I’ll cut right to the point, because that’s the spirit in which this book was born: Softbone is a molotov cocktail hurled into the gynocentric cancer infesting the publishing arenas–both trad and indie. An unapologetic cyberpunk dystopian Animal Farm that isn’t afraid to openly give a middle finger to the political brain-rot or the overly sanitized corpo-slobs that walk on the eggshells of their own professionalism.
Author Rian Stone is someone I was unaware of before fellow indie signal booster Kristin McTiernan showcased his previous book The Dog Walker, a book about the trials of a man dating in the modern era. He outta be heralded for the attempt, because the romance genre is so completely subsumed by women that a male author making the attempt to write romance both for male readers and from the male perspective is something most of us wouldn’t even bother attempting. Legion are the authors who plant a flag on a genre and declare it their personal domain and never venture forth to other worlds.
I’ve long said that some of the best books you’ll read come from authors who come from outside the genre. Sara Douglass came into fantasy after years in the romance genre and made some of the best fantasy ever. Similarly, Rian Stone a “rancher turned sailor turned corporate turned writer, accused of espionage, huge fan of cyberpunk and conan and neo noir.” has been in and around the red pill arena with books on the continually imploding dynamics between modern men and women. He also told me “Tate and Myron got their start on my podcast with Rollo and for that I’m sorry.”
The book’s cover sets the tone perfectly, reminiscent of a bygone era of hard-boiled pulp paperbacks that always had hot girls, the specter of danger, and badass dudes who knew were ready with a gun and the nerves to dive headfirst into danger. I love this cover.
Thus he enters the cyberpunk genre that leans into a tech-saturated, overly-pharmaceutical, corporate dominated dystopia steeped heavily in gynofascism. That’s a lotta buzzwords, but bear with me. Normally, I’m loathe to venture into fiction that deals too much with modern politics because most of the time it’s some Reddit-brained Bluesky user using the text of their book to cry about “Muh fascism, muh colonialism, muh patriarchy” that puts none of the effort into actually trying to make their work entertaining and functions as their virtue signal fanfiction disguised as a block of paper. It’s so cringe it bends the fabric of reality.
I trust few authors to take any political elements and weave them into an effective story that’s also entertaining, but Rian Stone does just that and much of it I credit to his creative mentality. I regularly catch his saturday morning livestreams at work where he’s espoused a love of old school entertainment–especially Aeon Flux and how the show doesn’t explain anything to you, it just throws you into the story and you have to figure it out as it goes. It’s a mentality that would be foreign if not downright sacreligious to the world-building mind of the modern fantasy author.
But that’s what Rian does in Softbone: he throws you into the middle of an estrogen tyranny with its main character Jacov Longhaus aka Jake Long, a man broken under the weight of an estrogen tyrannical government that beats the men of it’s society down with enforced political correctness, where everyone is too afraid of the system punishing you into uselessness to fight back. Nations are a thing of the past, now corporations like Amazon and Samsung operate techno-states and control all the technology. You have to watch an ad for everything from logging onto the internet to just opening a door. SSRIs are infused into everything you drink, maintaining a placid populace that can’t indulge in vice that’s not approved by corpos.
Rather than taking 150 pages to establish the world building, we are almost immediate jumping into the plot and a call to action that hit so quickly I felt like I was part of it. I’ve enjoyed my fellow indie works over the years, but I’ve been embroiled in so many slow start, long-winded world building for so long, I’ve become a bit weary of plots that take up to 50% of the book to really kick off.
Thank God for Softbone. What a refreshing change of pace this book was for me. A fast-moving techo-thriller with everything you’d want from a hardboiled cyberpunk Noir story. Deep down, Jake understands how wrong everything is so he escapes periodically to a place called New Kowloon, taking himself off the perpetually online grid and into what they call the Analogue. It’s an old tech wild west where the same rules apply: you get by with what can get be it by fist, bullet, wheel & deal, or a pound of flesh. Jake indulges in coffee, Zyns, and an illicit online affair with a woman who isn’t his ball-busting brickshithouse of a wife.
The short bit of time we spend with Jake up to the call of action, which was so good I was fist-pumping the air, endears you to a man who feels like he has been browbeated into a lesser state of being. Forced to work on code corrupted by incompetent third-worlders, enduring his overbearing wife just for the chance to be a state-approved father for a few years. Like all men, he’s forced by the state to endure hormone suppression therapy because the women in charge don’t want a population of testosterone infested men who have no outlet for their anger and osteoporosis from a lifetime of forced estrogen (thus the nickname Softbone for guys like him). Xanax and Ambien are in everything, keeping him placid and “safe”. Personal humiliation after personal humiliation. When he finally starts breaking free of the programming, it’s some of the most cathartic writing I’ve read in years.
Jake gets swept off by his love interest Fatahl to Ukraine and meets with Buck, the head of a team of counter-insurgents who hit back against the corpos in a guerilla war to prevent a manufactured vaccine from wiping out humanity. Buck is everything jake isn’t: strong, confident, decisive, everything he isn’t. Every step of the journey is Jake undoing his lifetime of suppressive programming, breaking free of chains that only he can see and hounded by his Ghost. Think of a Ghost as your intrusive thoughts brought to life as a voice in your head due to too much time online. A devil on your shoulder trying to get you to act out of sorts who remains an omnipresent representative of Jake’s own intrusive thoughts.
Danger remains a constant and not just in the extremely well written action scenes. Jake is engrossed for the first time in his life in a world of rugged individualists with little to help guide him besides the examples set by others. He grows stronger, more confident, more capable, but often at a cost. It’s gratifying to watch him slowly grow a spine while navigating social circles that feel normal now, but are entirely foreign to him. It’s a fish out of water story that doesn’t bog you down in Jake’s feelings for too long. It felt a lot like watching Ragoth’s personal growth from my debut book The Black Crown (the origin of the Orc City meme, which Rian has never forgiven me for not renaming the book to that).
The prose is tight and evocative, often with phrases that capture the moment. Like:
“Jake was wired while wired…He was awake only better. His blood flowed like it had somewhere to be.”
Softbone brings a lot of real world software talk into the picture, but without making it boring or turning it into sci-fi movie hacking. So much of the book feels like it could be copy-pasted into the real world right now. That’s something that scares me a little. Blaine Pardoe has a novel series called Blue Dawn where he lays down a second American civil war that has the dubious distinction of having events in his books become real world prophecies. I pray none of Rian Stone’s visions of the future in this book come true.
Which isn’t to say is a dour affair. At times it’s got levity to keep from taking itself too seriously. A mission in which they have to trick drone AI into not recognizing them as soldiers leads to a humorous work around I won’t spoil here. The book itself is like a lot of cyberpunk and works effectively as a satirical commentary on feminism, corporatism, techno-feudalism, people who are terminally online and such. It takes itself seriously enough that it maintains its tension but doesn’t take itself so seriously that it becomes pretentious.
During my time with the book, I found little to complain about. A few spots of wonky formatting on my kindle app, a couple of typos, but nothing that ruined the experience. It only affected me negatively because it halted my reading temporarily and I was wholly invested in this book from early on.
More than anything, Softbone is entertaining and fun. And that’s something sorely missing from so much of the indie book spaces where authors are trying to write the next Game of Thrones or Suneater Saga. Rian as an author hands you this book and dares you not to have fun. In this goal it works perfectly. Even if you care nothing at all about the aspects of social commentary within, this book is still a perfectly entertaining cyberpunk tech-thriller that delivers what we need the most: fun and entertainment.
This book is perfect for a lot of readers: for the guys who wants book made for guys, for fans of action and cyberpunk intrigue, for those bored of pretentious storytelling and want something quick and fun (book is about a 230 pages physical, so it’s a quick read).
Softbone is available in e-book, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.
The sequel, Ghost of Odessa is out now as well.
You can find Rian Stone on Twitter, Substack, and Youtube
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