Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [0]
SPARES
“No wonder Hollywood’s DreamWorks SKG has snapped up the film rights. This darkly atmospheric sci-fi thriller, long on technological wizardry and futuristic grotesqueries, makes excellent fodder for the big screen…. In his American debut novel, Smith masterfully moves the whodunnit toward the future, opening up refreshing vistas for a genre rooted in the present.”
—People
“Coma meets Blade Runner in this future noir thriller, a compulsively readable melding of hardboiled narrative and hardware invention…. Both a disconcerting portrait of a future that might be, and a poignant study of one man’s fight to resist it, this novel augurs a promising future of another sort for its author.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Inventive and horrifying.”
—The Rue Morgue
“Highly recommended.”
—Mysterious Galaxy
“A dark but witty futuristic thriller that combines Raymond Chandler and Robert A. Heinlein… Race down to the bookstore to grab this stunning debut.”
—Flint Journal
For Paula,
who lights up the forest.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Steve Jones, for whom I wrote the story which contained the seed of what follows; to the Chiselers and Chiselettes, for valued misery and chiseling; to arch-Miserablists Kim “Crispy” Newman and Paul “The Duck” McAuley for good advice (which I’m going to start taking); to Rob and Steve for helping me not to finish too early; to Clive Barker for kind words, and to Neil Caiman for helping me to not get sued; to Kingsley Amis and Tori Amos for very different inspirations; to Rachel Baker, Dick Jude, Chris Smith, Paul Landymore, and others for putting their weight behind the first one, and to the reps of HarperCollins for being a bunch of absolute stars; to Howard and Adam and Jenny and Les and Val and Mandy and Jo and Richard and Suzanne and Zaz for damaging my health; to Jane Johnson for putting up with me, and to Jim Rickards for being a hard bastard; to Ralph Vicinanza, Lisa Eveleigh, Linda Shaughnessy, Nick Marston and Bob Bookman; to Margaret and David and Tracey and Spangle and Lintilla for being who they are; and finally to Nana Harrup (Get through that defense) and Grandma Smith (oh, bother it) for being who they were.
Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad.
Jim Thompson
The Killer Inside Me
Wide shot.
New Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond, the historic capital of historical old Virginia, that sprawl of creaking tedium, but the New. The old Richmond was destroyed over a century ago, razed to the ground during riots which lasted two months. After decades of putting up with dreadful shopping facilities, a bewilderingly dull Old Town and no good restaurants to speak of, the residents suddenly went nonlinear and strode across the city like avenging angels, destroying everything in their wake. It was great.
Spin doctors blamed downtown decay, crack wars, the cast of the moon. Personally, I think everyone just got really bored, and either way good riddance to it. The old Richmond was a content-free mess, a waste of a good, level patch within sight of the pleasingly pointy Blue Ridge Mountains. Everyone agreed it was much better off as a landing strip, a refueling point for the MegaMalls.
The MegaMalls are aircraft—five miles square, two hundred stories high—which majestically transport passengers from one side of the continent to the other, from the bottom to the top; from wherever they’ve been to wherever they seem to think will be better. The biggest oblongs of all time, a fetching shade of consumer-goods black, studded with millions of points of light and so big they transcend function and become simply a shape again.
When oblongs grow up, they all want to be Mega-Malls.
Inside are thousands of stores, twenty-story atriums, food courts the size of small towns, dozens of multiplex cinemas, and a range of hotels to suit every wallet which has a Gold Card in it. All this