The novel “Irontown Blues” by John Varley was published for the first time in 2018. It’s part of the Eight Worlds series.
When a mysterious woman hires Christopher Bach to find the man who infected her with a genetically modified virus, the private investigator immediately suspects that something doesn’t add up. The main problem is that he’s supposed to look for the alleged culprit in Irontown, a Moon city where the inhabitants make their own laws.
Christopher Bach has very bad memories of Irontown connected to the time when he was a cop. He knows very well that he must move with great caution even if he’s assisted by Sherlock, a genetically modified dog who considers him his pack leader.
The beginning of “Irontown Blues” is in all respects a hard-boiled with the clichés of this genre. It’s actually set on the Moon in a future where an alien species has conquered the Earth forcing the surviving humans to settle in other places in the solar system. Generations after that event, the Moon’s habitats are very advanced but many humans have decided to live by reproducing patterns from the Earth’s past.
In the case of Christopher Bach, the investigation that begins after being hired by a classic femme fatale leads the private investigator in a direction that forces him to face a period of the past in which he risked dying. Flashbacks are an important part of the story, and you can understand their importance as you continue reading the novel.
At the same time, the investigation takes Christopher Bach beyond the patterns of the noir story. “Irontown Blues” blends rather diverse narrative elements with a plot that sometimes takes unexpected directions with twists and revelations.
One of the directions taken by the narrative is in the parts told in the first person by Sherlock. For this reason, the style is very different from the parts narrated in the first person by Christopher Bach. Sherlock essentially lives in a world of smells and offers a unique point of view. His intelligence is comparable to that of a human, but he’s still a dog with the instincts of his species. Even for him, it’s not easy to get by in a place like Irontown, where criminals and other people live following a philosophy of life that isn’t compatible with the normal lunar authorities.
John Varley has often been compared to Robert A. Heinlein, especially for certain themes present in the stories of the Eight Worlds series. In “Irontown Blues” the homage to the master of science fiction is explicit since Irontown is, among other things, the home of people who follow Heinleinian ideas. Varley also uses a part of the plot connected to this group of people to point out where he doesn’t agree with some of Heinlein’s ideas.
All this forms a novel that in some ways is heterogeneous and in which sometimes the style is also substance. This is even more true because there are times when the impression is that the plot is really thin and is used by John Varley only to develop certain interactions between characters and the various faces of the setting’s diversity. There’s more action and tension in the flashbacks in which Christopher Bach recounts dramatic events from his past.
“Irontown Blues” is a standalone novel, but some events told in the flashbacks intersect with those of “Steel Beach” and in some ways, it can be considered its sequel. The ideal would be to read both novels, which are very different from each other beyond the setting and certain events. Its composite structure, which blends heterogeneous parts, makes it difficult to recommend this novel to anyone other than John Varley fans. If the plot and narrative elements intrigue you, you might like it. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
