The Linear City is a long seemingly unending street - Broadway. Either side of this street are all the buildings needed for human existance - factories, shops, apartment blocks etc - seperated into blocks by the cross streets that extend just to the end of the building facing onto Broadway.

Behind the buildings to one side is a river, behind the other train tracks. beyond these are the realms of the dead, from where the bright Fisherwives or dark Yardbulls come to collect the dead to take them to their final destination.

This book tells of Diego Patchen of the 10,394,850th Block of Broadway in the borough of Gritsavage, a writer of cosmogonic fiction (this world's name for sf) in the pulp magazines of his time; of his dying father, his firewoman Amazonian girlfriend (Volusia Bittern), his drop out boyhood friend (Zohar Kush), the Borough's mayor (the wonderfully Dickensian-named Jobo Copperknob) a jazz musician (Rumbold Prague) and a newsstand vender (Snarky Chuff) amongst many other players.

The book is told by way of four episodes of Diego's life during one year although with some threads running throughout. We gain insight into his relationship with his dying father; we observe him try to help his friend Kush; we hear of how his and his girlfriends respective careers bloom; and finally we follow him on his trip to far distant blocks on a cultural exchange.

These individual tales though are not the main attraction for me with this book. There are two things I simply cannot recomment highly enough in this book - the setting and the actual writing itself.

The street-world on a world with two suns, with its 'Far Side of the Tracks' and 'The Other Side' physical representations of the incorporeal Heaven and Hell in Christian religion; the cultural differences shown by people seperated by thousands of blocks; the lack of progression in areas of technology; the jazz clubs and radio stations are wonderfully described and blend to give this a feeling of a distorted 1930's America.

The writer's actual prose is wonderful. Right from the opening phrase

"February, and his father could talk only of his own impending death"

the writing style is wonderful, aided greatly by some of the invented words the author uses as part of the dialects of the Boroughs we encounter, highlight, without seeming forced, the differences between this world and any equivalent it may have in the USA of the early 20th Century.

I've never read any Paul di Filippo before this book, I now have two more on order. This is stunningly good fiction!

Synposis
A moderately modern city, pulsing with music and commerce, seemingly of infinite length, yet only as broad as a wide avenue, flanked on one side by Heaven, on the other by Hell. Such is the milieu intimately familiar to -- and mostly unquestioned by -- the millions of average humans who inhabit the Linear City. Yet a small band of seekers do indeed ponder their odd lot, the genesis and fate of their strange habitation. Among the speculatively minded are a small group of writers who specialize in what they call "Cosmogonic Fiction." And among these men and women we find Diego Patchen, one of the younger luminaries of his set.

A Year in the Linear City is the story of Diego and his friends, their loves and rivalries, their failures and triumphs, during one pivotal year beneath the Seasonsun and Daysun, in forbidding sight of The Other Shore and The Wrong Side of the Tracks. Careers will flourish, comrades will part forever, subterranean adventures will endanger both soul and city, and a fateful expedition to faroff Blocks will bring new and challenging perspectives, leaving no one unchanged.