8 Great Novels that Mix Speculative Fiction and Noir
In one sense, noir is rooted in a very specific time and place. Noir sprang out of the hardboiled detective fiction that emerged in the United States around the Great Depression as the veneer was chipping off the mythic American dream. Prohibition had empowered organized crime, political corruption was rampant, and the gap between the poor in bread lines and the robber barons in gilded palaces was a growing chasm. The cynical antiheros of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett spoke to that specific time.
In another sense, noir is timeless and adaptable to any place real or imagined. Noir films and novels have been made in countries all over the world, and the style can be mashed up with almost any other genre. When I wrote my novel The Body Scout, I knew that even though it was a science fiction novel set in a futuristic baseball league a noir style would suit the material perfectly. Corruption, darkness, and mystery never seem to go away. So for this list, I’m going to talk about some fantastic noir novels that happen to take place in science fiction and fantasy worlds.
The other narrative, “The End of the World,” instead takes place in a fantasy realm, albeit a dreamy Murakami-ish one where unicorn skulls show dreams. The mysteries of the two storylines come together in a surprising way that I won’t spoil. As the title implies, the novel is in part an homage to American hardboiled fiction.
This 2016 novel combines neo-noir (“neon-noir” the author calls it) with vampires, reinventing both genres in the process. After the novel’s original publisher went under, it was resurrected this year by Tor Nightfire.
Sternbergh offers a dark and gritty portrait of the future, with a noir style to match. It’s a punchy and propulsive read for anyone who likes their dystopia with the hardest of hardboiled prose.
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But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn’t get much worse.
Then his brother–Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz–is murdered at home plate.
Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into a world of genetically modified CEOs, philosophical Neanderthals, and back-alley body modification, only to quickly find he’s in a game far bigger and more corrupt than he imagined. To keep himself together while the world is falling apart, he’ll have to navigate a time where both body and soul are sold to the highest bidder.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), which was named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed and reviewed in the New York Times; Vanity Fair; O, The Oprah Magazine; Tor.com and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry appear in The Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, Strange Horizons, Vice’s Motherboard, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His essays and criticism have been published by The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. He is the former editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. He is the co-editor of the science fiction anthology Gigantic Worlds (Gigantic Books 2015), the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018), and the forthcoming horror anthology Tiny Nightmares (Catapult, 2020). He teaches speculative fiction writing in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
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