Book Review: 'Heatseeker' by John Shirley
'Heatseeker' first was issued by the small press publisher Scream/Press in 1989; this mass-market paperback edition (364 pp.) was published in the U.K. by Grafton in 1990. The cover art is by Chris Moore.
The 19 stories collected in this collection all first saw print in the interval from 1975 to 1989, in magazines, digests, and anthologies like Interzone, Omni, and New Dimensions. Accordingly, they represent Shirley's progression as a writer of the freeform, 'speculative fiction' material that exemplified the New Wave ethos, to the more defined prose of the cyberpunk era.
Rather than critique each of the entries, I'll state outright that the best stories in 'Heatseeker' are those with Shirley's singularly street-level sensibility, written with a clear and unadorned prose style and a willingness to depict humanity in its less-than-salutary moments:
'Under the Generator' is a 1976 story from Terry Carr's Universe 6 anthology that displays a Harlan Ellison-esque flavor in its treatment of the commodification of the process of dying. With its downbeat atmosphere, 'Generator' thoroughly rejects the humanism that, as of 1976, still persisted in the pages of Universe and other New Wave collections of the era.
'Sleepwalkers', from 1988, showcases cyberpunk themes with its depiction of a group of junkies (the opening pages detail the process of cooking, and shooting up, meth) living in squalor in a bad neighborhood of a near-future Los Angeles. Needing money, would-be rock star guitarist Jules decides to temporarily rent his body to the Sleepwalkers Agency. Upon waking from his 'rental' period, Jules leaves the Agency 200 dollars richer.........but with an ache between his legs..............
'Six Kinds of Darkness', which appeared in High Times magazine in 1988, features a near-future New York City where the 'Hollow Head' drug den offers users a genuinely life-changing experience. The first page of the story is quintessential cyberpunk and, I would argue, an exemplar of how to begin any story, novelette, or novel in the genre.
'Wolves of the Plateau' (1988), from the highbrow literary journal Mississippi Review (!), places recurring character Jerome-X in a prison setting. A breakout attempt involving the collective use of inmates' wetware 'chips' may be successful......or a quick path to a group lobotomy.......this story is another example of Shirley's ability to take the tropes of cyberpunk and work them into something memorable.
Serving as a change of theme from the grim vistas presented in the above stories, 'Quill Tripstickler Eludes a Bride' deploys ribald humor in its tale of the eponymous hero's diplomatic mission to a planet ruled by a female entity with a decidedly........Freudian........ manifestation.
The remaining stories in 'Heatseeker' are less impressive. A number of tales fashioned around New Wave-era prose stylings have aged poorly: 'Tahiti in Terms of Squares', 'Silent Crickets', 'The Almost Empty Rooms' (which features a chapter titled 'Part III of Secondary Syntax'), 'Equilibrium', and 'Recurrent Dreams of Nuclear War Lead B. T. Quizenbaum Into Moral Dissolution'.
'What Cindy Saw', 'The Unfolding', and 'The Peculiar Happiness of Professor Cort' are absurdist tales that didn't strike me as particularly effective, while the more structured narratives of 'I Live in Elizabeth', 'The Gunshot', 'What It's Like to Kill a Man', 'Triggering', and 'Ticket to Heaven' suffer from less-than-convincing denouements. 'Uneasy Chrysalids, Our Memories' tries to meld psychological drama with the concept of 'injectable memories', but is overwritten and difficult to follow.
Summing up, as with 99% of anthologies, there are more misses than hits in the pages of 'Heatseeker'. That said, in my opinion there are sufficient memorable tales in its pages to justify the effort to acquire this Grafton edition from UK booksellers, particularly if you are a fan of cyberpunk from its early days in the 1980s.
