Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity Books in Order

Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity is Brockway's early cyberpunk novel, and it already has most of the things readers now associate with him, ugly futures, desperate jokes, damaged people, and horror lurking inside the technology. The story is set in the Four Posts, a dense, stratified city where addiction is not a side problem but the whole operating system. People use a drug called Presence to experience slices of history, corporations loom over everything, and even basic survival can feel like one more chemical transaction.

This is cyberpunk with a chemical hangover.

At the center is Red, a chemical beta tester, which is the polite term for professional drug addict. Red knows how to mix substances, chase a high, and stay alive just long enough to make the next bad decision. After testing a new Hockner Industries strain of Presence, he wakes up in trouble fast. He has broken the rules of a lethal non-disclosure agreement, strange hallucinations are getting harder to dismiss, and faceless recovery agents called the Alpha Gentlemen are suddenly very interested in finding him.

From there, the book turns into a grimy run through different layers of the city. Red has to move through the Wells and other dangerous corners of the Four Posts, deal with figures who are either helpful or terrifying or both, and figure out what the new drug has done to his mind. Two important allies travel with him, QC, a walking nanotech factory, and Byron, an upper-class slacker obsessed with the past. Their chemistry gives the novel much of its humor and most of its momentum.

The setting matters a lot here. Brockway builds a future that feels stacked, claustrophobic, and chemically saturated, with wealth and space hoarded at the top and chaos pressing in below. The social structure is part of the threat. So are the city's many unofficial rulers, its killers, and its strange half-broken systems. The book has the nervous energy of a chase story, but it also spends time on what this kind of world does to the people trapped inside it.

Nothing in this world is clean.

If you're deciding whether this series is for you, expect a self-contained story that reads like cyberpunk after a week without sleep. It is funny, filthy, paranoid, and full of forward motion, but it also cares about control, dependency, and the price of giving corporations too much access to the body and the mind. Even though this page is labeled as a series, Rx works best as one long, collected story. It first appeared in parts, but the experience now is a single, self-contained descent.