Sewer, Gas and Electric

The year is 2023. High above the canyons of Manhattan, a crew of human and android steelworkers is approaching the halfway point in the construction of a new Tower of Babel. The Tower is the brainchild of billionaire Harry Gant, who is building it as a monument to humanity's power to dream. Meanwhile, on the streets (and below), a darker game is afoot: A Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Harry's ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why. Accompanying her is philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, resurrected from the dead by computer and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan's unwilling assistant. While Rand vainly attempts to tutor her in "the virtue of selfishness," Joan discovers that the murder is the key to a much larger mystery - one in which millions of lives may hang in the balance.
The world of Sewer, Gas & Electric includes such characters as submarine eco-terrorist Philo Dufrense; his daughter, Seraphina, who lives in the walls of the New York Public Library; newspaper publisher Lexa Thatcher, whose Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbie Hoffman; and Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark who swims in the sewer tunnels beneath Times Square - all of whom, and many more besides, are caught up in a conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and an army of homicidal robots.

Arriving eight years after his auspicious debut (Fool on the Hill), Ruff's second novel is a gargantuan but uneven tome: a tripartite, SF roller-coaster satirizing the horrors of our nascent technocracy. Set in New York city in the year 2023, it features a huge cast of characters, including humans, androids and a mutant great white shark, all revolving around Harry Gant, a Donald Trump-style billionaire real estate developer who's building the world's tallest skyscraper, a "new Tower of Babel." Holding the many subplots together is Gant's ex-wife, Joan Fine, who sets out to investigate the murder of a Wall Street financier who had sought to topple Gant Industries and who was ostensibly beaten to death with a signed first edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. As Fine's research leads her through the history of the Walt Disney Co., Gant Industries and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, not to mention many digressions into Rand's theory of Objectivism, she uncovers a sweeping conspiracy involving a mysterious black plague that wiped out the entire black race at the turn of the 21st century. Ruff uses a cartoonist's palette in his portraits of everyone and everything: Philo Dufresne, the eco-terrorist captain of a Yellow Submarine-style vessel called Yabba-Dabba-Doo; Harvard-educated pornographer Lexa Thatcher; an attack submarine called City of Women (wo)manned by one Wendy Mankiller; a whole caste of "Electric Negroes" who serve the city's white upper class. Told with breezy good humor, this exuberantly silly tale will find an audience among admirers of the day-glo surrealism of Steve Erickson and the tangled conspiracy theories of David Foster Wallace. What is absent here are the carefully honed language and the attention to nuance and character necessary to prevent Ruff's own Tower of Babel from sagging under the weight of his pell-mell special effects.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After an eight-year hiatus (his 1988 novel, Fool on the Hill, became an underground hit), Ruff proves himself still capable of wild-eyed flights of fancy as he pits altruists against antihuman robots in an updated version of Atlas Shrugged above and below the streets of Manhattan. In the year 2023, visionary zillionaire industrialist Harry Gant is building a new Tower of Babel, uptown; his crusading ex- wife Joan is on a search-and-destroy effort in the city sewers, seeking a mutant Jaws-like shark named Meisterbrau; eco-terrorist Philo Dufresne, one of the few blacks remaining after the race- specific pandemic of '04, leads the brilliant, eccentric crew of the submarine Yabba-Dabba-Doo on a nonviolent attack against a Gant-owned ship to save Antarctica; Anderson Teaneck, Wall Street takeover specialist, also with a bead on Gant Industries, is murdered, perhaps by one of his servant robots--who are all carefully programmed, supposedly, to be harmless. Joan has a close encounter with Meisterbrau that leaves them intact but the East River in flames, then is enlisted to solve the Teaneck mystery, a mission that takes her into the heart of a plot hatched by a psychopath and his creation, an artificial brain sheltered in a bunker under Disneyland. Joan also ends up with the querulous companionship of Ayn Rand, reduced to a holograph on a hurricane lamp. Philo and crew, meanwhile, are threatened by the vengeful scheme of a Gant subordinate, as they willingly enter a trap to save what may be the world's last lemurs. Several torpedoes, robot assaults, philosophical debates, and an earthquake later, all is again reasonably right with the world. A careening riot to read, even with all of its zestful improbabilities: Ruff's second novel can only enhance his reputation as a fantasy writer with imagination to burn. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ruff conjures up a terrifying future in which evil androids covertly scheme to annihilate humankind while a mutant shark escapes the New York City sewer system and proceeds to destroy everything in its path. AIDS has been cured, but a computer-engineered racist plague has swept the world, killing off nearly every black person on the globe. Although the idea of technology turning against humans is somewhat cliched, Ruff does add some interesting twists, e.g., a band of underwater eco-terrorists skim the ocean floor in search of polluters and nonviolently sabotage their efforts. Despite these colorful twists, sudden jumps in setting and time make the plot at times hard to follow, and some of the characters lack believability. For larger collections.?Erin Cassin, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.