Spares

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Coma meets Blade Runner in this future noir thriller, a compulsively readable melding of hardboiled narrative and hardware invention. Smith forecasts a decadent future in which the rich clone themselves at birth and callously harvest replacement organs from their "spares" as they need them. Narrator Jack Randall, a debauched but conscientious ex-cop, flees to the megalopolis of New Richmond with seven clones he has liberated from a spare farm and is almost immediately relieved of them by a gang of thugs. Jack's efforts to find out who has abducted the spares and marked them for death plunge him into a mystery that ultimately links the two events that have shattered his life: the brutal unsolved murder of his wife and child, and his soul-searing tour of military duty in The Gap. A virtual world built from the flotsam and jetsam cluttering the Internet, The Gap is an awesome conception made to seem supernaturally eerie yet scientifically feasible. Smith elaborates this creation brilliantly, as a surreal battleground where Jack confronts the demons that have haunted him for a decade, and as a symbol of emptiness and waste that brings the novel's numerous depictions of personal and social devaluation into sharp focus. Both a disconcerting portrait of a future that might be, and a poignant study of one man's fight to resist it, this novel augurs a promising future of another sort for its author. Film rights to Dreamworks SKG. (May) FYI: This novel is an expansion of Smith's horror short story "To Receive Is Better."

Library Journal

Smith whisks readers into a surreal, futuristic Clockwork Orange-like world of frighteningly easy violence. In New Richmond, Virginia, former police lieutenant Jack Randall roams the dank ventilation chutes and festering floors of a 200-story MegaMall with "food courts the size of small towns," determined to rescue his seven buddies-make that six and one half-who are made up of spare parts. Jack, a refugee from better times with a price on his head, deals with a killer stalking him as well as bad guys from the Spares Farm who want their inmates back. The nastiness of the dismembering theme is relieved by a piquant humor and suspense that pace the reader through amazingly inventive scenes. Jack doesn't rise much above the tough-talking one-dimensional thriller hero who perseveres through all battles. But the Spares, including the six-foot-five Mr. Two, who carries a bag with a talking head, take on an endearing quality. Visually fascinating, Spares is scheduled to be a major film from Dreamworks SKG. Recommended for suspense collections.-Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.

A Guran

Anyone reviewing Michael Marshall Smith's cross-genre novel Spares is apt to fall back on a variety of comparisons. And they are all accurate -- Spares does evoke hard-boiled detective writers like Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler; Philip K. Dick and his cyberpunk descendants; the filmic atmospheres of A Clockwork Orange, Chinatown, and Blade Runner; even the humor of Douglas Adams. But to do so does a disservice to Smith, who deserves credit for his own unique imagination, skill, and this wonderfully diverse novel.

Spares is told in a poignant first-person by Jack Randall, an ex-cop, ex-soldier, ex-husband, ex-father, ex-member of the human race, and ex-addict -- except there is no such thing as an ex-addict. At the outset of the novel he's come back to his former home -- New Richmond, Virginia: a 200-story flying megamall that has been "grounded" for 83 years due to technological failure compounded by bureaucratic ineptitude. Jack's brought seven "spares" with him that he rescued from a "farm" that, shattered and drug-addled, he found himself in charge of. Spares are clones who exist only to provide spare parts -- skin, eyes, organs, limbs, faces -- for their legally "human" counterparts. Jack has treated the spares as humans -- teaching them to communicate, to actualize their emotions, and allowing them to think for themselves -- and is attempting to save them from the system that exploits their bodies and ignores their minds, feelings, and souls. In New Richmond Jack becomes embroiled in a deadly mystery involving denizens of both the underworld and overworld, his ex-partner, a former enemy, and The Gap -- the surrealistic ex-war zone born from a virtual world that had "grown too heavy and sloughed off the wires and coalesced into something solid."

Smith's future noir world of urban decay is one in which computers create their own programming and are sometimes more human than the humans. protagonist,The society is a plausibly corrupt extension of our current era with The Gap an obvious Vietnam allegory. And, of course, it is all the more chilling because we can so easily believe it. Smith falters in his culture only in one respect: his emphasis on class stratification is devoid of any racial overtones whatsoever -- as is the case in most SF. But, like the best SF -- and hard-boiled detective fiction -- Smith provides compelling philosophical and sociological underpinnings along with his energetic action.

For all the other comparisons, Spares reminds me most of John Shirley's early cyperpunk novel City Come A Walkin', and Jack Randall is reminiscent of the flawed heroes in Shirley's work. Like Shirley, Smith writes of dark things in dark worlds where the horror -- disturbingly familiar no matter what the trappings -- is often found within our own souls.

Spares could easily become a classic cherished by readers, argued over, dissected and discussed for years. And because it has been optioned by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG it has a chance of becoming more than a cult classic. Whatever Spares becomes -- it is required reading now.
— darkecho.com

Kirkus Reviews

British writer Smith's first US publication, an action fantasy about a future dystopia.

Ex-soldier, ex-detective Jack Randall, 39, is a victim of The Gap, a weird area in rural Virginia where collapsing computer codes of the "virtual world had grown too heavy and sloughed off the wires and coalesced into something solid." Computers have long since been given the job of writing code, of programming themselves, because, the narrator notes, "They were better at it, much better than us." However, "their motivations were sometimes uncertain, and after the code was sealed it was impossible to tell what was in there. Perhaps . . . a conversation humans weren't invited to eavesdrop on anymore." Twenty years ago, when The Gap was first discovered, Jack and his buddy Mal and Johnny Vinaldi were soldiers sent into the area to secure it; they emerged two years later, their psyches scarred by The Fear, a weapon generated by The Gap to protect itself. Jack and Mal became cops, while Vinaldi began his rise to drug kingpin. Meantime, in The Gap, Jack had become an addict of Rapt, the only known drug that was able to fight The Fear. Eventually, Jack ends up working at a complex where he guards Spares, clones of living people who are cannibalized when their originals require replacement parts. Jack grows attached to a group of Spares and, trying to save them, takes them to New Richmond, a fabulous, five-mile-square MegaMall 200 stories high, a cubic city that has the power of flight. When his Spares are kidnapped, Jack races about the vast hallways and villages of the MegaMall, pursued by weird figures from The Gap and involved in a series of increasingly bloody encounters leading to a surprising showdown.

Newcomer Smith has originality plus and a wicked flow of philosophic twists. If a novel was ever destined to follow Ridley Scott's classic filming of Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner, this is it.