I don’t know how it is that I haven’t come across the work of Richard Kadrey before. It was only when Warren Ellis linked to his new video blog, Dispatches from Probability Beach, that he appeared on my radar. But from the first story from Kadrey’s mythical town I was immediately a fan.

Then something occured to me. I looked on my bookshelf and there was a book of Kadrey’s first novel Metrophage, purchased during my great sf buying binge on amazon. So I immediately picked it up, and for the first time in ages, couldn’t put a book down.

Reading Metrophage was like re-discovering cyberpunk fiction all over again. He channels noir writers just like Gibson does in Neuromancer, but also drops in some sweet art history and quite respectable tech-extrapolations just like Sterling circa Holy Fire and street pomo theory, a la Zeitgeist.

Suffice to say Kadrey’s now on my must-read list. I’ll be trying to track down a copy of Kamikaze L’Amour and will load up my PSP with Blind Shrike.

In the meantime, if you wanna learn a bit more about Kadrey, check out the interview with him on NeoFiles.