Titanium Noir
Nick Harkaway
Knopf
Fiction, Mystery/Sci-Fi-Thriller
Themes: Altered DNA, Cross-Genre, Dystopias, Medicine, Urban Tales
***+
Description
Cal Sounder is a private detective specializing in incidents involving the Titans: medically-enhanced elites who can
potentially live forever. They are the richest of the rich, the most powerful of the powerful, literally larger than
life thanks to the growth effects of the drugs involved, and their crimes are as outsized as their lifestyles... so
when one of them turns up dead under very suspicious circumstances, the case could blow the roof off the city.
Roddy Tebbit was atypical even for a Titan, a modest techie working as a professor and pursuing private research into
lake algae. Who would want an inoffensive milquetoast of a man like that dead? The more Cal investigates, the more
doesn't make sense, leading him down a long and twisted path into deadly secrets long buried by the most powerful Titan
on the planet.
Review
A jaded investigator of gray morality, an untouchable elite, a criminal underworld at least as powerful as the
ostensible government... Titanium Noir isn't the first science fiction story to transplant the guts of a noir
thriller into a dystopian future, but it does so with confidence and a nice conceit in the Titan treatments and its
consequences, creating what is essentially another species with godlike aspirations.
Though an ordinary human, Cal has a unique position in the city as a liaison between the Titans and the normal
population: his girlfriend Athena is the daughter of the most powerful Titan in the city (and arguably the world), who
wound up turning Titan herself after a horrific accident... a transformation that has inevitably driven a wedge between
the pair. To become a Titan is to outgrow one's old self (literally; each life-extending, rejuvenating dose causes fresh
growth, so they physically tower over the populace and even their voices can cause physical harm), and many become
increasingly divorced from their humanity and from the consequences of their own actions. Even as Cal resents the Titans
who essentially rule in the way oligarchs do - not with official titles or offices but through money and power and
holding the keys to fame, fortune, and immortality - he has fallen into the role as their defender and protector on some
level. This is a fence he will not be able to straddle indefinitely; Athena beckons from the Titan side, while his
vestigial conscious and outsized awareness of how inhuman they become, how even love seems to fade among them after a
few decades or pesky human lifetimes, pull him toward humanity. The case of Roddy's murder plunges Cal deeper into Titan
secrets and deceptions than even he could imagine, making him few new friends and many new enemies. In noir fashion, Cal
finds corruption behind nearly every doorway in a case that inevitably zigs just when he anticipates a zag. Around him,
the future city he inhabits is revealed, a world with some progress but also mired in the past, in no small part due to
the essential-immortals pulling civilization's strings; if they can't change, why should the world?
It lost a half-star for an ending that felt a bit rushed (and a conclusion that left a slight aftertaste I didn't quite
like... one that I'm sure was intentional, but it being intentional didn't keep me from not quite enjoying it). Overall,
though, it's a decent blend of genres with an interesting examination of how immortality and elitism create a subspecies
almost literally divorced from the main body of the human race.