James Nicoll Reviews

Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 Gun, with Occasional Music is a near-future stand-alone noir novel. It was Lethem’s debut novel.

Drugs are free, television is entirely abstract, animals have been uplifted, and prison has been replaced by involuntary hibernation … but the life of a private dick is much the same as it was back in the days of Black Mask.

Former Inquisitor turned not particularly successful private inquisitor, Conrad Metcalf is offered a case that he can tell is a loser.

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Candas Jane Dorsey’s 1997 novel Black Wine is very hard to categorize. All I can confidently assert is that it is not set in the present. It was Dorsey’s debut novel.

A nameless waif fell from the sky into a predatory society, which enslaved her. Her life is one of hard labour and repeated rape. An encounter with a mysterious madwoman leaves the waif in possession of a book. There are consequences.

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Misha’s 1990 Red Spider White Web is a stand-alone cyberpunk novel.

Mickey-San provides its pampered inhabitants with every luxury that they could desire: a sealed environment, desperate employees to tend to their every need, even immersive virtual reality so that they need never sully their eyeballs by gazing on the real world. For the lucky few who can call Mickey-San home, it is as close to paradise as possible at this time.

Kumo does not live in Mickey-San. She lives outside, in the slums. Her life is quite different from that of a denizen of Mickey-San.

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