Headlong by Simon Ings

Headlong Reviews

• 
  Andries

  Absolutely brilliant. I think this is his best novel. Not as ambitious as Dead Water and Weight of Numbers, but absolutely perfect in laser focus. Brutal, tender, beautiful, nasty, violent, shocking, piercingly sad and subtly thought-provoking. I read it through the night, and when I got to the last page, I started at the beginning again.
• 
  Simon

  Although I read quite a lot of SF, I keep forgetting that quite a lot of it I'm not that keen on. Cyber punk is one of those sub genres that doesn't do much for me and this, being a kind of post-cyber punk really falls into the same camp. I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for when I picked it up and it just goes to show that picking up books on a whim doesn't always work (well duh!)
  
  The book has elements of conspiracy thriller and murder mystery in a not too distant future dystopian/declined society set in Britain. The protagonist is one of many people who have been sent back to earth after being cybernetically modified to work on terraforming and city building projects on the moon by interfacing with an ever evolving AI. Now, disconnected and abandoned they suffer extreme withdrawals and can't integrate back into society. The only things they can plug into and the treatments available are all illegal which only serves to drive them to desperate measures. But when Christopher finds out that his ex wife has been brutally murdered, he gets drawn into trying to solve the mystery of what happened.
  
  So while the book had enough to sustain my interest it didn't really get me hooked and, for me, the ending was lacking in terms of pay off. I'm sure it's not a bad book and I can see why many people like it; it's just not really for me. I certainly don't feel inclined to read anything else by the author.
• 
  Michael Whiteman

  This is very British, rainy and bleak cyberpunk. The writing is dense, flooding the reader with sensory information - in contrast to the extra AI-enhanced senses of the main character and the dull, blinded feelings when they are removed from him.
  
  The central mystery of Christopher's ex-wife's death leaves you disorientated, echoing his own bewilderment, but everything is wrapped up and concluded satisfyingly.
  
  There are a few details of the world that jar slightly, making it feel less real and more constructed but they don't take away from the story,which keeps things moving along through the various antagonists Christopher meets and questions over the death of Joanne.
  
  I enjoyed it greatly and, together with
  Hot-head, I am definitely a fan of Simon Ings and want to read more.
• 
  Ben Dunn-Flores

  This reads like a fever dream, it has an unreliable narrator, it jumps from thought to thought without pausing. He often does stuff like this 'he got out the car; he made coffee'. I loved it, as it's one of the most original things I've read in a while. Feels like blindsight or neuromancer, though more toward the former.
• 
  Sytze Hiemstra

  Dystopic, grim, grey. I found it tough to get into, but liked it when i did.
• 
  oliwia

  did not need those random slurs and hitting women
• 
  Jamie

  An interesting book that hasn't aged well.
  
  In this book, Christopher Yale learns of the (somewhat suspicious) death of his ex-wife Joanne in the UK, leading him to investigate. A bog-standard setup, made more interesting by the fact that Chris and Joanne were, when they were together, living on the moon, their heads stuffed with high tech hardware that allowed them access to a myriad of extra senses and direct access to city-building AIs and robots.
  
  When the story begins, Chris is living in the UK, and is a severely broken man, suffering from an extreme form of what is essentially PTSD from having his post-human hardware extracted from his head when he was recalled from the moon.
  
  Chris is essentially a post-post-human, and investigates his ex-wife's death like most regular people would: by meandering about randomly, wallowing in self-pity and being generally ineffectual. This is both interesting in how it subverts the normal suspicious-death storyline, but also leads to about a third of the book having not much happening. Really, it's not until Chris flashbacks to his time on the moon with Joanne that I became interested in the character or the plot.
  
  This is made worse by the fact that throughout, but in the first third in particular, the book feels much older than something written in the late 90s. In a future where architects with neural-enhancements can be rocketed to the moon to build cities, it strains believability that the UK seemingly has payphones everywhere and the only portable tech used is pen and paper. Some of this can be explained as the UK having gone through a civil war, but when you see images of real life refugees holding cellphones, it seems a little too convenient that most of the hardware available is what we had in the 90s. Convenient, but also a failure of worldbuilding.
  
  There are a few interesting lines about what the machines on the moon are doing without their human masters, but almost nothing is done with this for the vast bulk of the book. At best, this can be seen as the beginning of what could have been an interesting exploration of creating machines we can't fully understand or control, but it's never that relevant to the story. Other scifi books have addressed this in much more interesting ways.
  
  Overall, the book became interesting enough for me to want to finish, and the author manages some great descriptions, but I can't really recommend it. The world building feels musty when it's not feeling disjointed, and there's no greater depth here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
  
• 
  Amitai

  This book was a delightful surprise that I plucked off the shelves of Sefer v'Sefel. While many entries in the Sci-Fi genre use mystery as a pure device for stringing the reader along 300+ pages (whereas the same "What if...?" could be better told in a 30 page short story), Ings's construct is a beautifully dynamic exploration of the limits of our humanity. The book does not let you take the sci-fi elements for granted, but builds real, if 2-dimensional, characters to anchor the Alien in the Familiar. One cannot read this book without being impressed with his command of visual and spatial language - he does not repeat himself, and a quiet wisdom inspires his prose.
  
  Its slightly Blade Runner-esque atmosphere places the characters in different situations and locations, and the book is something like 4 or more short stories that only happen to follow each other chronologically and thematically. (That's not bad, I very much liked the effect).
• 
  Sami

  Quote: "The whole flat had been partitioned. Black plastic screens divided each room into a series of alcoves. Wires trailed over the floor, like strings spooled out through a tawdry maze by nervous explorers. At the end of the hall, the living room gave off a heady, solvent heat, and the bin-liner screens swayed to and fro in a strong current of toasted air. The room gave off a confused glow: bright splashes of colour against a ground of static and video blue."
  
  
• 
  Paul Grimsley

  Approaching cyberpunk from a slightly different angle -- here we see the fallout of the fusion of technology and humanity. What might happen when things go wrong or when the human part is unplugged from the mechanical part. This has a more resonant emotional core than a lot of cyberpunk and is all the better for that.
• 
  J.C. Hart

  While I was slow to get into the story when I first picked it up, I soon became hooked and sped through the book to find out what happened. It's a very interesting story and kept me wondering what would happen next.
• 
  Rodman

  Cyberpunk redefined. Read it if your IQ allows...
• 
  Jim Trela

  Interesting scifi book. Slow read at start. But fast exciting finish
• 
  Kevin Mathew

  A tale of losing a part of yourself mind and the drive and desperation that you would go to for even a much weaker and unfulfilling substitute.