Ratings6
Average rating3.7
New York Times bestselling author Richard 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 terrifying plague sweeps through L.A., wreaking death and panic. And no one, not even a clever 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 will include a Q & A with Cory Doctorow.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've been reading and enjoying Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels recently, but I wasn't familiar with any of his earlier books. To my surprise, this book was sitting on a shelf in my office. I must have bought it years ago with several other New Ace Science Fiction Specials. Published in 1988, Metrophage is set in a hellish 21st century Los Angeles. With Japanese, Mexican and Middle Eastern corporations and oil cartels in control of a drug-addicted, modified populace, nearly every character is thinking about survival and little else. It's a bleak look our future, with an unsettling ending, in that nearly all the characters we might want to care about are dead and Jonny, who's been drifting with the tide, trying to make sense of what's happened around him, has been picked up by another wave and is heading out of town. Kadrey's story got me thinking. Are we almost in his hell?
Excellent and very typical 80s cyberpunk - anything you would expect (gangs, the MC a dealer in trouble, decaying city, a lot of shooting and car chases and running underground, oppression, drugs and so on) is definitely here. So, if I had read this in the 80s or 90s, it would have been a 5/5. Its problem is... you find in it all and exactly what you would expect from a CP, so in 2021 it feels like I've already read it many times before.