Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Roberston.
Title: Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life.
Author: Warren Ellis.
Artist: Darick Robertson.
Genre: Graphic novel, fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1998.
Summary: After being dragged back to the City that made him famous (and nearly drove him insane), outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem is getting his old footing back. The stories are rolling in - nanotech consciousness downloads, dislocation disorders among cryogenic revivals, dispatches from the human culture reservations - and Jerusalem, with his shine new apartment and fresh-from-the-strip-club assistant, is firing on all cylinders. It's too good to last, of course. But not even Spider Jerusalem could predict how quickly he would end up penniless, locked in a pay toilet and hunted by multiple teams of assassins demanding payment in blood for his many transgressions.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ Refiring the miner, they nailed Mary's physical template memory, took a decent trace off it, and plugged the numbers into the quicktank. Bacterial-level robots in a mixture of water and soil started building the most complex machine in the world. Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly. Build and eye.
♥ Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding. She wasn't wanted here. She was Revived out of sense of begrudged duty. She's been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less.
She could have told the future what it'd been like to meet Ché Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides. But the future didn't want to know. It honored contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sums in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels.
...Many Revivals go into light catatonia on the streets. ... Mary sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the City is screened out a little. And she talks, to anyone who will listen. She tells of how she was Revived; tells it in cold, quiet, terrible detail. She has a photographer's eye. She's made a still documentary of her new life, up in her chilled head. And she tells of the past. Great rich warm human stories of Stephen Hawking mapping the universe from a wheelchair, of dancing with children in Zimbabwe dust and walking through Moscow snow with Mikhail Gorbachev... John Kennedy playing grab-ass in the White House, Nelson Mandela laughing at dirty jokes on a Jo'Burg street, a kid walking in front of a Chinese tank... The stories that make us great.
Mary will live for maybe another century. But her story's over. Because you wouldn't have it any other way.
♥ One day I'm going to drop a bomb on this city. A contraceptive bomb.