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Cyber Noir #4
Redrobe
Ex-assassin Axl Borja has agreed to do one last hit - only he hasn't told his gun yet. Cardinal Santo Ducque faces political ruin if he can't regain the Vatican's missing billions. Mai's a Japanese kinderwhore held hostage on a space habitat. As they collide their actions could change the world.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
4 people are currently reading
221 people want to read
About the author
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
55 books203 followers'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...
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...
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 2, 2022
My selection for the 'Award Finalist, But Not Won' square in the 2022 r/Fantasy Bingo (Hardmode).
This novel was nominated for the British SF award in 2001. I've liked everything I've read from this author (six novels now), and this one was no exception. It's a gritty cyberpunk story, mostly tracking the actions of Axl Borja, an assassin who, in order to save his life has agreed to do one last hit for Cardinal Santo Ducque. I can understand some of the negative reviews; there are a lot of things in this book that might cause offense, but for me, they were an integral part of the story. The character that stole the show (at least in every scene it appeared) was Borja's talking gun (complete with Brooklyn accent and potty mouth).
(Other 2022 Bingo squares that this would fit: Set in Space; Anti-Hero; Cool Weapon; No Ifs, Ands, or Buts).
This novel was nominated for the British SF award in 2001. I've liked everything I've read from this author (six novels now), and this one was no exception. It's a gritty cyberpunk story, mostly tracking the actions of Axl Borja, an assassin who, in order to save his life has agreed to do one last hit for Cardinal Santo Ducque. I can understand some of the negative reviews; there are a lot of things in this book that might cause offense, but for me, they were an integral part of the story. The character that stole the show (at least in every scene it appeared) was Borja's talking gun (complete with Brooklyn accent and potty mouth).
(Other 2022 Bingo squares that this would fit: Set in Space; Anti-Hero; Cool Weapon; No Ifs, Ands, or Buts).
February 13, 2015
There’s a website I visit now and again which generates surreal plot situations for people with writer's block.
’A gay cardinal, a one-eyed assassin and a sentient Buddhist gun hunt for the memories of a dead lesbian Pope inside a giant space-egg’ might well have come up.
This is a competent (if frustrating) cyberpunk thriller in which Axl Borja, augmented assassin, is hired by a Cardinal to find the downloaded memories of the late Pope Joan, who apparently siphoned off a large chunk of the Vatican’s wealth to give to charity.
The rather grim - but enlivened by snappy dialogue - chase ends up on Samsara, a Ringworld style rotating rock cylinder, home of the governing Buddhist AI, Tsongkhapa, and refugees from various wars and belligerence on earth.
There’s also pimps, clones, suicidal priests (2), lesbian army officers (2), an underage Japanese prostitute and sundry AIs.
The most interesting character is the self-aware gun, transformed on Samsara into the cyber embodiment of the winged monkey Rinpoche
It’s one of those irritating and annoying novels, so packed with references to corporations, wetware tradenames, hardware functions and software, that whole pages have to be re-read in case one misses something.
For those who like sort of thing, it’s a good book, if a little depressing, which makes some valuable points about religious and media political power.
Doesn't really break any new ground.
’A gay cardinal, a one-eyed assassin and a sentient Buddhist gun hunt for the memories of a dead lesbian Pope inside a giant space-egg’ might well have come up.
This is a competent (if frustrating) cyberpunk thriller in which Axl Borja, augmented assassin, is hired by a Cardinal to find the downloaded memories of the late Pope Joan, who apparently siphoned off a large chunk of the Vatican’s wealth to give to charity.
The rather grim - but enlivened by snappy dialogue - chase ends up on Samsara, a Ringworld style rotating rock cylinder, home of the governing Buddhist AI, Tsongkhapa, and refugees from various wars and belligerence on earth.
There’s also pimps, clones, suicidal priests (2), lesbian army officers (2), an underage Japanese prostitute and sundry AIs.
The most interesting character is the self-aware gun, transformed on Samsara into the cyber embodiment of the winged monkey Rinpoche
It’s one of those irritating and annoying novels, so packed with references to corporations, wetware tradenames, hardware functions and software, that whole pages have to be re-read in case one misses something.
For those who like sort of thing, it’s a good book, if a little depressing, which makes some valuable points about religious and media political power.
Doesn't really break any new ground.
February 19, 2017
The Artificial Kid meets Pynchon. Sure, it's rocky in parts, and the violence can get a bit out of hand, but as a crystallized cyberpunk style piece, boy howdy.
April 9, 2019
Imaginative cyberpunk action, with lots of great set pieces. Major drawback is that the author hasn't worked through some issues with women, and the misogyny is leaking through.
August 19, 2024
And so endeth this tetralogy of loosely connected novels.
It's the same universe in all 4 books and time moves forward, apart from flashbacks and historical fill-ins, from the first to the last book. Some characters show up in more than one book. The style is about the same in all books (dirty sci-fi). Apart from that, you might as well read each book as a standalone. In fact, I read the third one on its own and then went back and read all 4 in order and I was none the wiser for going back.
The third was the best. Just read that one if you're short of time. That said, if you're really short on time then spend it with friends. Create your own story. Don't waste your head wondering if you need to create a legacy. Don't even think about making a novel out of your life story. Just live it.
If you don't enjoy spending time with your friends, make new ones you like talking to and being with. Don't take this too far. Even though you and your life partner argue, that's not something worth separating for. Unless, of course, it's worse than the odd spat. In which case, you choose. I'm not in charge of your life.
These four books won't teach you much about life and relationships. In fact, most of the material is the opposite of life advice. These are not wholesome books. This is not candy. Most of it is crude and unpalletable, for example the whole concept of kinderwhores. I mean, really! And yeah, sure, there's a lot of ugly stuff in the world ... but I don't want it feeding into my brain.
Still, the action is nice. Cruel, crude and cruddy, but kinda well written.
Don't read this book or the first and second in the series. Only read the third (the best (IMO)) in the tetralogy if you've got a long, long time to live and so can kinda wash your mind clean with the rest of your experience. Try meditation. That might help.
It's the same universe in all 4 books and time moves forward, apart from flashbacks and historical fill-ins, from the first to the last book. Some characters show up in more than one book. The style is about the same in all books (dirty sci-fi). Apart from that, you might as well read each book as a standalone. In fact, I read the third one on its own and then went back and read all 4 in order and I was none the wiser for going back.
The third was the best. Just read that one if you're short of time. That said, if you're really short on time then spend it with friends. Create your own story. Don't waste your head wondering if you need to create a legacy. Don't even think about making a novel out of your life story. Just live it.
If you don't enjoy spending time with your friends, make new ones you like talking to and being with. Don't take this too far. Even though you and your life partner argue, that's not something worth separating for. Unless, of course, it's worse than the odd spat. In which case, you choose. I'm not in charge of your life.
These four books won't teach you much about life and relationships. In fact, most of the material is the opposite of life advice. These are not wholesome books. This is not candy. Most of it is crude and unpalletable, for example the whole concept of kinderwhores. I mean, really! And yeah, sure, there's a lot of ugly stuff in the world ... but I don't want it feeding into my brain.
Still, the action is nice. Cruel, crude and cruddy, but kinda well written.
Don't read this book or the first and second in the series. Only read the third (the best (IMO)) in the tetralogy if you've got a long, long time to live and so can kinda wash your mind clean with the rest of your experience. Try meditation. That might help.
January 2, 2016
Assassin Axl Borja has been recruited for one last mission – well, for a mission that he decides will be his last – but hasn’t told his gun, and it is a classy, stylish, expensive gun ideally suited to Axl’s line of work. Elsewhere in Mexico, Cardinal Santo Ducque is frustrated by shifting power relations in the church, Pope Joan’s populism and expenditure on the poor and his loos of access to church wealth. Further afield in North Africa, Mai, a Japanese child prostitute (kinderwhore in the argot of this inventive alt-world novel) is kidnapped as part of a bigger plan to reconfigure the institutional relations of the church.
Grimwood brings these three stories together on Samsara, a refugee planet soaking up Earth’s excess population unable to return to or stay in the various war zones spreading across the planet. Earth’s dystopia is off-set by Samsara’s pseudo-Nepal-inspired medieval environment of peace, serenity, monasteries and for some really big guns. Wonderfully dystopian, no-one really knows how to trust anyone else but is more than willing to enter opportunist alliances, and for a small number of true believers sacrifice themselves to the cause.
Despite this inventiveness and a twisting story, as the characters come together – Borja, Ducque (and his operatives), Mai, Kate (Pope Joan’s sister) and Borja’s gun – it feels a bit like Grimwood loses control of his narrative and in places narrative resolution or redirection falls into a close to deus ex machina trap (and I really dislike that: it is either lazy, or in this case a product of a little too much narrative complexity). The result is that there is a little too much implausibility given the rules of the world invented for this story. This just took the edge off for me: I feel a bit like a teacher writing a ‘could do better’ report card…… but it was hard not to get to the end and feel just a little disappointed.
Grimwood brings these three stories together on Samsara, a refugee planet soaking up Earth’s excess population unable to return to or stay in the various war zones spreading across the planet. Earth’s dystopia is off-set by Samsara’s pseudo-Nepal-inspired medieval environment of peace, serenity, monasteries and for some really big guns. Wonderfully dystopian, no-one really knows how to trust anyone else but is more than willing to enter opportunist alliances, and for a small number of true believers sacrifice themselves to the cause.
Despite this inventiveness and a twisting story, as the characters come together – Borja, Ducque (and his operatives), Mai, Kate (Pope Joan’s sister) and Borja’s gun – it feels a bit like Grimwood loses control of his narrative and in places narrative resolution or redirection falls into a close to deus ex machina trap (and I really dislike that: it is either lazy, or in this case a product of a little too much narrative complexity). The result is that there is a little too much implausibility given the rules of the world invented for this story. This just took the edge off for me: I feel a bit like a teacher writing a ‘could do better’ report card…… but it was hard not to get to the end and feel just a little disappointed.
October 25, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in February 2001.
A garish cover and the unusual typography of the title proclaim redRobe to be a trendy novel. It is fashionably violent and streetwise, but it is another case of Earthlight's designers pigeonholing a novel where it doesn't quite belong. It isn't just a novel about drugs, torture and sex; redRobe has more to it than that. (It does, however, contain lots of drugs, torture and sex, and much of the violence in particular is extremely unpleasant.)
redRobe is better than just a distillation of what is currently trendy. It has a strong vein of humour, mostly centred around uncooperative artificial intelligence, such as hand grenades which have to be persuaded to explode at the time you want them to. It also has a reasonable plot, about the search for the computer chips containing the memory backups of a murdered Pope. Its setting, based heavily on cyberpunk, is reasonably interesting if not particularly original.
It is the violence and the exploitation of violence - warfare has become the staple of TV as the ultimate thrill in fly on the wall drama - which stands out as the major feature of the novel, and in the end this overwhelms the other aspects. (Of course, the media packaging of violence is an important issue, and clearly this is one of the things that Grimwood wants to say about our society today, but using packaged violence to say it is a little disingenuous.) Although I found redRobe an interesting read, it did not lead me to want to explore Grimwood's other novels.
A garish cover and the unusual typography of the title proclaim redRobe to be a trendy novel. It is fashionably violent and streetwise, but it is another case of Earthlight's designers pigeonholing a novel where it doesn't quite belong. It isn't just a novel about drugs, torture and sex; redRobe has more to it than that. (It does, however, contain lots of drugs, torture and sex, and much of the violence in particular is extremely unpleasant.)
redRobe is better than just a distillation of what is currently trendy. It has a strong vein of humour, mostly centred around uncooperative artificial intelligence, such as hand grenades which have to be persuaded to explode at the time you want them to. It also has a reasonable plot, about the search for the computer chips containing the memory backups of a murdered Pope. Its setting, based heavily on cyberpunk, is reasonably interesting if not particularly original.
It is the violence and the exploitation of violence - warfare has become the staple of TV as the ultimate thrill in fly on the wall drama - which stands out as the major feature of the novel, and in the end this overwhelms the other aspects. (Of course, the media packaging of violence is an important issue, and clearly this is one of the things that Grimwood wants to say about our society today, but using packaged violence to say it is a little disingenuous.) Although I found redRobe an interesting read, it did not lead me to want to explore Grimwood's other novels.
May 26, 2011
I enjoyed this romp through Byzantine papal politics, an assassin's mind, and just two steps into the future outlook. The technology was fascinating, both biological and straight hardware wise, and the Colt's AI was *great*. I really enjoyed it. It has graphic violence, just as a warning to those that aren't into that, but I actually found the detailing only added to the atmosphere and grit of it.
The nanotech was just barely this side of magical (laughs) and I kind of liked that. Made me really think.
The nanotech was just barely this side of magical (laughs) and I kind of liked that. Made me really think.
May 14, 2012
I hate it when I get all the way to the end of a book only to discover that there is no point to the story. I struggled through the last 50 pages of this expecting to find something that would explain what the rest of the pages were for. But no, I got nothing. Definitely don't recommend this one at all.
April 6, 2014
Graphic cyberpunk, drugs, sex and violence, all part an amazing story. I'd actually read this a few years ago and picked it up again on a whim, and it was just as great the second time. Flying silver monkeys, guns with built-in AIs, you name it, Grimwood's thought of it already. If you like Snow Crash or Neuromancer, this one should be on your list!
February 10, 2016
Strange almost cyberpunk science fiction. Assasins and the vatican.
July 30, 2011
AWESOME
October 16, 2012
There was one bit of violence to a woman in this that it really put me off. Otherwise it was interesting and good.
June 25, 2014
women are not treated well in this book, very blokey orientated. however, loved the gun and the tech.
July 26, 2014
interesting ideas but I didn't care enough about the characters to continue
September 15, 2016
I liked thisca lot more the first time I read it. I may just not be in the mood for something so relentlessly brutal. I still love the talking gun, AI with attitude.
dnf
August 8, 2017This was a bit of a cover buy because it was only $2 so I'm not too upset I didn't like it. Just not my kinds thing especially with so many points of view befote we even onew the characters well at all, it got confusing.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews