K.W. Jeter’s Noir is a dystopic vision of the future, where capitalism has run its logical course, and copyright law is so extreme that the smallest infringement is met with worse-than-lethal force, where the perpetrator’s spinal column and the smallest part of his brain is preserved to allow a minimal amount of consciousness to feel the pain of being encased in speaker wire, or a toaster, or whatever the infringed-upon party wants, forever. People fall into different classes, the lowest of which can be dispensed of at no penalty except a pre-registration and perhaps a debit for urban disruption, which can be counterbalanced by planting ill-fated trees along a highway. The corporation is the ultimate entity, all-powerful and unforgiving, with employees that live in cubapts – cubicle apartments. Technology has so infiltrated life that “connect” is the ultimate swear word and insult.

One of the most chilling aspects of the novel is the indeadted, who are people who died while in debt, and are reanimated to do mundane tasks like scavenge for discarded recyclable materials until they pay off the debt, which never happens due to high interest rates. Even death does not allow escape from debt, and everyone seems to be in debt.

The main character, McNihil (it took me half the novel to get the name) has implants in his eyes that make everything look like a film noir. The “cube bunny,” or low-class sex-worker that comes to his apartment looks like Ida Lupino to him, and it is always night. True to form, he is a tragic antihero, looking out only for himself, and self-sabotaging on the way. It is interesting that the future for McNihil, and for Jeter, so resembles film noir, a dark fantasy of sex and betrayal, where no one is pure and everyone is the agent, object or both of lethal deception. People here have use-value so long as they can help someone else profit. Even the church is a online, for-profit enterprise.

Amidst the many science fiction film updates of film noir, spanning from Bladerunner through Dark City and Strange Days to Minority Report and even Sin City, Jeter self-relfexively updates the pulp detective novel with all the visual trappings of the film genre, positing the techno-global-capitalist future as the ultimate film noir. And it is connecting scary.

Dick’s prose sneaks up on you. It is so sparse, and some of the dialogue so seemingly simplistic that I get lulled into a false sense of mindless consumption, and then the implications of the prose hit me. This is an intricately woven novel, hinting at a multitude of meanings, questioning the nature of identity, the roles of technology, nature and religion in our lives, the compulsion to collect, the nature of social status, the ethics of sex, all under the backdrop of grim post-nuke world.

I have had this book sitting on my shelf forever, and now that I’m on a huge sf kick, I’ve started it. Pretty good so far – only on chapter 5. Already much more intricate than the movie, but it’s clearer where some of the mise-en-scene from the movie comes from (e.g. the owl). I look forward to finishing it.

I’m about 40 pages in, and this is really thought-provoking stuff.

It took a long time for me to get into this book, but I persevered and laughed out loud quite a bit. The characters are well-drawn, even if extremely exaggerated. Worth a read.