From Amazon.com
Imagine a fast-moving computer game set in the black-and-white environment of a 1940s detective movie and you'll begin to get some idea of the mixed metaphors that fill the air in K.W. Jeter's difficult but ultimately rewarding new futuristic thriller.
Jeter, who also writes a series of novels based on the popular Blade Runner film about apocalyptic Los Angeles, centers Noir in that same city, now a dark jewel of the dominant Pacific Rim. A detective named McNihil (yes, you got it) has had his eyes surgically altered so that everything looks like an early Bogart movie to him. "Gray newspapers with significant headlines--'Dewey Defeats Truman,''Pearl Harbor Bombed'--moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil's jacket," Jeter writes about the scene of a plane crash where the detective has been summoned by a corporate villain. A top young executive has been murdered, and McNihil is arm-twisted into tracking down the dead man's missing "prowler"--a computer simulation that roams the world like an electronic ghost.
Aided by a young woman called November, whose fingertips are alive with lethal magnetic currents, McNihil brings his--and Jeter's--unique noir vision to bear on a world that for all its weirdness is the ultimately believable extension of our present-day nightmares. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A master of dark visions, Jeter (Blade Runner: Replicant Night) delivers his most difficult and intellectually ambitious novel to date. In a near-future world where the poor are entirely disenfranchised and white-collar employees live and work themselves to death in tiny, randomly assigned cubicles, the super-wealthy seek vicarious, perverse, cybernetically enhanced thrills on the streets of Los Angeles. Repulsed by the era he's forced to live in, McNihil, a retired cop with a violent past, has had his eyes surgically altered so that he sees everything through a computer-generated overlay that simulates the black-and-white world of the hard-boiled detective films of the 1930s. When Harrisch, an executive with a powerful multinational corporation, tries to hire him to solve a murder and track down the deceased's missing "prowler," a computerized simulation of the dead man, McNihil refuses, only to find himself blackmailed into compliance. Aided by a gutsy young operative named November, McNihil uncovers a complex web of lies and violence, a world where nothing is what it seems and even the dead have power. Jeter is a fine prose stylist, but some will find his knotted, intensely metaphoric language slow going. Equally problematic is his tendency to assume in his reader a sophisticated knowledge of the conventions of both the noir thrillers of the 1930s and contemporary cyberpunk SF. Frequently, his characters seem to operate in an evocative semi-vacuum, the facts needed to explain the plot having been mysteriously elided from the narrative. This is a difficult, eccentric and rewarding novel, an SF equivalent, perhaps, of The Name of the Rose.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
