Tales of the Spire: Price Check

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Awaiting you are tales from a Cyberpunk Dystopia.

In a world formerly ravaged by a Great Global War, The Spires, grand towers housing deep underground facilities acting as shelter and industry for their inhabitants, stand proudly at the epicenter of Corporate City States where people are born, live, and die.

Owen Price is a man with a dream.

As a non-Spire inhabitant of City 17, Owen's greatest hope is to obtain full Corporate Citizenship. Believing he was only one step away from achieving his goals, Owen is forced to evaluate his future when a death triggers an unfortunate series of events.

Now exposed to a hidden world adjacent to the one once lived, Owen must learn... Here, in City 17, where The Glow never fades and residents never truly sleep, new dreams always come with a price.

Welcome to Tales of the Spire.

[Updated on Royal Road on Saturdays]

Author Note: Cover by Deckard.Commander. This novella (a novel now because: reasons) series is a work in progress. Edits will need to be made occasionally, so apologies in advance.Discussions and recommendations welcome, and thank you!

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2024
Author: LBJames

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 5.0/ 5.0
Followers: 40
Views: 13,813

Chapters(42 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(6)

CervineComedyRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I’ve been hankering a good cyberpunk story for a while, and this certainly fits the bill to a T! The setting and characters are well realized and feel like genuine people in the situation that they’re in. I love the descriptions of the setting and the technology and the corporate types are the perfect level of hateable! Good work, and I look forward to reading more!
GhostcatRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
In Dystopian Cyberpunk, corporate evil usually comes standard. This is no exception. The pacing is moment to moment, and the future-forward tech gets plenty of explanation between explosive, intense narrative. James works in a wealth of history and structure with careful, knowledgeable craft. It's a good read for fans of the genre.
HaelionthyneRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Owen Price was just a cog in the wheel in Tales of the Spire: Price Check. One who had kept his head down and was slowly grinding his way to the top. He had a job, a girl, a home, and a dream until a freak accident caused him to lose it all.
Now he is a man on the run, mercilessly ejected from the system and caught in a Corpo game of intrigue that’s well above his pay grade.
LBJames has a wonderful writing style, drawing even the most inexperienced Sci-fi reader into his dystopian world and making the cyberpunk techno-speak easy to understand and envision.
Characters are well-written and feel human despite their uncanny and/or robotic appearance and nature. Owen is a lovable and naïve goof, while McCreed is a ruthless corpo suit. He piques your interest in their journeys early on, although their motives are still unclear.
Grammar and spelling are mostly flawless, with only a few errors here and there. A quick read-through ought to fix them easily enough.
Overall, Tales of the Spire: Price Check is a nail-biting tale about a man fighting for his life and coming to terms with the realisation that the life he had wasn’t his in the first place.
KGHeathRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Great world building. I'm getting a Blade Runner vibe. The prose is really well written, letting me settle into the story and the world. Getting this on my follow list and coming back for more!
I can really see myself getting into this book.
Would love to know what you think of my own story.
Rowdha Al SolRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Keeping things simple: this is pretty good so far and the plot follows a fairly tight direction. My guess is this will either be a medium length novel in the range of 300 - 400 pages, given the quick pacing, or it might just end up being a long-term web-serial with arcs treated as different stories. Not sure. But so far, so good.
Conceptually, it is pretty standard Cyberpunk with some well-recognised tropes. The only real outlier to this type of work is the strange, dystopian plot that feels very villain-hero-focused, sort of like Borderlands 2 with Handsome Jack and the Vault Hunters, rather than building the character up to face off the evil. You're not gonna get much jump-in-the-ripperdoc-and-upgrade-your-abilities plot lines with this one. It's focused, in a good way.
The only real issues are the ways in which the story is presented on a technical level. The writing has a nice lilt to it, but at times the words break down and it can be difficult to understand what the purpose of the prose is. Some typos, particularly with dialogue formatting, and just some grammatical errors here and there. Nothing too serious.
The pacing at the start I found a little jarring, particularly with McCreed. Outside of that, it seems to handle itself well. There's clearly some sci-fi experience there, whether by reading it, writing it, or both.
Stoney TaterRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
LBJames is a great storyteller. From what I've made it to so far, there's wit, amazing descriptors, and the pacing is great. He goes from the inside of the MC's mind all the way out to the rare 4th wall break seamlessly and it all feels so natural without breaking immersion. Its funny and exciting and really well done.