Sewer, Gas and Electric: THE PUBLIC WORKS TRILOGY [Mass Market Paperback]

Matt Ruff (Author)

Book Description

Series: Public Works Trilogy | Publication Date: September 1, 1998

As the world's wealthiest man, Harry Gant, erects a sky-high building, bizarre life forms wage a war in the city's ever-expanding sewer systems, led by Joan Fine, Gant's ex-wife, who is working incognito as a heroic commando.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The closest fictional relatives of Sewer, Gas & Electric may not be books at all but visionary movies like Brazil and Blade Runner. A comic writer and Information Age social satirist of the first water, Matt Ruff has one of the most fertile imaginations you'll come across, and the confident chops to string the fruits of this inventive intelligence together. The story is set in a near-future Manhattan of mile-high skyscraper construction projects, eco-terrorism, man-eating mutant sewer-dwelling white sharks and even more dangerous corporations. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Arriving eight years after his auspicious debut (Fool on the Hill), Ruff's second novel is a gargantuan but uneven tome: a tripartite, SF roller-coaster satirizing the horrors of our nascent technocracy. Set in New York city in the year 2023, it features a huge cast of characters, including humans, androids and a mutant great white shark, all revolving around Harry Gant, a Donald Trump-style billionaire real estate developer who's building the world's tallest skyscraper, a "new Tower of Babel." Holding the many subplots together is Gant's ex-wife, Joan Fine, who sets out to investigate the murder of a Wall Street financier who had sought to topple Gant Industries and who was ostensibly beaten to death with a signed first edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. As Fine's research leads her through the history of the Walt Disney Co., Gant Industries and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, not to mention many digressions into Rand's theory of Objectivism, she uncovers a sweeping conspiracy involving a mysterious black plague that wiped out the entire black race at the turn of the 21st century. Ruff uses a cartoonist's palette in his portraits of everyone and everything: Philo Dufresne, the eco-terrorist captain of a Yellow Submarine-style vessel called Yabba-Dabba-Doo; Harvard-educated pornographer Lexa Thatcher; an attack submarine called City of Women (wo)manned by one Wendy Mankiller; a whole caste of "Electric Negroes" who serve the city's white upper class. Told with breezy good humor, this exuberantly silly tale will find an audience among admirers of the day-glo surrealism of Steve Erickson and the tangled conspiracy theories of David Foster Wallace. What is absent here are the carefully honed language and the attention to nuance and character necessary to prevent Ruff's own Tower of Babel from sagging under the weight of his pell-mell special effects.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Aspect (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446606421
• ISBN-13: 978-0446606424
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #419,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written, well plotted, but not for the right wingers!, September 25, 2000

By 

Paul L. Sungenis (East Vineland, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sewer, Gas and Electric: THE PUBLIC WORKS TRILOGY (Mass Market Paperback)

Having devoured "Fool On The Hill," I moved on to "Sewer Gas And Electric: The Public Works Trilogy" expecting more of the same. I didn't get the same, I got better. Ruff is a man who knows how to weave a plot around a multitude of characters, and give each their own distinctive voice. The voices of Abbie Hoffman and Ayn Rand can be clearly heard through their technological doppelgangers (if you know either character, or both, you will collapse laughing during one scene where Abbie is desperately trying to tell Ayn a joke). I read most of this novel during a vacation at Walt Disney World (which is ironic since Disney plays a pivotal part in the plot) and found the book more engrossing than some of the activities we undertook in the park. But be warned: if you worship Ayn Rand (there is a scathing attack on "Atlas Shrugged" within the book), believe that the environment will take care of itself, or are a racist, you will hate this book. You have been warned. Everyone else should give it a try.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's not your father's psuedo-SF social satire eco-comedy., April 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sewer, Gas and Electric: THE PUBLIC WORKS TRILOGY (Mass Market Paperback)

Well, let's see. How can you possibly describe a book featuring a 181 year-old female U.S. Civil War veteran, a book gleefully unwilling to explain how such a person could end up still alive in the year 2023? A book detailing an extremely selective plague, wiping out the world's black population, only to be replaced by jive-talking Amos and Andy robotic equivilents? A book following the exploits of a submarine-based eco-terrorist team, floating through the world's oceans in a home-brewed high-tech submersible, hunted by the world's nicest billionaire industrialist? A book featuring the arch-conservative musings of author Ayn Rand's holographic likeness in a jar?

Wait a minute, I just did. At any rate, think of this book as a demented Neal Stephenson on acid. On top of a bedrock of solid characterizations and a fully coalesced storyline, Ruff constructs some of the strangest situations, oddest segues and wackiest future forcasts in recent memory. It may get a bit confusing at times, and Ayn does tend to grate on about the glories of U.S. mass consumption, but trust me...it's a G.A.S.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best liberal cartoon of a book I've ever read..., December 26, 2000

By 

Dan Seitz "cinnatusc" (Somerville, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sewer, Gas and Electric: THE PUBLIC WORKS TRILOGY (Mass Market Paperback)

Ruff doesn't hide his politics. This in of itself would normally be cause for dread; after a recent painful reading experience (Bill Fitzhugh's "The Organ Grinders", I have a review posted), it's a relief to read a writer who can be political without being, well, annoying about it.

It's this very thing that lets Ruff be gut-bustingly funny where other authors tend to fall flat. Where others just make one side saints and the other side demons, Ruff allows that us liberals aren't the only people capable of being decent human beings. Of course, a rat is a rat is a rat, and under the surface, Ruff has some rather sharp observations about America, especially when it comes to commerce and race.

But first and foremost, this book is FUNNY. The "Mr. Science" scene alone, which involves a salami as a high-velocity projectile, is worth the seven bucks. Toss in Meisterbrau (read the book), Ayn Rand in a lamp, the darker side of Walt Disney, and an industrialist who finds creative sabotage of his enterprises as funny as everyone else, and you've got a great cocktail. Highly recommended light reading.