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Ghost Dancers

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The US of A in the final throes of the twentieth century. Climactic catastrophe has devastated the land. The economy, civilisation, and even the laws of nature are falling apart. Contrast the fortress city-states of the corporate-owned Policed Zones with the decaying wilderness prowled by the tribalistic gang-cults of the new millennium.

GenTech - one of the most powerful mega-corps on the planet - have lost a computer disk. Not just any disk. This disk belonged to Doc Zarathustra eccentric genius and head of the corporation's BioDiv. And now everyone wants it - at any price.

Kid Zero - one-time member of the Low Numbers - owes fealty to no one. His only companion is Lady Venom - a six-foot, female rattlesnake. And he has the disk. Pursued half-way round the world and back by the most ruthless killers Gen Tech and its competitors can send after him, the odds are not on his side. But the Kid is cunning. He may be a lone wolf, but he's not without friends. And the kid doesn't want money or power; the kid wants revenge...

Cover by John Blanche

Published in 1991 by Games Workshop Publishing (as by Brian Craig)
ISBN:1-872372-34-1

Review by Ian Braidwood

Cast of Characters:
Lady Venom, Kid Zero, Homer Hegarty, Ace the Ace, Doc Zarathustra, Carl Preston, Sasumu Yokoi, Ray Pascoe, Mr Hayhurst, Jensen, Carey Castle, Harriet the Hooker, Cyril Atlas, Charlie Atlas, Sammy Ulinski, Rico Andriano and Junichi Tanagawa.

Ghost Dancers features a mysterious guy called Kid Zero, who rides about the deserts of the ex-USA with a pet rattlesnake called Lady Venom. The intent is to provide a Mad Max style setting, so there is a surfeit of semi and fully automatic means of persuasion, armour plated means of dogged resistance, hackers, and lots of things considered 'cool' by its intended audience.

To this recipe for eternal harmony must be added the corps - that's corporations to you - who are the nearest thing to governments in the Dark Future universe. It is the machinations of and rivalry between Gen Tech and Mitsu-Makema which provide motive force for the series, (other authors have written Dark Future stories, including Kim Newman - OOPS! - Jack Yeovil.

Ghost Dancers itself doesn't disappoint. It really is full of callous idiots who feel the very acme of human development is robbing people so they can get enough money to buy ammunition and beer. I am of the opinion that the title is a comment on the whole Mad Max type of ethos and people who buy into it.

Anyway, the book reads very easily and I was quite happy turning each page, knowing I was working closer to the end, when: WHUMPH! Brian only goes and plonks down a corker of an idea! Parts of my mind, which had been busy composing a review had to stop what they were doing and pay attention!

Now I would complain, except whose writing am I reviewing? Only mr 'subvert the genre' himself, so I don't really have any right of complaint, after all he's caught me out before, hasn't he? Oh yes.

Thus I have had to restrain myself from ripping this book to shreds, but don't think that's a recommendation, because it isn't.

The Brian Stableford Website