Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #614307 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Steel-eating mutant bacteria have reduced Europe to isolated, barbarous rubble and Nazi cossacks are at the gates of Imperial Paris. LizAlec, adopted daughter of Lady Claire, icily glamourous head of Imperial security, is kidnapped from a lunar Arrivals Lounge on her way to finishing school, and rescued by a one-lunged outcast who keeps his best friend's head in a coolbox. Everyone wants a piece of LizAlec--her mother's rivals, a murderous tele-evangelist who lives in a space ark, her burned-out cyborg rock star boyfriend, and whatever it is that lurks in her own body and makes her surprisingly competent in emergencies. Grimwood has made a modest career out of the realisation that cyberpunk long ago ceased to be the messianic next big thing in sf and became a set of gestures and a marketing ploy. The intelligent absurdities of his plotting, a vein of perverse eroticism, and his love affair with the brand-named impedimenta of an improbable high-tech future, add up to superior brain candy; a caper thriller with ideas in orbit above its station. There is a place for glossy fluff in sf, and Grimwood occupies it with real competence. --Roz Kaveney

Synopsis
LizAlec is wired for sound, speed and anything else that money can buy. But she's abducted. Her mother's a French minister, who moves Heaven and Earth to find her. Fixx fixes things - recordings, people, anything that makes money. Some of him is almost human. Now he has to find LizAlec.

From the Author
Vicious, blackly-witty, violent...
When LizAlec Fabio goes missing on her way to school, her mother knows just the person to get her back, Fixx Valmont - burned-out DJ and crystalMeth addict.

Only Fixx isn't just in jail facing statutory-rape charges relating to LizAlec - he's legless. Literally, since Lady Clare Fabio had Fixx's legs chopped off at the hips to stop him doing a runner.

Meanwhile, aboard the Arc, Sister Aaron is collecting together two of every species to create a new Eden in deep space, while Brother Michael is even busier collecting handmaidens. Paris is under seige from the Fourth Reich and a virus is sweeping Europe, eating all the steel in its path.

Customer Reviews

whats everybodies problem?
I read this book a while ago, and I can't possibly see how people can shadow this book. The characters are believable and and the story-telling is brutal and inline with the aggressive and often violent, gritty storyline.

This book reads incredibly tightly and the ideas that JCG uses are original and well explained. I think that all credit is due for this book to the author, as the novel reads well and is a good individual statement which thumbs its nose at the conformist way of writing (whirlwind in a teacup).

Whether cyberpunk is, or isnt your deal, this offering is a slap in the face that will leave you wanting to read more. And its a bargain too now that it isnt brand new...

A total waste of time and money
Ths is THE WORST cyberpunk novel I have read, and boy have I read a lot!. The plot is just about suitable for Days of our Lives, ie truly awfull. Where the plot gets too thin, Grimwwod has punctuated it with highly graphic sex and violence, neither of which are even vaugely compelling, and just tend to iritate! There is ONE good idea in the book, that being the anti-steel nano virus thing. Unfortuneately, this is basically left in the background in favour of the travels of the highly irritating main character and his pointless and inane travels. If you wanted to read cyberpunk, try Neal Stephenson, Jeff Noon or Michael Marshall Smith (who does what Grimwood fails to do effortlessly, write fluid, funny pageturning cyber-novels, as opposed to the more complex works of the other authors mentioned). All of these are also recomened by other reviewers here, get the message... Lastly, and I hate to have to TELL people this, just go and find a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson, since reading this will make it clear that the only place for grimwood's novels is blessed obscurity!

I didn't know they still printed this kind of rubbish...
Sci-fi novels are great. Lacking in credibility maybe, but generally they're great fun, combining brain-stretching ideas with often underrated plotting. William Gibson once wrote a genre-defining novel called 'Neuromancer' in the eighties and started an avalanche of wannabe cyberpunk-novelists. About a decade or so later, Grimwood decides to riff on the cyberpunk idea and produces one of the worst novels of any genre I've ever had the misfortune to read. It's high-octane, ultra-violent soft-core adolescent trash. Clichéd characters, a total lack of new or interesting ideas and a frankly terrible story. In his defence, Grimwood writes with some visceral energy, but he fails to convert this energy to his plotting.

If you like your reading high on action and don't care about being gripped by the story, my advice is to go out and buy a graphic novel instead - there are plenty of great ones around, and many of them offer deeper and more satisfying reads than this. 'reMix' is the kind of novel that gives sci-fi a bad name. Whilst two-dimensional rubbish like this is still being printed, talented writers like Michael Marshall Smith and Jeff Noon will never get the credit they deserve.