2001 FourWallsEightWindows


1996 Eyeball Books


1996 German Translation


1980 Dell Paperback

CITY COME A-WALKIN'
WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAID

City Come a-Walkin'
Review Date: August 3, 2001
Revolution Rating: 10/10

I was just finishing kindergarten when CITY COME A-WALKIN' came out and prepared the literary landscape for cyberpunk. But I'm glad that Four Walls, Eight Windows saw fit to reprint this brilliant work. CITY COME A-WALKIN' is edgy, dark and intense, with none of the glamour given hardware in William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's work. From the rich, evocative prose, to the gritty, future 1980 that Shirley gives us, this book has a lot to savor.

Club owner Stu Cole is in trouble: with the agency that controls the new cashless society, with vigilantes, with the Mob. With him is psychic singer Catz Wailen, his only friend. Together they encounter a strange being: a living embodiment of the city of San Francisco, and he needs their help. When the Mob takes control of the organization that runs the electronic finances of the city, Stu is recruited by City because of his special rapport with it. To save his club, Stu must help the city's avatar, but at a price he may not be willing to pay.

This book is a treat for cyberpunk aficionados. Not only is City perpetually clad in mirrorshades, THE cyberpunk symbol, but Shirley's 1980s San Francisco is full of futuristic trappings-from gasahol cars to video phones to street kiosks that display news articles electronically. All of this is described in Shirley's engaging prose, which captures the emotions and intensity of each scene, as in this passage:

He poured drinks, lubricating the cogs of the Saturday Night Blowoff Machine, and kept a watchful eye over his smoky-dim mirrorball-spangled domain.

Shirley's description of music is also wonderful, as in this passage:

The band thundered on like a phalanx of armored tanks grinding across a battlefield. The melodies were precise and involved, but amplified and toned with an edge that, to the uninitiated, made them sound like a wall of noise. But like an armored vehicle which at first glance seems a bullish mass of metallic aggression and nothing more, the music, closely examined, was made up of many carefully-honed and securely interlocked parts. A great machine of sound.

This sounds like a description of any type of music, but especially hard rock or heavy metal, that only an afficionado could appreciate.

Another interesting thing about CITY COME A-WALKIN' is its structure. The book is divided into ten chapters, sandwiched in between an intro and outro. The chapter titles--WUN! through TENNN!--go along with an instrumental that Catz's band does in the first chapter, after their first sighting of City. With each shout of a chapter number Catz feeds Cole mental images of important events that are going to happen during the course of the narrative. This gives the book an added depth.

What impresses me most about this book is, well, everything. I love the way Shirley can put words and sentences together. I love the plot. I love the dirty, corrupt future Shirley has created. I love the protagonists Stu and Catz, and I both love and hate City, who is at once a champion of near limitless might and an amoral guardian of, ultimately, himself. For it is the city itself that City is protecting. And if someone gets in his way, woe be unto them.

If you like your SF a little gritty and hard-edged, or if you're just tired of the same old flashy cyberpunk, take a walk through Shirley's San Francisco. He takes an original premise and turns it into an entertaining novel that will keep you turning pages. -- James M. Palmer, The Revolution Review

CITY COME A WALKIN'
(Four Walls/Eight Windows)

John Shirley put the punk in cyberpunk. He was the first carrier of the virus, both shaman and totem to the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. In 1980, when CITY COME A WALKIN' was first published, Shirley was fronting punk bands in Portland; writing was just his day job.

Set in San Francisco in 2008, CITY COME A WALKIN' is the story of Stuart Cole, the aging owner of Club Anesthesia. All he wants out of life is to run his club, but the Mafia and the government have teamed up to digitally control all monetary transactions and unionize the vice industry, using vigilantes to strong-arm any opposition. Enter City, a brutal, amoral avatar of San Francisco's overmind, who enslaves Cole in the fight against the forces of technocratic fascism, turning him into a pawn in a chess game whose stakes are the future.

Aside from its place in the history of cyberpunk, CITY COME A WALKIN' is a wild ride, blending a distinctively American version of magical realism with the underground culture's resistance to the encroachments of the string-pullers in suits. City is punk rock's answer to the death of God, a Zeitgeist given form and cut loose to wreak havoc on the forces of evil. More than anything, CITY COME A WALKIN' IS A ROCK AND ROLL gesture in literary form, a middle finger raised in the face of fascism's dream of total control. It's like going to a good punk show where the music and the electricity wash everything away and anything is possible. -- Dallas Taylor, The Stranger

WIRED: Street Cred: Cyberpunk's Patient Zero by Marc Laidlaw
2:25 p.m. Jan. 29, 1997 PST

In the introduction to this new edition of CITY COME A-WALKIN', William Gibson calls John Shirley "cyberpunk's Patient Zero." Reckless, rude, and raw-edged, Shirley had the 'tude before anyone; he also walked the walk. In the darkly exuberant CITY COME A-WALKIN', published four years before NEUROMANCER and long out of print, cyberpunk was already in full riotous bloom. Now Shirley has taken a swipe at polishing the sometimes rushed and awkward prose of the first edition, giving everything a sheen to match the beautiful trade-paper packaging provided by Eyeball Books. An essential addition to the libraries of cyberpunk historians, City's appeal is much more than academic.

Science fiction - and especially cyberpunk - often views humanity in terms of its cities. The metropolis is a perfect dramatic backdrop, a microcosm that permits us to view the collision of culture and technology at the very point of impact. In Shirley's novel, the city is not only the setting but also the protagonist: San Francisco has come to life in the form of a punked-out golem, determined to "take back the streets" from violent forces that have rotted it from within. The campaign is violent. Like most of the cyberpunk writers who came after him, Shirley has all but eliminated pastoral images from his fiction: the closest thing to paradise is the reclaimed urban wilderness left behind after the tyrants have been clobbered and the buildings have burned themselves out. -- Mark Laidlaw

The Absolutely Weird Bookshelf, strangewords.com (no date)

You can't really look at John Shirley's CITY COME A-WALKIN' [Dell, 1980] without also considering the cyberpunk movement which followed it so closely. Cyberpunk is not a thing unto itself. Rather than springing fresh from the brows of Gibson/Sterling/et al, it is the flower of a secret continuum of fiction stretching back to Alfred Bester's DEMOLISHED MAN and before, and continuing on through such works as Delany's DHALGREN, a science fiction which doesn't really need space travel to propel its plots. A hundred years from now, this thread of fiction may well be looked back on as the axis of science fiction, rather than the young adult-ish works of Asimov, Clarke and others we now regard as the root texts. We are now in the collapse of the space age, where outer space will become ever more abstracted, the man in the rocket being replaced by the instrument package and delivery system. The will to space is gone. It doesn't even look like we will be able to establish a real station in near orbit. And as fiction follows culture, the cyberpunk movement emphasizes the importance of the computer, data, and the network as the important science to be fictionalized, eclipsing the starship and the alien as the speculative icons of choice. This will facilitate a retroactive revision of the science fiction opus, marginalizing space opera and its assorted offspring to a dead end branch of the literary tree. There will be no starships, it's too expensive to travel in space, and there are more than likely no aliens as we have imagined them awaiting or searching for us, and our science fiction will slowly sluff off such things as one does a dream becoming dim in our memory.

CITY COME A-WALKIN' is an appropriate prefiguring of technological change in allegorical form. Shirley posits a twilight world where the cities come alive and create avatars to weed out the coprruption that inevitably arises in periods of transition. City is the tale of the urban entity dying righteously, so a new world can arise from its ashes. Shirley's vision is part allegory and part punk anthem to a world getting ready to change. Without the tech flash of the cyberpunks, Shirley burns a disc which riffs the birth of the Networks, the wiring of the population that will ultimately remake urban society. The cyberpunk worlds of Gibson amd Sterling are birthless slices of a future that exist without a deeper context, in many ways. Shirley looks at the crux moment, the fulcrum around which the present is about to become the Future.

CITY COME A-WALKIN' is neither sentimental nor apocalyptic. It is about the inevitability of change. Its story is about a last paroxysm to cleanse the sidewalks of the City before a new dawn, the action that will push the button of the transformation of consciousness. A burned out club owner and an angst-ish punker musician with a Gift walk with the disembodied avatar of San Francisco, who smells the change in the air and sets out to balance accounts and cleanse away the evil and corruption of the Old World in a Book of Revelations sweep. It is the City as Weapon, a manifested subconscious will of its citizens, a natty shapechanger in mirrorshades who prowls the nighttime streets. City cuts a swath through organized criminals, murderous right-wing vigilantes, rapacious developers, and the other dirty froth cast up by the sins of the twentieth century. For the new world to be born, the puppet masters who hover like thin shadows behind the politicians, the CEO's, the cops, the banks, must be swept away in an exorcism of blood. So the City must Walk.

CITY COME A-WALKIN' supplies a neccesary context to the later work of the cyberpunks. Shirley supplies the wired imagination with a mythic history, a canvas upon which to paint the tones of the Future world. It has a realness that doesn't often show up in cyberpunk fiction, a combination of seedy old infrastructure with the shiny Tech of the New. The myth of cyberpunk is the wired world, an egalitarian technology that will filter down through the layers of society. What is more likely is a class division between the wired and the not, a division that will become economic and hardened in place as the techies get and protect Their's. This is Shirley's tough picture of the world a-comin', a societally more dangerous place that will spring from the shoulders of the dwarfs it stands on.

Walk on.

L.R.C. Munro, SciFi.com

A take-no-prisoners trip into the heart of a sentient city

Stu Cole runs Club Anesthesia, the wildest fringe bar in a near-future San Francisco. This is a tough world where criminal organizations vie for power, vigilantes roam the streets and electronic credit is the only legal tender. Cole's club is a meeting place for all elements of the city's social fringe. One night a grim, trench-coated man in mirrorshades appears in the club and beckons Cole and Catz Wailen, a psi-sensitive singer, out into the streets.

The "man" is actually City, the living-flesh avatar of the city's collective unconscious, and he is on a mission to right the wrongs that plague its streets. City draws Cole and Catz into one violent confrontation after another, forcing them to take on its enemies, regardless of their own desires. While Cole and Catz wrestle with the personal cost of being avenging angels, City drives them on to battle a criminal "cancer" that threatens to destroy not only San Francisco, but possibly the rest of the country.

CITY COME A-WALKIN' is considered by some (including William Gibson, who wrote the forward to this edition) to be the vanguard of cyberpunk. Originally published in 1980, it contains most of the fundamental elements of the genre, but in a raw, rough form. There is no "cyberspace" here, no AIs, not even personal computers, yet all of these concepts are implied in the book's concrete analogy of electronic-interconnectedness-as-neural-network and in the way the city (and City) operates.

What comes through even more strongly is the "punk" ethic. Shirley captures the gritty feel of subcultures evolving on the margins of a corrupt, monolithic power structure, yet since the landscape isn't die-cut from NEUROMANCER or BLADE RUNNER, City feels even grittier and a lot like urban North America in the '90s. This is a revised edition, so it's hard to say if Shirley was as prophetic as he seems, but there is some striking prognostication here.

City stands up less well as a novel in its own right. The writing is choppy and raw; City's "enemies" are generic and everybody's dialogue is afflicted with annoying phonetic slang. Cole and Catz are solid enough characters to evoke some empathy, but not enough to really make readers care what happens to them. In fact, most of that caring is evoked by the bracketing story narrated by a now mysteriously disembodied Cole. On the other hand, the urgency of the ideas and the rough edge of the prose has its own energy that makes the book very readable despite its flaws.

This revised reprint of CITY COME A-WAILKIN' is a rough, energetic, often violent book full of ideas that, if no longer new, are still considered radical. Definitely worth a look, although more interesting for its place in the evolution of science fiction than for its own intrinsic charm.

I would recommend this book both to people who love cyberpunk and those who despise it as it gives a very different view of the underpinnings of the genre. -- L.R.C. Munro


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