Return to Mark/Space
homepage
ISBN 0-312-13100-3 (US hbk)
novel, science fiction, slipstream, music, identity, future
Near future, California, rampant nature. A portion of this book appeared previously, in slightly different form, in Omni Best Science Fiction One (Omni Books).
"To start off the new century, rock sensation Ryder fakes his own death and checks into a sanitarium. Three weeks later, he takes off for San Francisco, where his first sight is a mangrove swamp that's the new northern tip of the Amazon rain forest.
"The surreal jungle is more appealing to Ryder than the media-overloaded rock world, and the fractal wilderness draws Ryder to it in search of such exotic flora and fauna as his identity, the true nature of sound and light, and that elusive bloom called happiness.
"Kamikaze L'Amour is a fantastic mélange, an experimental symphony resonating in a Ballardian landscape through which sleepwalkers, hustlers, refugees, and soldiers search for meaning in an America transformed into a synesthetic dream." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1995]
"Perhaps the first novel to create a patina of romance around the digital sound-gathering instrumentalists of the future, in the same way a jazz horn player shows up in film noir mode." --Jon Hassell.
"As though some gorgeous Ballardian eco-catastrophe had been rear-ended by a Steve Erickson novel on its way to the Viper Room. Killer." --William Gibson.
"Richard Kadrey is brilliant, a voice for the twenty-first century." --Pat Cadigan.
"L.A., city of night, becomes the city of light in this luminescent novel of jungles neon and Amazonian, of death, rebirth, and mad love." --Richard Calder.
"A story of altered states and human identity set in a fractal matrix of music, madness, and ecological mayhem." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1997).
Highly recommended.
Additional Links:
Metrophage
To reach Richard Kadrey himself:
"The Horse Latitudes"
(an excerpt from Kamikaze L'Amour by Richard Kadrey)
(For a complete online text of his novel Metrophage)
e-mail:
kadrey@well.com
Of related interest:
bookshops * clubs & music hangouts * library * office * spaceport * teleport