His first novel, The Night Mayor ( 1989), potently intensifies the Virtual Reality claustrophobias of cyberpunk through a plot whose villain, the criminal Daine, has escaped into a Magic-Realist, glowing, alternate-world mental construct peopled by personas from detective films of the 1940s, from which haven he must be flushed by the Dream-Hacking protagonists.
Newman's almost excessive sensitivity to the icons of Hollywood helps distinguish him from his sf models. Newman began publishing sf with "Dreamers" for Interzone in Summer 1984, rapidly establishing a name for liquidly dense tales of the Near Future – or Alternate-History versions of the earlier twentieth century – which combine a more or less standard Cyberpunk idiom with an acute sensitivity to the dream world of the movies, in particular the film noir tradition already mined by authors like William Gibson. His film books express a generically savvy, sophisticatedly wry vision of their subject matters, a vision also articulated in the weekly reviews he has conducted on television since 1989.
(1959- ) UK author and broadcaster who remains as well known for his film criticism as for his fiction, though the latter has become increasingly dominant in his output.
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