Book Review: 'Nightside City' by Lawrence Watt-Evans
'Nightside City' (227 pp.) was published by Del Rey / Ballantine in April, 1989, and features a dramatic cover illustration by David Schleinkofer.
The novel is set on the planet Epimetheus, circa 2300 AD.
Epimetheus isn't a particularly hospitable place. It doesn't rotate, so one half of the planet constantly is in darkness, while the other half is exposed to continuous sunlight and attendant UV radiation and heat. As luck would have it, a massive mineral deposit was discovered in the darkside, not very far from the terminator dividing the light and dark halves. The resultant mining operation has been prosperous enough to support the eponymous City, whose brothels, casinos, and tourist traps serve not just the miners, but sightseers from the wider Federation.
There's just one problem with Epimetheus: it turns out the planetologists were wrong, and the plant is beginning to rotate. Within the next century, the entirety of the City will come into the day side and be sterilized into a depopulated wasteland. Anyone with means is planning on going off-planet well before the sunshine overtakes the City.
As 'Nightside City' opens, we are introduced to lead character Carlisle 'Carlie' Hsing, who ekes out a living as a private eye. Born and raised in the City, Hsing has difficulty imaging living anywhere else than Epimetheus, but like many residents, she is aware that time is running out, and earning enough money for passage elsewhere increasingly is a priority.
Zar Pickens, the disheveled leader of a group of squatters occupying abandoned buildings on the City's westside, where perpetual sunlight is starting to touch the tips of the structures, has come to hire a private eye. It seems that someone is buying up the abandoned properties and evicting the squatters. Why would anyone spend good money to buy condemned real estate ?
Carlie Hsing, willing to take on even a minor case if there is a fee involved, decides to look into the matter. She discovers that someone with a great deal of money and power indeed is investing in the westside. Someone who believes that there is a way to stop the rotation of Epimetheus, and save Nightside City from destruction..........
'Nightside City' belongs to the cyberpunk - noir genre of sci-fi that started in 1986, with the publication of ‘When Gravity Fails’by George Alec Effinger. The genre flourished well into the 1990s, with additional 'Budayeen' novels from Effinger; the 'Carlucci' trilogy from Richard Paul Russo; 'Montezuma Strip,' by Alan Dean Foster; 'Noir,' by K. W. Jeter; and 'Tower of Dreams,' by Jamil Nasir.
But, compared to these novels, 'Nightside' is a disappointment. While it certainly is competent in incorporating cyberpunk trappings, it suffers from the author's insistence on portraying Carlie Hsing as the antithesis of the hard-boiled, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, macho male protagonist of noir and crime fiction. However admirable it may be to have a female character who relies on 'feminine' tactics to solve cases, it makes for a dull read.
Much of the novel revolves around internal monologues, in which Hsing ponders over all the permutations of what she could, and should, do. There is lots of verbal fencing between Hsing and her adversaries, designed to showcase how she uses her intuition and guile (rather than threats of violence) to acquire information. There are lots of passages in which Hsing undergoes protracted self-reflection before taking any sort of action. Indeed, not until page 112 is there any sort of tension or suspense, and this involves Hsing confronting a robot (?!).
The novel's climax is lackluster, with Hsing and the bad guys using Human Resources-style negotiating tactics to achieve a bloodless but mutually satisfying resolution. It's a lukewarm payoff for dutifully following a narrative that never really takes on the edge that's present in the best noir fiction. If you like your cyberpunk contemplative and slow-paced, then you may like 'Nightside City,' but all others can pass on this title.
No comments:
Post a Comment