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Spares
Michael Marshall Smith
HarperCollins hardback, 305 pages, £9.99
Published October 1996
ISBN 000224649X
Review by Steve Jeffery (1996)

Jack Randall is a loser, a veteran of the Gap War, an ex-cop with a Rapt habit that could float a battleship. He arrives at New Richmond, a former flying shopping complex, MegaMall 156, that downed in Richmond, Virginia, and grew into a barter city of opportunist squatters and resident entrepreneurs. He brings a nasty little secret, something that looks like a RAM chip, and a group of Spares.

People aren’t supposed to know about the Spares. Technically they aren’t even human, just walking replacement parts for the rich, the old and the injury prone, and the just plain careless. Randall has just walked out of a Rapt stupor and a rock bottom job as caretaker, or more properly ‘meat attendant’, at a SafetyNet Farm with six and a half Spares; some of them have been used. There’s also someone close to the top of New Richmond that he very much wants to kill. Unfortunately somebody, or something, seems to have started without him, leaving the victims with ‘unspecified facial damage’.

Spares practically rings with echoes, some more overt than others. The antecedents are from film as much as SF novels: the drug-psyched madness of the Gap is as reminiscent of Apocalypse Now as it is of Lucius Shepard’s bombed out troopers of Life During Wartime, while New Richmond blends the scavenger hacker and street lowlife culture somewhere between Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Sprawl and the bridge community of Virtual Light. Not that these are relatives to be ashamed of, and Marshall Smith is a good and canny enough writer to make of it something of his own. I just wish he’d not done that bit about the eyes – I’m very squeamish in that area.

Graphically violent in places, unsettlingly nasty in others, and finally almost overly sentimental, Spares is a curious beast and mostly works well, just about hanging together at the end. Perhaps I’m just not used to happy endings, even though only a few characters survive that long. Intriguing, prompting me to check out Michael Marshall Smith’s first novel, Only Forward. •

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