Synopsis
It is 1999. The Last Days, say some; the First, say others. The climate has altered irrevocably, the cities have imploded into vicious shards, and the stars haven't been seen for months. The sky is a shimmering arras of reds and greens and golds, the result of global warming, it is thought.
Jack Finnegan, publisher of the world's last literary magazine, is dying of AIDS while he watches the floodwaters rise toward his decaying mansion on the Hudson. Trip Marlowe, a rock star addicted to the wild glories of the hallucinogenic drug IZE, is immortalizing himself as a digital VR icon. Marz Candry, the "Hyacinth Girl" blooming under the canopy of the Glimmering, is waiting to bear Trip's child, while the fellahin and their underground cults are preparing the frenzies of the Night of the Thousand Years.
All these and more are drawn in to the seductive web of Leonard Thrope, the Warhol-like "sociocultural pathologist" who arrives from the East with his entourage bearing a gift: an elixir developed by an exiled scientist in a Tibetan lamasery. Jack (who tries everything, on principle) finds he is no longer HIV positive, no longer dying. Thanks to Fusax, something far more terrible, far more wonderful, far more unexpected is about to happen to Jack Finnegan and his world.
Reviews
Fin-de-siŠcle/apocalyptic yarn from the author of Waking the Moon (1995), etc. Earth's atmosphere, destroyed by pollution and ozone depletion, coruscates with bizarrely colorful discharges, banishing night and hiding the stars. In 1999, everyone's seemingly crazy, drugged, fanatical, or dying of AIDS. Photographer and ``sociocultural pathologist'' Leonard Thrope gives AIDS patient and former lover Jack Finnegan a new drug whipped up by a former Japanese WW II medical experimenter; Jack soon feels better but starts to see. . . ghosts? visions? Then Leonard jabs fundamentalist rock singer Trip Marlowe with a new synthetic drug, IZE, that's addictive, psychotropic, and confers the ability to see. . . what Jack sees? Trip spends a blissful afternoon in the arms of attractive waif Marz Candry, who then disappears. In despair, Trip tries to kill himself, but instead he's rescued from a Maine beach by AIDS victim Martin Dionysos, another of Leonard's exes. Later, Marz will turn up at Jack's, only to die in childbirth before a recovered Trip arrives. The Golden Family corporation, inventor and distributor of IZE, claims to be able to restore the atmosphere, but its fix-it airships are destroyed by ecoterrorist bombs. Leonard, meanwhile, revels in all the millennial weirdness he's helped create. Flashy and downbeat, a sort of pre-post-cyberpunk as depressing as it is pointless. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
After a March 1997 Antarctic ocean avalanche released methane to mix with bromotetrachloride in the atmosphere during a solar storm, strange charged particles began the glimmering in the ozone layer. HIV-positive magazine publisher Jack Finnegan awaits the millennium in his crumbling New York mansion. Hand's (Waking the Moon, HarperPrism: HarperCollins, 1995) bleak ecological disaster novel, which straddles sf and fantasy, belongs in most collections.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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