This review took a long time to get to because my reading time has pretty much been eclipsed by writing time, but the end result is no less sweet for having been stretched out. Marcher was almost bad enough to turn me off the written word forever, but Nova Swing has restored my faith.
Yeah. That cover pretty much sums it up. But I’ll elaborate past the cut.
Nova Swing is a 50’s noir transported into the far future. We open in a bar on a backwater planet where Vic Serotonin, a jazz-loving mook, is about to meet a tourist.
What’s so wikkid about tourism?
See, there’s a massive stretch of space-time-randomness floating above this planet like a scar in space, and when some dumb space-jockey flew into the scar a few decades back a chunk fell planet-side and blew a small hole in reality. Now half of Moneytown is taken up by the event-site where the chunk landed: a heavily guarded wasteland of twisting physics where the streets overlap, rain flows upwards, and the sound of children singing seems to come from around every corner. Naturally, people want to sneak in and see what all the fuss is about. But getting in isn’t half as difficult as getting back out, and if you ever want to escape you need a tour guide. Enter Vic Serotonin.
There’s enough in here already for a story. But when you add in the embittered gumshoe trying to track down Vic as his last, greatest bust, and the fact that Vic has been sneaking artefacts out of the event site to sell to the mob - artefacts that may or may not be alive depending on how you look at them - you have all the ingredients for a brilliant future-noir.
Harrison isn’t the world’s greatest writer, but he’s consistently solid with moments of brilliance. His characterisation is sharp and vivid:
“(Liv Hula) wasn’t one to complain. She was one of those women that draw in on themselves after their fortieth year, short, thin, with brush-cut grey hair, a couple of smart tattoos on her muscular forearms, an expression as if she was always thinking of something else.”
“She was a black haired woman, with wide blunt hips, who blushed up quickly under her olive skin… in those days Edith was both pretty and talented. She had clever feet. She learned to play the accordion early, dance a table while she squeezed. Her energy was endless…”
Dang! Harrison’s world is equally vivid. Moneytown is a dirty neon mob-run mess of gene-shops and legalised street-corner gladiatorial battles, where fighters have surgery to be more like animal like, more deadly.
“The fighters moved with studied, looming, fuck-off grace, speech reduced by careful tuning of their onboard hormonal patches to the amused, confident, inarticulate growl of those who are invincible at what they do, and will never be less than what they are, and will always be more than you. The light fell on their strutting cockerel legs, clawed and brazen-scaled. It showed you suddenly the weird articulations at knee and hip, the vast perpetually erect cock bursting from the leather britches, the second thumb a brass spur too… Tourists loved it.”
But the star of the city is the event site, where shoes fly about in huge flocks, buildings grow smaller as you approach and the things that once were people have become parasitic chunks of code that latch on to visitors and consume them from the inside. There’s a lot of dread involved in every visit into the event site, but also a lot of wonder; Harrison very neatly balances the apprehension of stepping past the gates and the need of the reader to find what hides inside.
If it sounds like the perfect novel then I’ll have to burst the bubble now. There’s a lot that doesn’t quite come off the way you want it to, and in the end the story is vaguely unsatisfying. Some major plot-lines just peter out, or get wrapped up in a single page of exposition. Some major characters fade out in favour of people you would have considered minor. But can this be forgiven? I certainly can.
Harrison is brilliant. Nova Swing is somewhat less than brilliant, but it’s still a solid 4/5 shiny Ruzkin stars. If you like a great noir atmosphere, vivid (if sometimes easy to predict) characters, and some real narrative subtlety, grab a copy.
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