Hot Head

More than 20 years after its first U.K. publication, Ings’s small but dense debut novel gets a well-deserved U.S. release. In the near future (from the perspective of 1992, when the book was written), the global economy is reshuffling as the environment crumbles. Europe faces a huge influx of immigration from Islamic countries, including Malise, a young girl who emigrates from Azerbaijan to Italy. She grows up to work in outer space, but when authorities learn she has an implanted technological enhancement—illegal on Earth—they remove it, impairing the newfound senses she relied on. Soon Malise’s story expands to encompass illegal operations, snuff films, and drug overdoses. Ings plays with form and structure as well as story, jumping around in time, delivering stream-of-consciousness thoughts, and even replicating Tristram Shandy’s famous black page. There’s plenty of violence and sex (sometimes at the same time), and while none of it feels gratuitous, it’s deliberately uncomfortable in a way that fans of Peter Watts’s Rifters books will find familiar. Ings’s novel shows its age in places, but it’s still a classic cyberpunk story concerned less with the neonoir overtones so common in the genre than with experimenting with form and structure. [em](June) [/em]