Horn 1: Hot Zone
By Ben Sloane
1990 Gold Eagle
Max Horn is a detective in the New York
City of 2025. He and his partner foil a robbery of some documents
sought by evil corporate CEO of Titus Steel, Oasis Fine. Fine’s
henchman Stellar kills Horn’s wife and daughter, leaving Horn
conveniently left for dead. Horn gets an arm and knee blown off, but
he replaces them with black market cybernetics called E-mods.
Seeking revenge, Horn applies for a
transfer to the asteroid mining colony of New Pittsburgh, which for
some reason is under the jurisdiction of NYPD. Between attempts on
his life, Horn uncovers a plot to destroy the asteroid to drive up
the price of titanium, killing the 15,000 residents in the process.
While there are occasionally
surprisingly mature characters, the villains are especially absurd,
and we get a lot of them. Every other chapter is Fine and Stellar
sitting around an office yelling variations of “I want Horn taken
care of…permanently!” For some reason Fine thinks it’s a good
idea to spend weeks flying out to the asteroid and plan to fly back
minutes before the whole place explodes.
In an odd scene Horn bangs Fine’s
mother, who was set up as the real power of Titus Steel, but she gets
written out pretty quick. Maybe Sloane’s saving her for later in
the series, but we don’t even get any “yo mama” quips out of
it.
The future world of 2025 is very
Robocop. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, cops are
ineffective, criminality is rampant, and the corporations are a force
unto themselves. Aside from E-mods and space ships, about the only
other technological advancement is caseless ammunition in the
conventional firearms everyone still uses.
Where the novel really shines is in its
stark brutality. New York City is basically Robocop’s Detroit, but
New Pittsburgh is where it really gets bleak. The prostitutes and
drunken miners are the classy citizens. Suicidal drug addicts called
Terminals work in the reactor, baking in radiation, only coming out
periodically to buy drugs and gang rape women, who are driven mad
from radiation sickness.
Horn fits right in, blowing off heads
with his 9mm, slicing off noses with broken beer mugs, snapping necks
with his robot arm, etc. While he shows some tenderness towards a
witness he protects, meaning he bangs her, Horn is peculiarly
insensitive to human suffering. When he discovers Fine’s plot to
murder 15,000 people, his reaction is good, I’ll add that to his
charges.
Horn focuses more on escaping with his
gal pal and her kid than on saving the rest of the colony. At one
point he murders several innocent workers while destroying an airlock
to prevent Fine’s escape. To add insult, after he makes a romantic
overture to the woman he saves, she tells him she doesn’t date
cops, making the multi-week trip back to Earth especially awkward.
I don’t think
I’ve ever come across a book that held such little regard for the
dignity of human life. I’m definitely in for the next one.
Paperback from AbeBooks
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