Onyx reviews: Irontown Blues by John Varley

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 09/09/2018

Some twenty years after he last wrote about the Luna colony and the Big Glitch that almost destroyed it, John Varley returns to the Eight Worlds series with a science-fiction noir detective novel. Irontown Blues follows Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, both published in the 1990s. At least passing familiarity with those books will help readers orient themselves in Irontown Blues, but they aren't strictly required reading. The climax of this novel, though, wraps up business that was initiated in those earlier novels.

Humanity has scattered to the planets and moons of the solar system after being forcibly evicted by aliens known as Invaders, who claimed Earth for themselves. Only a few thousand humans survived the invasion, but in the intervening centuries they have proliferated and prospered. Now, Luna's society is opulent; energy is cheap and unlimited, almost all labor is automated, and you can design and print virtually anything your heart desires. If a person wants to live in a neighborhood modeled after something historical or fictional, he need only find a few dozen like-minded individuals, and it will be created for them.

Irontown Blues' protagonist is Chris Bach¹, and his sidekick is a Cybernetically Enhanced Canine (CEC for short) named Sherlock, an eighty-pound bloodhound who tells his part of in the story via a translator. Bach is a fan of Chandler, Hammett, Rex Stout and others, and his working life has become a literal clone of that world. His private detective agency is located in a neighborhood called Noirtown in the 1930s sector. He talks the noir detective talk and walks the walk. His latest client is a mysterious woman calling herself Mary Smith, who claims she was attacked with a weaponized form of leprosy, something unheard of since all disease has been eradicated.

Bach realizes something doesn't ring true about her story, and his client may have had a nefarious reason to enlist his help. Bach and Sherlock attempt to track her down, but enough time has passed that the trail is cold. All avenues, though, seem to lead to Irontown, a dangerous part of the colony occupied by paranoids, criminals, sociopaths, hoarders, cultists, anarchists and self-professed political refugees, which means Bach will have to confront a dark part of his past.

Bach's mother was former Chief of the New Dresden Police. She has now retired and raises reverse-engineered dinosaurs. The Big Glitch involved a fault in the artificially intelligent Central Computer (CC) that ran the colony, interfacing with every human on Luna. The raid on Irontown that followed the Big Glitch was her idea. She wanted to clean up all of the dangerous sections of Irontown, but the CC had another motive: it wanted to eradicate the Heinleiners, a rebel group in possession of a coveted piece of technology. Bach's mother has never forgiven herself for the way things turned out. Bach was also involved in the raid and was severely injured. Now he has to revisit that traumatic time and is forced to confront the reality that nothing he knows about his world is as it seems.

Once Bach returns to Irontown, the "private detective" aspect of the novel falls away for the most part and the science fictional aspects kick into overdrive.

While much of the story is told from Bach's viewpoint, intervening chapters are from Sherlock's unique perspective, filtered through his interpreter, Penelope Cornflower, who often comments or expands upon Sherlock's text. She explains how many of Sherlock's concepts are impossible to translate and how his vocabulary for smells is something akin to the myriad words the Inuit suppsedly have for "snow." Sherlock benefits from neural implants that allow him to understand some human dialog (although many concepts elude his grasp). Unbeknownst to his master, his interface also allows him to open virtually any door on the colony, which explains why Sherlock can always get places faster than Bach can. Sherlock also has a wry and oftentimes corny sense of humor. Whether or not a person enjoys these sections will go a long way toward determining whether they'll enjoy Irontown Blues. This is definitely a book for dog lovers.

1. Bach might be named for a dog trainer who writes about perfecting the relationship between people and dogs