Redrobe (Earthlight) [Paperback]

Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Author)

Book Description

Series: Earthlight | Publication Date: March 6, 2000

Ex-assassin Axl Borja has agreed to do one last hit - only he hasn't told his gun yet. Cardinal Santo Ducque faces political ruin if he can't regain the Vatican's missing billions. Mai's a Japanese kinderwhore held hostage on a space habitat. As they collide their actions could change the world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books; 4th edition (March 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671022601
• ISBN-13: 978-0671022600
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,959,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Passable cyberpunk, May 8, 2002

By 

"demiurge7" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Redrobe (Paperback)

If you really love cyberpunk, then you'll probably enjoy Redrobe. If not, you'll probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how corporate names could be so completely confused with adjectives.

Grimwood is intelligent and clearly working at developing a complex image of the future. He still takes a lot of shortcuts supplied by the genre rather than trying to elevate it. Too much emphasis on visual flash and terse descriptions as an attempt to keep a high pace. Unfortuately the story is not well crafted and seems slapdash rather than lightning fast.

I'm holding this book up to high standards, though. I think the obvious comparison to Gibson doesn't do Grimwood any harm. Redrobe's characters are much more three dimensional. Nor do I think that Neal Stephenson has the market cornered on good craft. Stephenson has some serious need of an editor.

Still, the Locus tag/dig on the front of the book rings true: "rapidly developing into a novelist worth watching." He's not there yet but we'll see.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Slumming Angel, January 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Redrobe (Paperback)

Jon Courtney Grimwood inspires comparison with William Gibson due to his ability to develop highly intense situations and characters with real vitality. However, my first inclinations on reading redRobe were to think of Neal Stephenson and Raymond Chandler, as his characters and the world he paints make one want to explore them. redRobe moves very quickly between the slums of Mexico City and an orbital safe-zone for political refugees, each and all drawn in vivid colors with no time or space allowed for anything close to overfamiliarity. The characters involved range from a gun with AI (not to mention personality) to a dead pope. I hate to give any details, as the story and characters (note how I keep coming back to characters) are best left to unfold as Mr. Grimwood has written them. It evokes the best reaction I can imagine from any fiction, which is to make me want to read everything written by the author. I've followed Cyberpunk from it's inception, and this is some of the best.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Guilty Pleasures, October 2, 2002

By 

Jeffery Edwards "Novelist and Naval Warfare S... (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Redrobe (Paperback)

This one is a lot of fun (and probably shouldn't be). The anti-hero, AXL, is a tangle of self-contradictions that make him not so much complex as convoluted. He has built a reputation for being good at things that no one should ever be good at, and he frequently wants to fail even as he struggles desperately to succeed. The resulting tension kept me turning the pages long after I should have gone to sleep. I'm not sure the plot ever did make sense to me, but I'm fairly confident that the author never intended that it should. While this may violate a fundamental rule of story telling (the whole thing must make some sort of sense in the end), it strikes me as a recognizable -- if distorted -- view of real life. As weird as Grimwood's vision of the future is, it's not any stranger than a world that can produce the likes of Jerry Springer and the infamous 'Bum Fights' videos. If you are a fan of cyberpunk, this is as darkly distopian as it gets. Dress warm, make sure your gun is loaded, and I'll see you on the other side. ;)

Jeff Edwards, Author of "Torpedo: A Surface Warfare Thriller"