Pepe Rojo

Book was pretty good. I liked the concept of a dystopic world where crime is rife, people enjoy watching suicides on tv and one of the only ways to make easy money is to have cameras surgically inserted into your retinas and you become a tabloid reporter for the rest of your life.

Naturally, our protagonist is one such reporter that walks around the city all day and makes money recording gruesome crimes using the cameras in his eyes. Apparently a tech disease is killing a lot of reporters and he seems to fear catching it which causes hallucinations and death from heart failure.

But then... the story just sort of jumps all over the place and one episode he is worried of the brain zapping disease, next chapter he wanders around the sewers trying to locate a new race of blind humans that lives there, then he wants to locate the anti electricity terrorists for no apparent reason, etc... There doesn't seem to be much of a linearity in the plot. Combine that sense of episodic nature with the fact this novelette is still topping 10,000 words, and it sort of feels a bit longer than it should.

I like the premise and the author's writing style is nice. Just felt it would have had a bigger bang if it had just selected one possible scenario and been a 4000 word short story instead. In case any English readers are interested, there is apparently an English translation of the story in a magazine called Cosmos Latino.… (mehr)