Noir (novel)

Jeter, K. W. (Kevin Wayne). Noir. New York City: Bantam Spectra (hard-back), 1998; Bantam Spectra (paperback), 1999. For translations and other editions — and links to major reviews — see Internet Speculative Fiction Database at link.[1]

Late cyberpunk novel, strongly in the darker areas of the Noir tradition(s).[2][3]

Reviewed by Victoria Strauss (1999) on SF Site Reviews, linked here.[4]

From the back-cover publisher's blurb, Bantam Spectra paperback 1999:

LA: the sparkling metropolis at the new center of what's left of the civilized world. Here wealthy men and women seek forbidden thrills through a system that enables them to indulge safely and anonymously in their wildest fantasies through the use of computerized simulations known as prowlers. Then a young executive at one of the world's most powerful corporations is brutally slain[,] and an ex-information cop named McNihil is called in to find the dead man's still "living" prowler. [...] Teamed with a ruthless female operative [...,] McNihil is about to enter a world in which no one can be trusted [...,] a world in which a vast conspiracy of evil is about to blur the razor-thin line between the sane safety of daylight and the dark danger of NOIR.

In addition to the cybernetic simulacra, see for the following (citations to Spectra pb, 1999):

• Very sophisticated implants, including nerve-connected business-card equivalents, with potential sexual implications (some readers in the palm transmitting data to the person's genitals, "where the nerves were clustered thick enough for almost instant readout" [ch. 2, pp. 14-15]).
• The initial murder-victim's body being partially covered by "pipes and tubes, small machinery like burrowing chrome rats" that are "little machines" harvesting the victim's organs for use as his corporation sees fit (ch. 2, p. 17).
• E-mail that come in visible swarms of "tiny holo'd images" around the heads of low-ranking corporate "suits" (ch. 2, p. 18).
• McNihil's eye replacements that has him see the world like a noir film: black and white, with strong lighting effects (etc., passim). 
• The quite long "reveal" (mostly ch. 24 [and that's a "spoiler" warning if knowing the end spoils the story for you]): In the case of the murder victim, the "prowler was specifically designed [...] to receive Travelt's essence and carry it into the Wedge," a kind of red-light district on a large scale. Tavelt had "been infected with TOAW" so "With Travelt aboard, the prowler could sneak TOAW in past whatever defenses the Wedge might've had, infect and spread TOAW throughout the whole Wedge until it was one big vector pool. Like a venereal disease [...]" (p. 467). TOAW is the successor to TIAC and is the ultimate capitalist product. TIAC: Turd in a can, something worthless — but material — packaged and marketed brilliantly. TOAW: Turd on a wire (with a possible allusion to the 1990 John Badham film BIRD ON A WIRE[5] and the likely allusion to the well-known Leonard Cohen song by that name.[6]).

In ch. 23 we learn that the DynaZauber ("Zauber": Magic) Corporation — the evil zaibatsu in Noir — has learned how to manipulate the "wire" of the human brain's "dopamine path" and with the manipulation cause addiction (pp. 459-60), which can be spread like VD. TIAC at least requires material products and the costs of producing, packaging, marketing those products. TOAW is the perfect capitalist product because after initial production, it spreads virally for free, and people need it. It can be spread human to human and by the manufactured prowlers, but not by the novel's living dead (ch. 24, pp. 273-74). Though a negative for a dead, they are still part of the set, so TOAW, "a biological disease, brings together something like replicants or androids (cf. and contrast BLADE RUNNER) with standard-issue humans, and the dead, in an addiction racket going beyond that described in The Space Merchants.

RDE, finishing, 19Mar21 f.