New York Blues

‘Hal Halliday is just another of the lost, crowding the streets of New York, mired in a 21st Century that is going nowhere. His business partner is dead and Hal is keeping their missing persons business going without really knowing why.

When a holodrama star approaches Hal to find her missing sister Hal is drawn into the world of dreams set up by VR magnate Sergio Mantoni. It is a world built on the desperate lives of a population of a ruined America; a world facing a new challenge from VIREX, an underground movement dedicated to ending the false promise of Virtual Reality.’

Blurb from the 2002 Gollancz Edition

Hal Halliday, Private Eye, still in mourning from the death of his partner Barney and the loss of his girlfriend, Kim, is commissioned by vampish VR starlet Vanessa Artois (One can’t help thinking her name should have been Stella) to find her missing sister, Canada.
This is a step up from ‘New York Nights’ in many ways. The pace is faster, the mood is darker, and although initially one might feel that the plot of NYN is being rehashed, we are taken into areas where it seems no one can be trusted.
Brown seems to have found his feet here, and having established his world with NYN can afford to dive straight into the action and shadow Hal as he follows clues and leads from location to location. A sub-plot involving members of the anti-VR organisation VIREX ends up being a little redundant and adds nothing to the plot other than to give Hal a clue as to the identity of the kidnapper.
An interesting feature of this novel is that Brown extrapolates the ambivalent nature of contemporary internet sexual identities to its logical conclusion. People entering VR sex-sites can choose the age and sex of their avatar. Mantoni’s hitman, Pablo for instance (a large muscular moustachioed Mexican) has regular meetings with Mantoni in a VR environment and adopts the persona of an attractive blonde female, often resulting in a sexual encounter with Mantoni. Mantoni is fully aware of Pablo’s ‘real’ form, but is nonetheless happy to engage in the sexual activities which Pablo initiates.
Halliday himself, in order to set a trap for the kidnapper, poses as a teenage girl in the Eros VR site and finds himself in the position of experiencing a teenage girl’s sexual arousal at Mantoni's overtures.
Brown does not explore the issue in any depth, but thankfully neither does he moralise or allow Halliday outbursts of righteous self-disgust at these feelings.
The subject matter of course, relates directly to contemporary worries about older men (or indeed women) ‘grooming’ children on the internet whom the subsequently meet in the real world, which no doubt strikes a chord with many parents of internet users.
It’s a novel of a certain type, in that it is a lightweight, enjoyable read. ‘For those who like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing they will like’. It will appeal, I would imagine to those who don’t read a lot of Science Fiction.
My main problem with it (and it’s a minor niggle) is Halliday who, despite his dead boss and absconded ex-girlfriend, is just too patient and too likeable. Detectives should have psychological problems and speak rudely to anyone within earshot, or else have a deep dark secret. Even Sherlock Holmes had his seven percent solution to take the edge off his too-good-to-be true-ness. They should be tolerated only because they are the only ones capable of solving the case. Being nice is just not an option.

reviews.metaphorosis.com

2.5 stars

Virtual reality start Vanessa Artois contacts Halford Halliday, low-rent private detective, to find her missing sister. When Halliday investigates, he finds himself deeply (and literally) immersed in the world of virtual reality.

The previous book in the trilogy, New York Nights, somewhat explored the world of virtual reality as a concept. This sequel is much more of a standard detective story with virtual reality thinly layered on top. It's in some ways a better story than the first, but also less interesting. The aspects of virtual reality discussed sometimes just flat out don't make sense, and Brown attempts to work in an underground protest movement, Virex, that appears only at start and end, and feels very much like an add-on. While the whole series is called the Virex Trilogy, Virex has so far played a very small role.

In the first book, Brown made frequent and uncomfortable use of stereotypes. Here, that effect is lessened (though in its place there's a constant fear the protagonist will turn out to be something else nasty)., but Brown does retain some verbal tics. All the characters like to say "It's time I wasn't here," when they mean to leave. And there's simply a fair amount of dialogue that doesn't sound like New York, but does sound British. (Also, to Brown, New York City appears to consist mainly of Chinese laundries.) Some of the dialogue (especially from female characters) has the wide-eyed feel of a cheap TV show. ("But he knows you're working for me! ... it'd be dangerous, Hal.") . There are also quite a few typos - always irritating.

The main problem with the story, though, is that the characters simply aren't credible. Most of them come straight from stock, and their motivations are pretty thin. This is especially true of the evil villain, whose goals are unclear, and whose methods are baffling, to say the least. The protagonist and his romantic interest are predictable from page one.

This seems to be one of Brown's early books. While it's a bit surprising that he was able to sell more, the later ones do get better. If you're not a Brown fan, skip these. If you are, these are an interesting but somewhat painful look at his earlier style, and at some of his continuing weaknesses.

Part 2 of the Virex Trilogy.

This is a different pace than the first book, maybe because the first book started off quite slowly. But this started with a bang and kept going.

This carried on almost straight after the first book ended, and a large chunk of the book is focussed on VR. As this book is only set around 20 years in the future it does bring up some interesting questions.
Among which are:
If the technology advances to the level in the book, will the creators wield unsurpassable power and become unanswerable for their actions?
Will the new 'power drug' become time in VR sex rooms or VR torture rooms?
Will 80 year old granny's become 18 year old hussy's in VR?

Although the ending was slightly predictable (I called it quite a few chapters from the end) the book was enjoyable and difficult to put down.

On to the final one of the trilogy!

Oproti prvnímu dílu sem se u této knihy, tak dobře nebavil. Sice se mi líbí téma virtuální reality i příběh samotný, ale vše se odehrává v takovém klidném tempu. Závěrečný finiš bych si tedy představoval trochu více dramatičtější.

As the next-in-series reading list rolls around, so I find myself returning to the New York of 2040 (although it's presumably 2041 or even 2042 by now). This is the sequel to n  New York Nightsn and the same central character – the detective Hal – is back, still running his missing persons detective agency. This time he's engaged to find the missing sister of a famous VR star, who is herself the subject of a failed assassination attempt even as she's hiring him. Pretty exciting stuff already.

The meeting of science-fiction and crime-thriller is the same format as the previous novel. And, as with the previous novel Eric Brown's interest in including slightly more sexy-sexy than is strictly necessary becomes apparent. That time it was continual references to the fact that some of the main characters were lesbians – it just about stopped short of uncomfortable, but it was noticeable. This time we switch out the lesbians and introduce a main villain with obvious paedophile tendencies. It's never clearly laid out like that, but we have a man who is using virtual-reality to approach and seduce much younger women, before kidnapping them. And, while Hal is angry at this, it feels like he's probably slightly more angry because it's happened to the sister of his client (who he's obviously going to fall for) rather than because she's so young. In fact, there's even an implication that some of the characters think that the activity (bar the kidnapping) is borderline okay because it's in VR, therefore it's not real. To an extent this is explored as an idea – on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog – but the awkwardness comes because it's not really investigated as an idea, more just left there as a convenient excuse for the villain to try and convince himself of.

Taken for what it's clearly meant to be: a sci-fi crime-thriller sequel; it's an enjoyable read. It could have been more though if it had dug deeper into some of the topics it starts to look at. Instead it skims over the top of them and risks just feeling a bit creepy. The third book hasn't been published as an ebook yet, so I may find myself waiting a bit to complete the set.