‘Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel’ (310 pp.) was published as a trade paperback in November 2008 by Elder Signs Press, a since-defunct small press / vanity press publisher.
In an essay written in 2009, John Shirley relates that in the early 80s he and William Gibson had a meeting with an anonymous Hollywood director about making a cyberpunk-themed movie using a script, tentatively titled ‘Microchip’, that Shirley and Gibson had conceptualized. The movie deal never came through and Shirley didn’t pay much attention to ‘Microchip’ until 2007, when he decided to revise it and publish it as ‘Black Glass’.
In Shirley’s words,
I just had to update its tech, environmental and cultural references and recognize that my pulp-inflected metaphor may be at the pop end of art, but it’s vitalized by the pointed honesty of its symbols.
‘Black Glass’ is set in the near future, in a dystopian USA where corporations, rather than politicians, run things......and society is divided into the Haves, and the Have Nothings. As the novel opens, Richard Candle, a former L.A. police officer, is being released from prison, where he was serving a four-year sentence under the aegis of ‘UnMinding’, a sort of reversible lobotomization designed to make inmates cooperative and compliant.
Candle went to prison to take the fall for his brother Danny, a dissipated punk-rocker who made the risky decision to try and profit off the theft of high-value software from the powerful Slakon corporation. Knowing Danny couldn’t survive a stint in the pen, Richard sacrificed his own career and good name………and four years of his life.
With Richard now free, Terrence Grist, the odious CEO of Slakon, orders Candle to be trailed by a team of operatives in hopes of recovering the stolen software. As the novel unfolds, Candle negotiates the trash-strewn, polluted slums of L.A. and their louche denizens. His goals: find a way to wean his brother off an addiction to Virtual Reality; make some badly-needed money on the online black market; and find the stolen software and use it to keep Slakon at bay.
Or better yet, use the software to take Slakon, and Terrence Grist, down and out………
I found ‘Black Glass’ to be a three-star novel. The things that Shirley did well in his cyberpunk novels and short stories from the 80s and early 90s - atmosphere, characterization, an authentic 'street-level' perception of the cyberpunk milieu - are present and accounted for in 'Black Glass' :
Rack Nidd wasn’t happy to see Danny Candle. Danny could tell by the way the robot scorpion on Rack’s left shoulder was rearing up and chittering warningly……Rack just stood there in the doorway of his loft, twining a long piece of his greasy hair with his finger. He didn’t have much hair to twine; he had a disease that made his hair prematurely gray and patchy; what there was grew out all droopy long from the patches. His grimace was patchy too; he was missing every third tooth.……Rack Nidd wasn’t his real name, of course. He’d once owned a nu-punk aggregate site, before going into illegal VR: Arachnid Recordings. He stood there, now, pot-bellied, all but naked, wearing only a pair of vintage boxers shorts with some cartoon on them from an earlier era. A yellow cartoon kid with a pincushion head was saying “Ay Caramba !” on one of the boxer’s panels. Rack’s Japanese thongs completed the picture; the rank smell completed the experience.
Where 'Black Glass' suffers is in its plotting, which tends to meander. Too often, the narrative veers into tangents that lengthen the novel, but don't contribute all that much to it; for example, a segment in which Richard Candle communes with his Buddhist Master could have been excised without penalty, as could multiple, redundant segments designed to display the villainy of Terrence Grist. And the denouement of 'Black Glass' relies on a plot development to ensure that all the loose ends get tied up, a plot development that I found gimmicky and contrived.
The verdict ? Fans of Shirley's cyberpunk works of the 80s and early 90s likely will find 'Black Glass' rewarding despite its plotting deficiencies, but honestly, I can't see many younger fans of the genre, who have been reared on the careful wordsmithing and plotting of contemporary cyberpunk books (such as William Gibson's 'Blue Ant' novels, or the novels of Paolo Bacigalupi) eagerly diving into 'Black Glass'. This is one for the Old School readership.
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