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Johnny Zed
A futuristic American government gone awry is being set to rights by Johnny Zed and his girlfriend, Shelly Tracer, but when their Disruptionist movement becomes corrupted, they must fight on alone
213 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
5 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
John Gregory Betancourt
398 books69 followersJohn Gregory Betancourt is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and mystery novels as well as short stories. He has worked as an assistant editor at Amazing Stories and editor of Horror: The Newsmagazine of the Horror Field, the revived Weird Tales magazine, the first issue of H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror (which he subsequently hired Marvin Kaye to edit), Cat Tales magazine (which he subsequently hired George H. Scithers to edit), and Adventure Tales magazine. He worked as a Senior Editor for Byron Preiss Visual Publications (1989-1996) and iBooks. He is the writer of four Star Trek novels and the new Chronicles of Amber prequel series, as well as a dozen original novels. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as Writer's Digest and The Washington Post.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 7, 2018
Make no mistake -- in no world should anyone imagine that Johnny Zed is a good book. But really, if you're digging through used sci-fi paperbacks in a beachtown bookstore in Southern California looking for War and Peace, you're doing it wrong. What you're looking for is a few things that Johnny Zed absolutely does have: a ridiculous cover (that gold-embossed title! those see-through legs!) and a howler of a first sentence ("She let Johnny gag her mouth with a belt, that way she wouldn't scream when he amputated her two mangled fingers.")
I just realized that sentence is a run-on.
Case in point.
The most shocking thing about Johnny Zed is not only that Johnny Zed himself is not the main character, which he isn't; it's that with what little pagetime he does have, he still manages to drive the narrative almost completely from start to finish. The actual protagonist, a cyborg named Shelly Tracer (the transparently-legged damsel in the jpeg, natch) has even less agency than most 80's movie girlfriends, and that's saying something -- but Shelly is, essentially, an 80's movie girlfriend, and although we follow her most closely, she usually isn't doing much of anything that Johnny hasn't told her to do. Alternately (just to give her an edge) she sometimes does the opposite of what she thinks Johnny would want her to do (when she thinks he might actually be a spy, which is about every other chapter). But, of course, because he is JOHNNY FUCKING ZED, even when you don't do what he wants, you're still playing right into his hands -- because Johnny Zed, my friends, is the raddest fucking dude alive.
If Shelly is an 80's movie girlfriend, Johnny Zed is Ferris Bueller mixed with a dash of John Connor -- a political revolutionary who's also sooooo coool. The world the characters inhabit is the Sprawl (literally called the Sprawl because William Gibson really needs to sue more people) crossed with 1984, and the book's highs and low-lows are entirely reliant on this weird mix of influences.
Moment-for-moment, Johnny Zed is hilarious for how hilarious it doesn't know it is. When Shelly gets into (frequent) shootouts, or street fights with "catmen" (clarification: these are men who are also cats), she always, and without exception, gets her clothing ripped across or near her breasts. When Shelly inevitably gets blown up in said scuffle and is then rebuilt at a cyborg chop-shop or whatever, she always (and without exception) wakes up naked, and walks around naked, for awhile after. When Shelly gets tired of being a revolutionary in the middle of the book, she just goes home to her parents' house in the suburbs and hangs out at the mall, which is apparently not as post-apocalyptic as the catmen-invested Sprawl literally twenty minutes away. And when Johnny has Shelly helm his top-secret mission to steal personal data from corrupt congressmen, she does so by calling each of them on a "vidphone" (so you know this is the future) pretending to be a representative for a dataplan company that offers to manage what newsfeeds and electronic messages they receive.
...And yes, the central plot of this book involves selling internet packages to politicians. "This sounds interesting," says one of the future-politicians over the future-vidphone to the cyborg on the other end of the line. "I'd like you to fax me more information."
This shit is for real.
But -- BUT -- the flipside of all this, the 1984 of all this, rests on why the revolutionaries' plan is centered on selling internet packages. Because the plan, see, is that when the congressmen use their services, the revolutionaries will actually be able to farm their data and figure out where their money is being funneled.
Which is both obvious and goofy and...and...actually sorta interesting?
Because, like, let's be clear here, Johnny Zed is a dumb book, but this dumb-book-plan is essentially exactly what it took us a decade to figure out our phones and social media accounts were doing to us thirty years later in real life.
So that's one interesting thing. Another is how deeply, deeply cynical the book's politics are. Like every Serious Sci-Fi Book Ever, quotes from fictional characters open up every chapter. The first one (right above the finger-amputation scene) is this: "The subtle, truly debilitating manifestations of a degenerate society are twofold. First, the ruling class no longer cares for the proletariat. Second, the proletariat no longer cares."
Which is, y'know, some kind of dark-and-true shit for a book with a gold-embossed title that's called Johnny Zed. And that sort of nihilistic emptiness carries through the entire thing, even with the catmen and breast-exposing and oh-I-forgot-to-tell-you hacking sequence which is literally like someone trying to describe bad CGI -- even with all that, there's this underlying suggestion, this sort of crawling feeling, that the entire revolution is ultimately pointless; that the general populace beyond the main characters is basically unaware that their society is either wholly corrupt or, possibly, capable of being something better. Shelly herself, when it's all said and done, wins in the end (literally because the last four words of the book are "win in the end") and yet we're still, very intentionally, meant to wonder if she or Johnny Zed accomplished anything -- if it was in fact ever actually possible to accomplish anything, or if playing at being a revolutionary was just a way for them to feel better about themselves (and to kill a lotta lotta people).
Which is, again, not to say that Johnny Zed is good. It is, clearly and absolutely, not. But it's surprisingly unnerving, and it gave me a chill in my bones.
If you want more info, I can fax it over as soon as I put some clothes on over my breasts. It's just going to be hard with these amputated fingers.
I just realized that sentence is a run-on.
Case in point.
The most shocking thing about Johnny Zed is not only that Johnny Zed himself is not the main character, which he isn't; it's that with what little pagetime he does have, he still manages to drive the narrative almost completely from start to finish. The actual protagonist, a cyborg named Shelly Tracer (the transparently-legged damsel in the jpeg, natch) has even less agency than most 80's movie girlfriends, and that's saying something -- but Shelly is, essentially, an 80's movie girlfriend, and although we follow her most closely, she usually isn't doing much of anything that Johnny hasn't told her to do. Alternately (just to give her an edge) she sometimes does the opposite of what she thinks Johnny would want her to do (when she thinks he might actually be a spy, which is about every other chapter). But, of course, because he is JOHNNY FUCKING ZED, even when you don't do what he wants, you're still playing right into his hands -- because Johnny Zed, my friends, is the raddest fucking dude alive.
If Shelly is an 80's movie girlfriend, Johnny Zed is Ferris Bueller mixed with a dash of John Connor -- a political revolutionary who's also sooooo coool. The world the characters inhabit is the Sprawl (literally called the Sprawl because William Gibson really needs to sue more people) crossed with 1984, and the book's highs and low-lows are entirely reliant on this weird mix of influences.
Moment-for-moment, Johnny Zed is hilarious for how hilarious it doesn't know it is. When Shelly gets into (frequent) shootouts, or street fights with "catmen" (clarification: these are men who are also cats), she always, and without exception, gets her clothing ripped across or near her breasts. When Shelly inevitably gets blown up in said scuffle and is then rebuilt at a cyborg chop-shop or whatever, she always (and without exception) wakes up naked, and walks around naked, for awhile after. When Shelly gets tired of being a revolutionary in the middle of the book, she just goes home to her parents' house in the suburbs and hangs out at the mall, which is apparently not as post-apocalyptic as the catmen-invested Sprawl literally twenty minutes away. And when Johnny has Shelly helm his top-secret mission to steal personal data from corrupt congressmen, she does so by calling each of them on a "vidphone" (so you know this is the future) pretending to be a representative for a dataplan company that offers to manage what newsfeeds and electronic messages they receive.
...And yes, the central plot of this book involves selling internet packages to politicians. "This sounds interesting," says one of the future-politicians over the future-vidphone to the cyborg on the other end of the line. "I'd like you to fax me more information."
This shit is for real.
But -- BUT -- the flipside of all this, the 1984 of all this, rests on why the revolutionaries' plan is centered on selling internet packages. Because the plan, see, is that when the congressmen use their services, the revolutionaries will actually be able to farm their data and figure out where their money is being funneled.
Which is both obvious and goofy and...and...actually sorta interesting?
Because, like, let's be clear here, Johnny Zed is a dumb book, but this dumb-book-plan is essentially exactly what it took us a decade to figure out our phones and social media accounts were doing to us thirty years later in real life.
So that's one interesting thing. Another is how deeply, deeply cynical the book's politics are. Like every Serious Sci-Fi Book Ever, quotes from fictional characters open up every chapter. The first one (right above the finger-amputation scene) is this: "The subtle, truly debilitating manifestations of a degenerate society are twofold. First, the ruling class no longer cares for the proletariat. Second, the proletariat no longer cares."
Which is, y'know, some kind of dark-and-true shit for a book with a gold-embossed title that's called Johnny Zed. And that sort of nihilistic emptiness carries through the entire thing, even with the catmen and breast-exposing and oh-I-forgot-to-tell-you hacking sequence which is literally like someone trying to describe bad CGI -- even with all that, there's this underlying suggestion, this sort of crawling feeling, that the entire revolution is ultimately pointless; that the general populace beyond the main characters is basically unaware that their society is either wholly corrupt or, possibly, capable of being something better. Shelly herself, when it's all said and done, wins in the end (literally because the last four words of the book are "win in the end") and yet we're still, very intentionally, meant to wonder if she or Johnny Zed accomplished anything -- if it was in fact ever actually possible to accomplish anything, or if playing at being a revolutionary was just a way for them to feel better about themselves (and to kill a lotta lotta people).
Which is, again, not to say that Johnny Zed is good. It is, clearly and absolutely, not. But it's surprisingly unnerving, and it gave me a chill in my bones.
If you want more info, I can fax it over as soon as I put some clothes on over my breasts. It's just going to be hard with these amputated fingers.
November 11, 2024
A fast-moving cyberpunk novel that tackles political oppression, rather than corporate. It's a serpentine tale that starts off as one thing, then shifts throughout. With its theme of fighting back against a corrupt government and the apathy of the people, it seems sadly topical.
September 22, 2013
A sci-fi novel about a woman - Shelly Tracer and 2 workers, Johnny Zed & his brother, Karl. They belong to a revolutionary group that wants to overthrow the present corrupt gov't.
Through Johnny's schemes, he, Karl & Shelly manage to make significant progress. First Johnny has kidnapped the most powerful congressman, his father, and replaced him with Karl (after surgery). Second, he and his tech friends have managed to race $714 trillion skimmed from the Federal budget and transferred it Swiss bank accounts. They then transferred it into their own accounts after they had set themselves up as an information agency. Following, Johnny in a public speech confronts the congressman and senators who skimmed the money. He was killed by a congressman. He had entered a tape which played out his instructions. Shelly becomes President.
He also laid the way for the entire Congress to be bomed and everyone inside killed. A fresh start. Great book!
Through Johnny's schemes, he, Karl & Shelly manage to make significant progress. First Johnny has kidnapped the most powerful congressman, his father, and replaced him with Karl (after surgery). Second, he and his tech friends have managed to race $714 trillion skimmed from the Federal budget and transferred it Swiss bank accounts. They then transferred it into their own accounts after they had set themselves up as an information agency. Following, Johnny in a public speech confronts the congressman and senators who skimmed the money. He was killed by a congressman. He had entered a tape which played out his instructions. Shelly becomes President.
He also laid the way for the entire Congress to be bomed and everyone inside killed. A fresh start. Great book!
September 24, 2010
I read this a long time ago but I adored it at the time. It had science fiction politics and philosophy; what more could a teenage girl want.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews