Welcome to Los Angeles... where anger, hunger, and disease run rampant, and life and hope are strictly rationed. This is Jonny's world. He's a street-wise hustler, a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival, until a strange new plague turns L.A. into a city of death--and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure.
s reciting in a low whiskey voice:
The streets breathe, ebb and flow like the
seas beneath a sodden twilight eye.
The sky appears from a maw of rooftops-
Dusk streets, dry fountains
coax the cemetery stars.
Jonny pulled a few Dapsone and tetrahydrocanabinol capsules from his pouch and dropped them into the battered Stetson. The leper who had been reciting, his head and face heavily bandaged, opened his jacket.
"Thank you, friend," the leper said through broken lips, pointing to his freshest scars.
Nodding politely, Jonny left the lepers and stepped down into the Pit.
The skyline tilted, angled steeply downward, then up, became a vertical blur of mirrored windows, skyscrapers leading to a hologram star field. Jonny was in the Pit's game parlor, separated from the bar by a dirty lotus print curtain. Around the edges of the room, antique pinball machines beeped and rang prosaically while the air in the center of the parlor burned with the phantom lig
Most enjoyable. Very literate and well-written science-fiction.
Thus really should be considered a cyberpunk classic.
Energetic and rough, I'd say -- very good story, complex enough to be worth finishing, but not so convoluted that you lose track of who-does-what-where-now?
An excellent book. I read it about 5 years ago, and I devoured it in one intense session. Some alludes to William Gibson, but nonetheless an original and fascinating piece of cyberpunk.
