Eclipse Corona

A Song Called Youth #3

by John Shirley

A Song Called Youth, Book 3.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction Fantasy

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

John Shirley won the Bram Stoker Award for his story collection Black Butterflies, and is the author of numerous novels, including the best-seller DEMONS, the cyberpunk classics CITY COME A-WALKIN', ECLIPSE, and BLACK GLASS, and his newest novels STORMLAND and A SORCERER OF ATLANTIS.

He is also a screenwriter, having written for television and movies; he was co-screenwriter of THE CROW. He has been several Year's Best anthologies including Prime Books' THE YEAR'S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR anthology, and his nwest story collection is IN EXTREMIS: THE MOST EXTREME SHORT STORIES OF JOHN SHIRLEY. His novel BIOSHOCK: RAPTURE telling the story of the creation and undoing of Rapture, from the hit videogame BIOSHOCK is out from TOR books; his Halo novel, HALO: BROKEN CIRCLE is coming out from Pocket Books.

His most recent novels are STORMLAND and (forthcoming) AXLE BUST CREEK. His new story collection is THE FEVERISH STARS. STORMLAND and other John Shirley novels are available as audiobooks.

He is also a lyricist, having written lyrics for 18 songs recorded by the Blue Oyster Cult (especially on their albums Heaven Forbidden and Curse of the Hidden Mirror), and his own recordings.

John Shirley has written only one nonfiction book, GURDJIEFF: AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS LIFE AND IDEAS, published by Penguin/Jeremy Tarcher.

John Shirley story collections include BLACK BUTTERFLIES, IN EXTREMIS, REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY WEIRD STORIES, and LIVING SHADOWS.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The is a republishing of a 1990 conclusion to Shirley’s cyberpunk series about a near-future fight against a global fascist conspiracy by a plucky band of freedom fighters. I see I rendered only 3 stars for the first in the series, published in the mid-80s. This one gets an extra star because of the timeliness in relation to the recent acceleration of nationalism fueled by racism and the refugee crisis. The hopeless feeling one gets needs the balm of belief that good people will rise up in effective action to make sure the next genocide is deterred.

The book blurb for the first in the series provides an effective introduction:
Tapping anxieties about rising global nationalism, Shirley presents a Goya-esque vision of war-torn western Europe, bombed out and unstable in the early years of the 21st century from a resurgence of Russian militarism and the collapse of NATO. The Second Alliance, a government-sanctioned multinational police force, has rushed in to restore order and revealed itself a nightmarish incarnation of every fascist and fundamentalist power fantasy. The only defense against the Alliance's creeping totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot pick-up team of rebels ..

Our setting here is primarily Paris, where the chaos of disrupted communications and infrastructure has allowed the Second Alliance (SA) to place a puppet in power as president and erode human liberties under the guise of law-and-order and sophisticated racist propaganda against the hoards of starving refugees that have arrived in the months after the war. We alternate between the evil puppetmasters and the rebels in an escalating set of conflicts, ranging from street protests that get out of hand to broader conflict over the world domination mission and genocidal plans of the SA. So far France, Italy, and Germany have come under control, the UK is crumbling, and the U.S. is on the sideline, reaping profits from armament sales and shrugging off warnings of the true situation as fake-news conspiracy.

Each country thinks it’s developing a new nationalism, but in fact it’s selling its soul to a greater European Fascist state.

Our motley crew of heroes include an old spy, a hacker, a media producer, a pop music star, a manager of an orbital colony, and an oil sheik from the Middle East. That range brings useful skills and resources for their revolt. The bad guys have a lot of high-tech munitions, drones, spying and torture technologies, bioweapons, and AI-managed propaganda and real-time crowd reading. Written shortly the Internet and cell phone connectivity emerged, much of the tech is out of date, but that doesn’t interfere with the story.

A key strategy for the good guys is to help a respected journalist to document and disseminate over world media the machinations and motives of the SA conspiracy. The recruitment of a genetic engineer working with the SA on their plans for a new “Final Solution” makes for an important turning point in the conflict. One of the main characters (the ex-media guy) is a Jew who finds a lot of parallels to the Holocaust, with this one seeming to target all people of color. For the crime of his effort to bring illegal relief to refugees, he is interred in a prison camp in a Paris suburb with thousands of illegal immigrants and protesters under unspeakable conditions. He begins to understand the answer many asked about why the Jews didn’t rise up en masse to rush their Nazi captors.

Hunger became weakness and weakness became passivity. It was hard to think things out, hard to work in unison with others when you couldn’t think. Hard to make a decision and hard to find the strength to carry it out. …
And the degradation, too, the shaving and the uniforms and the cattlelike herding and the random punishments. Techniques that worked on men and women like coring tools on apples. They cut the pith out of you.

This inspires him to proceed with a successful breakout, but only to bring them to grief at facing robot-controlled machine guns. Also different in this era, the military are capable of wiping out the whole prison facility by rapid response:
Then he felt the ground shake. He paused, looked back to see the crystallized-steel Gargantua arching its metal scythes over the horizon: a Jaegernaut, ten stories high, this one, a spoked wheel without its rim, a giant steel swastika, a skyscraper-size Rototiller ripping up anything in its path …

The mechanized terror at the hand of the bad guys here is a bit more horrific but less sci-fi than the reality of Hellfire missile strikes by drone. The idea of a plague engineered to spare the white race I thought was pretty horrific, but also imaginative within track record of books and films that harness the marriage of genetic engineering and eugenic compulsions.

After the Holocaust, humankind said “never again” and says now “it can’t happen here”, yet other genocides have occurred. We can’t help but be wary of the nationalist impulse and means to power over the fate of nonwhite races and alien cultures. This over-the-top tale reminds us of the need to unify diverse sectors to surmount this common threat.

I read on Wiki that Shirley also wrote horror and fantasy tales in addition to sci fi, sang and wrote punk rock, and wrote a lot of film scripts for TV and films. The key role of hackers in this series against a pervasively corrupt corporate/political system puts the tale into the cyberpunk realm (the author thanks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in his introduction “for research assistance and other kinds of help, some of it difficult to define”). The tale has the same kind of brain-jacks for accessing a virtual network and realities as early Gibson and Stephenson. But I find the series has more the flavor of Cory Doctorow’s precautionary tales of techno-political drama, though less fun in plot thrills and YA heroes. For stars on the pleasure meter, it’s more like 3.5, rounded up.

The book was provided by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conclusion to A Song Called Youth trilogy ends with a bang... or rather, a very gruesome whimper. That's not to say it's sad, but after so much dystopian reality so close to what we have now and a rich and nasty strain of ultimate fascism threaded through the text, I feel like we've been living it.

Okay. Maybe I'm overexaggerating a LITTLE. But still, it's chilling to see a truly pan-racist fascism crop up among the religious right, the generally hateful, the fearful, and the power-hungry.

This one ends with freedom fighters and selective germ-warfare, an antidote to the disinformation machine, and the few good men (and women) standing up against the face of evil.

All in all, it's still an epic and sprawling fight against fascism worldwide and on a colony off the planet. Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll punk against the machine, baby. :)

Oh, and there's a very nice cyberpunk Plateau going on here, man. Counterculture for the win! :)

Honestly, tho, I think the most important thing to realize here is that this trilogy is just as timely now as it was back in the mid-eighties when it was first published. In context, I'm actually pretty astonished. Even more astonished than I would be during a re-read of Neuromancer. Some things age better than others, and this one has aged fine.

A fine non-wine cocktail of cocaine and hard-liquor. ;)

[Alexis · Rating 1 out of 5]

My review of John Shirley's A Song Called Youth Trilogy Book #3 (and the series as a whole)

General issues

I don't know that this book was really any worse than the proceeding two, but it took this long for the cracks to really start to show blatantly for me. Up front, I loved the premise of a band of hard rocking guerrilla misfits taking on Christian fascists against the backdrop of a cyberpunk world ravaged by a new world war, and I think that awesome premise kind of blinded me to the problems with this story for a long time. I kept giving it chance after chance, forcing myself to push through in the hopes that it would eventually really live up to what I wanted it to be. But sadly the end of the first book is really the highlight of the whole series; after that, the plot just feels thin, stretched out, bare bones — far too little butter spread out over far too much bread, to borrow an expression. It feels like a procession of anecdotes, jumping between characters and introducing new ones, as well as new plot points, at random, with nothing really quite feeling like it was properly built up to or integrated into the rest of the narrative. Especially after the first 3rd of the final book, the various components of the Second Alliance's downfall and the New Resistance's triumph seem to just magically assemble themselves out of convenience more than anything else. Nothing feels particularly earned or worked for, because the plot is too busy skipping around between people and narrating things in the abstract to really settle down with a specific cast of characters and show the struggle they had to go through to achieve anything, and this plot convenience and lack of narrative build up / justification leads to everything feeling like a convenient accident instead of a climax. It uses plot convenience and detached narration to accelerate our characters and the plot through any potential setback or hardship or problem — or even any individual scene — as quickly as possible, as if author had a general outline of the plot and is just more interested in getting each plot beat over with and moving to the next then actually narrating the story that's happening right now. It almost feels like a Cliff's Notes of some far more interesting war drama, like he's more interested in the feeling of having written these books then he is in the actual story contained within them.

As a result of the thinness of the plot, the characters also suffer as well: their character development often takes place off screen during unspecified time jumps, and their relationships just form out of nowhere, more as a convenience for generating pathos in the plot then anything else. Moreover, it never really feels like anything that was set up for any of the characters really goes anywhere — for example, the author spends a lot of time talking about Daniel Torrence's perverse love of violence and how guilty he is about that, which was am idea I found interesting, but he never ends up dealing with it in any meaningful way.

The above is more than enough, I feel, to justify me not liking the trilogy and explain why it's taken me so long to painfully drag my way through what is, in the end, a pretty short series of books, but there are far more issues I have with the trilogy.

Racism

First of all is the startling lack of intersectionality here. John Shirley doesn't seem to understand that fascism threatens far more than just racialized people; instead he focuses myopically on just that one thing to the absolute exclusion of all else. Disabled people and neurodiverse people are of course not mentioned, despite being some of the earliest targets of the Nazi thanks to eugenics, and although gay people are mentioned here and there (and perhaps five extremely minor characters are acknowledged to be gay, most of whom only show up for a page or two), there isn't even lip service to the idea that gay people — not to mention trans people — were also among the first explicit targets of the Nazis, with the first Nazi book burning targeting knowledge about LGBTQ people. The Second Alliance just simply, somehow, isn't interested in disabled or queer people at all. Obviously the targeting of racialized people is perhaps the biggest impact and most known aspect of fascists, but if someone is telling a story about a motley band of misfits unified by various disparate personal causes fighting back against fascists, and really getting in the head of CHRISTIAN fascists and showing what their rule is supposed to be like, it feels extremely strange for the other groups that were targeted by fascists historically — and would be targeted as genetic impurities by the Second Alliance — to just be completely ignored, not represented as being related to the fight at all. To be honest, I think this is because John Shirley is the kind of liberal for whom only the really obviously bad things that our whole culture seems to agree are bad (at least in the abstract) really click as actual causes that matter, annd for whom nothing else seems very important.

Which leads me to my next point, which is definitely worse and also made extremely ironic by the above: despite choosing to focus on racism to the exclusion of all else as the main issue of his trilogy, John Shirley fails at being an anti-racist himself: all of our point of view characters, all of the people with any real agency and decision-making power, the ones that are focused on by the narrative as the main heroes, barring one POV (who is an American Jew) and one side character (also Jewish, which I point out not out of antisemitism, but just because instinctively for many liberals, Jewish people are white, and are thus the easiest racialized group for them to include) are white, and mostly men too. People of color are relegated to supporting roles, and even when they are given badass moments it feels almost more like an afterthought or a concession then anything else: there are moments of badassery are mostly relegated to off-screen acts perpetrated in support of our main characters, which are glossed over and not really given much thought, and even such occurrences happen at very wide intervals. It feels patronizing.

More than that, Shirley falls back heavily on racial stereotypes for every single one of his characters of color. The overweight, loud, domineering, and hypersexualized (while also played for spectacle) black woman with a "New Orleans accent," the South Korean who is obsessed with his appearance, the only named (iirc) Arabic new resistance fighter committing a suicide bombing, the cynical manual labor (as technichies are portrayed) Hispanic man who's a socialist, and more I ranted to my girlfriend about that I can't remember here.

It feels like at every turn it's up to some white guy — and on at least two occasions a white guy who is explicitly an enforcer of the fascist power structure — to take agency and save nonwhite people. I might not have minded the focus on white people's agency so much in a book with a different subject matter, bc I would have just chalked it up to Shirley's own unconscious biases as a white man himself, which I wouldn't really worry about too much (we tend to write characters like us, after all), but since Shirley decided to make racism the primary focus of this series, and combined with his continual leaning on racial tropes, I really have to call this out. This feels like the white savior fantasy of a milquetoast liberal who hasn't really actually done much to deprogram himself. Especially since the only kinds of racism that Shirley seems to be capable of understanding are outright pseudoscientific racism and outright simple racism. The only kind of racism to him is obvious racism that basically everyone would condemn — even, nominally, modern-day Christian fascists! So he just sets up these obviously racist and bad enemies for everyone to fight against that are extremely easy to identify and differentiate from himself — look at how great I am for not being as evil and obviously racist as they are! But sadly being able to set up an example of much worse people to set yourself against and compare yourself to in order to feel morally superior is in fact not a good barometer of one's own moral worth. Do not misunderstand me: my problem isn't that he made his Nazis insufficiently morally gray or some shit, but that he's relying on the liberal fantasy that when evil comes it will be obvious and easy to identify and make them look great in comparison, and everyone will agree it's bad when presented with the evidence.

Queerphobia

Then of course there is the treatment of gay and gender nonconforming people in these books. Again, LGBTQ people were a major target of the Nazis historically speaking and are one of two major targets of current Christian fascist movements, and yet he spends basically no time on them and when he does doesn't tie them being queer into the struggle at all. Not only that but he goes out of his way to create a brand new vaccine resistant AIDS virus for his world just so he can make a bunch of offhand comments about how tragic it is that homosexual men die constantly? And he treats bisexual and lesbian women as sexualized side characters and the only point of view character who engages in lesbian sex treats it as just "a phase" she indulges in because she's mad at her boyfriend and on drugs, and that doesn't really mean anything at all (a standard misogynistic lesbophobic trope). And then to top it all off the only two gender non-conforming people that show up in his story are an explicitly morally corrupt junkie pimp who "just can't stay out of drag when he's high" and whose "soft white member" hangs below his dress as he sits a disgusting mess in one corner of the room, and a "drag queen" who has undergone extensive gender affirming surgery (not something drag queens do, so he's just failing to distinguish "man putting on a clown-type performance art" and trans women here) who is explicitly hypersexual, misogynistic, and "obsessed with cunts," and who is who she is by virtue of childhood trauma. No wonder Shirley spends his time on Mastodon (I've personally interacted with him) sealioning about trans rights and standing up for J.K. Rowling.

Liberal wet dream

Then of course there's the absolute howling hilarity of the idea that a militant anti-fascist organization like the new resistance would be composed of everyone from conservatives and nationalists to milk toast liberals and anarchists and communists, and that leftists would be a patronizingly dismissed minority. As if. I've taken part in anti-fascist organizing against the proud boys and I can tell you right now that the only people who actually care to go up against fascists in a meaningful and militant way are fucking leftists and everyone else will just wring their hands or try to debate them. This absurdity is heightened by the ending of the trilogy where simply broadcasting the truth about the Holocaust that the Second Alliance is performing as well as a massive false flag attack are enough to motivate the masses to as one turn against the fascists and simply overpower them with their sheer amount of bodies. As if.

Speaking of the Holocaust, I honestly find it really frustrating reading his accounts of the concentration camps that the second alliance puts in place. The fact that he has people stage a breakout of a concentration camp via some lackluster speechefine which somehow convinces everyone at once that actually dying to machine gun fire is better than surviving in a concentration camp and so they should all just run straight into machine gun fire to go out in a blaze of glory, which however nice and true in theory is not a respectful and accurate depiction of how actual concentration camp insurrections happened. The fact that instead of working extremely hard to hide the existence of their concentration camps in order to maintain a public image of legitimacy, as actual real world fascists did, the second alliance makes no real effort to keep them secret at all besides a general media blackout and a weak cover story, and in fact televises the use of their gas chambers within their countries. Fuck, it just feels like a mockery. If you are going to reiterate the Holocaust fucking do your research and make it as horrifying and hopeless as it should be.

Ethnostates and Theocracy are good when Islamic people do them, actually, didn't you know

Also I find it extremely interesting that he has a whole side plot about a sort of theocratic traditionalist Islamic North Korea built underground in the Sahara that explicitly censors its media and controls its citizens to disallow any challenges to its religion, which he portrays as "actually a pretty good place" and "not so bad", and as something that might actually be a good idea since the west is threatening their religion and so we just need to be separate from them. What? Is this an apologia for ethnostates? People of different cultures should just separate so they aren't threatened by cultural cross pollination? Isn't this sort of fundamentalist theocratic state precisely what the new resistance is supposed to be fighting against in America and Europe, just Islamic instead of Christian? But he spends most of its description praising it as actually not so bad because... it isn't as oppressive as it could be and it's extremely ordered and everyone is taken care of and the trains run on time. Sound familiar? It's almost like John Shirley doesn't actually have a deep seated moral issue with theocracies and authoritarianism per se, but just really happens to hate a specific type of extremely overt and patriotic fascism and racism because basically everyone in our culture can agree those things are bad, mostly based on aesthetic Impressions. His level of analysis and moral sensitivity are about as deep as the average Indiana Jones movie.

Conclusion

In essence then this whole enterprise smacks of a centrist liberal who is high on his own sense of moral superiority and wanted to write a power fantasy where he fights off the obviously evil fascists in order to feel radical and revolutionary like the leftists, but who couldn't imagine what the resistance to fascists would look like in today's world and who really isn't so different from the fascists anyway — is, in fact, someone who would be and is tricked by real-world fascists. It shouldn't surprise you then that he spends his time online chanting vote blue no matter who and backing Biden and decrying leftist extremism (as well as, like I said, falling for their anti-trans propaganda). Because he has no actual understanding of fascism nor any wholesale and principled opposition to them if they don't display the obvious and simple evil traits that he can identify.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Shirley's A Song Called Youth finalé brings the whole, full-tilt edifice around: you see how these things could happen, improbably but not impossibly (as has happened, each time, when these régimes take over) without most of the populace's of the First World's deigning to turn a full, non-dismissive eye upon the happenings. You feel the frustration of the Lefty New Resistance'rs, as they have to almost plead and cajole to outsiders to just fucking look and listen to what they've brought back documenting what's happening — and, steely-eyed as his narrative voice is, Shirley does not disguise the cringe-worthy frustration of having to hear the real Truth-Tellers come off, tonally, as (potentially) paranoid cranks.

Harsh truths within harsh truths. This is what "scary" entertainment is for!

(Try not to root for your "favorite"; you'll lose the experience of empathizing with, and mourning, every character!)

A rousing climax. And, true to the title, it's "rock 'n roll"!

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final book in the Eclipse trilogy is of the same high quality as the others but unlike the previous two the typesetting isn't unbelievably awful. A character's name inexplicably changes and the "updated" name for the Russia differs with every novel (Greater Russia? New-Soviet Union? New Soviet Republic?), but it's not immersion-breaking this time round.

[Antonio Fanelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

ne avevo letto un estratto su una antologia e prometteva bene
Il romanzo invece si è rivelato non essere poi questa gran cosa.

[Hex75 · Rating 4 out of 5]

una volta tanto una trilogia che si conclude con un libro che riesce a mantenere le promesse del primo capitolo, e già questo per il sottoscritto è abbastanza per gioire.
certo, "gioire" è un verbo forse fuori luogo in questo contesto: abbiamo massacri, campi di concentramento, un regime neonazista sempre sul punto di sferrare l'attacco definitivo, subumani creati in laboratorio e persino armi batteriologiche. insomma: non uno scenario da favola, e shirley ha buon gioco nel creare il personaggio di bargeman, un evaso da uno di quei nuovi lager che si trasforma in un militante della nuova resistenza, nel quale incarnare tutto il dolore e i dubbi di chi era sopravvissuto a situazioni simili reali.
bargeman fa da ottimo compagni di lotta a vecchi personaggi che rispetto ai primi due libri si trovano a cambiare assai psicologicamente (e anche fisicamente, come si vedrà), in particolare il buon occhi duri, ormai sempre più dan torrence: la perdita del soprannome è graduale, ma rispecchia il cambiamento interiore dell'uomo che abbiamo conosciuto come un razziatore sbandato all'inizio del primo libro, con un buon lavoro di costruzione del personaggio da parte di shirley.
per il resto ci troviamo ancora a piangere per alcuni personaggi (preparate i fazzoletti, ma ormai al terzo libro ci si è fatta l'abitudine, no?), troviamo non poco sesso, droga e rock'n'roll (soprattutto sesso: si scopa assai, buon per i nostri guerriglieri), e troviamo non poche analogie di pensiero con certe situazioni recenti affianco a qualche situazione oggi impensabile.
insomma, ottima fantascienza da recuperare per i fan del genere!

[KW · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat satisfying conclusion to the whole thing, although I have to say I'm relieved that now I've finished it I no longer have to read about horrific violence in excruciating detail at every other page turn. Overall I really liked the structure of this series - bouncing around a big globe-scattered (and in space!) ensemble made the world and its wars feel bigger. I could pick apart at length Shirley's sort of blunt-seeming understanding of anti fascism, which in my opinion seems to be a little too self congratulatory while still being ultimately rooted in cishet white guy bullshit (please stop using someone's race or country of origin as a noun!! why do we need to know whether or not every single female character is fuckable? all this and almost no mention of how fascism intersects with disability, gender, and queer identity?), but this is a product of its time, republishing or no, and I don't have the energy. I still think this was an interesting and worthwhile foray and, for what it's worth, it's a story about leftists having to work across disagreement and political lines to stamp out fascism, so... Not for nothin!

[Nathan Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a pretty amazing trilogy. I will say, though, that it is pretty extreme cyberpunk: plenty of sex and violence, described richly.
This series is gaining some traction again today with the rise of nationalism. The villains are modern nazis who argue using "science" that eliminating other races will bring peace on Earth. It's left to the reader to argue against them.
I only wish that the author had not gone back and updated the series with new historical developments. It doesn't work well to comment on current events in a novel placed in an unknown time, and some of the comments were off-base already, only a few years after publication.

[Daniel Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entire Trilogy

Enjoyable read, Relatable to current events - 2020 USA!
Well thought out and updated. Definitely should be read in sequence.

[Mirko Unipan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know, good cyberpunk but I found it more of the same as the two previous books, and I just couldn’t care about any of the characters

[Neon Snake · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying and solid end to the trilogy. The war is over, the good guys have won. For now.

The theatre moves purely to Europe here, as the propaganda war in the US disables any influence over there. There are, again, a few pieces that jar, new plot points, new villains, not foreshadowed or introduced earlier in the trilogy that they seem to have come from nowhere. It makes the book feel slightly incohesive, but maybe more real, a better description of the chaos of real war when neither side has a plan that has gone from A to Z without a hitch.

The ending is great, exactly what it should be, as we hear for the final time Street Fighting Man playing out over the news.

While not perfect, the trilogy is damn close, and one I'll no doubt be returning to over the years. Assuming that it is just a fiction, that Shirley's vision of fascist Europe remains a fantasy, or else it's going to end up on a "banned" list pretty damn soon.

And for that, and for everything else, it needs to be read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Satisfying Conclusion to "A Song Called Youth" Trilogy

John Shirley shines once more, in the riveting conclusion of his "A Song Called Youth" trilogy. After being discredited in the United States, the Second Alliance makes its final stand in Europe. About to unleash genocide as it tries to unite Western Europe under its Christian Fundamentalist Fascism, only the New Resistance (NR) stands in its way. And high in Earth orbit, the NR's chief financial sponsor has his own sinister plans for humanity. Again, Shirley delivers the goods with his fine, fast-paced lyrical prose. Without a doubt, his "A Song Called Youth" trilogy is one of the classics of cyberpunk literature.

(Reposted from my 2001 Amazon review)

[Lars]

Waiting for time to open up for this one as the first two books in the trilogy were fantastic.

[Florin Pitea · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a review of this excellent cyberpunk novel, please visit my blog: http://tesatorul.blogspot.ro/2008/01/...

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fun read. Some of the best use of music and musicians in any book. Maybe a little violent--spends a lot of time on battle scenes--but all around exciting. Bravo John Shirley!

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Der dritte ist definitiv mein Lieblingsteil!!