Metrophage

New York: Harper Voyager, 2014. Signed First Edition, specially bound and produced by the publisher [stated]. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. [2], xvii, [3], 297, [3] pages. Signed First Edition sticker on front cover. Includes Acknowledgments and Introduction. Richard Kadrey (born August 27, 1957) is a San Francisco-based novelist. He is also a freelance writer and photographer. Kadrey has published nine novels and more than fifty stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, his short story "Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye" was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award, and his novel Butcher Bir was nominated for the Prix Elbakin in France. Kadrey's first novel, the cult classic dystopian cyberpunk tale, now back in print after twenty years in a special signed, collectible edition. Welcome to the near future: Los Angeles in the late 21st century. a segregated city of haves and have nots, where morality is dead and technology rules. Here, a small group of wealthy seclude themselves in gilded cages. Beyond their high security compounds, far from their pretty comforts, lies a lawless wasteland where the angry masses battle hunger, rampant disease, and their own despair to survive. Jonny was born into this Hobbesian paradise. A street-wise hustler who deals drugs on the black market, narcotics that heal the body and cool the mind, he looks out for nobody but himself. Until a plague sweeps through L.A., wreaking death and panic. And no one, not even an operator like Jonny, is safe. His own life hanging in the balance, Jonny must risk everything to find the cure, if there is one. The book includes a Q & A with Cory Doctorow. Derived from a 2014 review by Jason Sheehan found on-line: Metrophage is not a new book. That's important to understand right from the start. Metrophage is, in fact, 26 years old. Published originally in 1988, it was Richard Kadrey's first novel. If you know Kadrey today, it's likely from his much more recent Sandman Slim books — which tread some (slightly) similar turf, but this is a reprint. A relic. Almost like a time capsule buried and half-forgotten and, now, just brought out into the light again all chromed and bullet-holed, dripping acid rain and goop. A freshly-jacketed re-issue from a techno-literary past almost impossible to comprehend unless, as the cool kids say, you were there. A cult classic is what they call it now — an early vision of dystopian L.A. which seems to brilliantly adopt (and occasionally prefigure) all the tropes which came to define cyberpunk — until you read the included interview between Kadrey and Cory Doctorow where he admits to unabashed thievery from every big name working at the time. With Metrophage, he's like a painter working in shades of scumbag. His main man, Jonny, is a killer and a smuggler, an ex-cop turned drug runner and thief whose primary life skills seem to be smart-assery and a gutter rat's instinct for survival. His compadres are anarchist revolutionaries, murder artists and underground clinic doctors (handy since Jonny gets injured on about every other page) — street level hustlers for the most part, working the fringes of a dying Los Angeles where food riots, gunfights, catching leprosy, dog fighting, alien invasion and getting shot in the face are all just what you do on a Tuesday night. Taken all together, it's got a gleeful, anarchic edge to it that keeps you turning pages, even if only to see how long this crank-jangled mess can keep going before the wheels come completely off. If you can open wide enough to swallow the thing whole and accept it for what it was when it was bright and young, Kadrey's 26-year-old debut still has a magnetic, psychotic charm. And for those of you who come to it just for Kadrey's name on the cover, look close and you can see, buried under the clutter of floppy disks, AK-47s and CRT monitors, hints of the writer he was striving to become.