Kyn is an Envoy. He is a killer who serves at the whims of the Sentry, who rule the city from their towers and media conglomerates. He is one of the few who survived the ordeals children are forced through, which has graced him with the ability to heal from any wound. Kyn’s handlers begin to reign in his rebellious behavior as he tries to maintain a relationship with his hacker boyfriend (whom he’s pretty sure works for a freelance information broker), and terrorist attacks threaten the Sentry’s reign. Kyn is on a short leash, and he’ll kill for his owners. You can bet that he’ll take his pound of flesh from them at any opportunity, however. 

What Worked for Me:
One of the most important things for me in a Cyberpunk novel is the aesthetics, and Kyn knocks this out of the park. There’s some genericness at times: tiered cities where the rich are at the top isn’t exactly a novel concept. However, Ramsay is excellent at crafting juxtapositions in the city of Unity. You get sewage waterfalls mixing with neon hair and sleeveless jumpsuits. Our protagonist murders his way through a drug production lab at the behest of his masters, only to pick up a bunch of merchandise to use at home that night. Bioelectric tattoos dance across the skin, interfacing with holograms and drones. Reality television programs dominate gossip right before militia forces begin a culling to keep the undercity’s population under control. The whole book feels a little bit like some of my favorite nightclubs of my youth, and it was a delight.

Kyn’s relationship with the Sentry was another big highlight. He’s a reluctant attack dog, hating his master without taking any steps to work against them. He’s trapped in a prison that he doesn’t see a way out of, so his rebellions are small. He’ll delay reporting for duty, misunderstand instructions, and sleep around with people his bosses would rather he kill. Of course, Kyn really would love nothing more than to murder the Sentry, but Ramsay really captures the pragmatic futility of Kyn’s mindset. He’s here to carve out the best life he possibly can from a bleak situation. That life turns out to have plenty of sex, noodles, and sassy remarks whenever he feels he can get away with it. I really appreciated the focus Kyn had delineating his work and private lives – until he was suddenly very much not able to seperate the two – there was a lovely push/pull of Kyn going on a killing spree for his masters only to return to his apartment to take a nice long shower and visit the cranky chef on the street for some dinner.

What Didn’t Work For Me:
While there was a lot in this book that worked for me, I wish that Ramsay had dialed back the action scenes a little bit. Fights can be a ton of fun, but they frequently dragged on far longer than I wanted them to. They worked best when there was an interesting goal for the fight, but it typically boiled down to ‘murder everyone’, and Kyn’s immortality removes a lot of tension. If he’s immune to physical harm & death, tension in fight scenes must come from an alternate source: protecting an item or squishy normal person, capturing an objective, etc. Instead, Kyn got hurt a lot, healed from that harm, and killed the person who shot him through the head. Rinse & repeat. I needed them to either be shorter scenes or feature more diversity. This includes phrasing; Kyn danced away from blows more times than I cared to count. I was on board for a long opening combat scene, but when I realized they were all going that long, I found myself tuning out a bit while Kyn’s stiletto came out to play. I will say that I hope the sequel features some more creative uses of Kyn’s immortality. I kept thinking back to my reads of Ajin; the manga is extraordinarily dark, but extrapolates on infinite regeneration in some really cool ways. I wish Ramsay had pushed further and adjusted some of the action sequences.

On a more holistic front, this entire book could have used a line edit and proofreading pass. This is fairly common in self-published works, especially by early books from authors. There’s awkward phrasing, typos, and words repeated a bit too close for their own comfort. I’d say there were a higher than average number of times this popped up, even for a self-published book. If this is going to bother you excessively, then Kyn might not be the book for you.

Conclusion: action packed and vibrant, Kyn needs an editing pass or two but was a ton of fun