Customer Reviews

Streetlethal

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved this book! Need I say more? Well, ok, if you really want me to, I guess I will. This book had brilliant description of surroundings that Aubry was in. And, as and avid martial artist, I loved the extensive descriptions of the hand-to-hand fight scenes and the warrior/fighter philosophy instilled by the teacher character of the story. A great book making the reader seem to be there as Aubry goes from fighter to warrior, in a metamorphosis that the reader hopes will keep Aubry alive until the end. I enjoyed it immensely.

I thought this book was a wonderful cyberpunk book. It had great action, vivid descriptions of the city and the life of the characters and bystanders. The taste of the cyberpunk genre was very strong and very real. The story and plot were just absolutely impeccable as well as interesting. However, I found one very irritating aspect about the writer's style. Every time Aubry gets into a fight the author becomes rediculously overengrossed in describing the exact methods of how the fight progresses. For a while I tried to envision how these fights were taking place while I was reading them, but the author's descriptions made that tedious and impossible. He overdescribed every hand-to-hand fight scene that took place in that book. If he had made those sections shorter and sweeter, this book might have gotten a "10."

i am not what you would call an avid book reader but on a greyhound bus trip that was to take over 24 hours i found this book in the luggage rack. from the 2nd page i was totally engrossed and finished it before i arrived at my destination.
the character aubry knight is an absolute winner. i lost this book and searched for two months until i found a copy. that is when i found the other two aubry knight stories. i have read all 3 books 3 times apiece and have just started them again after 2 years of sitting on the bookshelf. i cannot reccomend them more
if i was sitting there speaking to you all directly. pick them up, you will not put them down. 20 ********************

If you have a hankering for a cyberpunk martial arts adventure, Steven Barnes's STREETLETHAL is a good one to get with. The lead character, Aubry Knight, is one indomitable, hard core muthereffer and Barnes writes him like a force of nature. Back in 1983, Aubry Knight also counted as one of the very few black protagonists in fiction literature, never mind that the book cover here has some supremely tanned white dude in a combat pose. That ain't Aubry.

The story takes place in the nasty near future setting of 2022 (keep in mind that this book was published in 1983), in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. When Aubry Knight, a null gravity fighter, is framed by his woman and by crime lord Luis Ortega, he vows to exact revenge. But, first, there's that hard prison sentence to serve.

Steven Barnes can construct a gripping story, but what I like best about him is that he really sells the action sequences. And in the sub-genre of bonecrunching sci-fi martial arts novels, Barnes - himself a prolific martial artist - ranks only second behind Steve Perry. In STREETLETHAL he establishes a dark dystopian world still struggling to rebuild after the Great L.A. Quake. Los Angeles is a crummy, sleazy, chaotic purgatory where disease-spreading punks called Spiders prowl the streets and attempt to infect as many victims as they can and where experimental mushrooms may or may not prove to be mankind's salvation. The future technology Barnes lays in is apropos of what we're capable of decades from now. Some of it may even be borderline possible today - plastiskin, organ harvesting, and null gravity and such.

Aubry Knight is one of those stoic, tormented, uber-capable heroes, and his story progresses along the traditional heroic arc. I do find him an interesting character, as he goes from inmate to Scavenger to whatever it is that he becomes as he takes on the Ortegas. But the writer also surrounds Aubry with an interesting cast. Most of them are damaged characters and very sharply written. Barnes really probes the psychological underpinnings of these folks. Promise is an exotic dancer and a courtesan and would also become Aubry's love interest (and, no, she wasn't the one who sent him up the river). I think she's a great character, and her relationship with Aubry is more often rocky than not, which is why it pays off in the end. As well, Tomaso Ortega, who becomes the underworld boss of Los Angeles. In fact, Barnes spends quality time fleshing Tomaso out into a three-dimensional character. The aged but steel-willed matriarch of the Ortega crime family, Margarete, and also Diego Mirabal, the frightening and enigmatic head security for the Ortegas, don't get a lot of screen time but they right away make an impression. And one of the things I really looked forward to was Mirabal and Aubry's inevitable clash. Mirabal threatens to be even more formidable than Aubry. Turns out he is.

I wish Steven Barnes wrote more novels. I already tore thru GORGON'S CHILD and FIREDANCE, the terrific sequels to STREETLETHAL. I also recommend the dark fantasy thriller BLOOD BROTHERS, his Dream Park collaborations, and his absolutely riveting alternate history books LION'S BLOOD and ZULU HEART. If you're an action junkie - or, to heck with that - if you enjoy well-written tales, my man Steven Barnes won't let you down.

...because the COVER of the Ace Original 1983 paperback edition really doesn't do the book justice (it's crappy!). I thought I was going to be reading a P.O.S. pulp sci-fi for laughs, and ended up crying at the end, having read the whole book cover to cover in one sitting. If you're a sci-fi fan at all, you'll dig this one. It's great.

Funny how it's getting an average of five out of five stars from people who have read it, and yet it's out of print, and used copies are going for pennies.

Streetlethal (1983) by Steven Barnes, takes place in a post-quake California, controlled by corrupt corporations and a powerful crime ring, the Ortegas. Aubry Knight, space-boxing expert, just wanted to do his thing (his thing being "Maxine"), but the Ortegas wouldn't let him. Set up for murder, Knight is sent off to jail for life. He vows revenge, etc. etc.

The entire book reads like a particularly florid transcription of a forgettable 1980's action movie. Knight punches his way out of jail, punches his way through LA, punches his way through the rebel underground and then punches his way up the corporate ladder.

The book was half decent (as a fist-fest) until Knight gets mixed up with some sort of super-mushroom and achieves philosophical transcendence. Armed with the aforementioned fists and a particularly repellent need to spout off about the nature of love, he's an unstoppable force. That which he can't punch, he can wrap his love-mind around. That which he can't love-mind, he punches.

By the end, I wasn't just cheering for the bad guys, I was praying for another earthquake.

Knight is also, for the record, a complete pain. He spends half the book whinging about revenge, half the time whinging that his (equally assinine) female co-star doesn't lurve him enough, another half whinging that everyone is picking on him and a final half being randomly insensitive to those around him. That's 4 halves, but this book is bad enough for two.

The equally assinine female co-star, Promise, is also noteworthy. She's a half-plastic prostitute with the ability to alter her artificial skin to show tie-dye rainbow patterns. This makes her super hot, and when she dances, everyone does sticky things in their pants. (Streetlethal: straight to Cinemax in 1987!) Knight loves her (reasons unknown, as she's never anything but cruel to him), and sees through the super-splooging to the (intolerable moo) woman underneath. They take super-mushrooms together and can then communicate telepathically, which, according to Streetlethal, is the height of love.

Even as a feat of post-apocalyptic world building, this book is a disappointment. There's a tantalizing (for Streetlethal) reference to a group of rabid punks with SuperAIDS, but they only appear for a couple of pages. There's an underground (literally) counter-culture, an inexplicably immense global crime syndicate and (somehow) zero-gravity boxing with minimal references to space. Knight punches his way from one setting to another, each goofier and more irritating than the one before. None are explained, none are rational and none are, in any way, interesting.

Aubry Knight doesn't just have fists and a telepathic love-mind - he also has sequels. Try them if you like, but may god have mercy on your soul, for Aubry Knight will not.

In a future California that has been busted up, Santa Monica someone sort of survives cataclysms, water, and all that stuff.

Aubry Knight is a cyberpunk style bodyguard type, and has a falling out with his boss. Knight ends up crusading against the crime lord types to stop them and their drug plot.

Much bashings.