Jovian Reverie: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure

Cyber Dreams, Book 4

By: Plum Parrot

Narrated by: Suzy Jackson

Length: 18 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

There's no such thing as a cyborg vacation in the fourth installment of this action-packed sci-fi adventure from the author of the Victor of Tucson series.

Juliet Bianchi used to be a lowly scrap scrounger in Arizona. But when she was accidentally implanted with a beyond-awesome AI chip, her life changed dramatically—what with all the nanotechnology, bodywork, and other badass enhancements. Now, she's a high-powered weapon-for-hire in hiding as . . . what else? A not-so-lowly scrap scrounger!

When a new gig calls for her to climb aboard a swanky cruise ship on its way to Io, Juliet is more than happy to live the high life for a little while. And it gives her a chance to test out her latest upgrades, which just so happen to include telekinesis and mind-reading. Unfortunately, with great power comes some sort of responsibility.

Because when Juliet tries out her new mental mojo on a crowd of passengers, she picks up some unwanted intel. It seems there's an assassin onboard who's on their way to make a hit. Juliet will have to balance being a cold-blooded mercenary herself with stopping a fellow killer. And then things actually get complicated . . .

The fourth volume of the hit cyberpunk series—with more than a million views on Royal Road—now available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible!

©2024 Plum Parrot (P)2024 Podium Audio

Wow just wow

This was so good I couldn’t put it down! Only complaint was the mispronunciation of the word Athenry. But that’s neither here nor there. All in all this book had so much world building and left me with more questions than I went in with. I will eagerly await the next book. This series has climbed its way into my top favorites and I don’t see that changing.

As good as the others

If you like the one that came before, then you will like this one too. It's like really great extension of Bladerunner.

I need more!

What another awesome edition to the series! Awesome action and intrigue, character development, and new plot hooks!!!

Another great addition

Great ongoing character development and action. Just one thought…how lucky can one person get?

Psionics Are Nonsense, But It's Fun So Whatever

Another great addition to the series! The sheer amount of enjoyable character interactions, cool cybernetics, and fascinating worldbuilding is delightful as always. Prose, dialog, and narration are once again A tier content. I love to see how Juliet is going to interact with any given situation, and even relatively boring sections (like pub crawls and cruise ships) manage to be fun and characterful.

That said, I do have some gripes about how the plot armor expresses itself. That said, as you read this, please keep in mind that I thoroughly enjoyed this book despite these issues and am actively hopeful about the direction this plot armor is going in. And that's with me being very picky about what I consider "tolerable plot armor".

First off, we're four for four with Juliet getting her hands on ridiculously overpowered blackproject tech in these books, and it kinda feels more like she's being handed things rather than earning or finding them. Then again, maybe there really ARE insanely valuable research stations hidden around every corner, and most people are just too dead to profit from them. Not really a big problem, but certainly caused me to sigh and say "ooooof course" several times.

Second off, her psionics are utterly broken as a mechanic. She installs the blood cooling system at the beginning of the book, so we get to explore that as an ability way more. On one hand, it's really cool and I love all the applications. On the other hand, it's the most unbelievably useful thing ever. Let me explain.

The base function is the ability to read a (somehow) *coherent* stream of thought from a person she is [a] close to and [b] visualizing their face/looking into their eyes. This is peerlessly useful in determining if she can trust people and picking apart any plans they currently have active. The passive, uncontrolled functionality is the ability to see glimpses of a possible future. This is pretty limited and not entirely accurate, but it gives *explicitly* paradoxical information to her, and without a doubt saves her life at least once. Overall, really useful and potentially critically useful, respectively.

[MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD] The new functions which we learn about in this book are minor telekinesis, deep dives, and persona projection. You know how telekinesis works. Deep dives allow her to completely extract a single concept from a target (what's your plan, what's your weakness, what's the deal with so-and-so, etc.), which is the ultimate detective ability, with the mild downside of having her zone out while doing it, and the less mild downside of a complete personality replacement if she does it for too long. Completely and insanely useful, and a reasonable chance of kinda just killing her. Persona projection is just psychic charisma, but it allows her to, in essence, set the genre and background music of any interaction with someone. She can flip the vibe of an encounter from sit-com, to slice-of-life, to full on horror movie with a simple application of will, allowing her to be fun and approachable one second, and utterly terrifying a few moments later. This has MANY applications with manipulating people.

So, five major abilities, some with drawbacks, some without. Overall, however, it really just feels like plot armor. She knows what people think about her, she can pluck any relevant information out of anyone's head, she can be (sporadically) warned of literally unpredictable threats and situations, and she can control how people feel towards her. It feels like she's playing an RPG in Admin mode and with the script pinned in the background. Add to that her "luck" is also probably caused by her psionics (according to Angel's theories), and this, ladies and gentlemen, is some real thick plot armor.

However, that's not necessarily a bad thing (hold on, bear with me). If I had to say, this thick plot armor is a lot like a thick pancake. A bit unwieldy and prone to falling apart, but just THINK of all the syrup it can soak up! The syrup, in this metaphor, is that juicy juicy character interactions that got us all hooked on this series. The main thing these overpowered psionic abilities enable is more character drama, more interpersonal relationships, and a few hefty shortcuts around some painfully slow plot sections.

If you pair that with Juliet and Angel acknowledging the scarily effective nature of her psionics, and the epilogue showing WBD getting their hands on a psionic of their own, I think Juliet's time in "Admin Mode" isn't going to last very long, so I'm not really worried.


Overall, a fantastic book and a great addition to the series. There are a few elements that make me uneasy about how we're supposed to keep stakes credible, but just as many that make me excited for the potential of what Plum Parrot might pull off.

I thoroughly recommend.

loving all this authors stories

the whole story line is amazing. kinda sad it's probably going to take a while for the next book since she has another world to work on.

Great story as per usual

Plum Parrot has quickly become one of my most anticipated authors of late. They've created such an amazing futuristic, expansive universe of humanity that our beloved MC has to make her way thru along with her ever present companion Angel. One of the things i most appreciate about Plum Parrot is they put out their books in a very reasonable amount of time. It shows me their consistent and commited to us readers to give us their work to enjoy as quickly as possible which you dont get very often with alot of authors these days. And the product doesnt suffer for it.
In this book Juliette is doing a kind of training program with one of Alices friends in order to show she can handle piloting the gun ship and ends up being roped into a very high risk job going undercover with some pirates. Shes also being hunted by several demons from her past and runs into several more complications along the way. This is what i love about this series sooo much is it just flows so naturally and the quality of the story never suffer or feels like theres just filler. Everything that happens comes with consequences and or benefits and it brings the story along very nicely. So i don't want to give any spoilers but there is a part in this book where something huge lands in Juliettes lap and im excited to see where that goes. Really great arc for the story and im looking forward to figuring out what happens. All love from me🖖

excellent installment

Once again this cyberpunk series captivated my attention. starts off a little slow but man does it ramp up at the end.

Incredible!!!

Great book, fun adventure!!! Love the series, can't wait until the next book!!! Also great narration... just all around amazing book. Thank you

A great addition to the series.

Probably my favorite book so far in the series. Hope the author keeps them coming!