Afterparty

By Daryl Gregory

In the years after the smart drug revolution, any high school student with a chemjet can print drugs... or invent them. A teenaged girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. Lyda Rose, another patient in the detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug, and is all too aware of what it can do; she has her own personal hallucinated angel to remind her. With the help of an ex-government agent and the imaginary, drug-induced Dr. Gloria, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous to try and set things right...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titan Books
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783294596

Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory won the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award for his first novel, Pandemonium. His second novel, The Devil's Alphabet, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2009. His novelette "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth" was a Hugo finalist. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and The Year’s Best SF. He has also written comics for BOOM! Studios and IDW. Daryl lives in Oakland, CA.

Reviews for Afterparty

[objectplace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

entertaining read, not so unlikely and with a twist. I enjoyed it and the possible future. there are other stories about avatars and their influence this one was the most put together

[cherylk_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. Gregory is a new to me author. The reason I wanted to read this book is because the idea that someone can find God by taking a drug is intriguing in the idea itself. Although I have said it before that I usually stray away from books that defie other ideas of God or religion. This is just my thing. However I thought this book was not just about religion or drugs but about the people, greed, effects of drugs, loneliness, and survival. So for these reasons, the story was so much more complex. Which I was intrigued by the seedy underbelly side of the drug world. Ok, so maybe I shouldn't say seedy as I am sure not all the people involved in the making and selling of drugs are all bad. It is the image involved in the drugs that make them bad which I have briefly gotten to see this first hand. My husband lost his youngest brother to drugs. Back to the book. There is some language used but for this type of book, I would expect this and was not offended. I just wanted to put this warning out there in case some people are offended by language. I would say this book is gritty in a good way. I was so fascinated by what was happening in the story that it made reading the book go by quickly. This book is worth checking out.

[cjordan916 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

[amandacb_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I felt like *I* was taking drugs as I read this confusing story. A neuroscientist helps to invent a drug to treat schizophrenia, but the drug is being used to subject innocent people to a cult. Or something like that.

[crazybatcow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This might sound strange but... I would be able to tell this book was Canadian just from the way it is written. Not sure what it is that makes Canadian authors sound just a bit... something... if you've read Armstrong, Atwood, Sawyer or Watts, you'll find they all have that same "Canadian" tone. It's not quite pretentious (that belongs to the UK writers... hah)... but it's along those lines - they use 7 words when 4 would do, and it seems that swear words have to be creatively modified, or left out altogether. Not really wordy in a bad way... but, yes, wordy... and not really moralistic but... there are "morals" present. Maybe it's just their educative backgrounds - makes them use more and bigger words and write about "issues".So. This doesn't mean I didn't like this book - I almost did... in fact, I usually quite like Canadian authors - I just have to be in the head-space to read books that have "meaning" or that are trying to clarify an "issue" instead of my usual trashy mind-candy fare.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very similar plot to Sternberg's _Shovel Ready_ - instead of plugging into the net in order to "see God," these folks are taking a drug. Cannot say I liked any of the characters too much or had much sympathy for them so it was a bit of a slog. Two point five stars = three.

[altheaann · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow! This really exceeded my expectations.

Previously, I've read Gregory's 'The Devil's Alphabet.' I didn't really like that book, aesthetically, and thought it had flaws - but I thought the writing was good enough that I wanted to give the author another try. I've actually got 'Pandemonium' in my TBR backlog, but 'Afterparty' came up on NetGalley, so I requested it and it went to the top of the list.

I wholeheartedly loved it. What if, instead of technology, William Gibson wrote about drugs? You might get something like 'Afterparty.' Actually, here, the drugs pretty much are technology. In this near future,'smart drugs' are all the rage, rather than cybernetic enhancements. Designer cocktails which can drastically rearrange your neurons are simple and easy to get, due to the development of chem-jet printers, which can mix up a dose for you without too much effort. Plain old tobacco cigarettes are more strictly controlled than any number of bizarre intoxicants.

However, the founders of the start-up company Little Sprout weren't interested in a party drug. They hoped that their medical research might be able to find a cure for schizophrenia. However, the events of one terrible night led to them all being affected by an overdose of their own product.

Lyda Rose, formerly a successful businesswoman, is now in a mental hospital and accompanied by an imaginary angel. But when a young woman is admitted to the hospital with religious delusions that mirror Lyda's own, Lyda fears - with cause - that the drug she developed has made it out onto the street. And she's got to do something about it.

The story that ensues is a fast-moving, easy-to-read thriller - but it also has a lot to say about atheism, religion, the nature of humanity and the meaning of sanity. It's also got a plethora of hilariously quirky characters, and sharp-witted, hip commentary on today's society.

Recommended for subscribers to 'Wired,' and fans of both Neal Stephenson's REAMde and Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition.'

[gwendydd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Afterparty is set in a near-future world where it is easy to make custom designer drugs that can mess with the mind in all sorts of crazy ways. The main character, Lyda, is in a mental institution, dealing with the effects of an overdose of a drug she was helping to develop. The side effect of the drug is her own personal god - an angel named Dr. Gloria - who is with her always. Lyda thought that no one was making the drug anymore, but when another patient checks into the hospital with the same symptoms, Lyda wants to track down the person who is manufacturing the drug again. She does this with the help of her friend and fellow lunatic Ollie, who used to use a drug called Clarity that gave her extreme paranoia. All of the major characters in this book suffer from neuroses of some sort or another, which means they're all quirky. They know they're messed up, and they're doing their best to work with their neuroses. There are a lot of great things about this book - it's clever, suspenseful, funny - but the thing that really makes the book outstanding is the characters. They're delightful despite (or maybe because of) their flaws.

[pwaites_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Afterparty is an addicting techno-thriller that explores some complex ideas while still being a lot of fun to read.In Afterparty‘s future, drugs can easily be created through chemical printers. Ten years ago, Lydia Rose was one of five people who created a drug called Numinous. Meant to cure schizophrenia, Numinous instead produced the perception of a divine presence. At a disastrous party, the creators all overdosed on the drug, leaving the survivors with permanent hallucinations of their own guardian angel. However, Lydia’s wife did not survive the party – she was found stabbed to death once the other four came out of the drug.Flash forward to the current day, where Lydia’s in a mental hospital and a girl recently brought in commits suicide. Lydia recognizes her symptoms – someone out there is producing Numinous, and Lydia’s determined to find out who.“Look, you can’t think of a person like it’s one thing, one ‘I’ that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn’t make a decision, it arrives at one.”Lydia’s a wonderfully complicated person. She’s angry and bitter and unwilling to trust anyone, least of all herself. She’s a determined atheist who yet deep down believes that the angel inside her head is real. Whether or not the angel does exist solely outside of her head, Lydia doesn’t know how to live without her.The plot speeds along, full of twists and turns. Little bits of Lydia and others pasts are revealed to show more and more of what really happened on that fateful night of the overdose.There’s so much to love about Afterparty. A strong plot, intriguing characters, a diverse cast, interesting philosophical questions… this book would appeal to a wide range of people. I’d check it out particularly if you’re looking for something in a similar vein to Michael Crichton techno-thrillers or for a lesbian protagonist.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.

[nwhyte-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

near-future drugs and intersection with the forces of law and order, but I felt that A Scanner Darkly trod the same ground almost forty years ago and did it better

[pussreboots · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory is a Canadian near future speculative fiction. When a teenage girl under arrest for using Numinous &mdash a mind altering drug sort of like a mixture of Flash (see Continuum) and Spice (Dune). But Numinous has permanent side effects, something its creator is living with each and every day.Most of Afterparty is a detective fiction in a science fiction setting. There's a crime &mdash the illegal distribution of Numinous. There are clues to hunt. And there's a detective — Lyda Rose. But Lyda Rose, as the creator of the drug and ex-user of the drug, she has her own personal angel, a smart mouthed woman named Gloria (who I pictured as an older and sassier version of LeShawna (Total Drama Island).With a main character who talks to her own personal angel and has some other problems with reality, there's no reliable narrator. In this regard, the mystery unfolds a bit like Memento or Vertigo, but dressed up with all sorts of near-future technology (like micro-farming and 3D printers that print pharmaceuticals).For me, it was a slow (ten pages a night) but satisfying book. It took about two months to read and another couple to mull. It was well worth the effort though.

[strider66_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pros: complicated & diverse characters, interesting plotCons: some far fetched actionSeveral years ago Lyda was part of a scientific company looking for a drug to cure schizophrenia. But on the night of their success, the team was drugged, and the resultant overdose left one of them dead and the others seeing god. Now in a mental hospital for delusions, Lyda encounters a young woman who’s symptoms resemble those of the drug her team created, NME 110, numenous. In order to stop the drug from spreading in this new world where designer drugs can be printed onto paper and drug parties are de rigueur, Lyda gets herself released to hunt down the remaining members of the team and find out who’s behind it.Be prepared to reread sections of this book in order to figure out what’s going on. The author cleverly leaves out information that forces you - when you finally realize what’s missing - to reevaluate what’s happening. The first one of these comes at the end of chapter one.One aspect of the plot was easy to figure out, but other aspects kept me guessing until the very end.I loved the diversity of the characters and how they each deal with their own… issues. Most of the main characters have a mental problem of some sort, and these get exacerbated by the use - and abuse - of drugs. Lyda, a middle aged black lesbian, is the point of view character for the majority of the book, and has a guardian angel thanks to NME 110. As an atheist and scientist she knows the angel is part of her own psyche, but has to constantly remind herself that it’s not real. Ollie is an ex-intelligence officer, whose abuse of drugs made her paranoid. To counter those effects she must stay on different drugs, ones that dull her senses making it difficult for her to see as well as think analytically. I loved Sasha as a character who overcomes the challenges she faces - both physical and mental - using technology.With the exception of Sasha, who only comes in towards the end, and perhaps Dr. Gloria, the characters weren’t particularly likeable. They were people dealing with difficult circumstances in realistic ways. Lyda is often angry and demanding, not willing to listen to her conscience if it gets in the way of what she feels she needs to do. At the same time, I didn’t dislike anyone, though Rovil is a bit irritating in how much of a pushover he is when faced with Lyda’s demands.While I enjoyed watching Lyda get around her medical implant and deal with the Millies, I didn’t believe how things worked out with her getting into the US. It seemed far fetched and over the top. Though, I’m left wondering if Lyda was meant to be an unreliable narrator, and if so, whether her version of events is wilder than what actually happened. This is an interesting book that looks into drug use, mental disorders, extreme belief systems and more.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A team of scientists develops a pharmaceutical that gives people the experience of knowing that there is a God/gods. A decade after one of them overdoses the others, one of the survivors gets out of custody in order to track down the source of a new drug that seems dangerously similar to that pharmaceutical. She has to fight her way through competing drug dealers worried about competition, fellow inmates whose own delusions make them only partially reliable allies, friends from her past—and Dr. Gloria, the angel who follows her around hectoring her about her bad behavior. Heretical, sad, and twisty—a great read.