Vienna Blood

Coming at a time when most sci-fi authors seem to think a thorough peppering of improbable gadgets is a substitute for good writing and a plot, this book is a revelation. Its characters are great. It’s a masterfully written, brilliantly paced novel that sucks you into the depths of a biotech nightmare … The best thing to happen to Vienna since Ultravox split.

The writer who took out a patent on the cyberpunk novel was, of course, William Gibson. His nightmarish vision of the future has proved a literary gold mine for many of his followers. Mathews’ book, however, is something noticeably different. Although it could certainly be called science fiction (it is after all set in the year 2026), Mathews clearly has a more literary model in mind. And although his compulsive narrative has many thriller trappings, the use of language is both exciting and innovative. …. Readers of literary novels (or, for that matter, readers of straight thrillers) should not be frightened away by the science fiction elements here. This is a piece which has plenty to offer all kinds of readers.

Imagine Philip Kerr’s early Weimer detective novels updated to the 21st century by William Gibson with dialogue by Dashiell Hammett and you begin to get the flavour of Adrian Mathews’s remarkable new novel. The title suggets gore, but in fact it comes from a Johann Strauss operetta and in the context of this strange story it refers to heredity. Mathews has taken Vienna in the year 2026 and done for it what the director Ridley Scott did for Los Angeles in Blade Runner: extrapolated the obvious to extremes. … Mathews has conjured up a Vienna of the future from the seeds of the past and present and not without touches of black humour … Mathews works up to a made-for-movies, Michael Crichton-style surreal stand-off, complete with life-size interactive Daffy Duck holograms, before a walk in the Vienna woods reveals the strange and complex truth. This is science and fiction at the cutting edge.

Adrian Mathews’ ambitious first novel carries a weighty cargo of black comedy, suspense, erudite knowledge, literary game-playing and a dream-like atmosphere of gothic unease. … we’re carried along by his cleverly contrived plot, his neatly drawn company of characters, his ability to convey a sense of threat and his quirky, outsider’s-eye-view of Paris.

Solid entertainment … like Greene’s Harry Lime and Scott’s replicant-chaser Deckard, Mathews’s hero, society columnist Sharkey, has plenty of weight on the page, and his voice gives the story an exotic density of Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude woven amusingly with well-balanced electrono-pedantry and neo-Gibsonesque micrometic technojargon … Tip-top charcoal character sketches, dandy dialogue, and atmospheric evocation of Vienna swimming in the dark waters of the future.

Hardboiled but intellectually agile, Vienna Blood is a delight: a techno-thriller so impressive it re-ennobles a genre woefully demeaned in recent years by neo-Crichton buck-chasers. Mathews’s creations leap off the page, and the fruits of his impressively thorough research are integrated subtly and organically … Of course, Vienna Blood’s world, orbited by the spinning hulk of the Marriott Space Hotel, is really our own a couple of scientific screw turns down the line … it’s a world of chilly convenience and moral blankness … You wouldn’t want to live there, but you’d be mad not to visit.

This is Orson Welles’s The Third Man revamped for the new century, not least because of the Viennese setting so compellingly realised and put to use in the book’s pages. There’s a noirish feel to Mathews’s work. His prose is scalpel sharp and peppered with phrases of a Chandleresque nordancy so that you read on eager to see what he’ll come out with next. The characters are well done, convincingly amoral and complex. The science sounds chillingly plausible and the incidental invention works well. The plot holds the attention from the first word to last and … manages to deliver a few genuine surprises, particularly at the end. A first rate techno-thriller from a writer who shows real promise.

… an intriguing futuristic drama … Adrian Mathews pays homage to tales like The Third Man and even Star Wars (the cantina scene) with a novel that will one day have future writers pay similar esteem to him.

… an inventive mixture of science fiction and literary thriller… What gives Vienna Blood its consierable charm is the verve of Mathews’ prose, the quirky memorability of such figures as Leo and Petra, and the absorbing, ambivalent vision of the future … As in his equally offbeat The Hat of Victor Noir, Mathews has clearly saturated himself in the culture of his chosen city, from Mozart to Musil, and (as Thomas Pynchon does in his fiction set in Europe) conveys the likeable impression of relishing his audacity in showing local writers how it is done.