Spares
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Talking fridges, human clone farms, flying shopping malls – we must be in the Michael Marshall Smith zone. A world all too close to our own…
Spares – human clones, the ultimate health insurance. An eye for an eye – but some people are doing all the taking.
Spares – the story of Jack Randall: burnt-out, dropped out, and way overdrawn at the luck bank. But as caretaker on a Spares Farm, he still has a choice, and it might make a difference…if he can run fast enough.
Spares – a breathless race through strange, disturbing territories in a world all too close to our own.
Spares – it’s fiction. But only just…
Reviews
‘Comic, cruel, twisted and surreal’
EMPIRE
‘Some books stretch the imagination. This one mugs it’
DAVID BADDIEL
‘Tense, exciting and at times very, very funny… He’s worth every penny’
TIME OUT
‘Witty, hard-edged and coruscatingly imaginative… Compellingly off-kilter’
NEW SCIENTIST
‘Spares blurs imaginative surrealism and hard-bitten horror with a storytelling skill that can only be described as pure genius’
VENUE
‘A compulsively readable melding of hardboiled narrative and hardware invention’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
About the author
Michael Marshall Smith was born and raised – itinerantly – in the USA and the UK. Since leaving University he has been writing: for radio, for the movies, for TV and for print. After the success of Spares, Warner Brothers have already bought the rights to his third novel, One of Us, amid intense competition. His novels are bestsellers in translation around the world. Mike lives in North London, where he is currently working on his fourth novel and a number of film projects while providing a warm place for his cats to sleep.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coma meets Blade Runner in this future noir thriller, a compulsively readable melding of hardboiled narrative and hardware invention. Smith forecasts a decadent future in which the rich clone themselves at birth and callously harvest replacement organs from their "spares" as they need them. Narrator Jack Randall, a debauched but conscientious ex-cop, flees to the megalopolis of New Richmond with seven clones he has liberated from a spare farm and is almost immediately relieved of them by a gang of thugs. Jack's efforts to find out who has abducted the spares and marked them for death plunge him into a mystery that ultimately links the two events that have shattered his life: the brutal unsolved murder of his wife and child, and his soul-searing tour of military duty in The Gap. A virtual world built from the flotsam and jetsam cluttering the Internet, The Gap is an awesome conception made to seem supernaturally eerie yet scientifically feasible. Smith elaborates this creation brilliantly, as a surreal battleground where Jack confronts the demons that have haunted him for a decade, and as a symbol of emptiness and waste that brings the novel's numerous depictions of personal and social devaluation into sharp focus. Both a disconcerting portrait of a future that might be, and a poignant study of one man's fight to resist it, this novel augurs a promising future of another sort for its author. Film rights to Dreamworks SKG. FYI: This novel is an expansion of Smith's horror short story "To Receive Is Better."
