Hot Head
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
An ambitious SF novel that is at once post-cyberpunk and post-modern. Complex, multi-layered, it combines hard science, tarot and images of late 20th-century Europe to make something utterly original. And introduces a memorable new heroine to the genre ...
Malise has a problem. She's come downwell to Earth, but years of space combat have ruined her: her muscles have wasted away, her past is a confused torture of events and her brain is wired to addictive military hardware that's illegal on Earth.
But with an AI mining probe returning to Earth, having bred and grown until it is hundreds of miles across, Malise is in the firing line again. The probe is indestructible and it is insatiable for more metals. No one knows how to stop it. Malise doesn't know she has a blueprint for humanity's survival wired into her head.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 20 years after its first U.K. publication, Ings's small but dense debut novel gets a well-deserved U.S. release. In the near future (from the perspective of 1992, when the book was written), the global economy is reshuffling as the environment crumbles. Europe faces a huge influx of immigration from Islamic countries, including Malise, a young girl who emigrates from Azerbaijan to Italy. She grows up to work in outer space, but when authorities learn she has an implanted technological enhancement illegal on Earth they remove it, impairing the newfound senses she relied on. Soon Malise's story expands to encompass illegal operations, snuff films, and drug overdoses. Ings plays with form and structure as well as story, jumping around in time, delivering stream-of-consciousness thoughts, and even replicating Tristram Shandy's famous black page. There's plenty of violence and sex (sometimes at the same time), and while none of it feels gratuitous, it's deliberately uncomfortable in a way that fans of Peter Watts's Rifters books will find familiar. Ings's novel shows its age in places, but it's still a classic cyberpunk story concerned less with the neonoir overtones so common in the genre than with experimenting with form and structure.
