New York Nights

Virex Trilogy #1

by Eric Brown

New York in 2040 is a city of the lost. A good place to work in Missing Persons. But business is not quite good enough for Hal Halliday to forget his sister, burned alive when only child all those years ago. And now VR offers the chance of bringing her back, the future may yet allow Hal to live in the past. If he can survive the next job . . .

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Ebooks

327 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Eric Brown was a British science fiction author and Guardian critic.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tech-noir, set in 2040 in a New York City (NYC), suffering from Gaia's Vengeance , and involving a: Private Investigator (PI) with a Dark and Troubled Past , an AI That Grew Beyond its Programming , and Virtual-Reality Warping . First book in the author’s Virex trilogy.


New York Nights VR Immersion “Tanks”

My dead tree copy was a moderate 327 pages long. It had a UK 2000 copyright.

Eric Brown was a British science fiction author. He passed in 2023 at the age of 63. He was the author of more than 20 science fiction books in both series and standalone. This was the fourth book I’ve read by the author. The last being Cosmopath (Bengal Station #3).

I found this book and the two other books of the trilogy near the bottom of my physical TBR. I’d bought them, nearly 15-years ago, whilst living in the UK, after finishing the author’s Bengal Station trilogy. They went into a box, when I returned to the States, stayed there for years, and were recently unearthed, along with other old chestnuts. Its time had come. Only when I started reading it did I realize the book was 25-years old and by a Brit writing about an American place and characters still 15-years in the future.

TL;DR

Ex-NYPD cops, and now PIs Hal Halliday and Barney Kruger run a struggling detective agency specializing in missing persons. Both were broken men. However, they’re not starving. They’re hired to find a missing female tech guru, by her female partner. The real police were overburdened and unsympathetic. The investigation quickly gets both violent and complicated involving: competing VR startups, thugs and assassins, a peculiar variant of the L word, Brain/Computer Interface and an unforeseen consequence of the synergy between AI and VR.

In a Four Lines, All Waiting structure, Brown’s ensemble cast of characters and their relationships, past and present jostle with the SF AI/VR plotline. Not all of these were handled as well as the others.

The Review

Brown was a proficient, experienced author. Both dialog and descriptive prose were good. Note this book’s prose was written in an attempt at the hard-boiled ‘American-style’, vs. the author’s native Brit. Dialog was good. Although it did not contain a lot of the snappy irony and sarcastic patter expected in a PI story. The descriptive narrative was also good. However, in both the dialog, and descriptive prose for Brown’s American NYC, there were more than a few British-isms. For example, NYC doesn’t have “kerbs”. I suspect this was because I had a UK-published copy, which had not been thoroughly “Americanized” for publication in the States? In addition, over 25-years, the context of words and idioms has changed. For example, “dyke” is not a term completely embraced by the modern lesbian community. Some folks may find the lesbian plot element offensive?

There were a few POVs. Hal Halliday was the nominal “main” protagonist. He was an introverted character, the product of an overbearing male single parent household. He did not feel he was being a success, despite some evidence to the contrary. Halliday, was good at his job. Frankly, he was better than I would have expected at being an “Action Hero,” given his mundane, ex-police background. Barney Kruger was Halliday’s, senior partner. He had a supporting POV. He was both the older man and original founder of the agency. A relatively recent widower, he was on a long, slow spiral downward. With his wife’s passing, he was lost, and develops a VR-addiction. He’s a not quite a Retired Badass . Anna Ellischild was a supporting POV. She’s also Halliday’s estranged sister. She’s the partner of a female tech guru working for a competitor of the now missing tech guru's firm. She’s a literary novelist wannabee. Paradoxically, she’s gotten wealthy as a screenwriter of lesbian, softcore, pr0n for media under a pseudonym. She’s feeling unfulfilled.

The nominal antagonist was a Eccentric A.I.. However, regarding the supporting plotlines, for: Halliday, it was Internal Conflict; for Kruger it was Another Character, his past wife; and with Ellischild it was Circumstances, her success at lowbrow media vs. literary novels.

The story also contained a host of supporting characters with some riffs on hard-boiled arch-types. Kruger typically "knew a guy or gal", for everything that was needed to move the plot along. There was the peculiar lesbian subculture, which included: "good Girls"; “good Bad Girls”; and “bad Good Girls”. Being ex-cops, Halliday and Kruger only knew “Good Cops”. There were “Techies”, capable of prodigious feats of Hollywood Hacking and hardware magic. The story also included: thugs, doctors, bureaucrats, bartenders, cabbies and refugees of the ecologic catastrophe. Interestingly—there were no Lawyers, crooked or otherwise.

For a short (~350 pages) book, plotting was OK. There were fewer red herrings than expected. However, the Tech/Thriller plotline was only the first amongst equals amongst both Halliday’s, Kruger's and Ellischild’s. This left me feeling the book was more character study than thriller? The convergence of their plotlines, and “solving the case” left the reader with a HFN ending. Not uncommon in a series. However, hardboiled stories typically have unhappy endings.

The story contained: sex, drugs, no Rock ‘n Roll and violence.

Halliday had consensual sex. All sex was moderately graphic with an artfully descriptive pre-amble. Interestingly, in 2040 tobacco products were still being consumed. Alcohol, was consumed, although not in excess. This ran counter to the hardboiled genre. Women drank “cocktails” mixed at bars and wine at home. The men drank beer and not out of a can. No pharmaceutical or black-market drug abuse was mentioned even within the demimonde. VR dependency was not called-out explicitly, but should have. There was no future Rock ‘n Roll or music of any kind mentioned.

Violence was moderate. It was physical, firearms, non-lethal weapons, and futuristic laser related edged weapons. Both Halliday and Kruger were tough, but not particularly skilled marksman. It should be noted that Brown’s descriptions, like many authors not living in a gun culture, showed unfamiliarity with handguns. Tasers hadn't been invented yet? A strange "Freeze" device was the author's invention to knockout bad guys. A magic high-tech knife was the reviled weapon of bad guys. It cut through people and things like butter. Halliday and Kruger kicked-ass when provoked and for revenge. Halliday did take the kind of physical punishment that would have killed a lessor man. He likewise displayed the marvelous recuperative powers of almost all fictional Action Heroes. Resulted trauma from violence was moderately descriptive. Body count was moderate.

The world building was mixed and peculiar. For a book written in 2000, and set in 2040, it was interesting to contrast Brown’s exercise in futurism with 15-years short of the reality.

Location of the story was New York City (Manhattan) in 2040, Westchester and Nassau Counties. The description of “The City,” felt like it came from maps and guidebooks. I noted that the World Trade Center (1973–2001) was still standing.

Due to terrorism and misadventure, there was an ecological collapse in-progress. It appears to have been a Nuclear Winter? The city had a surfeit of refugees from the US states to the west and the south and some from offshore. A familiarity with modern, urban, homeless encampments provided greater fidelity than Brown’s descriptions. Folks were oddly not starving? It was gritty enough, outside of the upper-class, New Yorker’s apartments. I suppose a nuclear winter was just as bad as Climate Change?

The tech in use, reminded me of that found in a low-budget movie. It felt antiquated, but serviceable in context. The VR took several forms. In some ways it was the best developed tech. There were VR building facades and balaclava-like masks, to change exterior looks. The personal experience of VR occurred in large, sensory deprivation tanks, wired for: sight, sound, smell(?), and feel. Occupants entered the tank nude with a breathing apparatus. That was a far cry from a contemporary visor, with optional Teledildonics ? The AI was less well fleshed out. For example, it wasn’t as pervasive and integrated into applications as it is today. It was more HAL 9000-like, and not like the cheerful, subservient, Siri or Alexa chatbots. Other things that stuck out were: a lack of self-driving cars and ride-shares vs. cabbies driving yellow hacks, paying with cash and “cheque” vs. credit, 50GB of storage and US$50K were enormous quantities, and folks not carrying portable computer technology (smart phones, laptops, or tablets).

It should be noted that this being the first book in the authors’ Virex trilogy, that Virex was only mentioned once in passing. They’re a Luddite, terrorist group.

Summary

Twenty-five years ago, when this book was written, both AI and VR were acronyms not getting a lot of use in science fiction. Since then, savvy readers all know about LLMs, the more useful Augmented Reality (AR), and DoFs. Today, I use AI regularly, and own a VR headset. Neither AI or VR in 2025 is developing as imagined in Brown’s 2040.

Also, I’ve lived and worked in NYC several times, sometimes for long periods, before and after this book was written. I've been the 'native guide', for visitors from the UK; taking them to hip NYC restaurants and bars. Brown (a Brit), most likely never lived there? His native NYC characters, didn’t speak or act like New Yorkers. Behaviorally, they were more like expat Canadians, who hadn’t completely figured-out NYC yet? Setting the story in London, would likely have had greater verisimilitude.

Still, this story was a solid, albeit aged, tech-noir. It loosely held true to the hard-boiled PI genre, while stretching the then available tech to a credible future minimum, with a lot of VR window dressing. Unfortunately, Brown kept to his own more literary, prose-style, rather than trying to more closely imitate hardboiled. The level of technical detail was good, taking into account the age of the book. In fact, picking-at his alt-future development, made the story more interesting. (At least to me.) However, this was more a character study than an SF story. The ending was also somewhat problematic. The hardboiled genre's No happy endings requirement, was somewhat satisfied when the author pulled a HFN. It also made me wonder if there would be a second appearance of the characters in the series?

Readers should have at least a passing acquaintance with classic hard-boiled, to get the most out of this novel. However, the story was mostly three-character studies. Finally, this book was blissfully short in comparison to the current bloated science fiction novels commonly available.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a random, free download, on Kindle, I really wasn't sure what to expect from this. I'd heard of neither the Virex series, nor of Eric Brown before, but I was going through a phase of eagerly downloading anything free and vaguely science-fictiony. Consequently, I ended up on holiday with a Kindle full of books that I couldn't have told apart in a line-up. Luckily I had a friend's daughter there to choose the next book for me, through the power of a complicated rhyme and paging through the list of books one by one until she declared this the winner.

Initially it seemed like it was going to be a hard slog. The book started out positively purple, with far too many adjectives per noun. Then Brown introduced a cast of alternative lifestyle lesbians and I worried it was going to end up one of those man-writes-in-too-much-detail-about-lesbians books. Luckily, once the plot kicked in I was left with a science-fiction crime-noir tale set in a run-down futuristic New York. Hal Halliday and Barney Kluger, both grizzled ex-cops, run a less-than-glamorous detective agency in the lower-rent side of Spanish Harlem. They specialise in finding missing people, however with the recent influx of refugees, this isn't as easy as they'd like. The story revolves mostly around the single case: Carrie Villeux has hired them to find her missing lover, Sissi Nigeria. As Carrie and Sissi are futuristic alternative-culture lesbians, this gives the two detectives plenty of opportunity to excercise their dated, paternalistic views, while still being the good guys and Brown is careful to not let the book stray into the horrible mess of stereotype and cliché it could have so easily been. Sissi is a leading engineer with a virtual reality company, which provides the convenient science-fiction hook. And before we know it we have multiple dead bodies and the case is much larger than they, or the police, have realised. A pleasant mix of Bladerunner, I Robot (the movie more than the book) and with a similar feel to Gregory S. Fallis's Dog on Fire (although nowhere near as well structured, written or characterised) - I found myself racing through the book to find out what happens in the end.

Annoyingly, the book contained a number of quite annoying typos and odd acronyms. The early, and repeated, use of 'ms' as shorthand for manuscript was very confusing - I had to look it up. The typos start about half way through, and increase in frequency as you approach the end. Either the editor had given up by that point, or had become so engrossed in the story that he had stopped actually checking the text.

[Metaphorosis · Rating 3 out of 5]

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3 stars

The junior partner in a detective agency, Halliday follows up on a new missing persons case that turns out to be far more complicated and serious than it seems. As he follows the leads in a near-future New York City, more and more his nearest and dearest get involved, and the stakes get higher and higher.

Have patience with this book; try to get at least a few chapters in. After that, it's not bad. Those first few chapters, though, are a very tough read. If I hadn't already read several Brown books, I'd have stopped there. The first chapters exhibit stereotypes left and right, including particularly offensive treatment of lesbians. Every few pages I'd think of giving up in disgust, but kept searching for a sign that this was just a character viewpoint we were seeing. That was never clearly expressed, but after a while the offensiveness toned down (though quite a bit of stereotyping remained). The protagonist, Halliday, seems otherwise likeable, but we never really see any indication that his viewpoint has changed - he just uses milder terminology. There is a chapter from a lesbian's point of view that is much more bearable, so perhaps it really is a just an offensive trait of the character rather than the author.

Potential bigotry aside... This is a straightforward detective story with SF elements. There's nothing here you haven't seen in one form or another, but it's put together fairly well on both genre fronts. There are moments of dialogue or word choice that seem to betray Brown's non-NY origins, but they're minor. (I do wonder why so many non-American authors seem to feel compelled to set their stories in the US, but that's another issue.) The story itself works fairly well on plotting, character, and story, and the mechanics are good. In fact, in some ways, the story is more complete than some of his later more successful work.

If you're a fan of SF detective stories, by all means give this a try. If you can make it past the first two chapters, you'll be okay. If not, try some of Brown's other work - Helix, perhaps. I'll be going on to the next book in the series because... well, because I already have it, and because I know the stereotypes are not the whole story - just a (substantial) barrier to it.

Fair number of typos.

[Hyman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first came across Eric Brown’s work in The Fall of Tartarus, a collection of short stories I stumbled upon while working in India. The premise hooked me immediately: a world doomed to destruction in a century, a blend of medieval superstition and high-tech intergalactic civilization, fanatical cults lurking in the shadows. At least, that was the promise of the back cover. In reality, those elements were more like background flourishes than integral parts of the stories themselves. But despite that, I found myself charmed. Brown’s characters had warmth, his writing was engaging, and a few of those stories have stayed with me as some of my favorite sci-fi shorts of all time.

A couple of years later, working in Thailand, I came across New York Dreams, the third book in Brown’s Virex trilogy. I enjoyed it. The concept of people immersing themselves in isolation tanks to spend their lives in virtual reality was intriguing. But by the end, I felt the story fell apart.

Which brings me to "New York Nights", the first book in the trilogy, which I’ve just finished reading. And I find myself running into the same issues that nagged at me with "New York Dreams". The characters are likable. The writing is easygoing. The concepts are fun. But the world he’s built feels flimsy, like window dressing for a story that doesn’t really need it.

The obvious comparison is to William Gibson, whose future landscapes feel like places you could get lost in. Gibson’s setting is oppressive, inescapable, and fundamental to the narrative. You couldn’t strip the sci-fi out of Neuromancer and have anything left. Brown, on the other hand, has crafted a future where holograms can disguise identities, buildings can be made to look like something else entirely, and virtual reality is immersive to the point of bodily transformation… but none of it feels fully realized. These are cool ideas, but they never become more than props.

And that’s the problem. The best science fiction holds up a mirror to our own world. The Time Machine isn’t just about a distant future where the rich are cattle and the poor are cannibals—it’s about the social anxieties of H.G. Wells’ own time. Neuromancer paints a future where human connection has withered away, replaced by intimacy with technology. But what does New York Nights say about us? That’s where Brown misses an opportunity. He’s created a world drowning in illusions—holograms, VR escapism, a society ignoring its own collapse—but rather than using these elements to make a statement, he uses them as the backdrop for a fairly standard hard-boiled detective story.

Which is fine. I have no problem with a sci-fi detective novel. But if that’s what you’re going for, then commit to it. I don't know, maybe Dresden Files in the future with Sci Fi instead of supernatural elements? Instead, Brown seems caught in the middle, unsure of what he wants his book to be.

Take the antagonist: an AI that hijacks the minds of people with neural implants, turning them into puppets. That’s a fantastic idea. It could be terrifying. It could be the foundation for a gripping psychological thriller. Instead, it’s treated as just another obstacle for our protagonist, Halliday, to overcome. It’s another prop.

And if all the sci-fi elements are just props, then what’s the actual story? Mostly, Halliday’s relationship with his Chinese girlfriend, which is cute, even if her portrayal might raise some eyebrows today. His partnership with Barney is solid. They work well together and still have good relationships with the police department they left behind, which adds a nice change of pace from the usual “ex-cops vs. the system” trope.

But even with that, the world still doesn’t feel integrated into the story. We could strip the futuristic setting away and tell the same basic detective tale in a modern-day thriller—swap the AI villain for a government mind control experiment and it would work just as well.

Try doing that with Neuromancer. You can’t.

The novel also suffers from pacing issues, particularly in the second half, where it starts to lumber under its own weight. Halliday’s personal backstory—his estranged sister, his guilt over the twin he couldn’t save, the occasional “ghost” of his dead sibling haunting him—feels like it belongs in a different novel. It’s a forced attempt to give him depth, but it never really ties into the main narrative in a meaningful way.

At the end of the day, New York Nights isn’t bad. It’s got enjoyable characters, some fun ideas, and a narrative that keeps you going, even if it drags in places. But in the end, it feels thin. It’s a detective story first, and a science fiction novel second. And maybe that’s why, as much affection as I have for Brown, I can’t shake the feeling that this book, like its world, is more of a façade than something fully lived-in.

[david james · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Eric Brown. A frayed at the seams detective hired to find a missing lover, which turns into a much more complicated and far reaching case.

Set in a 2040's New York this is a futuristic cyber-punk, crime-noir thriller, and once you get through the first few chapters (which are slow going as they set the scene), the book is one that is hard to put down.

This is the 8th or 9th Eric Brown book I've read (most of which is pure SF), and he's yet to disappoint me.

This is the first of a trilogy, and I'm already half way through the next, New York Blues.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An atmospheric near-future detective tale set at the dawning of realistic VR for popular use, New York Nights neatly captures an investigation in which technological advancement muddies the waters of appearance and motivation. When the past, present and future intersect in an otherwise standard case, this tech-thriller evolves into a very human story filled with intelligence and careful observations as several partners seek answers to complex questions.

Brown’s writing contains good energy and style, and his New York of 2040 is nicely realised as a living city full of contrasts: a metropolis of many peoples, operating 24 hours a day. Sci-fi, crime and cyberpunk fans will likely find something of interest here, as will anyone interested in solid storytelling containing believable characters and situations.

[Drowned · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asi budu za blázna, ale mě se kniha líbila bez výhrad od začátku do konce. Letos čtu jen samé sci-fi a tohle namíchání s detektivkou je pro mě skvělé osvěžení. Nechybělo mi napětí, nečekané zvraty, trocha hraní si s emocemi čtenáře a to vše okořeněné virtuální realitou či počítačovým programem ovládající celý New York budoucnosti. Proč ne?

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

'2040. New York is crowded with the lost. Refugees from the radioactive eastern seaboard, the splintered remains of a society in freefall, walk the streets and spend their last dollars on an hour snatched in one of the new Virtual Reality paradises.

In a society bent on escape, Missing Persons is a good business to be in. If nothing else it keeps Hal Halliday busy enough to avoid his past.

But the past is not so easy to escape.

NEW YORK NIGHTS is a fast moving yet thought-provoking SF thriller. It examines the human costs of isolation and escapism in a future that offers wild possibilities.'

Blurb from the 2001 Gollancz paperback edition

This, the first novel in the Virex trilogy introduces Hal Halliday - an affable New York ex-cop turned private eye of the mid Twenty-First Century – and his older partner Barney.
The duo run a semi-successful business chasing missing persons and assisting the local PD with cold cases.
Hal is intrigues by the case of Sissy Nigeria, reported missing by her lesbian lover. It’s a seemingly simple case but one which becomes more complex when Hal is attacked by a shape-shifter in the missing woman’s flat.
Sissy’s home computer system has been burnt out and Hal later discovers that her research work for Cybertech involved the creation of machine intelligence.
Despite a lack of complexity and some coincidences which stretch credulity, Brown has created a compelling an highly readable novel which races along like a cyborg greyhound.
The most intriguing aspect is perhaps Brown’s depiction of a Lesbian Separatist community of which his estranged sister is a member. He manages to avoid cliched stereotypes without being preciously politically correct, and sets the stage for the next two books in the series. Indeed the whole novel has the feel of the TV pilot which sets up the relationships between the major characters and sets them in context before moving on to the meat and potatoes of the narrative.
Brown doesn’t go far enough to explore the potentialities of VR, although there are some truly innovative moments, such as the interactive holosoap. One can log in to a virtual city, adopt a character and literally become one of the three million stories in the Naked City, which run perpetually.
‘New York Nights’ is that rare thing in SF of the period, a novel which is too short. One expects the detective to be wrong-footed by red herrings and following various nebulous leads. This is what detectives do. If one compares this to Morgan’s ‘Altered Carbon’ – a novel of similar style but superior quality – one immediately notes the differences. Morgan’s novel is full of character and location detail, layered over a zig-zagging plotline. Brown lacks the detail and therefore this novel, although workmanlike, lacks atmosphere.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

An AI goes hostile, escapes onto the net, takes over several humans, but is then captured (dramatically), and finally investigated, by the same people who were dumb enough to create it in the first place and let it escape. ummm. All set in a dystopian New York of 2040 (anyone old enough to remember when the future was a better place?). Not bad, but a tad wordy. I don't think that I will be re-reading or reading the other two in the trilogy.

[Kaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read. Looking forward to the next two in the Virex series.

[Andres · Rating 1 out of 5]

Primer libro en que aplico mi mueva política. Leo hasta la página 50 aprox, si no me gusta se cierra y bye. No time for bad reading. Too many pendings.
Este no tenía gusto a nada.