Headlong - Softcover

Ings, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575131128 ISBN 13: 9780575131125

Publisher: Gollancz, 2014

Synopsis

Post-cyberpunk SF that recalls the darkness of M. John Harrison and the wild visual imagination of China Mieville and Hannu Rajaniemi, HEADLONG felt ahead of the curve when first published and now serves to show just why Simon Ings has remained on the cutting edge of genre fiction.

Surgically connected to their swarming robotic workers, architects Christopher and Joanne Yale are turning the moon into a paradise.

But now, without warning, the machines have pulled the plug and are building a new, insane future away from the control of human minds.

About this title

Review:

When they take away your electronic add-ons, new senses and new ways of thinking, you get sick and apathetic and want to die. Yale and his wife Joanne built cities on the Moon, but now nobody wants to know; Artificial Intelligences have sent mere humans home, and the authorities are frightened of what people might be allowed to become if the wires are not stripped out of their heads. And now Joanne is mysteriously dead, and nobody wants to know about that either; Yale has had enough, and starts wandering around asking awkward questions, and soon people are trying to kill him, and he is discovering that he has a nasty temper... The gloomiest of Simon Ings' triptych of novels about the transhuman condition, this is less fancy than Hot Head and Hotwire; more like a thriller and less like a space opera. There is pain in all three books, but only here is there a sense that there are some pains which will never go away. Set in a decaying London and derelict Yorkshire of the near future, this is perhaps Ings' most adult and intelligent novel; sf that refuses the stock consolations of sf. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

‘Hot Head is entertaining and intelligent’
Time Out

‘Hot Head is the rosy glow announcing the dawn of a new era of excitement in science fiction’
New York Review of Science Fiction

‘Simon Ings goes into orbit as a science fiction master’
Daily Mail

‘SF’s hippest star’
Dazed and Confused

About this edition

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0575131128
• ISBN 13: 9780575131125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 285