his collection is the first from Spinrad in many years, appearing coincidentally with his new novel, The Druid King.
The main offering here is a short novel originally published in standalone form in 1993. "Deus X" is a narrative split between two tellers. Marley Phillipe is a cyberspace cowboy on a dying Earth. The planet is nearly terminal from pollution, overpopulation and global warming. But the tattered societies still manage to run a version of cyberspace known as the Big Board. Marley is a loner and a roamer, piloting his self-contained "windfoil sailer" around the globe without ever making substantial landfall, so as to avoid the chaos onshore. Jacked in wirelessly, he does PI work on the Big Board while blissfully afloat and stoned, for any client who will pay him.
Our other narrator is Father De Leone, a dying elderly Roman Catholic priest. Father De Leone is planning on making a graceful exit from this mortal coil when he is tapped by Pope Mary I for a final assignment. The RC Church has adamantly inveighed against granting full soul status to the various "successor entities" dwelling in the Big Board. In fact, uploading one's consciousness is deemed a mortal sin. But now Pope Mary is contemplating a change in papal policy, and wants to send De Leone over to the Other Side as her investigator. He reluctantly consents.
But once on the Other Side, De Leone's software self is stolen away by the mysterious AI entities that hide behind the Vortex, and Marley Phillipe is hired by the Church to bring De Leone back. What Marley finds when he visits the Big Board is a theological tarpit. And although he might indeed rescue De Leone, it appears that will merely be the start of his responsibilities.
The remaining story and novella both revolve around addiction of one sort or another. The more humorous entry is the shorter one, "The Fat Vampire." In Hollywood society, one can never be too thin. This is a lesson fading starlet Christine Coleman has internalized to the point of practicing bulimia. But when she meets and begins dating the mysterious Armand Kubescu—an elegant, trim foreigner—she finds herself inexplicably adding pound after pound to her frame, despite endless trips to the toilet. Could it have something to do with Kubescu's own nonstop eating? Why not ask his ex-girlfriends, all fat as blimps?
In "Vampire Junkies," a comic inferno, poor, immortal Count Vlad the Impaler, the first and best vampire, finds himself in New York City, after being forced to flee the fall of Communist Romania. There, it is his misfortune to pick as his first victim a heroin-shooting hooker called Little Mary Sunshine. Even as the count passes his plague to her, she passes her plague to him. Now New York faces a pair of hungry, hungry harpies.
A cynical serving of late-period cyberpunk
Norman Spinrad possesses a castigating, flensing, witty voice too long absent from the short-fiction arena. Even though these stories are not absolute top-drawer Spinrad on the lines of those in his classic collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970), they will amply repay the aficionado of Spinrad's caustic assaults on hypocrisy, sham and pigheadedness.
The title piece sits solidly on the pioneering cyberpunk work of Gibson, Sterling, Vinge, et al. Spinrad was an early partisan of the movement, and he has analytically penetrated to the gist of its attractions, then adapted them to his own style and concerns. His depiction of cyberspace has its own novel elements, and his portrait of the fouled, dying Earth is heartfelt and brutal. Marley Phillipe shares some of the family pedigree of Rudy Rucker's stoner dudes. But, surprisingly, the theological aspects of the story are the most sustained. In this regard, Spinrad is working the territory of James Blish and Anthony Boucher as much as he is mining the cyberpunk vein.
After this centerpiece, the other two stories are entertaining, but relatively slight. "The Fat Vampire" has a kind of manic Monty Python quality to it, all surface glitz and parody. Still, there's satisfaction in seeing the evil Kubescu defeated at his own game. "Vampire Junkies"—and note that the title is a clever blending of the notions of "vampires who are junkies" and "vampires who prey on junkies"—starts out a mix of giddy and gritty before finally culminating in tragedy. But you have to love any story that finds a rather sheltered Count Dracula frightened by the more horrific aspects of street life in New York City.
Regard this collection as merely a pint or two of Spinrad's rich, heady blood. It will surely whet your hunger, making you jones for more Spinrad short fiction soon.
