Noir »

K.W. Jeter is one of the most respected SF writers working today.  He is the author of fourteen novels, including Dr. Adder, Wolf Flow, The Edge of Human, and Replicant Night.  He lives in Oregon.

Although K. W. Jeter is perhaps best known for his popular Star Wars novels and his vivid re-creations of Ridley Scott's The Blade Runner, Jeter has also been applauded for his cutting-edge stand-alone science fiction. Now Jeter offers Noir, a powerful vision of the future that is as bleak and haunting as the title suggests. Noir is a high-tech murder mystery set in a future L.A. that involves corporate intrigue, greed, and Jeter's unparalleled imagination and stylistic skill.

Publishers Weekly

A master of dark visions, Jeter (Blade Runner: Replicant Night) delivers his most difficult and intellectually ambitious novel to date. In a near-future world where the poor are entirely disenfranchised and white-collar employees live and work themselves to death in tiny, randomly assigned cubicles, the super-wealthy seek vicarious, perverse, cybernetically enhanced thrills on the streets of Los Angeles. Repulsed by the era he's forced to live in, McNihil, a retired cop with a violent past, has had his eyes surgically altered so that he sees everything through a computer-generated overlay that simulates the black-and-white world of the hard-boiled detective films of the 1930s. When Harrisch, an executive with a powerful multinational corporation, tries to hire him to solve a murder and track down the deceased's missing "prowler," a computerized simulation of the dead man, McNihil refuses, only to find himself blackmailed into compliance. Aided by a gutsy young operative named November, McNihil uncovers a complex web of lies and violence, a world where nothing is what it seems and even the dead have power. Jeter is a fine prose stylist, but some will find his knotted, intensely metaphoric language slow going. Equally problematic is his tendency to assume in his reader a sophisticated knowledge of the conventions of both the noir thrillers of the 1930s and contemporary cyberpunk SF. Frequently, his characters seem to operate in an evocative semi-vacuum, the facts needed to explain the plot having been mysteriously elided from the narrative. This is a difficult, eccentric and rewarding novel, an SF equivalent, perhaps, of The Name of the Rose. (Nov.)