Because of delays from flooding in the morning and a flat tire on the bus in the evening, I managed to finish John Shirley’s book City Come a Walking in one day.

John Shirley is a seminal Cyberpunk author, but is probably best known as the original screenwriter for the movie The Crow and the book versions of movies.

City Come a Walking, written in 1980, is John’s third book. His first, Transmaniacon, I found at the Philadelphia Book Exchange when I was hunting down the new Science Fiction subgenre called cyberpunk in the late 1980s. I had accidentally discovered Mirrorshades, an anthology of cyberpunk stories, and I tried to find novels by everyone in the book. I discovered Shirley, William Gibson, and Lewis Shiner in the Mirrorshades anthology.

John Shirley has been a tough writer to track down, at least in the second hand shops where I find my reading material. As a writer, he is far from the mainstream. (Shirley, though, has succumbed to the need to buy food, lately, by writing some forgettable novelizations of bad movies.) I finally found City Come a Walking in an Amazon Shop, nearly new and in my price range.

City Come a Walking is an intense, poetic book that wanders the razor’s edge between metaphor and lucid dreaming. The style reminds me of a line from Howl:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

The setting is a near dystopic future, as are most cyberpunk novels. The premise is more fantastic, and the City in the title is San Francisco, which has coalesced into a personality. The plot, however, is superfluous and you read the book as a though you were in a runaway bus, with possibly just minutes to live, and only an anthology of punk rock poetry between you and eternity.

You can see the birth of the Cyberpunk subgenre in this book. Shirley IS the punk in cyberpunk. Gibson, Bruce Sterling and the other writers used this book as their bivouac point on their own cyberpunk ventures. Gibson, who wrote the preface, enumerates the influences that City Comes a Walking had on his book Neuromancer.

This is an important book, a good read. It is a book that I need to reread, soon.