Since I’m more into SF than noir, it’s not really my thing. Also, a bit too much violence for my tastes.

I’m kind of busy, what with the baby and all, plus learning Scheme, plus learning Spanish, plus practicing the guitar. Nonetheless, I find some time to read this “SF noir.” Although it’s good SF, in a strange way it seems sort of dated, even though it’s only a few years old. I don’t get quite the, “Aha!” feeling I get when reading my favorites like Cory Doctorow, David Brin, or Vernor Vinge. These authors all seem to be part of a long conversation on which I’m eavesdropping.

Vince recommended Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon to me, knowing my love of classic John Varley stories and film noir, and it was a fun read. Morgan has the tone of far-future noir down pat, with an intelligently speculative setting and lots of hard-boiled action. If you enjoy the typical noir antihero — aggressive, haunted, misogynistic — then Takeshi Kovacs should be right up your alley; subversive, this is not. But the choking masculinity effectively evokes the ghosts of Mickey Spillane, of Hammet, of Chandler, and more recently, the graphic fiction of Frank Miller. So! If you’re looking for that kind of literary fix, this may be right up your alley.

Directly afterwards, started reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which in many bizarre ways is exactly the same book (well, at least as far as I’ve gotten in it).