I really enjoyed this book. As a fan of the intersection of noir and SF, this book hit all my buttons. It helps to have a background in noir films, but I don't think it's required to enjoy this story with elements of virtual reality, advanced AIs and gat-toting hoods. A fun read. ( )

My reactions to reading this book in 1992. Spoilers follow.

I picked up this book having never heard of it or its author and was very pleasantly surprised. I’m sure if I knew more about movies I’d have liked it even more. As it was, I didn’t get all the allusions to various actors and movies, but I got a lot of them, and I liked the book a lot.

Newman, in his Richie Quick section, writes with the snappy funny dialogue of 40’s film noir. The conceit of the city is wonderful with its black and white world, theme music for characters, constant appearances by actors and actresses, fade ins, and underimagined venues (not to mention that its always 2:30 AM and raining). Newman (while making some telling but affectionately critical comments about film noir -- paticularly women's place in it) provides a sturdy enough (barely) plot. Daine’s imagined world is taking up more and more memory in the world computer (the few viewpoint sections of the computer are sardonic and well-done); however, it’s all a cover for Daine to escape prison by “colonizing” a life support system belonging to Yggdrasil, the world computer. Daine has “8921 counts of first-degree murder alone, excluding his various thermonuclear adventures”. He's a pop culture supercriminal.

The book has a very fantasy feel where, unlike hard sf where things are usually explained in explicit, scientific or pseudo-scientific ways, the workings of Dreaming and combat in Dreaming are suggested by metaphor. It’s not clear why violating the imaginings of another will push ther consciousness out of a Dream, why combat has to involve shifting dream images. Still, taken for what it was, an affectionate use and commentary of film noir, it was very enjoyable, witty, and fun. ( )

A rare excursion into 'straight' sf by Newman; shenanigans in a virtual reality environment. Newman's delight in mashing up fictional characters is allowed fully justified rein for once, as the virtual world his characters inhabit is based on noir thiller movies. The basic premise isn't new: Bob Shaw gave us this sort of thing in his short story At the cosmic cocktail party (aka Harold Wilson at the cosmic cocktail party) back in the heady days of the New Wave in the late 1960s. But this has the sort of style that so many crave, as do I; so it rates highly with me. All together now: "It was two-thirty in the morning and raining. In the City, it was always two-thirty in the morning and raining." ( )

Kim Newman always has a lot of fun mixing his own characters with other people's fictional creations and even historical figures, but in this short SF novel he adds another layer with his characters trapped in a cyberspace film noir city. In the near future a totalitarian government manipulates two professional 'dreamers' to take on the dream creation of an evil genius in a maximum security prison; a city where it's always raining and always night. This book starts well and just gets better, combining the characteristics of Noir, Cyberpunk and political satire to create a satisfying whole. Short but packed with ideas and gleeful invention. ( )

British futuristic with fun slang (like gunmint for government) that conveyed the changes time has brought without overexplaining. In the future there is a jobdescription named dreamer. Dreamers make the dreams that have replaced movies as entertainment, and while submerged in an artificial environment - a 'dream' they can control and alter their surroundings. A criminal mastermind has escaped from a prison into a dreamworld of his own making, prompting the AI who host him to conscribe two dreamers to catch him. The one dreamer is a PI, already in the dreamworld at the start of the story. He is loosing his grip of reality, and becomes submerged in his PI role in the dreamworld. The second dreamer is sent into the dreamworld, and aided by the AI the dreamers get together.
The story is fun and inventive.
A slow starter, where the story first becomes relevant when all the pieces comes together (the rough PI style dosn't do much for me on its own) ( )