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Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2024
Look. It's a great book. Hilarious, deeply weird, and cyberpunk down to it's veins. But you can find those details in other reviews. I want to devote my review to another question:WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET THIS BOOK IN KINDLE?!Seriously. I bought this out-of-print book in paperback years ago out of desperation but I want it in digital so I never lose it & can revisit it wherever I get the urge, from where ever I am at that moment. Amazon used to have a button that allowed you to send a request to the publisher to make an ebook. I'm pretty sure there was a 6 month period where I clicked that weekly (if not more). Cyberpunk shouldn't be trapped in dead-trees-format!Please.. Think of the children. The ones in the future who will never read this awesome book cuz no one is going to pay $25 for a used mass market paperback that they can't even try a sample of. And that's a terrible shame.
GhostintheShell
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2023
Bruce Bethke is one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre and the man who invented the term "cyberpunk" itself. I love his short story of the same title which started it all!Headcrash was his first novel and it's a crazy ride through the early days of cyberpunk.Many authors and readers take the genre extremely seriously, some even see it as a political movement--which is, of course, total nonsense.Others believe cyberpunk is dead while some purists don't want to touch anything that was written after 1990.In Headcrash Bruce Bethke makes fun of this in a hilarious way. The book is a parody of the most common cyberpunk tropes and he even makes fun of the term cyberpunk itself.At a certain point in the story, the hero of the book, a hacker named Max Kool is introduced to several secret groups in cyberspace. There are cryopunks, cipherpunks, ciderpunks...and the worst of them all: the cyberpunks.This is clearly a very loving slap on the hand to those who complain there's not enough "punk" in cyberpunk...Sadly, this wonderful book is out of print and hard to come by. But if you can find it somewhere secondhand, I highly recommend giving Headcrash a shot. It's brilliant and a must-read for all cyberpunks!
J.N.Cameron
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2020
What more can I add about this super cool and classic novel? I'm very happy I read this.
Alan Dowd
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2019
Delightful take on the whole cyberpunk genre. Particularly amusing to me, because I went to work at the IRL inspiration for Monolithic Diversified Enterprises and I worked for a Director who kept a laser-cut, transparent aluminum model of one of his products from his work in the Sanguinary Tech-Systems Division on the credenza in his office.
Zteknon
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2015
One of my favorite books ever. I keep hoping they put it on the Kindle marketplace but they havent yet.
Ben Tague
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2002
In a massive sea of cyberpunk books that take themselves way too seriously, HeadCrash is a shining example of how humor can turn an ordinary novel into a piece of literature that everyone should read. Bruce Bethke has created a book that is truly engaging for the reader.One way he accomplished this is through an interesting plot line with numerous twists that kept me constantly on guard. HeadCrash follows the story of :cybergeek" Jack Burroughs; a.k.a. Pyle; a.k.a. MAX_KOOL. The story starts with Jack going through a management shake up at MDE, Monolithic Diversified Enterprises. Later on, after Jack suddenly finds himself in a sticky situation, the reader watches as Jack uses his cyberspace alter ego, MAX_KOOL, and an embarrassing way to interface with the internet, to do a hack job for a mysterious woman known only as Amber. Saying anymore about the plot would lessen the amazing experience that any reader would have reading this book. The engaging plot and Bethke's outrageously funny style of writing made reading this book a truly positive experience.
TY
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2000
"Headcrash" started out slowly for the first chapter, which was devoted to establishing the nerdy thought processes of the narrator. After that, it kicks into high gear and never lets up.Set in 2005, the plot is kind of a funny version of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (without the Sumerian mythology) crossed with Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," with some doses of William Gibson's "Neuromancer." The narrator works as a tech-nerd at a huge corporate conglomerate, with a horrible boss, gets fired, and is approached to cause some havoc at his former employer's information database.Much of the novel is set in a virtually real Internet -- and for once, an author writing about virtual reality does NOT resort to the "if you die in here, you die in reality" trick.Bethke pays homage along the way to an impressive collection of pop culture: "The Godfather," "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "Sesame Street," "Brave New World," and "Doom" and other first person shooter games among others. He takes aim at political correctness (there's a law against Ethnic Humor).
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