Fried's debut explores issues likely to affect everyone—and pokes predatory capitalism with a sharp stick, attracting readers of darkly absurd science fiction à la Philip K. Dick, Charlie Jane Anders, and Warren Ellis.
The obnoxious antics of artificial intelligence OWEN, who finds both children and seniors suspicious, and who spends much of his time figuring out how to replicate the sensation of becoming drunk, contrast brilliantly against the serious Henry, a man with few friends and a love of trains and transit, whose main personality trait is dedication to his work. Fried’s skill at making their friendship so dynamic, mismatched, and often ridiculous is what makes this novel so effective—OWEN and Henry’s quest to defeat an evil genius becomes a touching and funny caper that keeps the reader intrigued through the final pages. Meanwhile, in the background floats a quiet debate about the modern city. Fried gestures to city-planning thinkers such as Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs, revealing his careful research and thought into the ways that targeted infrastructure and funding can encourage neglect and gentrification.
Immediately one sees parallels with Isaac Asimov’s 1953 classic The Caves of Steel, in which the detective hero was partnered with a robot. OWEN, however, is not at all like Asimov’s deferential R. Daneel Olivaw. He’s an AI with attitude, quick to point out that his human partner is just 'a bipedal ape with high manual dexterity,' whose brain is remarkable only because he grew it himself ... The clashes between OWEN and Henry, between Suitland and Metropolis, turn into a conflict of philosophies, in which the right side is never clear. AIs are good at helping, in unexpected and sometimes comic ways, but in the end a city has to be 'organized around human relationships.' The Municipalists is a new and irreverent take on both real-world politics and sci-fi history.
... a futuristic noir that isn’t quite a noir; a bumpy buddy cop story where the cops are a career bureaucrat and computer program, and most of the outsized emotions belong to the computer program; a love letter to cities that actually looks at the ways cities are destroyed by systemic inequality. It’s also deeply, constantly funny, and able to transform from a breezy page-turner into a serious exploration of class and trauma in a few well-turned sentences ... [Fried] proves that he can orchestrate a tight, complicated plot, without ever losing touch with his characters. And maybe best of all he keeps his usual sharp humor, but never at the expense of heart ... My one quibble here is that as a basically humorous novel that is also a noir riff, we get a lot of violence and action scenes, and Fried keeps an extremely light touch in those scenes...But that’s a very small note in the midst of an inventive and ultimately moving book.
A very weird debut novel that somehow manages to transport Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to a futuristic mega-city with a minimum of social satire but grand sociological observations about cities on the scale of Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City ... Fried can’t quite decide what he wants to play here—it’s too buddy-cop comic to be a hardcore thriller and too tongue-in-cheek about technology to be a serious social satire, but it’s still a fun read. The narrative is packed with irrelevant but fun-to-read set pieces including a gunfight in a museum, a couple of car chases, and a few deadlocks that are usually solved by OWEN’s deus-ex-machina abilities. Kirklin and Laury are mostly ciphers, and not very interesting ones at that, but the banter between the drab Henry and the supercilious OWEN is worth the price of admission ... A fun, relatively harmless comic thriller about the nature of cities, the threats of technology, and how to blow stuff up good.
... lackluster ... an urban thriller constrained by its narrow scope ... The relationship between Henry and OWEN is simple and repetitive, and with a small and male-dominated cast, the story is empty and quiet. The breadcrumb-trail plot and stiff protagonists undermine both the serious thriller concepts and the contrasting elements of the bizarre.
