Remix

Cyber Noir #3

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

LizAlec is wired for sound, speed and anything else that money can buy. But she's abducted. Her mother's a French minister, who moves Heaven and Earth to find her. Fixx fixes things - recordings, people, anything that makes money. Some of him is almost human. Now he has to find LizAlec.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Fiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 1999

About the author

'Tough, sexy and brutal, but leavened with sharp humour... Grimwood is a name to watch.' The Times

Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels he writes for magazines and newspapers. He travels extensively and undertakes a certain amount of consulting. Until recently he wrote a monthly review column for the Guardian.

Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did his last book, End of the World Blues, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo. He has just delivered the Fallen Blade, the first of three novels set in an alternate 15th-century Venice

His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish and American, among others

He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, currently editor-in-chief of Red magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester...

Reviews

[Peter]

Pulp scifi (and not in a good way): Imagine the weird kid you went to school with. You know, the one who put hamsters in microwaves to see them pop, and who used to stare at the pretty girls a bit too intensely, then vanish off to the toilets for a while.

Now, imagine that kid reads some Gibson, a bit of Stephenson and skims Noon in a pretty cursory way. This is the novel that kid would write.

I really tried to like this book: after reading the above authors to death, I was hungry for more cyberpunk. I kept forcing my way through the adolescent sex and violence, the sub-Gibson environment, sub-Noon cyberdelica and woeful technology in the hope that something would eventually "click" and I'd suddenly *get it* and be able to enjoy reading. Didn't happen. I remained annoyed with the writing from start to finish (incidentally, mixedCaps brandNames were never cool. Not when they were around for about 5 minutes in the mid-90s, and not in this book).

It's a real shame that the style is so bad, because there's some genuinely good ideas in there: the steel-eating plague, the geopolitical setup of Grimwood's world and the plot aren't bad. It's just dressed up in so much pap that it's really hard to keep going. Do yourself a favour and read something by the other authors mentioned here or in other reviews.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The style of this book gets in the way of its concepts and the narrative does not have enough focus to be truly compelling. Instead, the author opts for gratuitous sex scenes that do little to develop the characters and an unsatisfactory ending with a number of characters unaccounted for. All in all, this is a somewhat fun and easy read, but far from a high point for the genre.

[James Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read reMix by Jon Courtenay Grimwood some twenty plus years ago, but could remember little about it other than I liked it and faithfully kept a copy on my bookshelf. How could I have forgotten what an adrenaline pumping ride this story is from start to finish. This is a comic book caper, ripe for making into a movie or a tv series and it is surprising that it is not known better.

Set in the future when the Earth has terrible social-political problems as well as climate issues and rampant techno nightmares causing trouble left right and centre, a young teenager called LizAlec Fabio is kidnapped while on her way to boarding school on the Moon. She might be young, but she’s never been innocent and has a mouth and language to rile a nun that repeatedly gets her in trouble with everyone she comes across. From the outset this story is an absolute blast. The tight plot line yoyos between LizAlec’s plight to escape and her mother in a war torn and perpetually rain-soaked Paris is skilfully handled. Dialogue leaps off the page, action sequences make your head spin and the tale is peppered with explicit full-on sex delivered with pomp and vigour. This is a difficult ask to pull-off convincingly and although it now appears a little dated, it still really works. The cover of my version tells of “William Gibson meets Tarantino” is actually a great description and one accurately portrays the novel in one sentence. If this was ever a movie it would be full of pounding music too.

The imagery is first-class and my only complaint is the ending felt a little underdone, incomplete and a trick missed, but it’s a minor one. This is William Gibson on steroids and everyone should search out a copy NOW!

[Sara]

Wasted in nano thin
silver ring
hand hight
from all the road
have my adv
reveulition without trouble
cyberpunk joke to live
its snow crush
its new year night
one to stand
but ther rong in that rainbow
its far from hard rain
its mom storm
and brok the bridg
without fear
its gd steap
bult the wall

[Matthew Low · Rating 4 out of 5]

A derivative of William Gibson's earlier work. An entertaining read, not quite as groundbreaking as the original cyberpunk novel(s).

[Sue Chant · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor - unsympathetic cardboard characters, confused and implausible plot, unnecessarily detailed descriptions of sex and violence clearly designed for the adolescent male market.

[Paul Pryce · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gambled, I lost.

[Mike Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

a fat fifty-kilometre silver ring that spun twenty times an hour around the spindle, like a vast wheel rolling around a hub.

At a speed of one revolution every twenty seconds, any decent pilot could dock without trouble


I find Grimwood’s books very hard to evaluate; I have given each of the three ‘Cyber Noir’ books, of which this one is the third, just three stars, which normally would mean that I have had enough of this author and would be unlikely to return to them, and yet I know I will return. I’m not absolutely sure what keeps bringing me back to him but I think it might be that I simply love his stories, characters, settings and action; they are brilliant, dynamic, punchy cyberpunk. So why aren’t I giving them 4 or 5 stars? The problem is that the finishing is poor; the details are messy and often don’t add up or don’t make sense. There are frequent consistency and continuity errors. For example the following two extracts occur within 10 pages of each other and are describing the same rotating wheel habitat:

“…a fat fifty-kilometre silver ring that spun twenty times an hour around the spindle, like a vast wheel rolling around a hub.”

“At a speed of one revolution every twenty seconds, any decent pilot could dock without trouble.”


Now maybe I’m being picky but the trouble is that I can’t help noticing this sort of thing and, even if I’m prepared to shrug it off (as I do), it has already pulled me out of my immersion in the story and that spoils it for me. A great shame because otherwise I do love Grimwood’s work.

I did have one other complaint with this book. The ending was very rushed and abrupt and many strands were left unresolved. To be honest it felt like it was being left open for a fourth book, however 14 years on that now seems unlikely!

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This went fast! I haven't read a book in the last few months that caught me like this one did, and I could not put down, so that's impressive. On the surface it seems to really channel William Gibson's Neuromancer. You know, AI is a thing. And let's leave the gravity well and go on this labyrinthine search of an otherworldly place. And there's a lady samurai supporting character. But, no one spends time in VR. So maybe it's more Snow Crash? Regardless, I couldn't help comparing this to earlier works, but at the same time, I really enjoyed this, and I immediately looked to see if the other books Grimwood wrote in the early 00's were sequels or related, but I think they are not.

The main characters (Mom, Daughter, Boyfriend) are very intriguing, and seem very authentic. They take different journeys, have different motivations that all seem real. There are occasional moments of "that's just too over the top to believe" (like the daughter's super power moment that she's not able to re-create pages later when it would be useful again). And some of the timing towards the end is a bit contrived, but overall I really enjoyed it, the world building was fantastic, and the decay of modern society was a fun side touch.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The edition I eventually acquired, after having this book on my to-read list for quite some time, bears the cover blurb "william gibson meets quentin tarantino" (artful lower case in original).

Umm, okay—that's not the worst possible description of this grim high-tech lowlife future, which throws nanotechnological plague, bioengineering and space colonization in with social regression, graphic sex, unrelenting violence and misery on nearly every page.

It's all very exciting, of course, splitting the action and drama between a decaying French Empire whose figurehead is a bodiless Emperor and which is menaced by a resurgent Prussian Reich, of all things, and an anarcho-capitalist Luna straight out of Heinlein. But it's also... charmingly retro, when read today: left behind by the future. The musical descriptions—as well as the ways of making music—are already realized or close to it, and the other assorted furniture of this particular cyberpunk future feels altogether too well-used at this point, though it probably seemed a lot fresher back in 1999 when this book was new.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Awful. Crappy Gibson-clone. Don't know why I picked this book up. I considered not finishing it.

The book was overly dramatic. I read some of this to my unborn son(my wife thinks it will be good for him/her to hear my voice. Reading it aloud made it sound worse. My wife didn't like listening to it-she thought it was boring.

The characters were not paper thin, at least. But, I didn't care about any of them.

There were SF points that came out of nowhere like Deus Ex Machinas.

I can't think of any SF thing that was original, except maybe the steel eating virus.

The way he tried to make AIs funny was annoying.

Maybe I should give this one star.

[Robert Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

******
Addition on 2nd read: does not benefit from reading book 1 and 2 first.
******

if I could have given this seven out of five then I would have because it gives me everything I want from a book: a believable, hi-tech, lushly described world occupied by interesting and engaging characters following their individual natures through a twisty-turny story that grabbed my attention from the start and held it all the way through to an end that came too soon.

There are four books in this series and I'm going to get them all and indulge myself.

Read this if you like your (science) fiction to be innovative and yet believable.

[Dark-Draco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! Loved every second of this. A proper SF, with actual scientific stuff in it rather than bloody great spaceships firing lasers at each other!

I loved the concept of the Azerbijan virus - scary though! Can you imagine that really happening? In fact the only thing I didn't really get was the stuff about LizAlec's parents - I kept thinking there must have been a prequal to this that I haven't read. Still, go with the flow and enjoy it!

[X · Rating 5 out of 5]

a political kidnapping gone wrong, a washed-out dreadlocked white musician (an early shadow of ashraf bey?), paris about to be overrun by the fourth reich, a sexy but bloodthirsty female samurai ballerina, a ferro-eating viral nanite, a mad sexually-deviant self-proclaimed messiah form the framework of a story of lost innocence and the blinding light of self-knowledge.

[Billy Abbott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read this since it came out but thought I'd have another delve in. It goes down the CamelCase and 'whacky' names route of 90s cyberpunk and has the requisite sex 'n violence, but doesn't really do anything particularly interesting. Nanovirus/scary religion/moon habitats/cybernetics/dystopian France and all a bit meh in the end. And what happened to Ben's head?

[Lysergius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another bad trip that could have been a decent tale.

[Antony Tyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it. No clear criticisms. I thought the ideas were very good, though it all seemed to be rather haphazardly strung together. It's been a few years though, so I may re-read and re-evaluate...

[Steven Ackerley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite JCG novel, Redrobe comes next!

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had some good ideas and a couple of awsome phrases, but that's it.