J.D. Masters' Cold Steele

Cold Steele, published in 1989, is the second of the Steele books by J.D. Masters.

I went into Cold Steele expecting a violent but fun pulp action thriller in the men’s adventure mode. It is in fact a very successful adrenalin-rush pulp action thriller but it’s also a surprisingly smart and interesting and somewhat complex cyberpunk science fiction novel.

The hero is a cyborg, but he’s not a robot with a human brain. He’s a partially robotically enhanced flesh-and-blood man but the twist is that he doesn’t have a human brain. He has a computer brain. Well, it’s sort of a computer brain and sort of a human brain.

Donovan Steele was (and maybe is) a cop who got badly shot up. His body survived. It was badly mangled but with bionic enhancements it was made fully functional. His brain however did not survive. Not on organic form. His personality was however uploaded and used as the basis for the software that drives his electronic brain.

This personality uploading idea was very fashionable in the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 80s. It’s an idea that always struck me as very unconvincing. Masters however handles it rather deftly and in a genuinely provocative and interesting way. Donovan Steele doesn’t know if he’s human or not. He has his human memories. He experiences human emotions. Or at least he thinks he does. But he knows he’s not human in the way other people are human.

And he has some problems, which psychiatrist Dev Cooper is supposed to be helping him work through. Steele has nightmares. These seem to be memories. Very vivid memories. He is convinced that they are real memories. The trouble is that they’re not his memories.

Dev Cooper has problems as well. Ethical problems. He’s been working with a digital copy of Donovan Steele’s personality. This is a Donovan Steele who exists only in digital form, with no physical existence. Dev’s problem is that he has to decide if this digital copy is alive. Does it have rights?

This is also a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. The world has been devastated by viruses and nuclear war. Large parts of the United States are nothing but radioactive wastelands. Significant parts of the country are controlled by crime gangs who are essentially warlords. Texas has declared its independence. Nobody knows if anybody is still alive in California because nobody has dared to investigate. The federal government wants to reassert its authority and sees cyborgs like Donovan Steele as a way to do this. One cyborg is as effective as a whole squad of cops, and much cheaper. The government doesn’t care about the ethical issues. It just wants power and control.

Donovan Steele’s assignment in this novel is to take down the Borodini crime family which controls much of New York. It would take a small army to deal with the Borodini family. They live in a fortress. Steele figures he can do the job himself.

He has some help. Ice is a black former gang leader who has agreed to help in return for immunity from prosecution. Steele and Ice don’t trust each other but they both have something to gain from working together, and Ice can certainly handle himself in a tough spot. Steele’s other ally is Raven, a young hooker whom he rescued. She can be trusted insofar as she has a personal grudge against the Borodinis.

A weird emotional bond develops between Steele and Raven. Steele doesn’t care that she’s a hooker. Raven doesn’t care that he’s a robot. They’re both broken inside but they find, to their own mutual surprise, that they’ve started to care for each other.

Of course this book is part of a series so some issues are left only partially resolved, presumably to be dealt with further in later books.

There’s as much action and mayhem as you could possibly desire, combined with a strange love story and some surprisingly deep emotional, moral and intellectual speculation. Some of these issues would also be dealt with a few years later in the excellent Japanese sci-fi anime movie Ghost in the Shell.

I enjoyed this novel enough to leave me quite open to the idea of buying the next book in the series.

Cold Steele is highly recommended.