Lucifer's Dragon by
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
pbk out March 04
(Pocket Books)
at £6.99
Mainline some serotonin, suck on some freebase, morph your bodyshape to a
drakul, and invest in sperm futures. Watch out for the Zeiss-eyed Ishie camming the
scene, and settle down to read the latest offering from John Courtenay Grimwood. Of
course, you're in the thick of it from the beginning, and you have to learn the lingo on
the fly. But it's worth it.
The book runs in two timelines. In the present, which is the far future to us,
Karo, the daughter of Count Ryuchi, slips away from her father's palazzo in
newVenice. He is the current chairman of CySat, the media giant, and guardian of
Aurelio, the ten-year-old Doge of newVenice. Aurelio is guarded by the exotic and
super-enhanced Razz. Sadly even her abilities are not enough to stop the attack on
Aurelio. The last thing she sees is the pointy end of an Uzi. Then she wakes up in
Zurich….dead. In the mean time, Karo falls foul of NVPD officer Lieutenant Angeli
Rispoli who has been drafted in to investigate the murder. She bad-mouths him in a
bar where she is playing the multi-level, self-perpetuating, on-line game, Lucifer's
Dragon, with unpleasant results. But that's not all.
Through Angeli's illegal viewing of a Sim called Saints and Synners, we get
the history of newVenice. This timeline is set a hundred years in the past. Angeli's
past. But it's still the future to us. There, we learn about Passion di Orchi, daughter of
a West Coast mafia boss, who is determined to rebuild Venice in the Pacific on the
back of a huge flotilla of scrapped and derelict rusty hulks. This new island is thus
free of any other country's laws, regulations and restrictions. The trouble is, back in
Angeli and Karo's time, Count Ryuchi wants to literally cut adrift the denizens of the
levels who inhabit the outer fringes of newVenice. Something's gotta give.
Like the computer game at the centre of the story, this novel is multi-layered,
and deeply addictive. Every sentence is bursting with techno-speak and layers of
meaning. By throwing the reader in at the deep end, Grimwood manages to surround
you with a believable future world, and still make it comprehensible. The far future
speaks volumes about the issues we face today, extrapolating them to their natural (or
unnatural) conclusions. Yet he still manages to create the subtle differences between
Karo and Angeli's future, and the more easily graspable near future when newVenice
is being created. After we have been dragged dizzyingly through the far future,
Passion's world seems almost pedestrian and normal by comparison. We know it is
the world we live in, but just a few years up the line.
I am sure this analogy has been made before, because it's the obvious one.
Grimwood's books are the Bladerunner of future novels. He conjures up a complex,
packed environment through which the story runs like mercury through a maze. Read
this one, then read all the others.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
New Books by Jon Courtenay Grimwood at Amazon.co.uk
Lucifer's Dragon by
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
