Excellent and very typical 80s cyberpunk - anything you would expect (gangs, the MC a dealer in trouble, decaying city, a lot of shooting and car chases and running underground, oppression, drugs and so on) is definitely here. So, if I had read this in the 80s or 90s, it would have been a 5/5. Its problem is... you find in it all and exactly what you would expect from a CP, so in 2021 it feels like I've already read it many times before. ( )

Inspiration from Gibson and Ruck openly acknowledged by Kadrey and it shows throughout the book. Still great fun and fast paced action in a dystopian setting. ( )

Metrophage by Richard Kadrey is a recommended cyber-punk classic that is being re-released.

Metrophage is set in a future LA that is harshly divided into those who have wealth and those who don't. LA itself has been partially destroyed. Now the city is populated by hustlers of various ilk and specialties. Jonny Qabbala is a street hustler who sells drugs, but right now he's out looking for Easy Money, another dealer who killed one of his friends. Circumstances send Jonny on the run. While he's trying to survive, a plague is breaking out and beginning to spread.

This is a dark story with lots of violence and a kinetic, frantic feeling to all of it. The strengths of the novel are the characterizations and the imagery Kadrey manages to capture. The downside is the violence. The jury is still out on cyberpunk for me, but for those who want to read one of the early ground breaking cyberpunk works, Metrophage is a novel you would want to include.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes. ( )

A few weeks ago I was in Pacific Grove and sauntered into what I thought was a coffee place (it was) but turned out to also be a bookstore — Bookworks! Pretty cool feeling to find a bookstore when you weren't even looking for one. So, after enjoying our coffee and croissants, spent some time browsing the small shop. I knew right away that Bookworks of Pacific Grove was an awesome bookshop when I saw the lone copy of Infinite Jest and its fat blue spine (the tenth anniversary edition) occupying a large slot in the bottom shelf of the CLASSICS section in-between the glossy sheen of brand new trade paperback copies of Lew Wallace's Ben Hur and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. I told the gentleman manning the register how cool I thought it was that they stocked Infinite Jest in the CLASSICS section and he smiled, nodded, and replied that "it comes and goes often".

Another book that comes and goes with even more frequency than Infinite Jest from the shelves of Bookworks, come to find out, if the kind tall man with a slight stoop in his step standing at the register was to be believed (and I saw no reason why he shouldn't be), is Metrophage by San Francisco-based freelance writer and photographer, Richard Kadrey. "Couldn't keep those in stock when they first came in," he said, handing the copy of Metrophage I'd just purchased back to me in a white paper bag with handles. I'd first heard of Metrophage in one of those science fiction best-of lists from yesteryear, and had never been able to find a copy. Until walking unwittingly into Bookworks in Pacific Grove on the first Tuesday of August, 2015, that is. Seems Metrophage had been out of print for years (it'd been published originally in 1988 by Ace Specials), until Harper Voyager reissued it as a "SIGNED FIRST EDITION" in late 2014.

Metrophage has essentially been my introduction to "cyberpunk" even though the genre has been around for thirty-one years since the release of William Gibson's innovative and instant-classic-sensation first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984. Of course elements of cyberpunk had been around since at least Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from way back when in the early nineteenth century (and I recommend reading Larry McCaffery's enlightening anthology on the subject, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, for a superb and authoritative book-by-book chronological assessment of cyberpunk's genesis and evolution) but it was Neuromancer that pieced all the nascent elements of the genre's inchoate fragments together in such perfectly realized ways that it was obvious among the avant-garde science fiction/postmodernist crowds that something new in literature had just been born — cyberpunk — and its name was synonymous with Neuromancer, and it's father was William Gibson. I've no clue who cyberpunk's mother was.

Enter Metrophage stage left, four years later. Nearly thirty, Metrophage remains a vital novel; it reads as technologically and culturally relevant today as the day it was published (the latter I can only imagine); it is a novel that is not dated like the hair metal and synthesizers and Milli Vanilli lip-synckers that defined the music scene of the era in which Richard Kadrey's first novel was published. It's not dated probably because of its prescience on multicultural and sociopolitical fronts. The intermingling of Asian and North American cultures is a prominent trope of cyberpunk, I've learned, from reading Storming the Reality Studio, which reminds us how well director Ridley Scott managed the America-Asia image-mix in so many of those futuristic scenes he artfully rendered in Blade Runner, but Kadrey tweaked the trope a bit adding Arab and Middle Eastern cultures to the mashup, and the imaginary Los Angeles (or "Last Ass" as the locals call their city) that he projected from the future back in 1988 bears an uncanny resemblance to the Last Ass I see and breathe today in 2015.

The sociopolitical zeitgeist of Metrophage took for granted the ongoing, ever present existence of the one percent/ninety-nine percent cultural divide/debate in the United States (I know I don't recall this reality in political discourse when the first Bush beat Dukakis in '88), and went so satirically over the top with the concept that when a young one-percenter, Jonny (I'd rank Jonny as a one-percenter, yet must acknowledge and allow for alternate perceptions that he's never explicitly described by Kadrey as being said one-percenter), the antihero of Metrophage; that is, when Jonny gets cornered by a poverty stricken septuagenarian gang of "discards and defectives" known as The Piranhas, wielding "the few weapons they could find, principally government-issued teeth—filed and set firmly in angry, withered jaws," he refused to shoot his way out through them with his high-tech Futukoro handgun/grenade launcher because he felt an irritating compassion/kinship for them — imagine that, a one-percenter feeling compassion?, feeling sorry for and identifying with the poor beleaguered ninety-nine percent?) and so instead had to use his wits and his fists to escape from the septuagenarian's deadly dentures. Does anyone now living in the United States who's not deluded, drugged out, outright crazy, a politician or overpaid C.E.O., doubt the reality of the one percent/ninety-nine percent divide in the U.S.A.? The denizens of Last Ass were already taking the divide for granted when Richard Kadrey first envisioned them doing so in the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was king; though, admittedly, the Last Ass denizens weren't even conceptualized then and so couldn't have been taking the one percent/ninety-nine percent divide for granted as early as 1968, when Reagan was just California's governor and J.G. Ballard, prescient as he was as a speculative pre-cyberpunky type of writer, somehow saw the imperialist danger lurking in plain goobernatorial (sic) sight a little over a decade away, and published his provocatively titled pamphlet that, to my knowledge, wasn't narrated by a real or fictitious Nancy Reagan, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," but, man oh man, I have digressed. . . .

Suffice to say, the good publishing people over at Harper Voyager knew what the hell they were doing reissuing Metrophage. Perhaps the next time I stroll into Bookworks in Pacific Grove, Metrophage will also be shelved in the CLASSICS section, where it belongs, and by CLASSICS I do not mean CULT CLASSICS. ( )

I got a copy of this novel to review through NetGalley. This was a well done and gritty cyberpunk novel. Previously I have read a variety of cyberpunk, mostly books by William Gibson and some of Neal Stephenson's earlier works (Diamond Age and Snow Crash). I didn’t like this book quite as much as those books, but I still thought it was a fun read.

The story is set in future a Los Angeles where everything has pretty much gone to the dogs. Our “hero” (actually more of an anti-hero) is Johnny. He’s hustler that sells drugs to those who need them on the streets. He used to be part of a government organization that loosely enforced the law in Los Angeles, but he gave that up to avoid being burned out by all the stimulants the government feeds their agents.

However Johnny’s past comes back to haunt him when the government hears rumors that Johnny is involved with the Alpha Rats. The whole conspiracy is news to Johnny, but his involvement gets deeper when he one of his friends gets sick with the strange leprosy-like disease that is plaguing the streets. Now Johnny is on a mission to help cure this disease.

This book is full of Kadrey's gritty style, one liners and over the top dialogue. For those who have read and loved his Sandman Slim series, the writing style of this book is similar is a bit less refined.

Johnny is a typical anti-hero. He is mostly out for himself but somehow ends up trying to save humanity through a series of chance encounters and mishaps. He is self-destructive to a fault, but also has a canny ability to survive almost everything. If Johnny has a super power it is survival...and maybe fast talking.

I enjoyed a lot of the side characters as well. They are all quirky and I wish we had gotten to get to know them a bit better. Johnny’s housemates are two woman named Ice and Sumi. Each of them are very intriguing and have their own quirky set of abilities. The strange good guy/bad guy Conovan is another interesting character; he has lived for a very long time due to a life extending drug that is basically rotting his body from the inside out.

The story is a bit of a mish-mash of topics. There is some government conspiracy, potential alien invasion, discussion on drug trafficking, a commentary on the medical community, as well as a dissolute community’s response to plague. The book is fast-paced and honestly a bit crazy at points.

I ended up really enjoying it. It's a very dark story but there are crazy new things around each corner...you just never know what the next page is going to hold. It reminds a bit of Simon Green's The Nightside series from that aspect. You never know what strangely deviant and decadent atrocity you are going to be reading about next.

There is a ton of over-the-top violence here and it is truly a thing of beauty. There's even a whole cult of people in here who practice "violence as beauty". Not necessarily a book for the faint of heart, but if you have read Kadrey's other books you already know that. There are also some very explicit sex scenes between Johnny and the two women he loves.

Overall this was a crazy and fun read. It’s a very dark and gritty tale and at times has a bit of ADD going on. However I enjoyed all the crazy people and things we meet throughout the story, you really never know what you are going to be reading about from page to page. I also enjoyed all the action. Like the Sandman Slim series this book is not for the faint of heart. It is also not quite as good as other cyberpunk novels out there. While I would recommend reading William Gibson or early Neal Stephenson books first if you want to check out the cyberpunk genre, I would say if you have read those and want more cyberpunk this book is a decent option. It’s crazily creative and definitely entertaining. ( )