Read the wonderful interview here.
This is a great interview; I’m d.y.i.n.g. for his new book coming out next week. I feel like Gibson has an almost singular genius for being able to seemingly reach at will and get the pulse of Western cultural anxieties, that he then just…curates into something bleak, funny, textured, but with some vague tinge of hope, po-mo nihilism only sometimes tongue-in-cheek.
There’s no writer / blogger / creator whose brain I most try to invade and shamelessly steal from as Warren Ellis.
Since 14 or so, every artistic obsession of mine (what I consume, what I want to create) is rooted in his varied, rich, visceral, staggering career.
Cityscapes, the dirty urban, the sprawling technet, the weird and shimmering PRESENT and all the ways it is tense, convulsing, reaching.
Rant over — but his scribblings over at http://morning.computer are so beyond worth subjecting your eyeballs and feeble brains to.
Time for Dr Whisky and re-reading FreakAngels. Gnight dearest comrades.
Shovel Ready: A Novel by Adam Sternbergh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I will be honest and admit I wasn’t overly convinced of this novel right away; as a lover of William Gibson and Warren Ellis, the setting and premise felt a bit too familiar and overall the ground felt a bit well-tread. I knew right away I’d probably not be disappointed because this kind of gritty, noir speculative fiction is deeply in my wheelhouse, but I wasn’t sure it was going to live up to the expectations I had been building up for it for months.
In the end, I had really been swept up by this book, which manages to be more than the sum of its parts, which is not necessarily a knock on the parts. Adam Sternbergh has an obvious talent for pace and a heavily stylized narrative voice. The plot remains a bit well-worn, a heavy-drinking hitman anti-hero meandering about a dirty-bombed New York City full of shanty camp towns and the rich plugged into yet another flavor of a Matrix-like mass hallucinatory cyberspace bites off big on a strange job that only gets stranger. But Sternbergh is a fine storyteller and more than competently ushers along an engrossing tale. But the real strength here is in the frenetic tempo of the entire story, the way tension is elevated higher and higher and kept taut through the end.
The real danger of writing in a familiar genre is too easily falling into tired tropes and half-hearted style, and the book manages to mostly avoid it; the grit and noir are convincing and textured, rubbing the right away and making sure it burns. I really can’t commend enough Sternbergh’s risky approach to style, rapidly hammering one scene into the next with staccato, almost absurdly lean prose. The culminating effect feels like an action movie or graphic novel, with things getting hot early and never settling into any downtime.
I was happy to learn, as I suspected, that this isn’t a standalone debut but that at least one more ‘Spademan’ novel is in the works. I look forward to seeing how these characters and this refreshing approach to pace and structure bear out with more time. The world Sternbergh has created may not be as ultimately unique, but it’s an enjoyable nod to its predecessors and well worth spending your time in.
white walls / black ink 