Tube journeys: 1 afternoon in (pre-apocalyptic) LA Try them if you like, but may god have mercy on your soul, for Aubry Knight will not. Knight punches his way from one setting to another, each goofier and more irritating than the one before.Īubry Knight doesn't just have fists and a telepathic love-mind - he also has sequels. There's an underground (literally) counter-culture, an inexplicably immense global crime syndicate and (somehow) zero-gravity boxing with minimal references to space. There's a tantalizing (for Streetlethal) reference to a group of rabid punks with SuperAIDS, but they only appear for a couple of pages. (Clearly the author hadn't watched any of the Lwaxana Troi episodes of Star Trek lately).Įven as a feat of post-apocalyptic world building, this book sucks. They take super-mushrooms together and can then communicate telepathically, which, according to Streetlethal, is the height of love. ( Streetlethal: straight to Cinemax in 1987!) Knight loves her (reasons unknown, as she's a bitch), and sees through the super-splooging to the (intolerable moo) woman underneath. This makes her super hot, and when she dances, everyone splooges in their pants. She's a half-plastic prostitute with the ability to alter her artificial skin to show tie-dye rainbow patterns. The equally assinine female co-star, Promise, is also noteworthy. That's 4 halves, but this book is bad enough for two.

He spends half the book whinging about revenge, half the time whinging that his (equally assinine) female co-star doesn't lurve him enough, another half whinging that everyone is picking on him and a final half being randomly insensitive to those around him.

Knight is also, for the record, a complete jackass. That which he can't love-mind, he punches.īy the end, I wasn't just cheering for the bad guys, I was praying for another earthquake. That which he can't punch, he can wrap his love-mind around. Armed with the aforementioned fists and a particularly repellent need to spout off about the nature of love, he's an unstoppable force. The book was half decent (as a fist-fest) until Knight gets mixed up with some sort of super-mushroom and achieves philosophical transcendence. Knight punches his way out of jail, punches his way through LA, punches his way through the rebel underground and then punches his way up the corporate ladder. The entire book reads like a particularly florid transcription of a forgettable 1980's action movie.

Set up for murder, Knight is sent off to jail for life. Aubry Knight, space-boxing expert, just wanted to do his thing (his thing being 'Maxine'), but the Ortegas wouldn't let him. By Steven Barnes, takes place in a post-quake California, controlled by corrupt corporations and a powerful crime ring, the Ortegas.

Streetlethal by Steven Barnes