Necropolis by Michael Dempsey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Necropolis—review
First there was cyberpunk. And then there was steampunk, and we started using “punk” to describe advanced technology tied to a certain aesthetic. You could call The Flintstones “stonepunk” if you want, and the works of Terry Pratchett are a kind of “magepunk.” So, why not “noirpunk”?
Which is the direction Necropolis tries to go, although it doesn’t last. You’ve got your wise-cracking detective, dames, roscoes, alcohol, thugs, hopeless cynicism. You’ve also got your plasma pistols, holograms, AIs, and advanced biological sciences. Not a bad mash-up. The more Marlowe parts of Philip K. Dick and the overlap of Sterling and Gibson with a sprinkling of Brown/Grisham/Chrichton.
Do I sound like I’m damning with faint praise? Good. Because, yeah, at first, we get the noir, and the sci-fi takes a back seat, like it should. But as the story keeps going, there are literally visual shifts to other aesthetics. The New York of the future, you see, has it’s 40s throwbacks, but also its 20s and 60s. yes, each of those eras has contributed, via good writers, to the hard-boiled detective trope. But for me the novel lost consistency.
The plot of Necropolis is nice and twisty (without being overfilled with clichéd “surprises.”) and Michael Dempsey does a good job of taking advantage of the science he’s invented to create a context that doesn’t require cliff-hangers or deus ex machine. So it’s fun to get through. There’s some politics and some moralizing and some romance, but they’re not too hard to gloss over.
If we’re lucky, Dempsey will do some more like this. I’m not looking for a sequel, but some more noirpunk would be great. Phillip K. Dick was great, so modernized version (ain’t that an ironic thing to say about a sci-fi novelist) would be great.