Book Mention: Titanium Noir

It's a hard-boiled detective story set in the near-ish future – at least, maybe a couple hundred years have passed but things aren't all that different – where some of the ultra-rich set have access to a life rejuvenation medical treatment that essentially resets a body's biological clock to the late teenage years and lets the recipient go on to live another life's worth of years.  A side effect is that the recipient grows another 20% or so.  Couple this with the name of the treatment regime being "Titanium 7," and you end up with these ultra-rich being sort of conspicuous and being called Titans.  Hence the name of the book.

Well, all is dandy until a Titan turns up dead.  It superficially looks like a suicide, but things aren't as they seem or else we wouldn't have a novel here.  So normal working joe of a private investigator gets pulled into the case by the police because he's worked with the Titans before and has a track record of playing well with them.  Mysteries are explored, dead ends are probed, interesting situations unfold, pretty much everything you'd want in a noir detective novel.  There are certainly some interesting characters, especially the gangster "Doublewide," so called because his off-brand life extension treatment added to his width and not so much to his height.  Too bad Sidney Greenstreet isn't around to play Doublewide when this gets made into a movie, which I sincerely hope happens and the sooner the better.  Paging Quentin Tarantino, paging Quentin Tarantino... Yeah, he'd do well coming out of retirement to film this one. 

So is Titanium Noir any good?  Yeah, I think so.  Like any decent sci-fi, it holds up a funhouse mirror to today so that we may better reflect upon current matters.  First there's the Titanium 7 rejuvenation treatment that's effectively a form of transhumanism so far unexplored in the genre.  With such extensive resetting/rebuilding of a body, is this even still the original person?  Not always entirely it seems.  Then there's the ultra-rich being set apart from the rest of us.  How does that work out?  There are always edges of the two groups that are going to rub.  What about the Titan wannabes?  That's well explored too.  Finally, is it fun to read?  Not my usual whisky, but yeah, it was fun.

Break out of your summer reading heat dome pattern, give this one a try.