{"id":720,"date":"2013-08-11T20:28:57","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T04:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=720"},"modified":"2013-08-11T20:28:57","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T04:28:57","slug":"review-necropolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/11\/review-necropolis\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Necropolis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Necropolis\"<\/a>
\n Necropolis<\/a> by Michael Dempsey<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Necropolis\u2014review<\/p>\n

First there was cyberpunk. And then there was steampunk, and we started using \u201cpunk\u201d to describe advanced technology tied to a certain aesthetic. You could call The Flintstones \u201cstonepunk\u201d if you want, and the works of Terry Pratchett are a kind of \u201cmagepunk.\u201d So, why not \u201cnoirpunk\u201d?<\/p>\n

Which is the direction Necropolis tries to go, although it doesn\u2019t last. You\u2019ve got your wise-cracking detective, dames, roscoes, alcohol, thugs, hopeless cynicism. You\u2019ve also got your plasma pistols, holograms, AIs, and advanced biological sciences. Not a bad mash-up. The more Marlowe parts of Philip K. Dick and the overlap of Sterling and Gibson with a sprinkling of Brown\/Grisham\/Chrichton.<\/p>\n

Do I sound like I\u2019m damning with faint praise? Good. Because, yeah, at first, we get the noir, and the sci-fi takes a back seat, like it should. But as the story keeps going, there are literally visual shifts to other aesthetics. The New York of the future, you see, has it\u2019s 40s throwbacks, but also its 20s and 60s. yes, each of those eras has contributed, via good writers, to the hard-boiled detective trope. But for me the novel lost consistency.<\/p>\n

The plot of Necropolis is nice and twisty (without being overfilled with clich\u00e9d \u201csurprises.\u201d) and Michael Dempsey does a good job of taking advantage of the science he\u2019s invented to create a context that doesn\u2019t require cliff-hangers or deus ex machine. So it\u2019s fun to get through. There\u2019s some politics and some moralizing and some romance, but they\u2019re not too hard to gloss over.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re lucky, Dempsey will do some more like this. I\u2019m not looking for a sequel, but some more noirpunk would be great. Phillip K. Dick was great, so modernized version (ain\u2019t that an ironic thing to say about a sci-fi novelist) would be great.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Necropolis by Michael Dempsey My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necropolis\u2014review First there was cyberpunk. And then there was steampunk, and we started using \u201cpunk\u201d to describe advanced technology tied to a certain aesthetic. You could call The Flintstones \u201cstonepunk\u201d if you want, and the works of Terry Pratchett are a kind of \u201cmagepunk.\u201d So, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: Necropolis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-bC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}