Spider Jerusalem is a gonzo journalist in the mold of Hunter S. Thompson. Five years ago, he was popular enough to make a decent bundle and moved to the mountains to get away from the City and the fans. And now an old contract is due and he has to get a job again— and return to the chaos of the City.

Ellis depicts a frenetic, high-tech future that looks all too believable: sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and society fragmenting into subculture after subculture. Spider’s return to the City sets the stage for exposition of this crazed world, and while Spider is a mad bastard whom I wouldn’t want to go near, he is ultimately redeemed by his love for the Truth.

This volume gives us the scene for Spider’s first column after he returns to the City, indicting the authorities at Civic Center for a crackdown on a particular subculture. Mao’s aphorism was that power comes from the barrel of a gun, but in a highly connected age, the more powerful barrel holds a camera lens. ( )

Transmet (as its loving fans refer to it) was published as a monthly series from 1997 (that's pre-Matrix) to 2002. In 2002, The Speed of Dark won the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke award. Transmet won no Nebulas, no Clarkes, no Hugos. It was by carefully analyzing these two facts that I confirmed that power does not only corrupt, but stupefy.

Transmet is the best piece of Sci-Fi in recent memory, grasping the dangling wires from the post-cyberpunk machine and jamming them into sockets, willy-nilly, until the whole thing lights up like a god-forsaken, fission-powered Christmas Tree.

The only caveat that I can offer is that the technology levels are sometimes a bit wonky. It isn't Star Trek's transporters compared to their inability to say, overcome aging or fix a spine, but it is still sometimes a bit annoying to the fan of Speculative Fiction.

I recall quite vividly after reading Snowcrash that I wished that more books could feel like that (especially Stephenson's own). Alas; it seems that such an enjoyable masterwork comes only once to a medium. So, read Snowcrash, play Fallout II, watch the Matrix, and for the state of your puny, mortal soul, find yourself a copy of Transmet. ( )

Transmet is one of my favorite comics, and this volume is purely - purely - about the power and joy of the spoken word. ( )

"Lust for Life" is about what living really means - questions of whether you are still you once you've been revived from the dead, translated into a computer, etc etc. Unlike most books that dwell on this topic, though, Transmet dances over it, only making its argument (basically, screw it, you're you and there's no point worrying about philosophy) as casually as it can.Also, the scene where Spider tromps through the convention of new religious movements is priceless. ( )

Spider's walk through Redchurch.Here Spider really comes into his own as an ironist - as a person who cares so much that he can't care, won't care, doesn't care, has to shield himself from caring because the world is going to do nothing but disappoint him.That's an attitude that I think a lot of people know well. ( )