Redrobe

Another high-energy cyberpunk romp set in the alternative future of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's previous novel reMix. Here he pushes gore and mutilation to almost farcical extremes, with medical nanotechnology meaning that ghastly injuries aren't for keeps--one character loses both eyes but is soon painfully seeing again, if only in black and white. The back-story: Pope Joan looted the Vatican's riches for good causes before her assassination, and now the powerful, corrupt Cardinal of Mexico hopes to claw back the money. A top-class though emotionally wrecked professional killer becomes his emissary, hunting Joan's legacy on Samsara, the vast space habitat and prayer wheel which the Dalai Lama and a Buddhist-pacifist AI have established as the UN dumping-ground for all the world's refugees. Other characters include Pope Joan's former lover, a chatty AI built into an advanced handgun, a Japanese child prostitute into whom some remnant of Joan has been downloaded, an illegal warrior clone, and a bunch of military "PaxForce" heavies whose sadistic female leaders defMoma and momaDef provide more tasty torture scenes and weird capitaLisation. Grimwood drives his story at unrelenting speed, with bursts of extreme violence disguising the less logical leaps, while literal background music plays in the wired-up assassin's head. Dizzying, gruesome and slightly tongue-in-cheek action. --David Langford

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Over the top Cyberpunk - Rated
There’s a website I visit now and again which generates surreal plot situations for people with writer's block.
’A gay cardinal, a one-eyed assassin and a sentient Buddhist gun hunt for the memories of a dead lesbian Pope inside a giant space-egg’ might well have come up.
This is a competent (if frustrating) cyberpunk thriller in which Axl Borja, augmented assassin, is hired by a Cardinal to find the downloaded memories of the late Pope Joan, who apparently siphoned off a large chunk of the Vatican’s wealth to give to charity.
The rather grim - but enlivened by snappy dialogue - chase ends up on Samsara, a Ringworld style rotating rock cylinder, home of the governing Buddhist AI, Tsongkhapa, and refugees from various wars and belligerence on earth.
There’s also pimps, clones, suicidal priests (2), lesbian army officers (2), an underage Japanese prostitute and sundry AIs.
The most interesting character is the self-aware gun, transformed on Samsara into the cyber embodiment of the winged monkey Rinpoche
It’s one of those irritating and annoying novels, so packed with references to corporations, wetware tradenames, hardware functions and software, that whole pages have to be re-read in case one misses something.
For those who like sort of thing, it’s a good book, if a little depressing, which makes some valuable points about religious and media political power.

Disappointing - Rated
Read The First Arabesk and loved it - great story, fascinating glimpses of alternate history/technology and a flawed hero: what more could a girl ask for?
Bought redrobe on the strength of it - what a mistake! Characterization strong as ever: the cardinal for example, and the gun was inspired, but overall the book was ...... dull, I suppose. I'm not averse to violence, but here I felt that when the author wanted to enliven the plot, he threw in some incident full of blood 'n' guts or some freakish moment from the past. It was just an overload of icing to hide a half-baked cake.
So, I'll try the Second and Third Arabesk (when the latter is published) but I wouldn't advise anyone to read this.

A dull mishmash of other people's ideas. - Rated
This book is a big disappointment. I don't think there is an original idea in it. I got more enjoyment from spotting the sources of his ideas than actually following the plot. Large chunks of the book are completely pointless and seem to do nothing more than pad out its thin story to a sellable length. A fun element was catching the laughable errors. One of the more amusing was the suggestion that you could tell how many people had been killed and mutilated by gathering all the toes of the dead, counting them and dividing by five. Five. (And yes, we are talking about human bodies here). I could forgive a great deal if the book were not quite so dull. But it is. So one star - for the silver dragon, which I liked (though the character was poorly used).

A must re-read book - Rated
The first time through I was blown away by the pace and complexity of this entirely plausible vision of the future - drawn on at such a rate by wanting to know where the story went next I missed out on the exceptional detail and intricacy of the writing.

Of course, you only realise that when you re-read it a year or so later, taking your time and enjoying this book more at an entirely different depth.

If you read it once and come away feeling like you've missed something - you have, go and do it again and take your time, trust me its worth it.

Absolutely Brilliant - Rated
At Eastercon in Liverpool a few years back I heard this man say that a happy ending was one when the main character could walk away - more or less still alive. Jon Courtenay Grimwood's like Michael Marshall Smith in that. Life's a mess for his heroes and then things get *really* bad.

When redRobe starts Axl is bored and unhappy. Things go down hill for Axl from there. With in a couple of chapters he's just glad to be alive and then the rest of the book is spent with Axl dodging a growing number of enemies. There's a talking gun, a Buddhist prayer wheel in space and a vampire Cardinal, lots of political jokes and some very weird science.

People either love or hate Jon Grimwood's work. I'm definitely one of the former, but there is no doubt that this one is far and away the best of Grimwood's novels. Redrobe is fast, very funny and slyly thoughtful. Qualities that are too often absent in most SF.

It's also on the short list for this year's BSFA award and I think it stands a good chance of winning.