With the completion of Grey, I have now red five of the six authors on the final ballot for the John W. Campbell Award this year. The sixth, Mary Robinette Kowal, only has published short stories to date.
Armstrong is quite the wordsmith, but I think that’s all I really liked about his debut novel. It wasn’t bad, but it’s not my thing. He sets it in a cyberpunk
future where family corporations control a fair portion of the world. Most everything is shallow, as if it were reality T.V. to the nth degree. Our protagonist is Michael Rivers, former star dancer and heir to the RiversCorp fortune. He’s in love with Nora of the MKG Corporation, with whom RiversCorp is considering a merger. And then everything falls apart and we follow a love-obsesed Michael as he attempts to see Nora on the sly as well as fight with his father. You know, Romeo and Juliet and all that.
Thing is, the thing I liked about the book also comprises what I hated too. Armstrong strings together words that make you think, can you say that?
yet still making them interesting:
“Slap me! Slap me hard!” he cried as the music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. “That’s You’re My Cunt Spaceship by TastyLüng,” he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the silence.
That’s a tame example. They make great bumper sticker quotes, but a book full of stuff like that, as well as plot and setting equivalents, is just too much. Like a Saturday Night Live sketch that has been turned into a movie. And yet they keep making those movies because a large number of people like them. A fair number will like Grey and I won’t say they are wrong for it. Just not my bag.
At the moment, Grey is available for download for free from the publisher. Read it for yourself. If I were voting for the Campbell, I would be voting for Scott Lynch though.
Title: Grey
Author: Jon Armstrong
Cover artist: Jeremy Geddes
Imprint / publisher: Night Shade Books
Format: PDF
Length: 240 p.
Publication date: March 2008 (originally 2007)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59780-065-5
