Customer Reviews

Blue Limbo - A Mitch Helwig Book

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BLUE LIMBO is an exciting, blazing fast, high-tech noir-thriller set in a near future Toronto. Mitch Helwig, a heroic cop with a poorly established sense of his own mortality has just raided and destroyed a criminal gang's warehouse dealing them a crippling financial blow. Not content to deal solely with the police and Helwig, the gang is out for revenge. They've kidnapped his aging father and they're attempting to murder his best friend and his young daughter.

Helwig is portrayed as a vengeance-minded rogue cop armed with futuristic weaponry like laser guns that can cut through flesh like a hot wire through soft butter, water guns capable of delivering lethal electrical shocks and infallible portable lie-detectors called "barking dogs". But despite Helwig's brutal arsenal and his willingness to get things done outside of any legal boundaries, BLUE LIMBO is not the simplistic, derivative BLADE RUNNER or MAD MAX type of novel one might be forgiven for expecting.

In fact, BLUE LIMBO is a compelling, character driven essay that explores the meaning of friendship, love, family and parenting. The dialogue that Green puts into the mouths of Helwig, his aging father and his beautiful but wise-beyond-her-years nine year old daughter is positively beautiful, humorous, exquisitely heartwarming and quite capable of moving a reader to tears.

Like his better known Canadian writing contemporary, Robert J Sawyer, Terence M Green is also a writer who isn't afraid to use his novels to explore deeper philosophical questions that are a natural outcome of the world's scientific advancements. In this case, the title BLUE LIMBO refers to a state of quasi-existence after death that the medical world has found a way to tap into and communicate with a deceased person's brain for a short period of time after what we have traditionally labelled as death. BLUE LIMBO positions itself deeply in the soft side of the sci-fi spectrum by leaving the technology unexplained, by simply asserting its existence and choosing instead to explore the issues that would arise were such technology available.

BLUE LIMBO is an exhilarating combination of physics, metaphysics and the realities of life and love. My hope would be that this positive review would help to deliver a few more readers. Goodness knows, BLUE LIMBO deserves it. Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

After the spectacular fire, one could easily guess that dirty cops would pop up at some unexpected moment. Although advertised as a book about the future, the scene was eerily 1990 - cars, cell phones, traditional schooling. As in most novels attempting a depiction of the future, this one offers a wild invention without any of the lead ups. For example, we suddenly didn't land a man on the moon. There were simultaneous developments in conputers, materials, chemistry and electronics. In this case, science has found a rather hokey way of reviving the dead for four weeks (don't ask) during which the "dead" person sees everything in blue.

Of course, one character will be killed and brought back to life with crime-solving revelations. Along the way, Mitch Helwig (where DOES he come up with these names?) goes semi-crazy, operating outside the law he has sworn to uphold and enforce. Think bad sci-fi avenger with big toys. At least a third of this rather sparse prose could have easily been eliminated without any degradation to the story. The good guy (?) wins in the end and perhaps gets the good gal. Ho hum.

When Tor books first published this book, I provided one of the cover blurbs for it. It's a terrific story of a cop-on-the-edge in a vividly realized near-future Toronto ... but it's also a story of a man putting his life together after his marriage fails. Great character moments abound in this book, and the central conceit of using technology to let us revive the dead long enough to find out what they know is cunningly handled. Read it.