Headlong Book

When they take away your electronic add-ons, new senses and new ways of thinking, you get sick and apathetic and want to die. Yale and his wife Joanne built cities on the Moon, but now nobody wants to know; Artificial Intelligences have sent mere humans home, and the authorities are frightened of what people might be allowed to become if the wires are not stripped out of their heads. And now Joanne is mysteriously dead, and nobody wants to know about that either; Yale has had enough, and starts wandering around asking awkward questions, and soon people are trying to kill him, and he is discovering that he has a nasty temper... The gloomiest of Simon Ings' triptych of novels about the transhuman condition, this is less fancy than Hot Head and Hotwire; more like a thriller and less like a space opera. There is pain in all three books, but only here is there a sense that there are some pains which will never go away. Set in a decaying London and derelict Yorkshire of the near future, this is perhaps Ings' most adult and intelligent novel; sf that refuses the stock consolations of sf. --Roz KaveneyRead More