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Burn
The corporate-funded police force of Old New York dropped its investigation into a man's mysterious death by fire. Spontaneous human combustion is the rumored cause, but a down-and-out private detective, a former member of the Old New York Police Force, soon learns that this wasn't the only man to die this way.
Now, working with an inhumanly beautiful android 'Netrunner named Jonny Cache, and with a little help from a team of paranormal enthusiasts and a militant group of genetically redesigned women, he must find out who, why, and how the killings are taking place without attracting the wrath of Expedite Corp. and the police force it funds.
In a surreal twenty-first century full of androids, binaries, chip trippers, NewSchool Grrls and Morlocks, black acid rain and StellarNet obsession, we meet Cage, a private detective down on his luck. Kicked off the prestigious Old New York Police Force after having gone up against Expedite, the most powerful computer corporation in the world, he is struggling to make ends meet when fate seems to lend him a helping hand. Fragile Janice Gild comes to him with the story of the death of her brother James, a death so bizarre, Cage can only begin to guess at the method of the gruesome killing, and the motive behind it.
Soon Cage's path is littered with the burnt remains of a seemingly unconnected group of people. Only James' ex-girlfriend, the inhumanly lovely Jonny Cache, can shed any light on the victims who have been made to burn....
Now, working with an inhumanly beautiful android 'Netrunner named Jonny Cache, and with a little help from a team of paranormal enthusiasts and a militant group of genetically redesigned women, he must find out who, why, and how the killings are taking place without attracting the wrath of Expedite Corp. and the police force it funds.
In a surreal twenty-first century full of androids, binaries, chip trippers, NewSchool Grrls and Morlocks, black acid rain and StellarNet obsession, we meet Cage, a private detective down on his luck. Kicked off the prestigious Old New York Police Force after having gone up against Expedite, the most powerful computer corporation in the world, he is struggling to make ends meet when fate seems to lend him a helping hand. Fragile Janice Gild comes to him with the story of the death of her brother James, a death so bizarre, Cage can only begin to guess at the method of the gruesome killing, and the motive behind it.
Soon Cage's path is littered with the burnt remains of a seemingly unconnected group of people. Only James' ex-girlfriend, the inhumanly lovely Jonny Cache, can shed any light on the victims who have been made to burn....
168 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
8 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lyons
22 books47 followersJonathan Lyons spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Monash University and lives in Portland, Oregon. His publications include The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and (with Geneive Abdo) Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 9, 2008
I gave up on this one about halfway through... and I don't often do that. The edition I encountered (from 2000; to be fair, there is apparently a 2005 revision which might be a little better) showed no evidence of ever having been proofread or edited by anyone. There were errors that any automated run-through should have flagged ("Glenlevit" whisky?), punctuation errors, missing or extraneous words... almost every page had something wrong with it, and even when it was technically grammatical, the prose was still consistently awkward.
Try reading this sample out loud (chosen at random; this is from p.29):
"She had wanted a little adventure in her life, so she'd stayed, answered a Help Wanted ad Cage had posted, and had found herself employed in a weathered, beaten part of the Old Gotham Quarter she was grateful to be able to fly to. Ground traffic in the area was, she thought, unsavory at least and unsafe, certainly."
Awkward prose isn't a deal-breaker for me all by itself - but it does make it harder to suspend disbelief. That doesn't help this book either, since its setting is the written equivalent of what Jonathan Lyons, a "computer expert," might call shovelware. All the furniture from a half-dozen cyberpunk novels gets crammed into this book - there are clones and self-aware androids and robot bartenders and underground gene-modding; there are implanted skills-on-a-chip and virtual realities (though of course the best hackers still use keyboards); there are unironic revivals of punk and goth subcultures (ooh, scary!); all criminals and fringe elements seem to have cooler and more effective technology than any of their lumbering oppressors, even though the oppressors have all the money and power; there's environmental collapse and rising sea levels but also flying cars and intercontinental ballistic passenger service...
Sometimes the contradictory features of the landscape don't make even cursory sense; in this world, the streets are still crowded and you can still get Laphroaig whisky in any bar in Li'l Ole New York - even though "we've had to construct a fake food chain to keep everyone from starving" - or, at least, that's what the annoyingly-named Kali says on p.100. (Actually, it's spelled K, superscript a, British pound sign, upside-down exclamation mark; that must've been almost as much pain to type even once for the macro as it was to read over and over.) The orthographically-challenged Kali goes on, a page later:
"Cultured, steroid-boosted, antibiotics-laced nori is the cultivated food-base paste most of our food is made from, not because meat and milk are so good for you Cage, not because meat and milk are such a delicacy, but because we killed everything."
I'm not sure - Kali might have been overreacting - but it was shortly after that rant that my interest in reading any more about Cage and Jonny Cache (yes, really) and the rest of the madcap gang finally died.
Try reading this sample out loud (chosen at random; this is from p.29):
"She had wanted a little adventure in her life, so she'd stayed, answered a Help Wanted ad Cage had posted, and had found herself employed in a weathered, beaten part of the Old Gotham Quarter she was grateful to be able to fly to. Ground traffic in the area was, she thought, unsavory at least and unsafe, certainly."
Awkward prose isn't a deal-breaker for me all by itself - but it does make it harder to suspend disbelief. That doesn't help this book either, since its setting is the written equivalent of what Jonathan Lyons, a "computer expert," might call shovelware. All the furniture from a half-dozen cyberpunk novels gets crammed into this book - there are clones and self-aware androids and robot bartenders and underground gene-modding; there are implanted skills-on-a-chip and virtual realities (though of course the best hackers still use keyboards); there are unironic revivals of punk and goth subcultures (ooh, scary!); all criminals and fringe elements seem to have cooler and more effective technology than any of their lumbering oppressors, even though the oppressors have all the money and power; there's environmental collapse and rising sea levels but also flying cars and intercontinental ballistic passenger service...
Sometimes the contradictory features of the landscape don't make even cursory sense; in this world, the streets are still crowded and you can still get Laphroaig whisky in any bar in Li'l Ole New York - even though "we've had to construct a fake food chain to keep everyone from starving" - or, at least, that's what the annoyingly-named Kali says on p.100. (Actually, it's spelled K, superscript a, British pound sign, upside-down exclamation mark; that must've been almost as much pain to type even once for the macro as it was to read over and over.) The orthographically-challenged Kali goes on, a page later:
"Cultured, steroid-boosted, antibiotics-laced nori is the cultivated food-base paste most of our food is made from, not because meat and milk are so good for you Cage, not because meat and milk are such a delicacy, but because we killed everything."
I'm not sure - Kali might have been overreacting - but it was shortly after that rant that my interest in reading any more about Cage and Jonny Cache (yes, really) and the rest of the madcap gang finally died.
Displaying 1 of 1 review