Andrew J. Offutt (1934–2013)

I did not like this book. I guess it was supposed to be a satire of Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books using a gritty realism take to get the satire across. It did not work. The style in which the book is written is irritating, the first-person narration by the motor-mouthed protagonist just annoyed me nonstop. The constant references to the Mars books made me want to read something more akin to those even though they rely on "false chivalry" as this book put it. The very long and detailed rape scene near the end of the first third of the book was a big negative but I read on.
Most of the book consists of long empty conversations that take a page and a half to say something that could have been communicated in a single sentence. There are a couple of fight scenes, not very exciting or even that impactful though it seems the author tried to make them shocking and bloody. It seemed to me that a large portion of the story uses descriptions of the bureaucracy of the city as world-building. I can see the satire in this as opposed to Sword & Planet tales but it was not executed at all very well. All it did was make me want to go read an actual Sword & Planet story.… (more)