So, for a Noirvember ask - besides your own stories, are there any other sci-fi noirs that you can recommend? Or fantasy, if said fantasy is incredibly subdued (no elves, overt magic, etc.)?
you're in luck, i'm not super well-versed in fantasy just in general. nothing against it at all, i just haven't read enough of it to form a strong opinion. but for sci-fi noirs, easy pick for me, the body scout!
Kobo has some problems. His cybernetics are a decade out of date, he's got a pair of twin sister loan sharks knocking on his door, and his work scouting for a baseball league run by pharmaceutical companies is about to go belly-up. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his childhood best friend-Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz-is murdered at home plate.
hugely, hugely recommend. tightly written, tightly paced, just a joy to read. lincoln michel i am your strongest soldier
if you want a fun one, then night mayor. way on the sillier side and with a specific caveat: it expects you to be very, very familiar with a lot of the movies, i don't think this is a good 'i'm dipping my toes in' pick
Truro Daine, a dangerous criminal who has been confined to imprisonment, escapes his incarceration by inventing a computer-generated dream world, which he rules as the Night Mayor.
the fun of this is that characters in the real world have to dive into his world and get typecast as a result. the real detective is forced to be a hardboiled detective, which means he's psychologically prevented from swearing due to the hay's code. he'll think 'how did i get into this?' and suddenly be subject to newspaper spinning and stock footage that makes him violently ill. sometimes i'll complain about pastiches and parodies being written by people who think they're better than the genre they're tackling. this isn't that. it's very, very loving