Gun, with Occasional Music is a 1994 novel by Jonathan Lethem. It blends science fiction and hardboiled detective fiction. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994.
The novel follows the adventures of Conrad Metcalf, a tough guy private detective and a wiseass, through a futuristic version of San Francisco and Oakland, California. Metcalf is hired by a man who claims that he's being framed for the murder of a prominent urologi...
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Gun, with Occasional Music is a 1994 novel by Jonathan Lethem. It blends science fiction and hardboiled detective fiction. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994.
The novel follows the adventures of Conrad Metcalf, a tough guy private detective and a wiseass, through a futuristic version of San Francisco and Oakland, California. Metcalf is hired by a man who claims that he's being framed for the murder of a prominent urologist. Metcalf quickly discovers that nobody wants the case solved: not the victim's ex-wife, not the police, and certainly not the gun-toting kangaroo who works for the local mafia boss.
Thanks to technology, children can become smarter and more cynical than adults; such children are known as baby-heads. Animals, too, can be given the intelligence of a human being through bioscientific techniques, a concept explored previously by David Brin in his Uplift novels and Roger Zelazny in Dream Master. Lethem's animals stand midway between these two;...
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