Metrophage

I've been reading and enjoying Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels recently, but I wasn't familiar with any of his earlier books. To my surprise, this book was sitting on a shelf in my office. I must have bought it years ago with several other New Ace Science Fiction Specials. Published in 1988, Metrophage is set in a hellish 21st century Los Angeles. With Japanese, Mexican and Middle Eastern corporations and oil cartels in control of a drug-addicted, modified populace, nearly every character is thinking about survival and little else. It's a bleak look our future, with an unsettling ending, in that nearly all the characters we might want to care about are dead and Jonny, who's been drifting with the tide, trying to make sense of what's happened around him, has been picked up by another wave and is heading out of town. Kadrey's story got me thinking. Are we almost in his hell?

A meaty cyberpunk thriller with even more emphasis on the film noir  than usual in the genre. As someone else said, it's 'entertaining but ... Blade-Runneresque'. That aside, it has the gonzoid lot! Organlegging, weird cults, mysterious aliens who have allegedly landed on the Moon... very much a book of its time, as they say, and the time was 1988 when cyberpunk wasn't yet just another trope in the SFnal sea of images; when it was something definable and separate and if writers added nothing to it, it was still not formulaic. Nowadays seedy ex-cops with personality implants seem to crop up in the unlikeliest of SF places and the c-word part of the genre needs to have something to distinguish it.