1989 science fiction. In the City, it's always two-thirty in the
morning, and raining. Mickey Rooney sells the papers and Barton
MacLane is Captain of Detectives. All the noir films happen at once…
and the guy behind it all needs to be taken down.
But it's all more complicated than that, because this is his
hallucinated virtual reality. How do you kill God? Two Dreamers,
authors of full-sensory hallucinations, will have to try.
Ah, 1989, when we may have thought William Gibson was going off a bit
but the vast anticlimax of The Difference Engine was still in the
future. Newman's first novel was a latecomer to the cyberpunk boom,
but does an effective job of taking the technology for granted and
asking more interesting questions: what will people do with it? And,
of course, an awful lot of cyberpunk relies on noir tropes already…
All right, the villain is just too much of a villain; he belongs
rather more in the black-and-white world than in the reality he lived
in, which I suppose is a point of sorts.
'Do you know,' said Trefusis, clearly enthused on his favourite
subject, 'when he finally came to trial, he was found guilty on
8,921 counts of first-degree murder alone, excluding his various
thermonuclear adventures.'
But the point of the book is for Newman to show off his love for and
knowledge of film noir, and one shouldn't forget that this was written
in an era when finding out about Ralph Bellamy or Anna May Wong
actually took some effort. The outer world, while amusingly grotesque,
is set up to make this story possible.
At the same time, this is not just a game of spot-the-reference, a
trick which has ruined many later works when it's overdone. There's a
real story here, even if most of the people in it are literally
extras; what happens to them still affects the principals.
The book is not perfect, certainly. The climactic moments of action
are muddy and forced. Occasional steps away from noir into other
genres are unsuccessful. But it's fun, in a way that far too much
cyberpunk forgot to be.
Some editions include four earlier short stories, set in the same
universe; they're amusing but disposable.
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