New York Blues (Volume 2 of The Virex Trilogy) by Eric Brown
01/12/2002 . Source: Joules Taylor 
Pub: Gollancz. 309 page paperback. Price: £ 5.99(UK). ISBN: 0-57507-301-2. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. Check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
I haven't read the first book in this
trilogy but I had it on good authority that it probably wasn't necessary
to have done so for the second to make sense - so I risked it. It's
a sci-fi detective novel, after all and I like sci-fi and detective
novels ...
 Despite
having my interest piqued by the mention of Laputa (the flying island
in Gulliver's Travels but which I know better from Hayao Miyazaki's
anime of the same name), for the first three chapters I thought
I was going to be disappointed.
Take
one archetypal 1930's private investigator, tough on the outside with a softer
interior, trying to keep the agency going after the death of his partner. Transplant
him into the year 2040 and a New York not all that different, ostensibly, from
today. Give him the traditional beautiful actress' missing sister to trace, add
a few technical gadgets and away you go... (The short, choppy sentences irritated
me, too.)
And then I reached chapter four and everything changed: Halliday
(the detective) suddenly became real. I think it was caused partly by finding
out the subject of the mysterious file that he was downloading in the previous
pages and partly by the first real insight into his character that chapter four
brings. However it happened, I now cared about him, what happened to him
and to the people who share his world.
The story itself is well-crafted
and intricate and raises a number of interesting - or should that be worrying?
- questions, for me at least. If it were possible to live out one's life in a
reality of one's own choosing, how many people would opt to do just that? Would
steal, cheat and kill to pay for it? What value would 'real life' hold
if one could simply escape from it, become whatever or whomever one wanted? Indeed,
which would be the more real, the life of the physical body or the life within
your own mind? The repercussions are frightening to consider. I should add that
these aren't literally addressed in the story but they certainly loomed large
in my mind as I was reading ...
I thoroughly enjoyed 'New York Blues'.
The characters are extremely well delineated and memorable, the plot compelling,
the descriptions of Halliday's world succinct and believable. I want to read the
rest of the series. More to the point, Eric Brown is a name I will remember
and look out for in future.
Joules Taylor
www.wordwrights.co.uk 
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