Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
My rating: 4/5 cats
You’ll leave a trail of trash on this Earth that will far exceed anything of worth you leave behind. For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.
between this and Schrödinger’s Gun: A Tor.Com Original, i seem to be on a roll with this noir/sci-fi genre mashup. this book is dark, funny, and a lot of fun. it’s also one of the fastest books i have read in a long time. part of it is that it’s written in snappy and short bits of dialogue that give it that classic-noir feel, but it’s also very actiony, without a lot of time wasted on descriptive passages or unnecessary commentary. from the first page, it’s all go-time scene scene scene, and the reader is propelled along in the story in the most enjoyable page-turny fashion.
it takes place in future-new york, after a dirty bomb detonated in times square and several subsequent smaller bombs have destroyed the city, turning it into this wasteland of horribleness. that’s not to say people don’t still live there, because they do, it’s just really shitty. the people who remain are mostly the wealthiest inhabitants, who take advantage of this sort of full-immersion virtual reality world and spend their days plugged in to locations and situations of their choosing while nurses tend to the needs of their bodies. the not-so-wealthy who stick around are the stubborn, the crazy, or those without the option to relocate, who keep the city running as much as possible despite the ruin and the rubble.
spademan is a former garbageman who now focuses on a different kind of waste-removal—he is a killer for hire, and he is very good at his job, in terms of efficiency, discretion, and a disdain for small talk.
I don’t want to know your reasons. If he owes you or he beat you or she swindled you or he got the promotion you wanted or you want to fuck his wife or she fucked your man or you bumped into each other on the subway and he didn’t say sorry. I don’t care. I’m not your Father Confessor.
Think of me more like a bullet.
Just point.
spademan lost his wife in the times square bombing, and now he commutes bleakly from jersey into the wasteland and does his job, no questions asked. when his latest assignment targets persephone harrow, the badass estranged daughter of a famous and powerful televangelist, details emerge which cause spademan to politely decline, as it conflicts with his single hard limit, but this steers him onto a dangerous path where he is forced to travel both the real world and the virtual one in order to live to kill another day.
it’s a real whirlwind of a book, in which clarity is sometimes sacrificed for pacing. there’s a ton of shit i don’t understand about this world: the rest of the country is fine, so why stay there if you have the choice, stubborn-rich or not? how does the economy work? how do people get spademan’s number to hire him if he swaps the phones out after every job? why is there no rebuilding effort? are all of his jobs in new york? how is that possible? etc etc etc.
but FOR ONCE, and going against all of my well-documented complaints in other reviews where i bitch and moan about weak worldbuilding, i honestly didn’t care. there’s something about this book that managed to override my usual bugbear about authors who don’t explain their worlds and i just thought this book was so much fun, my numerous questions didn’t kill the book for me. in fact, i barely had time to register them as i was swept away into the next exciting action part. i loved the characters, i loved the parts of the world i did understand (and this is a double shock for me, since i usually hate virtual reality crap), i loved “uriel,” and i got so caught up in the twists and turns and double/triple crossings and the snappy fun of the book that i came out of it with only good feelings, and i’m totally on board to read the next book: Near Enemy.
i never said i was consistent.
maggie’s favorite part of this book was the detail that apart from rooning new york, an inexplicable side effect of the dirty bomb is that it killed all the dogs. her favorite passage:
Used to be you’d see men with dogs. This was the hour for that. But there are no dogs anymore, of course, not in this city, and even if you had one, you’d never walk it, not in public, because it would be worth a million dollars and you’d be gutted once you got around the corner and out of sight if your trusty doorman and your own front door.
she awaits the promised apocalypse.
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