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Searching for obscure SCI-FI title

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2009 4:33 pm
by XboxNation
I have looked for this title for years now, but have little information on it. I do not remember the novel's name or the name of the author, but I remember what the story was about vaguely:

The setting:

An engineer or technician of some kind is working in a city in the future, and he deals as is necessary with the black market to get parts he needs, and special equipment.

He lives in a caste society that is still Western in some respects (It is similar in this respect but not Brave New World.) There is a caste hierarchy that is represented in color-coded clothing and parts of the city are color-coded as well. It may also be based on credit or holding a certain kind of card.

Characters in the story include a robot named Claude, which is a self-parody of the one-eyed robot's single large claw hand it operates to manipulate things (it later has a radar-eye attached to it by the main character!) It becomes badly damaged later in the novel and refers to itself as "CAKE LAUD."

There is also a major female character if I remember correctly who assists the main character in obtaining equipment or escaping as some point.

The story:

The main character is a technician who repairs things and is of middle class rank. At some point, his efforts to procure black-market goods or explore someplace he was not supposed to be caused him to see or become implicated in a murder he did not commit (If memory serves, the main character definitely goes on the wrong side of the law) or hold equipment that was illegal. He goes on the run, and in the end, not to spoil it for those who have not read it, do not read on:

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Spoiler:



The novel ends with him exploding the nuclear reactor in the center of the city.
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I regard this novel and author as extremely obscure and almost unknown outside of those who read sci-fi with religiosity or who have picked up alot of books at the library and stumbled across it.

I found it at school once, years ago, picked it up, and finished it over two sittings. It may have been from one of those Scholastic Book Fair type books. Hopefully someone else read it and knows what I'm talking about. Please answer if you know, or think you may know the one I'm referring to. I want to own it to read again.

It's a pulp sci-fi futuristic cyberpunk novel, a genre, frankly, that still has room to be explored. It's a good book, I just didn't realize that it was worth rereading at the time.