| Nova Swing | Contributor: Edwin | Posted: 18/02/07 | 09:32 |
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page 3 of 4 This is Cyberpunk, future stories about the marginalised and disenfranchised, who skirt the societal norms. Harrison has a great affinity for oddly juxtaposed things, from teen fashion and music scenes to the sorrow of a grieving widower, the atmosphere inside a dance club, how personal outlook shapes a person’s ultimate ambitions, and the raw street politics of physical violence. Yet, rather than the narcotic-chic of Gibson's young drug dealers, assassins and hackers, Harrison's protagonists are ageing, socially awkward, overweight or simple. One character’s practical caring for her elderly father is chronicled in unsettling detail. Harrison’s universe could be described as Cyber-"shabby-chic". Tourists visit the Saudade site, risk their lives and emerge with unreliable acid-trip like travelogues. Which brings us to Vic Serotonin, our protagonist. Vic is a tour guide of sorts, making a living by taking curious tourists into the aureole of the site and supervising their experiences within. A rather riskier side-business he has in selling xeno-artifacts from the site’s deeper cavities to a radiation-scarred conflict veteran is destined to end messily, showing us a brutal collision of thuggish nerve-and-muscle chops and what passes for projectile weapons in this age. Against his better instincts, Vic takes on the business of an upper class woman who has no concept of what she is looking for, or may find in the Saudade site. Their tense and oftentimes erotic relationship sends them spiralling into the mouth of disaster. These two are pursued by the Site Crime agency, specifically the odd couple of the ponderous middle-aged detective Lens Aschemann (who eerily resembles the elder Albert Einstein) and his unnamed assistant, who sports Fight Industry chops and harbours an innate urge to commit brutal violence. On their time off, Lens obsesses about his dead wife, while his assistant masturbates furiously in 1950’s float-tank simulations. Each seems far more absorbed in their own distractions and personal issues than the task at hand. People are forbidden from entering the Saudade site, but what concerns the Site Crime agency is the strange, mentally limited people who emerge from it. They wander about town, dance and fornicate with each other, but lack life experience. Like Phillip K Dick's short-lived androids, they don’t have a sense of their own destiny. They also have an odd tendency to vanish abruptly into thin air. |
