I feel quite the slacker. Not only was I running behind in Alyssa Rosenberg's book club, I'm bailing out before finishing. [I feel particularly bad, as I voted for it in the tiebreaker. I should have listened to my wife.] Chasm City is a reasonable noir/science fiction tale about a hard-bitten security expert out for revenge and a megalomaniac that had colonized the protagonist's world ages before. I think it manages to be fairly solid on the science; foe example, there's no faster than light drives. The novel has some interesting ideas, such as a cultist virus that can implant flashbacks and stigmata, and a city whose upper reaches have gone mad due to the combination of programmable growing buildings and a form of computer virus. The pacing, at least outside of the flashbacks, is fairly quick which kept me turning pages even when the content did not grab me.
However, while I could sense [Alastair Reynold's] creative, hard-working mind behind the book, I've chosen to put it down. As I mentioned in my review of Blacksad, I don't tend to enjoy straight noir and in this case science fiction wasn't enough of a twist. I didn't really care about the main character's underwhelming revenge motive and while I got attached to ancillary characters, they didn't stick around for long. Moreover, the wars and apocalypses of this universe distance us from the speculative future that undergirds it. Chasm City before the crash sounds like it would be something to see, although from what I've read of Rosenberg's posts on the book the life-extended aristocracy is consistently hateful so even then we'd be at a loss for interesting characters.
I like noir adaptations like Brick, Veronica Mars, Blacksad, and Cowboy Bebop because it is fun to see styles breed. There's nothing wrong with a hard-bitten hero, but that alone can't carry the story for me. Moreover, noir's love of pushing away or killing secondary characters and penchant for misogyny are both weak points of the genre that weren't overcome in the first sixteen chapters. On the upside, I was reminded of my love of Cowboy Bebop by comparison: the supporting cast that noir-émigré Spike can't get rid of, the vibrant world that stays grounded without being constantly run down, and of course the vibrant soundtrack that requires exceptional writing to match. Bebop's ending is pure noir and that's okay; in film-sized doses, as with L.A. Confidential, noir works for me. However, I don't think I'll be picking up another long form noir unless I'm confident that it transcends the genre.
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