Wilhelmina Baird

review of
Wilhelmina Baird's Clipjoint
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 29-30, 2019



Let's start off w/ a suspicious gift.

"I unzipped the edges expecting paper and a shiny flat box with buzzing holofigures fell into my hand. They were wearing spacesuits and seemed to be massacring each other. The label was TROUBLE ON TOROS, with tiny faraway music, martial, the kind that goes with space battles, and mixed scents of ozone and musk.

""It's a vidcrystal," I told Mokey. "Someone wants to entertain us."

""Make them go away," he mumbled. "We don't watch vids. You got a conscientious objection. Who's Santa Claus?"

"I fished around among the wrappings but that was it. One crystal in original case and the horse it rode in on. No name, address, shop-code, invoice." - p 4

Then the world blew up & the reviewer died & was reincarnated as an ear dildo shaped like a speaking carrot.

"I slid it into my behind-the-ear-socket." - p 5

In other words, typical cyberpunk detail.

"The lab didn't exist. There had been a bench, cabinets and the operating table where Hall did open-heart surgery on sick machines. The cli-controlled mainframe, his little deck for five-finger exercises, the usual setup for stealing current and mostly, Hallway." - p 10

""Oh, God. Dribble."

""He's grown," Moke noticed. Give the man a cigar. Last time I saw it it looked like a five-year-old but nobody was going to mistake this for a baby. It was pushing six feet and hung like a donkey. The rest looked like a half-melted taper, arms and legs dangling. It ran with its behind in the air and it drooled. It couldn't help it, its teeth would have scared a shark." - p 13

Enuf about the Milkman. Or do you mean the Doo-Doo?

"I guess so. Gooders are the Unemployed who work at living normal lives in abnormal environments. Or the opposite, depending on what you think is normal.

"Like neat streets. Painted doors. Numbers that run in sequence. A closed bakery smelling of bread made with flour. Green oildrums with clipped bay trees outside a health-food restaurant. Window boxes along a housefront. Brown brick apartment-blocks with swept stairs and lights behind the transoms.

"They have vigilante patrols who love their work and nobody messes with them. Gooders can get unbelievably nasty. Considering what they say about us." - p 16

Maybe this is the right time to mention that the back cover features praise from William Gibson about a previous novel of Baird's called Crashcourse:

"A pungent, gleamy-dark street-future, illuminated with memorable style, and a gratifying sense of humor, and a killer eye for twsited technological detail."

Some of you have probably noticed that often when one author praises another it's b/c the author praised writes like the author praising. That's somewhat the case here.

"Divine was one of the little globes that dot the sky around our celestial equator and would give the pygmies something to look at nights if any of them still survived. They're all incredibly expensive, which makes our mentor Hans-Bjorn's terraformed asteroid Never the authentic product of old Ari Money and his five klicks by three nearly infinity. As sats go.

"Divine didn't go nearly so far. But it had a dumb charm. A house and grounds curved around a core of self-generating grav-units on solar power, a genuine view of the sky, and with a horizon you probably got used to after the first few centuries." - pp 25-26

That's all well & good but what I don't get is why they'd bother to have self-generating gravy covering over the solar panels. I mean that seems sortof self-defeating. Conspicuous consumption? Well, all's well that ends well & what goes around comes around & what tells the part smells the part. What I say is: Pity the sister of the Missing Person.

""He means fell apart," Hallway said. His freckles stood out like burn-scars. I've never noticed he had them. "Face and hands disintegrated and her scalp came off. Then her feet at the ankle. What's left's in the hospital. Whole area's under quarantine. There's a news blackout but some guy with an illegal peeper gor the pictures on holo before the blinds came down. I saw it."" - p 73

Doncha just HATE when that happens?! But what it all really boils down to is that there's no such thing as a good cyberpunk novel w/o a little illegal organ transplanting.

""Yeah," Hal said, tired. "Especially plus the chips. Current cases'll do. Suite One elderly male, sounds high Ari. Aged a hundred sixty-seven, wore out his rejuve and his fourth heart. They've just done a transplant by donor, young male, who was alive until the exchange. It's explicitly forbidden. Only cloned material may be used in transplants. Special permission can be given. Not recorded."

""Who was the young male?" I asked.

"Sword's invisible stare turned. "You're kidding. Boys and girls disappear every day, on the Strip and off it. Some of their parents sell them. He's dead now."" - p 76

We've come a long way since the day when you cd sell yr body in advance for post-mortem research & get an ID number tattooed on the bottom of yr foot. Be careful about what frozen specimen you open.

"Murmansk had gone waxy yellow. "Put it back," he said thinly. "That's modified Hansen's disease."" - p 92

That's LEPROSY for you IG-NO-RAME-US-ES out there.

"The floor had crept somehow between my thighs and was behaving like floors don't get to. I began to see why so many girl spacers wore pin-heels. I took a handful of it in my fingers and dug my nails in. It mde a kind of bubbling noise and went limp. Lorn slapped under his backside and made a wry mouth. A few seconds later Moke closed down his slate with a snap, shoved it under him and hauled me onto his knee. Lorn, who's a quick learner, made a stool of his sack." - pp 212-213

I just tried to order one of those floors from the Dome Hepot & they were sold out. Can you believe it? The mom & pop store wd've had one in the back rm for me special but they went out of business. Maybe I wdn't want it anyway if I'd need to make my sac into a stool, if you get my drift.

This was written December 1990 - July 1991, a mere 30 yrs before the Floor Sexual Revolution made the 60s look like a limp biscuit. Baird really knows her sacs of shit.… (altro)

The William Gibson blurb on this title got me to buy it.

This book aims at being a far-future romp with a Max-Headroom-esque sense of humor.

An itinerant space medic, a stowaway reporter, a sentient ship, and their alien symbionts (which give them all kinds of shape-changing, telekinetic and other super-abilities) have episodic adventures while on a quest to find a mysterious and malevolent being that the main character describes as her ex-husband.

It's weird and ambitious - unfortunately, for me, it fell very flat. The complex oddity of this future was intriguing, but too often just felt confusing. The humor didn't hit my funnybone. The episodic nature of the plot felt choppy and disconnected. And the grand denouement, where the author starts talking about issues related to divorce and custody battles, just felt out of place with the rest of the book.… (altro)