Wow.

Any trendy genre is doomed to become desperately uncool in time. Take cyberpunk, bless it. That self-consciously wired sci-fi stepchild ended up making the journey from envelope-pushing early-80s edginess to nothing more than fodder for mid-90s straight-to-video stodge. But hey, it's not cyberpunk's fault. It heralded the age of information overload, but now that we're sliding down the infolanche for real, it can seem as naive as a 1950's World's Fair. A lot of its concerns - style tribes, virtual reality, post-apocalyptic dystopias - seem laughably dated.

M. John Harrison couldn't give a toss, though. Good for him.

"Nostalgia and science fiction are spookily close" A A Gill

That's one of the quotes that prefaces this extraordinary exercise in style. It makes a lot of sense, too. Harrison's world is cyberpunk refried and expertly blended into a pulp setting - a setting that cyberpunk has always been magnetically drawn to from the start. The action takes place in a backwater street of a down-at-heel city on a who-cares planet, stuffed full of romantically dissolute lowlifes. Liv Hula manages a bar, but can't pull her life out of the gutter; Vic Serotonin makes a living out of taking slumming tourists to the edge of an indescribable spatial anomaly that landed downtown a generation ago, but he's losing himself in the process; Fat Antoyne hustles for a buck and tries to get loved; Lens Aschemann is the detective who looks just like the older Albert Einstein, driving a 1952 pink Cadillac, who's trying to piece all these lives together. But the centre of the novel is the city Saudade itself, in its desperate, dingy beauty, eerily mirrored in the dreamlike chaos of the anomaly.

And everybody drinks, like there's no tomorrow. For these hoods and whores, maybe there isn't. They're trapped in a future where the only gene-modification you can't buy is a way to like who you are.

This isn't about the wisecracks-and-sharp-hats noir of films like The Big Sleep. It's more like the melancholy cool of Raymond Chandler's original novel, where regret and betrayal is more subtly deadly than a hundred blackjack-armed thugs, and the streets are always slick with rain. Nova Swing isn't about sci-fi whizz-bang gadgetry or cosmos-spanning metaphysics either, although Harrison doles these out with a sort of weary, inspired generosity.

So why isn't this a mere literary experiment? Because Harrison has something to write about. The characters circle each other, desperate to find a meaning in a midnight hook-up, a collar, a brawl. It's about how everything falls apart slowly, how adults betray their child-selves, how love is already on the lam; but how just maybe it's enough to get you off this godforsaken world and into a future which might be illusory, but has to be better than the now.

Make no mistake - Nova Swing sweats style. Even if sometimes the effects are a little laboured, it's all a labour of love. This review may be dull, but Harrison’s prose isn’t. It’s jaded, seductive street poetry.

Inevitably, the detective plot (which is always the loser in the pulp setting, and doesn't even have much what-happens-next attraction here) can't pull us all the way to a showstopping finish. But even this doesn't matter, because Harrison is evoking a mood, a style - a way of living or putting off life - that's as grown-up, thrilling and phantasmagorical as anything else in science fiction.