2023 PHILIP K DICK AWARD WINNER In her breakout technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic, badass, cyberpunk heroine that you desperately need: Eliza McKay. McKay is disgraced underground hacker who is just trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life in both the real and digital worlds. “Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.” ― Publishers Weekly Eliza McKay is, by extreme necessity, a low-profile Extractionist. McKay is an expert in the virtual reality space where minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky―it’s her job to quietly extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous. After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly. Meanwhile, the corporate executive she was hired to rescue from VR space is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted. Something is lurking in the Swim, and some very powerful people will stop at nothing to keep it secret. This job might be the big break McKay has been waiting for to reboot her career―but only if she can survive long enough to beat the hackers at their own game. With The Extractionist , virtual reality and gaming expert Kimberly Unger ( Nucleation ) has created an unforgettable cyberplayground where the rich still make their own rules, but a skilled operator remains the wildcard. Philip K. Dick Award Winner Gizmodo 's July New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books “Unger ( Nucleation ) makes hacking come alive in this fast-paced techno-thriller centered on the Swim, a virtual reality accessed by uploading a ‘persona,’ or a copy of the users mind, then downloading it again to retain the memories of the experience. Eliza McKay relies on her quick thinking and the computer system wired into her brain to make a living extracting people who’ve gotten stuck in the Swim. When the government hires McKay to extract agent Mike Miyamoto, it appears to be a normal job―except Mike’s in the Swim on a criminal investigation, and what he’s discovered has changed him so much that his persona refuses to reintegrate into the self he left behind. McKay must race the clock to extract him―but she’s not the only one who wants what Mike knows, and her adversaries are willing to go to any lengths to stop McKay from reaching him first. VR programmer Unger mines her expertise to create all too believable scenarios and creative solutions, and the novel’s at its best in the vivid, evocative descriptions of how hacking feels to a mind fully immersed in VR. The story dances between two worlds just as real as each other, pulling the reader along to an explosive conclusion. Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this .” ― Publishers Weekly “Kimberly Unger reimagines cyberpunk from the ground up to deliver a smart, fully immersive thriller.” ―Wil McCarthy, author of Rich Man’s Sky and the Queendom of Sol series “In a future where people have computers wired into their brains, programmers have gone well beyond virtual reality and created a place called The Swim, where the virtual becomes reality. Eliza McKay is an extractionist who pulls out people who have gone too deep and can no longer reconcile mind and body. She is trying to put her life and career back together after a disastrous experiment got her security clearance pulled. Her newest job seems like a simple extraction, but when the man she’s hired to extract refuses to go and warns her about a member of his team, she realizes there is a lot more going on. Soon, goons are showing up at her home, and the hacker is getting hacked. She’s no longer sure who she can trust: the man she was hired to extract, the secretive government employees who hired her, the tech genius who claims to need her help, or even The Swim itself. VERDICT Unger ( Nucleation ), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller with a refreshingly relatable protagonist ....” ― Library Journal “ The Extractionist reads like a cybernetic thriller, with lots of danger and double crosses. The Swim feels like a character all its own, with plenty of detail to help visualize what it might be like to explore an abstract, immersive online world. There’s a small cast of characters that helps McKay as she gets in and out of trouble; Spike, an artificial intelligence that McKay helped create, is a particular standout and serves as a friendly foil to our heroine. Recommended for fans of Annalee Newitz, Neal Stephenson, and of course, William Gibson .” ― Booklist “Our heroine is a business consultant, but we live in her cyborg brain, we see every detail through her augmented eyes, and the future world she haunts is crammed with invention to the point of psychedelia