Jon Scrivener’s debut dystopian cyberpunk novel, Tab, was released today. Set in a post-climate change future London, it sees protagonist Tab’s life turned upside-down when she pickpockets the wrong mark.

Synopsis –

Are you ready to face the future?

Ravaged by fires and deadly pandemics and inundated by a series of devastating floods, London is a city divided. At the heart of this drowned and fractured metropolis, a privileged elite basks in jealously guarded luxury, while for most, mere survival is a nightly challenge.

In the steamy neon heat soak of old Soho, beneath the looming presence of The Wall, 17-year-old Tab plies her trade as a dipper, preying on the wealthy slirks who come each night in search of illicit thrills. Scarred by trauma and cursed by her own skin, she’s a broken thing in a broken world, living solely for the crack of klepping from elites.

But for chancers like Tab, fortune ebbs and flows like the dark and toxic River Thames. One easy mark, and she finds herself the proud owner of a Sirius X-eight, a sweet piece of cutting-edge tech worth a fortune on the streets. It seems almost too good to be true. And it is.

Pretty soon, Tab’s being hunted, and in a city where life is cheap and everyone has an angle, she’ll need to face her demons and find somebody to trust if she wants to make it out alive.

Tab lives in a future-set London, where the haves have walled themselves away from the have-nots. She’s an orphan, and has seemingly never really managed to find family, as even the people around her she might call ‘friends’ can never really get past her prickly outer barrier. Getting buy by pickpocketing, or dipping as it’s called in the story, she lives a day to day existence where ‘hope’ is a forgotten word.

And who can blame her? The London of Tab is a post-apocalyptic wasteland of detritus and decay. The wealthy have walled themselves off from the great unwashed,leaving those living outside the wall walking a tightrope. There are police, of sorts, but they can’t be relied on for assistance, and only exist seemingly as one more hazard to be avoided in the dystopian capital.

Jon Scrivener’s cyberpunk is not a neon bathed, futuristic metropolis populated by technologically enhanced cyber gangs. It’s a dark, dingy gutter where every step in the city takes you closer to danger. The author has gone for a gritty realism, a future setting that can be traced forward along a certain path from our present. This is portrayed particularly effectively because of his use of an existing environment. Tab lives in London. The real city of London, with the districts and landmarks that are recognisable. This, along with Tab’s very London attitude and manner of speaking, situates you firmly within the geographic setting.

It is, however, Scrivener’s description of the city, and his use of real locations that show you just how bleak and broken London is. Buildings with grand histories have fallen into disrepair, repurposed by street gangs and criminals, their past grandeur long forgotten. You can be told that a dystopian setting is damaged, devastated, and utterly fallen, but it’s in the showing, using a frame of reference that has some meaning, that Tab excels.

Tab, the character, is a lost soul. Living day to day with no real direction, it’s ironic that the hopeless situation that she suddenly finds herself in burdens her with purpose for the first time. Forced to go on the run having become a target of some dangerous people, she begins to learn about herself at the same time we do. Her newfound motivation drives her forward, but it also puts her into situations where she discovers some things within herself that she was never aware of before. These revelations come slowly over the course of the story, paced out perfectly by the author, and though by the end she is a different person, we’ve seen for ourselves exactly why this is the case.

As the finale of the book draws near, Tab is just as surprised as the reader when things don’t go exactly the way we might have expected, and this again is a sign of the author’s commitment to creating a realism, rather than merely constructing a plot. Tab is Jon Scrivener’s first novel, and based on what we’ve read, we’re very interested to see what he does next.

Tab is available now in paperback format from all good booksellers.