Rebody: Clive Warner

“Murdered in 2009. Revived in 2373. Grafted to a vaccum cleaner. Enslaved as a domestic robot. It’s a hell of a time to be Rebodied.”

The main character in Clive Warner’s Rebody, Hugh, must be the luckiest and unluckiest run-of-the-mill professor to have lived. He is lucky in that he gets to mix with one of his students at poetry nights. Yolanda, five eight, french looking, makes a pair of jeans and baggy sweatshirt look Paris-chic, takes a liking to the professor. The professor is unlucky as Yolanda has a mean boyfriend who kind of manages to take him out with a size ten boot. He’s also unlucky (or you might say lucky I guess) because he managed to win a Cryo Freeze prize at a funfair, while out with Yolanda, earlier that same evening.

Satire and comedy in the genre have to be treated with the utmost care. Rebody tackles it well, never trying to be satirical for the sake of it. Even though the author himself has said its satirical, its reads very much tongue in cheek. From the internal dialogue of Hugh, to how he comes to terms with his environment, Hugh keeps his sense of humour. I mean, you’ve got to if the last thing you remember is getting beaten to a pulp and then waking up ’seconds later’ a few hundred years into the future, inside a vaccum cleaner.

Some of the subject matter is downright bordering on sexually explicit, but this is delivered in a genre-esque way. Having a human head grafted onto different bodies, each with its own pros and cons, but actually being gradually taken over by it. One example is Hugh having his head attached to an apes body, and talking about the size of its manhood, in human terms its quite small, in ape terms its apparently quite big. Even thinking about it now makes me guffaw. Clive delivers these tidbits in a fashion I’ve never quite seen before.

Clive’s use of sound effect is amusing too. ‘Suddenly my stomach rumbles and my mouth goes ‘borp” or ‘He presses the button. The wheel goes ‘pokpokpokpokpokitypok . pok . . pok . . . the light blurs through the slots, slower, slower, the screen flickers…’ Sometimes its hard to take the story seriously, though reading past this, you soon learn that it’s all part of the style of writing.

It’s full of funny bits, even if the funny is black comedy. There’s also some questions which arise from this, and any good SF. What would it be like to have your head attached to a vaccum cleaner or ape or any such foreign object? How would you handle it? It also covers racial equality and not to get involved in things you might regret.

There are also some suprising twists in the tale. It’s unusual for a book to do this to me, as I thought I could pre-empt any devilment an author might dream up.

Probably not one for younger readers. If you’ve ever fancied detaching your head and putting it onto something mechanical and/or biological then this is a story for you.

The publisher’s main site is Citiria Publishing.

Interestingly, Clive has put up some Rebody Outtakes to peruse. Yes, you read correctly!