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Headlong
Post-cyberpunk SF that recalls the darkness of M. John Harrison and the wild visual imagination of China Mieville and Hannu Rajaniemi, HEADLONG felt ahead of the curve when first published and now serves to show just why Simon Ings has remained on the cutting edge of genre fiction.Surgically connected to their swarming robotic workers, architects Christopher and Joanne Yale are turning the moon into a paradise. But now, without warning, the machines have pulled the plug and are building a new, insane future away from the control of human minds.
287 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1999
9 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Simon Ings
43 books147 followersI began by writing science fiction stories, novels and films, before disappearing down various rabbit-holes: perception (The Eye: A Natural History), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). I co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about the future, before joining New Scientist magazine as its arts editor. Now I eke out a freelance living in possibly the coldest flat in London, writing arts reviews for the newspapers. My latest non-fiction is Stalin and the Scientists, a history of Soviet science. My latest novel is The Smoke.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 25, 2014
Absolutely brilliant. I think this is his best novel. Not as ambitious as Dead Water and Weight of Numbers, but absolutely perfect in laser focus. Brutal, tender, beautiful, nasty, violent, shocking, piercingly sad and subtly thought-provoking. I read it through the night, and when I got to the last page, I started at the beginning again.
February 3, 2016
Although I read quite a lot of SF, I keep forgetting that quite a lot of it I'm not that keen on. Cyber punk is one of those sub genres that doesn't do much for me and this, being a kind of post-cyber punk really falls into the same camp. I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for when I picked it up and it just goes to show that picking up books on a whim doesn't always work (well duh!)
The book has elements of conspiracy thriller and murder mystery in a not too distant future dystopian/declined society set in Britain. The protagonist is one of many people who have been sent back to earth after being cybernetically modified to work on terraforming and city building projects on the moon by interfacing with an ever evolving AI. Now, disconnected and abandoned they suffer extreme withdrawals and can't integrate back into society. The only things they can plug into and the treatments available are all illegal which only serves to drive them to desperate measures. But when Christopher finds out that his ex wife has been brutally murdered, he gets drawn into trying to solve the mystery of what happened.
So while the book had enough to sustain my interest it didn't really get me hooked and, for me, the ending was lacking in terms of pay off. I'm sure it's not a bad book and I can see why many people like it; it's just not really for me. I certainly don't feel inclined to read anything else by the author.
The book has elements of conspiracy thriller and murder mystery in a not too distant future dystopian/declined society set in Britain. The protagonist is one of many people who have been sent back to earth after being cybernetically modified to work on terraforming and city building projects on the moon by interfacing with an ever evolving AI. Now, disconnected and abandoned they suffer extreme withdrawals and can't integrate back into society. The only things they can plug into and the treatments available are all illegal which only serves to drive them to desperate measures. But when Christopher finds out that his ex wife has been brutally murdered, he gets drawn into trying to solve the mystery of what happened.
So while the book had enough to sustain my interest it didn't really get me hooked and, for me, the ending was lacking in terms of pay off. I'm sure it's not a bad book and I can see why many people like it; it's just not really for me. I certainly don't feel inclined to read anything else by the author.
September 2, 2018
This book had a lot going for it: excellent premise, great hard SF-worldbuilding, vivid descriptions...however for two reasons I have to give it a 3/5.
The first reason is that I felt the pacing in the middle of the book was a bit slow, and at times I had difficult keeping interest. I am glad I read to the end though.
The second is that this book was very badly edited and contained probably the most number of mistakes I have seen in a book released by a real publisher (i.e. not self-published). For example, on page 23 there was several single quotes missing in dialogue. Besides this there was extra periods, invalid capitalization, incorrect hyphenation (a word with an extra hyphen that should have only had one: ”time-laps-e" on page 254), and many other errors. I didn't count but I'd guess at least 30-40 mistakes overall.
The writer is obvious very skilled at his craft, so I hope the publisher/editor can do a better job at avoiding such errors since it effected my enjoyment of the book. After 30-40 pages in I was focusing more on finding errors than enjoying the plot.
Nonetheless, I think Simon Ings is a SF author with great promise and am considering reading some of his newer works.
The first reason is that I felt the pacing in the middle of the book was a bit slow, and at times I had difficult keeping interest. I am glad I read to the end though.
The second is that this book was very badly edited and contained probably the most number of mistakes I have seen in a book released by a real publisher (i.e. not self-published). For example, on page 23 there was several single quotes missing in dialogue. Besides this there was extra periods, invalid capitalization, incorrect hyphenation (a word with an extra hyphen that should have only had one: ”time-laps-e" on page 254), and many other errors. I didn't count but I'd guess at least 30-40 mistakes overall.
The writer is obvious very skilled at his craft, so I hope the publisher/editor can do a better job at avoiding such errors since it effected my enjoyment of the book. After 30-40 pages in I was focusing more on finding errors than enjoying the plot.
Nonetheless, I think Simon Ings is a SF author with great promise and am considering reading some of his newer works.
September 29, 2016
This is very British, rainy and bleak cyberpunk. The writing is dense, flooding the reader with sensory information - in contrast to the extra AI-enhanced senses of the main character and the dull, blinded feelings when they are removed from him.
The central mystery of Christopher's ex-wife's death leaves you disorientated, echoing his own bewilderment, but everything is wrapped up and concluded satisfyingly.
There are a few details of the world that jar slightly, making it feel less real and more constructed but they don't take away from the story,which keeps things moving along through the various antagonists Christopher meets and questions over the death of Joanne.
I enjoyed it greatly and, together with Hot-head, I am definitely a fan of Simon Ings and want to read more.
The central mystery of Christopher's ex-wife's death leaves you disorientated, echoing his own bewilderment, but everything is wrapped up and concluded satisfyingly.
There are a few details of the world that jar slightly, making it feel less real and more constructed but they don't take away from the story,which keeps things moving along through the various antagonists Christopher meets and questions over the death of Joanne.
I enjoyed it greatly and, together with Hot-head, I am definitely a fan of Simon Ings and want to read more.
September 16, 2025
Headlong no es una novela cualquiera, es una implosión.
Es un Londres arrastrado al filo del siglo XXI, un paisaje de datos sudorosos y carne agotada por el ocaso de la civilización humana. Nada parece limpio, ni fresco. Todo procesado, triturado, genéticamente modificado, vuelto a ensamblar bajo la presión de la economía de la información y las capacidades de la inteligencia artificial que comienzan a dejarnos atrás tras una crisis económica sin precedentes. Es un futuro muy bien construido, con sus causas y efectos cuidadosamente calculados.
Ings disecciona todo esto como si fuera un enjambre de insectos y engranajes atrapados en una diapositiva. Christopher, el protagonista, es un arquitecto poshumano arrebatado de todos sus implantes y devuelto de la Luna a la Tierra. ¿Qué "dolor fantasma" resulta de esta mutilación de sinestesias, de unos sentidos aumentados que antes te hacían saborear el jazz o escuchar el color azul? Uno insoportable, irrecuperable. Por si fuera poco, la ex-mujer de Chris, otra poshumana en busca de remedios más radicales para superar la ausencia de implantes, ha aparecido muerta sin signos de violencia pero con su cráneo reventado. Y Chris no recuerda los últimos días.
Headlong es ciencia ficción sin futuro. Un tech-noir de resaca. Un desgarro psicológico mezclado con una historia policiaca. A diferencia de otros protagonistas del género y pese a su pasado como "poshumano", Chris no es un superhombre ni un detective. Es un hombre cansado y apaleado, que va por detrás y quiere su humanidad de vuelta sin las secuelas. Es un peón que se verá envuelto en una conspiración más grande que él.
El resultado es una novela biológica, pegajosa, sinestésica... inevitablemente humana. Una historia personal en un marco de teoría poshumana, inteligencia artificial, colonización lunar, degradación, implantes e individuos rotos que son ignorados y operan al margen del sistema.
Es un Londres arrastrado al filo del siglo XXI, un paisaje de datos sudorosos y carne agotada por el ocaso de la civilización humana. Nada parece limpio, ni fresco. Todo procesado, triturado, genéticamente modificado, vuelto a ensamblar bajo la presión de la economía de la información y las capacidades de la inteligencia artificial que comienzan a dejarnos atrás tras una crisis económica sin precedentes. Es un futuro muy bien construido, con sus causas y efectos cuidadosamente calculados.
Ings disecciona todo esto como si fuera un enjambre de insectos y engranajes atrapados en una diapositiva. Christopher, el protagonista, es un arquitecto poshumano arrebatado de todos sus implantes y devuelto de la Luna a la Tierra. ¿Qué "dolor fantasma" resulta de esta mutilación de sinestesias, de unos sentidos aumentados que antes te hacían saborear el jazz o escuchar el color azul? Uno insoportable, irrecuperable. Por si fuera poco, la ex-mujer de Chris, otra poshumana en busca de remedios más radicales para superar la ausencia de implantes, ha aparecido muerta sin signos de violencia pero con su cráneo reventado. Y Chris no recuerda los últimos días.
Headlong es ciencia ficción sin futuro. Un tech-noir de resaca. Un desgarro psicológico mezclado con una historia policiaca. A diferencia de otros protagonistas del género y pese a su pasado como "poshumano", Chris no es un superhombre ni un detective. Es un hombre cansado y apaleado, que va por detrás y quiere su humanidad de vuelta sin las secuelas. Es un peón que se verá envuelto en una conspiración más grande que él.
El resultado es una novela biológica, pegajosa, sinestésica... inevitablemente humana. Una historia personal en un marco de teoría poshumana, inteligencia artificial, colonización lunar, degradación, implantes e individuos rotos que son ignorados y operan al margen del sistema.
March 21, 2018
An interesting take on a post-Singularity world, but one that (imo) gets too wrapped up in the post- part and not wrapped up enough in the events. There are some really interesting parts here - terraforming the moon, the use of nano- or micro-robots, human-machine interfaces - but those parts are left to be described in bits and pieces, while the primary story is more of a traditional whodunnit/detective story. I'd have preferred a more linearly told story, more focus on the creative SF aspects (e.g., life on the moon), and less police conspiracy.
All that said, recommended for PKD fans; A Scanner Darkly may well have been an inspiration for Ings.
All that said, recommended for PKD fans; A Scanner Darkly may well have been an inspiration for Ings.
September 5, 2018
This reads like a fever dream, it has an unreliable narrator, it jumps from thought to thought without pausing. He often does stuff like this 'he got out the car; he made coffee'. I loved it, as it's one of the most original things I've read in a while. Feels like blindsight or neuromancer, though more toward the former.
Read
January 19, 2024Take the hardwere from my mind
take everything
they take my wife
is it coz our head in the moon
is it dard cyber secret flood over and over
dark night have me cold
thee take my wife lief
diesy
cant find my way
but thee found me too
its gray
take everything
they take my wife
is it coz our head in the moon
is it dard cyber secret flood over and over
dark night have me cold
thee take my wife lief
diesy
cant find my way
but thee found me too
its gray
January 30, 2020
Dystopic, grim, grey. I found it tough to get into, but liked it when i did.
November 12, 2023
did not need those random slurs and hitting women
January 9, 2016
An interesting book that hasn't aged well.
In this book, Christopher Yale learns of the (somewhat suspicious) death of his ex-wife Joanne in the UK, leading him to investigate. A bog-standard setup, made more interesting by the fact that Chris and Joanne were, when they were together, living on the moon, their heads stuffed with high tech hardware that allowed them access to a myriad of extra senses and direct access to city-building AIs and robots.
When the story begins, Chris is living in the UK, and is a severely broken man, suffering from an extreme form of what is essentially PTSD from having his post-human hardware extracted from his head when he was recalled from the moon.
Chris is essentially a post-post-human, and investigates his ex-wife's death like most regular people would: by meandering about randomly, wallowing in self-pity and being generally ineffectual. This is both interesting in how it subverts the normal suspicious-death storyline, but also leads to about a third of the book having not much happening. Really, it's not until Chris flashbacks to his time on the moon with Joanne that I became interested in the character or the plot.
This is made worse by the fact that throughout, but in the first third in particular, the book feels much older than something written in the late 90s. In a future where architects with neural-enhancements can be rocketed to the moon to build cities, it strains believability that the UK seemingly has payphones everywhere and the only portable tech used is pen and paper. Some of this can be explained as the UK having gone through a civil war, but when you see images of real life refugees holding cellphones, it seems a little too convenient that most of the hardware available is what we had in the 90s. Convenient, but also a failure of worldbuilding.
There are a few interesting lines about what the machines on the moon are doing without their human masters, but almost nothing is done with this for the vast bulk of the book. At best, this can be seen as the beginning of what could have been an interesting exploration of creating machines we can't fully understand or control, but it's never that relevant to the story. Other scifi books have addressed this in much more interesting ways.
Overall, the book became interesting enough for me to want to finish, and the author manages some great descriptions, but I can't really recommend it. The world building feels musty when it's not feeling disjointed, and there's no greater depth here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
In this book, Christopher Yale learns of the (somewhat suspicious) death of his ex-wife Joanne in the UK, leading him to investigate. A bog-standard setup, made more interesting by the fact that Chris and Joanne were, when they were together, living on the moon, their heads stuffed with high tech hardware that allowed them access to a myriad of extra senses and direct access to city-building AIs and robots.
When the story begins, Chris is living in the UK, and is a severely broken man, suffering from an extreme form of what is essentially PTSD from having his post-human hardware extracted from his head when he was recalled from the moon.
Chris is essentially a post-post-human, and investigates his ex-wife's death like most regular people would: by meandering about randomly, wallowing in self-pity and being generally ineffectual. This is both interesting in how it subverts the normal suspicious-death storyline, but also leads to about a third of the book having not much happening. Really, it's not until Chris flashbacks to his time on the moon with Joanne that I became interested in the character or the plot.
This is made worse by the fact that throughout, but in the first third in particular, the book feels much older than something written in the late 90s. In a future where architects with neural-enhancements can be rocketed to the moon to build cities, it strains believability that the UK seemingly has payphones everywhere and the only portable tech used is pen and paper. Some of this can be explained as the UK having gone through a civil war, but when you see images of real life refugees holding cellphones, it seems a little too convenient that most of the hardware available is what we had in the 90s. Convenient, but also a failure of worldbuilding.
There are a few interesting lines about what the machines on the moon are doing without their human masters, but almost nothing is done with this for the vast bulk of the book. At best, this can be seen as the beginning of what could have been an interesting exploration of creating machines we can't fully understand or control, but it's never that relevant to the story. Other scifi books have addressed this in much more interesting ways.
Overall, the book became interesting enough for me to want to finish, and the author manages some great descriptions, but I can't really recommend it. The world building feels musty when it's not feeling disjointed, and there's no greater depth here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
July 22, 2016
De flesta har nog sin egen doldis när det kommer till författare, någon de hittat helt själv men som borde vara mer välkänd. En riktigt bra författare men som av någon anledning inte nämns någon annanstans. För mig är den författaren Simon Ings, en britt som debuterade 1992. Jag skaffade "Hotwire" på mer eller mindre en ren chansning och tyckte om den. Detta är den andra jag läser och den var bättre än den första, så Ings har bara ökat i aktning. Liksom "Hotwire" är detta en slags cyberpunk av den mindre stereotypiska sorten, bra mycket mer influerad av Gibsons mellanperiod om något snarare än den regniga, smutsiga "Blade Runner" estetiken som generellt ses som urtypen av cyberpunk. Samma tema som genomsyrar så mycket SF men cyberpunk med avarter mer än något annat lyser starkt - teknologi och vårat förhållande till den. Det är nog första gången jag ser ett slut när det räknas som något bra att gå från en post-människa till en vanlig människa, en slags bakvänd "Permutation City". Vilket förvisso är ett intressant sätt att avsluta en pseudo-cyberpunk historia på men jag hade lite lust att örfila Christopher på slutet. Det hela börjar med huvudkaraktären Christopher Yale som tidigare varit anställd av ett företag för att terraforma månen. Till sin hjälp hade han och några till flertalet implantat och små nanorobotar som var mer eller mindre tankestyrda. Utöver detta kunde de utnyttja sina implantat för att se genom drönare och utöka sin vanliga fem sinnen oerhört, till den grad att de kunde höra minsta spänning i en stålvajer. Vad robotarna och maskinerna kände, såg och hörde kunde även människorna göra. Väl där träffar han också sin fru. När boken börjar har de blivit utsparkade från månen och fått sina implantat bortopererade. Så hittas Christophers fru död.
Ings bygger upp en fascinerande värld på samma sätt som Gibson gjorde i Sprawl-böckerna. Mest bara hintar eller små blinkningar. London till hälften sönderskjutet efter ett inbördeskrig och AI:s som totalt förstör ekonomin av mer eller mindre en olyckshändelse. Men boken är som bäst när den utforskar Yales erfarenheter med implantaten, skillnaden mellan när han hade dem och när han inte har dem. Mest för att det nog nästan blir prosadikt just då och Ings kan absolut skriva bitvis fantastisk prosa. Teknologi kontra människan och förhållandet däremellan är som alltid ett intressant och relevant tema. Det enda egentliga negativa är att boken hade kunnat blivit synad en gång till efter tryckfel och liknande.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 28, 2008
This book was a delightful surprise that I plucked off the shelves of Sefer v'Sefel. While many entries in the Sci-Fi genre use mystery as a pure device for stringing the reader along 300+ pages (whereas the same "What if...?" could be better told in a 30 page short story), Ings's construct is a beautifully dynamic exploration of the limits of our humanity. The book does not let you take the sci-fi elements for granted, but builds real, if 2-dimensional, characters to anchor the Alien in the Familiar. One cannot read this book without being impressed with his command of visual and spatial language - he does not repeat himself, and a quiet wisdom inspires his prose.
Its slightly Blade Runner-esque atmosphere places the characters in different situations and locations, and the book is something like 4 or more short stories that only happen to follow each other chronologically and thematically. (That's not bad, I very much liked the effect).
Its slightly Blade Runner-esque atmosphere places the characters in different situations and locations, and the book is something like 4 or more short stories that only happen to follow each other chronologically and thematically. (That's not bad, I very much liked the effect).
Currently reading
March 9, 2010Quote: "The whole flat had been partitioned. Black plastic screens divided each room into a series of alcoves. Wires trailed over the floor, like strings spooled out through a tawdry maze by nervous explorers. At the end of the hall, the living room gave off a heady, solvent heat, and the bin-liner screens swayed to and fro in a strong current of toasted air. The room gave off a confused glow: bright splashes of colour against a ground of static and video blue."
May 13, 2008
Approaching cyberpunk from a slightly different angle -- here we see the fallout of the fusion of technology and humanity. What might happen when things go wrong or when the human part is unplugged from the mechanical part. This has a more resonant emotional core than a lot of cyberpunk and is all the better for that.
February 17, 2009
While I was slow to get into the story when I first picked it up, I soon became hooked and sped through the book to find out what happened. It's a very interesting story and kept me wondering what would happen next.
March 21, 2007
Cyberpunk redefined. Read it if your IQ allows...
December 30, 2016
Interesting scifi book. Slow read at start. But fast exciting finish
April 3, 2023
A tale of losing a part of yourself mind and the drive and desperation that you would go to for even a much weaker and unfulfilling substitute.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews