A future where cyberpunk technology and ancient spiritual secrets merge into something very strange...something as strange as a silicon embrace.
Mark V. Ziesing Books
P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088
Hardcover/282 pp.
ISBN O-929480-44-9 (Trade edition) $29.95
ISBN O-929480-44-7 (Signed Edition) $65.00
Paul Di Filippo, Asimov's:
...the roots of John Shirley's Silicon Embrace are emphatically American, from 20th-century UFO-lore to the dangers of increasingly violent (but modern-eclectic) versions of fundamentalism. California in 2017 is particularly lawless, "with the Famine and the new American Civil War, ...the Christian Funs, the Islamic Funs and the Hispanic Nation ripping ateach other's scrotum, and in between all the warlords gnawing at the leavings..."
It's at this point the aliens who have long kept an eye of Earth are finally ready to reveal themselves, with help from what is left of the US government, and they've called in Faraday, an experienced adman, to develop the right spin on their pitch. But then there are the other alieans, to whom a himan teen named Anatole becomes oddly important. And somewhere in between (till several plotlines merge) are alternative-media guy Quinn and his motley companiona, a "black dude," a female neopunk "cultural chimera," and a humorless "modern Bolshevik."
A secret Nevada marine base near the center of UFO History.myth will serve as one meeting point for the forces of officialdom, anarchy, and general bewilderment, whil an East Coast prison, 21st-century style, will become another focus of action. And then there's the subatomic IAMton, with its own wealth of jargon, eventually laid on us by a manic, frowsy tramp called the Street Sweeper...
[...]Shirley deftly mixes wild comedy with human tragedy. There are plenty of SF in-jokes, like the middle-aged Cammo Dude (border guard) called Jerry Niven, and the long-lived alien. Seeking One, who admires the recent "Sci-Fi Irony Wave films based on the big Marc Laidlaw Revival." At the same time, there are moments of genuine anguish, along with insights into philosophical conflicts (science vs. metaphysics, etc.) which transcend human limits.
Silicon Embrace is at once sly, sad eloquent, gonzo, mystic, surreal, and all-American, mixing the pulpiest Sci-Fi with true literary sophistication. A new gem from John Shirley.
Publishers Weekly :
Omni & SciFiEye:
This is not to say that it's a heavy, convoluted, philosophizing meandering into some sociological near-future terrain that is a Metaphor for Our Time and/or Contemplation of Our Future. Nope. It's an entertaining rip-roaring, post-modern adventure...and a straight-out way-cool "alien encounters explained" SF piece..and a gritty future noir post-apocalyptic landscape story...and a metaphysical exploration of human history. It's about darkness and life and survival and love and hate and the universe and God. Silicon Embrace combines the best of Shirley's slambam cyberpunk with a profound spirituality, wicked sense of humor, aliens, UFOs, and a sociological/philosophical slant that leaves your mind spinning. It's a fucking sonic boom of a novel that leaves its echo with us on the ground while it breaks the sound barrier. We have John Shirley once again speeding faster than light beyond where we think we are in speculative writing.
The near-future U.S. of Silicon is one of both chaotic factional barbarism and a semblence of order through a heavy-handed government. A government that has indeed covered up our encounters with aliens just as we always expected. Think of The X-Files amplified, electrified, rationalized and punked up. That's just the rhythm line. Now add a screaming, finger-slicing lead riff from an overview of human history and Planet Earth as a vast experiment. Plug in some metaphysical bass with a brilliant take on voodoo loa translated in urban spirits and a cascading keyboard of an incredible cast of individual characters from slimey warlords (military version and desert rat guerrilla as well) to evocative children to the most menacingly believable aliens, the most ethereal aliens and the most endearing semi-alien since E.T. to not one, but two redemptive heroes and, and...did I mention the constant commie, the Girl, the symbolic performance artist, the ...oh you are getting the picture? You haven't even got to the percussion section of deep and not so deep metaphysics and there is MORE. You haven't even STARTED to see ANY of it and THAT is the POINT.
Deep breath...2...3...4.
Silicon Embrace also funny, sad, utter bullshit, completely serious, totally tongue-in-cheek, intellectual, anti-intellectual, cynical and optimistic. Shirley not only explains the universe in several different ways, he explains Science Fiction. That alone is worth the price of admission. It is most likely the most original work of speculative (or maybe other) fiction published lately. It has its flaws -- you might get impatient, you will certainly be challenged, but your mind will most definitely be boggled. Obviously all this boggled reviewer can do is string together inadequate descriptive words to try and convey its impact.
Because the publishing world is gutless, genitalia-less and has substituted marketing for vision, you won't find this book in your local slush saturated bookstore. It's available only in hardcover and comes from small press publisher Mark V Ziesing. But you'd better read it because somewhere some 18 year old kid, some gaggle of twenty-somethings are going to get hold of it and it may very well be the inspiration for the next revitalization of a near-defunct genre and you are going to be wondering why you wasted your time back in 1997 reading another serialization.
And yes, it is the third book in less than three months from John Shirley. It joins the re-release of City Come-A-Walkin' and the collection The Exploded Heart to form an extraordinary trinity of writing that should not be overlooked.
The Des Moines Register: For a time, John Shirley was the premiere "bad boy" of the SF subgenre
known as cyberpunk. He not only wrote fiction with that label, he lived the
life, going through stages of alcohol and drug dependency. Still, the
novels he turned out (City Come-A-Walkin, A Splendid Chaos ) became cult
classics. Though he has since forgone the self-destructive lifestyle, his
recent novels still reflect the wild, paranoid, unbridled imagination that
bubbles in his brain.
Silicon Embrace takes the reader from the biblical age of Christ (with
Jesus, and other biblical characters, playing important roles) into the
twenty-first century, when the United States has been splintered into
warring enclaves, divided by racial, ethnic and religious differences. The
government has become fascist. And when Quinn Helden, alternative media
reporter and a member of Generation Z, discovers a conspiracy involving two
different races of aliens (the Meta and the Zetans) and secret elements of
the U.S. Government, things really start hopping. UFOs, New Age religion, a
chocolate-loving, cigarette smoking alien ambassador who resides in Roswell,
New Mexico, and a
clandestine rogue element in the government -- too far fetched, you say?
Nope, just another pyrotechnic display by the former wild man of cyberpunk.
Buy it, read it, and sit back to watch the fireworks.
Glen Engel-Cox, SciFi.com:
Shirley's cyberpunk trilogy, A Song Called Youth (containing Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona), was filled with a feeling of punk rebellion, with a feeling that the fat corporate cats would one day get their comeuppance when the youth rose up in defiance. Compare this with the novel that become cyberpunk's seminal work, Gibson's Neuromancer, wherein the world's going to hell no matter if you are rich or poor, young or old (the one character who has a hope for something better is the non-human). In his short stories, Shirley continued to express that underlying theme that youth would some day win out.
Ten years later, John Shirley returns to SF with a new novel. Silicon Embrace recalls some of the aspects of his earlier trilogy but also shows that Shirley is not the same wide-eyed punk that he used to be. In those years, Shirley has started a family and kept food on the table by writing for Hollywood rather than New York. Given this, it shouldn't be a surprise if Silicon Embraceresembles a post-apocalyptic punk version of the X-Files.
Yes, the aliens are among us, and they have been for thousands of years. The fractionalization of the U.S., including a second Civil War, has resulted in the world of 2017 resembling John Carpenter's Escape from L.A., complete with megalomaniac warlords and ex-military commandos. Caught on the wrong side of the California border, Quinn Helden, a young alternative media journalist, and his crew join forces with a vet who has held his complex against the barbarian forces. When they escape, they stumble across the new Area 51, the secret agency working with the aliens to announce themselves to the world, as well as announce the evil aliens. But in true paranoid X-Files fashion, the agency isn't what it seems to be, nor are the aliens, nor is our hero, Quinn.
After the first 100 pages, I nearly quit this novel. The opening, in the lawless world of post-Civil War California, was raw and disturbing, more horror than SF. I'm glad I didn't stop, though, because once the characters leave California, the science fictional portion takes center stage and only rarely takes a break. And the ending, for what seemed a novel about a world gone mad, had such hope that I was startled to find that someone had not switched books on me when I wasn't looking.
I really should not have been surprised. Shirley has tricked me before. When I thought I had him pegged once as a gritty punk rocker turned cyberpunk turned horror writer (for example, the first six stories in his Scream/Press collection, Heatseeker), he threw in a Wodehouse SF pastiche ("Quill Tripstickler Eludes a Bride"). I expected his novel A Splendid Chaos to be a Neuromancer clone and it was strikingly non-cyberpunk, instead SF about aliens that resembled the 70s more than the 80s. I should have known that Shirley wouldn't play a simple song.
Silicon Embrace, although startling, has several flows, however. For one, it is in desperate need of an editor to get Shirley to drop the pop culture references (including one to his own rock band) in favor of descriptions with meaning for everyone. Some of these references, including the ones to Chris Carter and the X-Files, are too cute, and break the suspension of disbelief needed for SF. Shirley should know better.
Published by one of the genre small presses with the highest production values, Silicon Embracee is a beautiful book to look at. Once you get past some of the ugly parts in the beginning, it is a beautiful book to read, as well.
Jasmine Sailing, Cyber-Psycho AOD:
John Shirley has written the best novel of his career. Mature yet youthfully indignant, spiritually insightful yet carnally streetwise, his new book is aboil with ideas and action, full of keen-eyed speculations for the future and daring revisions of history. Silicon Embrace is a hypertrophied fusion of Patricia Anthony's Brother Termite and Algis Budrys's Some will Not Die, and reads like Sun Ra jamming with George Clinton and the entire P-Funk bank. Set a few years into the next century, amidst global chaos that includes a U.S. Civil War, Silicon Embrace posits our globe as a battlefield in the long-running secret war between the Zetans -- those traditional Grey aliens -- and the Meta, an incorporeal, dimension-crossing beneficent entity. Shirley propels his cast of averagely unique humans and one land-octopus (don't ask, just read the book) in true PKD style through hell to nirvana, and dares to ignite a brighter dawn for this sorry world. Brilliantly recursive, Shirley's book alludes to dozens of classic works, even presciently including unreleased movies -- Men In Black, The Fifth Element -- he could not yet have seen when writing! But that's just what happens when a plugged-in author's "real year" (to use the Clute terminology) is so contemporary.
Angels and aliens alike figure in this metaphysical SF novel from proto-cyberpunker Shirley (Heatseeker), who here throws UFOs, black helicopters, several major biblical figures and spiritual transcendence into the early 21st century. The U.S. has splintered into warring racial, religious and ethnic enclaves, and the federal government, vainly trying to hold things together, has become enormously repressive. As the novel opens, a public relations man is blackmailed into accepting employment at a secret government installment near Roswell, N.M. There, he discovers that most of the standard UFO myths are in fact true. There's not only a flying saucer at Roswell but a live alien as well, one who loves hot chocolate and cigarettes. And he isn't so much a prisoner as an ambassador. Unbeknownst to the president or congress, secret elements of the U.S. government have been working with the aliens for decades, ostensibly for the betterment of humankind though there are early hints that the aliens, called Zetans, have ulterior motives. Readers soon learn that two separate alien races have visited the Earth. The Zetans are, it seems, in conflict with the Meta, and the PR man has been hired to make the Meta look bad. Fans of politically conservative hard-SF may be turned off by Shirley's stereotypical characterization of the military, his brief and rather nasty send up of two popular right-wing SF writers and his metaphysical climax. But it's clear that the author is having fun tying together disparate UFO, conspiracy and New Age myths; readers will have fun watching him do the tying, too.
I am still thinking about this book. I can't even recall the last time I read a novel, closed it, thought to myself, "Oh, okay, now I am ready to read this for real," turned it over and opened it up again. Maybe with Vonnegut. But the last time doesn't matter, this time does and Silicon Embrace is that book.
You'd have to mix the weirdness and paranoia of The X-files and the
mysticism of Ghandi, with the break-neck speed plot of a Harrison Ford
adventure film to get anything that would even approximate the bizarre
conglomeration which makes up this book.
In the 1980s, when cyberpunk was a rallying cry instead of a marketing label, there was a group of five young male writers and one female. Playing the role of Trotsky was Bruce Sterling, sometimes called The Chairman. Lenin was, of course, William Gibson, and the rest of the brigade consisted of Lewis Shiner, Greg Bear, Tom Maddox, Marc Laidlaw, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley (yes, I know that adds up to more than five -- trouble was, at the time, that being labeled as a part of the group could be as damaging as not being part of it.) The female, and believe me, not a token by any means, was Pat Cadigan. The problems with the name cyberpunk were legion, one of them being that only one of the group could make much of a claim to being a true punk. When the punk, John Shirley, wrote about the underside of society, his descriptions were just a little more vivid than those of his colleagues. Rucker and Bear may have been jockeying for the position of most technically literate, but Shirley was by himself when it came to streetsmarts.
On the inner title page of my copy of this book, John Shirley wrote
"Choose your aliens well.". In this case, I did. I pegged the proper
aliens to align with & fear from the moment they were introduced. Why,
because it was obvious? No. It was largely because Shirley works so
well with the functions of conspiracy theory in these pages that, when
you couple a basic working knowledge of them with general governmental
distrust & a leaning toward the higher self, you pretty much need to
know which way to go. The read is wonderful, whether you have the
proper basic paranoias & leanings or not. The cover illustration, by
Paul Mavrides, is of a slightly green-hued Grey alien, green-hued due
to the rendering of "our" earth in the globe of its forehead. Mind
you, I'm using the term "our" very loosely in conjunction with this
earth. We were merely some of the barnacles that managed to "evolve"
here -- preceding us were God, or the gods, or higher powers, longer
sentient alien forms, & universal consciousness. Does this actually
pertain to the book? Yes! It does! It's a crucial element! & I'm not
going to tell you any more about it. Characters come & go in this
book, they die or they go their own ways. Everyone has a different
path to follow, some people definitely don't seem to follow the right
ones. Paths have a knack for interlinking though. In separatist &
fundamentalist gang ruled California you meet Quinn, Zizz, & Mahler,
as they watch their companion get his head blown open by ex soldiers.
Quinn is obsessed with media terrorist Black Betty & his remaining
friends share his dreams of finding out why she disappeared. Quinn &
Zizz are moreso arty journalists, Mahler is moreso a communist with
anti-establishment leanings. Their incident is happening fairly
closely to Westward Condoplex -- heavily defended home of militant
Jack Sullivan & his 2 kids, Anatole & Kian (the latter adopted after
his parents were killed in the same riots that took Anatole's mother),
plus Yamahira & his daughter Lila. Across the state line, in Nevada, a
PR man named Mike Farraday is being instructed, psyched, & threatened,
into a high security governmental project that even the President
isn't supposed to know about. After all, no one really knows what is
going on in Area 51. The converging paths for all of these people are
certainly not easy, moreso violent & torturous, I can't even claim
that each of the currently named characters survive. All I can claim
is that Jesus made some comments on a mountain over 2000 years before
this story takes place, & this is when the comments begin making
sense. Be leery of a government that only seeks its own betterment, &
be wary of those they take power from. To quickly ground this review
in reality I have to say that the book just doesn't let up. My
favourite character, from the moment of his introduction, was a rather
sweet & intelligent hybrid squid named Ceph. Other than country
consuming gang warfare, extreme military conspiracy, prison raids,
detailed futuristic technological (& techno-shamanic) imagery, false
advertising, a hell of a lot of pain, & perhaps a larger amount of
transcendence, you'll also find some great media reference worked in
throughout. One of my favourites was the oft- remembered incident of
Chris Carter being arrested on the set of the last, never finished,
episode of X-Files. Ah, but it'll likely never happen ago I finished
reading this novel, I still have the Black Betty song constantly
pounding through my brain. Shirley also supplies several pages of
commentary, on the involved themes, at the end of the book. Read the
actual story first so you don't ruin it for yourself.
