by John Shirley.
(Northridge, California): Babbage Press, 1999-2000.
First revised & updated edition, first printing; trade paperback.
Fine in illustrated wraps.
Cover art for all three volumes by Lydia C. Marano.
A three volume set.
"Like many works defining the wild cyberpunk fringe in the 1980s, this
depiction of a near-future dystopia, here revised and updated since its
1985 debut, seems almost acceptably mainstream today. But Shirley's
spiky prose and edgy attitudes, which lately have cultivated a following
among horror readers (Wetbones; Really, Really, Really, Really Weird
Stories), still hook the reader's attention. Tapping anxieties about
rising global nationalism, Shirley presents a Goya-esque vision of
war-torn western Europe, bombed out and unstable in the early years of
the 21st century from a resurgence of Russian militarism and the
collapse of NATO. The Second Alliance, a government-sanctioned
multinational police force, has rushed in to restore order and revealed
itself a nightmarish incarnation of every fascist and fundamentalist
power fantasy. The only defense against the Alliance's creeping
totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot pick-up team of rebels
that includes Rick Rickenharp, a tripping retro guitarist whose
artistic and political sensibilities are sinuously intertwined, and John
Swenson, a mole whose soul is blackened through his infiltration of the
Alliance. Stitched together from vivid swatches of action and intrigue
alternating kaleidoscopically between Earth sites and the orbiting
FirStep space colony, the novel offers a thrashy punk riff on science
fiction's familiar future war scenario and lays a solid foundation for
the subsequent volumes of Shirley's "A Song Called Youth" trilogy."--Publisher's Weekly.
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