- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Earthlight (6 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0671022601
- ISBN-13: 978-0671022600
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 411,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
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
Product Description
Ex-assassin Axl Borja has agreed to do one last hit - only he hasn't told his gun yet. Cardinal Santo Ducque faces political ruin if he can't regain the Vatican's missing billions. Mai's a Japanese kinderwhore held hostage on a space habitat. As they collide their actions could change the world.
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First Sentence
Axl could hear, that wasn't his problem. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Axl could hear, that wasn't his problem. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
But look - let's not try too hard to classify Jon's books, eh? Just for a moment forget the term "cyberpunk", ignore all those tedious Gibson and Tarantino comparisons, just get into what he's writing about.
redRobe is a colossal pisstake of a powerplay between huge media corporates and the church - which impacts on some wonderfully bizarre and corrupt characters.
Judging by other reviews, the talking gun already appears to be a star in its own right, and Axl Borja as the bleak, broken, ex-assasin "hero" deserves to reappear in a future novel.
redRobe works on three levels: Firstly, it's fun - almost slapstick - in the way the protagonists kill, maim, and slice their way through the plot. There's also a constant humour, albeit dark and venous, that keeps a (virtual) grin on your face throughout.
Secondly, Jon manages that neat trick of making his futures believable - almost inevitable. It's not enough just to dazzle readers with lots of clever techie ideas; for a book to grab you by the balls the author has to make the plot work independently of all the gizmos and gadgets. With a minor nip and tuck, the plot could be transposed to today's date and STILL be as engrossing. But, as the other reviews mention, Jon is absolutely awesome with his technological invention. Really impressive stuff.
Thirdly, after you've finished it, you'll find great big chunks of philosophy oozing around in your head. For example: we're all losing our geography right now, as national boundaries are being blurred by the net and assorted media. Speed that process up and you'll end up with armies that belong to the highest payer rather than some arbitrary piece of land. Can you see the Microsoft Marines yet, parking their tanks on your front lawn? The Sony SAS? Or even the Amazon Army (Literary Battalion)?
Then the armies of the church and banks aren't such a long way away. See what I mean about Jon's futures becoming almost inevitable?
Alternatively, heard of Bluetooth? That protocol which is going to let your fridge restock itself over the net, or let your VCR decide for itself to tape something you're interested in? Suddenly, a gun with AI isn't such a leap of faith after all....
Finally - yeah, you have to concentrate a bit on the loops and rolls of the plot, but surely that's a good thing. And this particular jaded and much-read reviewer actually laughed out loud at the twist that appears as the very last line...
Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Grimwood keeps getting better. In redRobe, he has finally achieved the careful meshing of plot, character and context to create fiction that reverberates in the mind, long after it has been read. But sometimes I wonder if I and the reviewers have been reading the same book. Where Jon Courtenay Grimwood is concerned, this feeling is recurrent. Grimwood's books are tech heavy, but they are not cyber punk (cyberspace does not seem to exist in his alternate universe). They contain violence, but they are not gratuitous: characters act as they must or as they are taught, rarely out of sadistic delight. Grimwood's books are subtle but searing critiques of state violence, so it is ironic that it is the violence of individuals which attracts most reviewers' attention. While Grimwood directs our gaze to the perversion of human mercy in contemporary refugee policies, the day to day violence of ill-health and vulnerability visited upon the poor, reviewers focus on the violent acts of the maddened, the oppressed and the revolutionary ignoring the internal strength and gentleness which many of these characters display.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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