I met Dave at Capclave a few years back, shortly before the release of his first book, The Mirrored Heavens. We share in common that our books have both gotten blurbs from Peter Watts. Watts says of Dave Williams’ book that it “explodes out of the gate like a sonic boom and never stops.” If you have any doubts, all you have to do is see Dave read. I went to his first reading not sure what to expect — turns out the dude does a reading kind of like you might expect Denethor from Peter Jackson’s Return of the King to do a reading. Intense. Fast. Loud. Intense. With authority. And did I mention intense?

Here’s the description from the back of the book:

With The Machinery of Light, David J. Williams completes his furiously paced, stunningly imagined trilogy—a work of vision, beauty, and pulse-pounding futuristic action.

September 26, 2110. 10:22 GMT. Following the assassination of the American president, the generals who have seized power initiate World War Three, launching a surprise attack against the Eurasian Coalition’s forces throughout the Earth-Moon system. Across the orbits, tens of thousands of particle beams and lasers blast away at one another. The goal: crush the other side’s weaponry, paving the way for nuclear bombardment of the cities.

As inferno becomes Armageddon, the rogue commando unit Autumn Rain embarks on one last run. Matthew Sinclair, an imprisoned spymaster, plots his escape. And his former protégé Claire Haskell, capable of hacking into both nets and minds, is realizing that all her powers may merely be playing into Sinclair’s plans. For even as Claire evades the soldiers of East and West amid carnage in the lunar tunnels, the surviving members of the Rain converge upon the Moon, one step ahead of the Eurasian fleets but one step behind the mastermind who created Autumn Rain—and his terrible final secret.

Yes, it’s cyberpunkish, and it’s also military fictionish. But don’t be dissuaded into thinking these are dumb shoot-’em-ups with ray guns. This is intelligent stuff, heavily researched, detailed and backgrounded. Mr. Williams even caused a little bit of a stir by getting into a science tiff with Jerry Pournelle a little while back, an incident which sounded like great fun.

And hey, if you’re intrigued, it so happens that Dave’s reading tonight at 7pm at the Borders on 1828 L Street NW, and then there’s going to be an afterparty at the Science Club. If you’re really motivated, you might just have time to read books 1 and 2 of his Autumn Rain trilogy before you go.

I don’t expect Dave to run and jump off a tall balcony covered in flames like Denethor did in Return of the King. But you never know. It would make a good finale to the trilogy, wouldn’t it?

Taking cyberpunk to the next level, this conclusion to Edelman’s trilogy (Infoquake, MultiReal) presents a drama of future technology that combines action with psychosocial intrigue. Tension comes as much from the clash of ideas as from physical confrontation. Highly recommended.

I suppose after Rob Sawyer had me resuscitating cyberpunk with defibrillator paddles in hand, it only made sense for me to take cyberpunk up to the next level. Perhaps next I’ll get to take cyberpunk to its room and hook it up to an IV.

British writer Jeff Noon’s debut novel Vurt takes pulp science fiction to a new level. It’s not necessarily a better level, mind you, but it’s certainly a more twisted, doped-up, glazed-over, trip-inducing place than sci-fi has been in a long while.

In Noon’s near-future Manchester, England, vurt is the designer drug of choice for a generation of punks and slackers living off the government dole. Administered by sucking on a special kind of hallucinogenic feather, vurt transports the user into an alternate reality that’s a shotgun wedding of the Internet and virtual reality technology. Depending on the shade of color you’ve sucked down, the vurt world can be a pornographers’ paradise or a land of primal wish-fulfillment or a horrific reenactment of your past from which there is no escape.

It’s this last category that has proven the bane of vurt junkie (and narrator) Scribble, who’s lost his sister Desdemona somewhere in the labyrinths of the mythical feather Curious Yellow. By the rules of exchange which govern interaction with vurtspace, Scribble has brought back to reality instead a slobbering mass of alien flesh he drolly calls the Thing from Outer Space. Only by bringing the Thing back into the Curious Yellow dimension can Scribble barter for his sister’s release.

Finding Curious Yellow again proves quite a task, however, in a future England where reality has taken a ride on the wild side. Cybercops and shadowcops prowl the streets in search of illegal vurt dealers, human and dog freely intermingle and interbreed, sisters sleep with brothers, and dark corners abound with “dreamsnakes” escaped from the vurt dimensions. It’s enough to generate a spontaneous acid flashback.

Noon’s brilliance lies in how he recognizes the inherent silliness of all this and plays into it. Vurt spins its tangled plot out with a melodramatic seriousness that convinces you for extended periods of time that this isn’t all just bubblegum. Like a vurt drug itself, Vurt reaches deep inside the id for gripping, pleasing, must-turn-the-page images and throws morals and messages to the wind.

Pleasantly absent from Noon’s future vision is the typical assortment of high-tech gizmos and whatchacallits that lazier science fiction authors pawn off as imagination. In the Manchester of Vurt, what’s organic and what’s electronic has become as indistinguishable as what’s real and what’s “vurt.” It’s all one big orgy of psychedelic confusion that recalls the quirky surrealism of Naked Lunch or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as much as the hard-wired Chiba City of Neuromancer.

In a way, the book itself slyly disclaims responsibility for its jarring visceral overload by suggesting that you, the reader, have been hallucinating the entire thing and are partly responsible for its content. It’s a sly take on the line fed to us by countless B-grade movie producers and schlock television execs, updated for the quick-fix ’90s generation.

And you may find yourself agreeing with Noon on this point when you realize how quickly you scarfed down the book’s 350 pages like a six-year-old buried neck deep in Halloween candy.