City Come a-Walkin'

City Come a Walkin' should be a neoliberal nightmare. The big banks, run by the mob, have displaced the government in the United States (no other country is mentioned). Digital credit, manipulated by the banks, has superseded money, which is all but banned. The final usurpation of power and the consolidation of a new criminal cartel is being plotted by mob bosses in the major cities of the nation. The corporatized criminals - the Mafioso-bankers - work in clandestine conjunction with culturally right-wing vigilantes, who brutally repress alternative forms of popular expression from pop concerts to prostitution. (Sound familiar?) Cities and their populations have been ravaged by the mob and their fascist conspirators. The venal destruction of the rich historic urban texture of the old is brilliantly contrasted to the enervating banality of the new. Those who love urban life and who constitute its originality are represented in the novel respectively by Stu Cole, a hard-bitten classic noir individualist and club owner and his star performer Catz Wailen. Both use their particular geniuses to resist the irresistible cultural depredations of the mob. The most memorable character of the novel is, however, City. City is the reified psyche of San Francisco's population, the personification the city's communal angst. It is the city come to life. City, manifesting himself to Cole on a television explains himself: "A TV is a media outlet for the city. A neuron in my brain. The means I use to transfer the image from video to electron-patterns, bring it through the wires and feed it into you TV--it's a form of telekinesis. Manipulating electronics with thought. At night I have the power in every cerebral battery in the city. A brain stores electricity. I can tap in, when they sleep. During the day I have only the power of those who sleep in the day--far fewer, so I am limited. Though I'm bolstered by people watching TV, since that's a form of sleeping. I'm the sum total of the unconscious cognition of every brain in the city. And I'm Rufe Roscoe [the mob's CEO], too--I'm his self-hatred." (58) The human characters of the novel are moral creatures: the protagonists are moral, the villain is immoral. In contrast, City, like the population from which he draws his life, is amoral. He acts, often savagely and indiscriminately, only in his own interests, in defense of the creative diversity that sustains urban life. Shirley's story is compelling not because of the plot and only partially because of the pace and grittiness of his writing. It is powerful because of its uncanny evocation of the dangers that affect the cities we love to inhabit.

If you know who Jack Hawksmoor of the Authority is, you will get some of the vibe here. San Francisco is making its own superheroes, to help combat corruption, takeover and neglect of its internal systems, and organised crime control of finance. However, it needs assistants, and ends up possessing those bodies, with their physical forms being destroyed. Other cities are on a similar path, by the end, without the superhero manifestations. This is superhero in the Authority sense, too. The protagonist is an aging music club owner, deeply in debt to his mob, who, of course, has a thing for the singer in one of his support acts. The problem is, that City does not trust her.

This book is definitely an important one as the forward by William Gibson indicates. Still, there is much left to be wanting. Looking back I remember being basically floored by the first fifty pages, and then subsequently let down for the majority of the rest of the book. The main character is hard to like and not in an anti-hero sort of way. I think this probably hints at John Shirley's true talent lying in his short story writing abilities. If I could do it again I would probably try to find some of those first, but overall this one is worth checking out.

This is probably the most unique concept I've come across. The idea of a the city's consciousness manifesting itself is fresh and interesting. It's hard to believe this title is as old as it is. It seems like recently written cyberpunk. Pretty obvious that instead, all other cyberpunk has taken from it.

For those of you that don't know john shirley, he is the father of Cyberpunk...a master of it. his novel, city come a-walkin', is one of my favorites, telling the story of a club owner who is visited by a representation of a city , in the form of a man. i highly recomend this book for those who are into dark, funny novels...