Slaughtermatic [Paperback]

Steve Aylett's Slaughtermatic is enacted in a parodic, cyberpunk world in which crime has become an individualistic and self-evolutionary art. Dante, the protagonist, plans to rob a bank with the help of Download Jones, a human meat puppet whose personality is live on the Net, and Kid Entropy, whose Kafkacell weapon bonds with his psyche to produce a suicide-wannabe who can only kill others. With the vault scan code in his pocket, Dante is duplicated in a time shift that puts him virtually ahead of the actual event--and able to enter the vault undetected. His crime and the action-filled plot become complicated when his second self, Dante Two, refuses to sacrifice himself as planned, murderous Brute Parker is set on Dante's trail and Rosa Control takes matters into her own razor-bladed hands. Into the melee steps Eddie Gamete, the presumed-dead postmodern prankster-philosopher, Dante's only hero and the author of The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel, a book no reader can survive. Expectations about what and who is real change like television channels in Dante's world, where fates much worse than death await. --Geoff Beos

A blisteringly original and entertaining parody of our cyber-technology driven future from a young British author

Dante Cubit and the Entropy Kid attempt a bank raid in Beerlight - the city where killing a man is less a murder than a mannerism, where false arrest is a moral duty. Moving effortlessly and seamlessly from real world to virtual reality we follow Dante in his efforts to steal the last book by rabble rouser and street philosopher extraordinaire Eddie Gamete. Meanwhile outside the bank, Blince, the local police chief, has closed down the area and deployed demographic cannon. Fortunately he doesn't realise that he has not left a virtual reality training site. Unfortunately Dante doesn't realise he is in the wrong bank. In a world where guns only shoot those who are asking for it and time locks propel you forward to a place where you've already been arrested, nothing is certain.

Steve Aylett is 36. He lives and works in Brighton. If he were any more English he'd be dead.