“I’m doing this because memory is sacred, Mister Ebbinghaus. Memory is civilization. My job is to defend that civilization. The people you work for are trying to tear it all down. Tear away our humanity for nothing more than the sake of a lucrative business deal. Without memory we are animals, creatures that respond only to the base instinct of the moment.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are who you think you are. That’s not the point. The point is this: our world – yours and mine – is perfect. Without memory there is no morality, no constraints, nothing but the perfection of the moment. Nothing we do matters, Endgame, so therefore we are able to do anything.”

T.R. Napper’s debut short story collection Neon Leviathan (2020) marked the emergence of an important new talent in cyberpunk, and with his debut novel 36 Streets (2022) saw him make the transition to longform with aplomb. His second novel The Escher Man (2024) is another stone-cold modern cyberpunk classic, an explosion of pulp violence that asks probing questions about our increasingly intimate relationship with technology. Set in the same world as Napper’s Neon Leviathan, where the Kandel-Yu machine allows the storage and manipulation of human memories, The Escher Man follows these technological anxieties to their logical conclusion – when our memories can no longer be trusted, what does that do to our sense of identity? Napper’s key themes of colonization of the mind and the corruptive power of capitalism are at the forefront, in a story that for every sharp psychological thriller twist poses a powerful and disturbing question about humanity and the direction we’re traveling in. 

Endel ‘Endgame’ Ebbinghaus is a thug, the head of security for Mr Long, boss of the Macau Syndicate. He is a man of violence, the perfect weapon – his memories are erased and rewritten by the Syndicate, allowing him to kill with impunity and without remorse. But Endel also has a wife and kids, and wants to leave his life of crime for a normal life with his family. Accused of the murder of his best friends, on the run with his wife and kids, Endel’s memory has been rewritten so many times he’s losing track of what’s reality and what he’s simply been programmed to believe. With his family safely hidden away, Endel works undercover to try and bring Long down so that he can finally be free. This requires hiding his memories of his identity and especially of his family from others and himself. But if Endel has is memory rewritten many more times, he will become the Escher Man – the remnants of a human being trying to make sense of the same handful of fragmented memories, unable to form new memories or understand who he is, mechanically living out routines and commands from an unremembered past. But as Ender gets sucked deeper into a conspiracy involving not only the drug cartel plans of the Syndicate but Chinalco, the owners of the memory-wiping technology that threatens to rewrite the world, his identity and his understanding of the world begin to unravel around him. Will he be able to save his family, and will enough of him survive to appreciate it if he does?

Napper established this dystopian future in Neon Leviathan, a world in which human memory can be stored in removeable memory pins, which can be edited by the Ommisioners, the keepers of memory, using the Kandel-Yu machine. In The Escher Man, he drills down into the terrifying existential implications of this technology. Napper deftly draws a line from our recognizable modern day technology, where external memory has evolved from books and record keeping to the computers and portable devices that have become an inextricable part of our lives, and how this is affecting how we form new memories, to the dystopian future he imagines, in which we have essentially outsourced our memory to external devices which can be removed and tampered with. Memory is so tied up with our sense of identity and sense of self, and in a broader context our sense of a shared culture stretching back through our ancestors, that if we can no longer trust it at all the whole edifice of personality comes crashing down. Chinalco’s ultimate plan is to use the next generation of memory altering technology to roll this out on a population level to reduce everyone to the level of easily malleable corporate slaves. 

Endel is a character whose sense of reality is always on the verge of collapse, and we spend the majority of the book in his head. Napper uses this as an excuse to play some thoroughly Philip K. Dickian games with reality, as neither Endel nor the reader can trust what is happening before our eyes. This is particularly well done as the book goes on, and the reader knows more and more about Endel and the conspiracies he is trapped in but, due to increasing memory wipes, Endel himself knows less and less. There is a powerful and nightmarish memory wiping sequence that recalls Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). With its hired thug with memory problems who is constantly being manipulated by outside sources, The Escher Man also brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). But Napper is a more canny manipulator of reality than Gondry and Nolan – he understands, like Dick before him, that what’s at stake is not just one man’s sanity, but the entire edifice of consensus reality. 

As with Napper’s previous works, the underlying reality-distorting force underneath all of this is revealed to be the twinned forces of capitalism and colonialism. We see this particularly in the section of the book set in Xuan Tang, the anonymous city in Vietnam that Endel tries to disappear to after hiding his family from Mr Long. The city’s entire economy is built on servicing the rich Chinese colonizers and tourists, from the casino to the bordello, to the extent that the Vietnamese locals have had their memories replaced with a one-size-fits-all generic memory of growing up in the city. The Vietnamese reallise they are being manipulated and rise up against the cartels and the casinos, but Chinalco is already working on a simulated reality to replace the real Xuan Tang, one in which the locals will be programmed to be more docile and tractable. This acts as a microcosm of how the big tech companies are perfectly happy to prop up colonizers and authoritarian regimes as long as they’re willing to pay and because they’ll further deregulate the industry, and reflects the disgustingly cynical behaviour of Silicon Valley and social media moguls in our own reality who are shilling for right wing thugs.

The Escher Man succeeds both as a fast paced, action packed thriller, and as a thoughtful dissection on how technology and capitalism impinge on our sense of self and identity. It’s exactly the kind of whip-smart and stylishly executed science fiction I’ve come to expect from Napper. Long may he continue his role as one of modern cyberpunk’s key practitioners. 

The Escher Man is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org