Very good. End of world, Mayan style, and eco-New-Arkers.
Noted during my 1980's attempt to read every book in my small town library. ( )

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the end of the world in 2012 based on the Mayan calendar ending it’s last cycle. In Deserted Cities of the Heart, Lewis Shiner was ahead of the game when he wrote in 1988! As the Indians in the book say, the end of the world has to start some place.

Deserted Cities is something like you’d get if you mixed Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, with Burroughs/Ginsburg’s The Yage Letters, and a bit of Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States thrown in. Deserted Cities is about rock star Eddie Yates who disappears from public life. With the help on an Indian shaman he discovers a psychedelic mushroom that sends you on a literal trip, it will take you to the past. Your past, or to the ancient Mayan past. Eddie is followed by his brother Thomas Yates who is an anthropologist and Eddie’s ex-wife, Lindsey who try to rescue Eddie from self-destruction. It‘s a story of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, time travel, Mexican revolutionaries, and the Mayan end of days.

Shiner’s early novels have been described as cyberpunk, whose best known adherent is William Gibson. I’m don’t really understand the label in this case. Deserted Cities is a well written pretty traditionally formatted novel. The action cinematically, ramping up the action for a climatic ending.

Deserted Cities is Shiner’s second novel. It was originally published in 1988. Although it uses the political situation in the plot, none of the story or action feels dated. I guess the more politics changes, the more it stays the same. With the talk of the end of the world in 2012 courtesy of the Mayan calendar it’s a good time for a republication of Deserted Cities. If you’ve read a lot of Shiner’s later novels, as I have, it’s interesting to see his subconscious already working with some common elements, a time traveling protagonist whose trips to the past aren’t very healthy for him, disappearing rock stars, Jimi Hendrix, which are precursors of his later works such as Glimpses. In using these elements you can see the evolution of Shiner as a writer. ( )

*note to self. Copy from A.