If you are a person of towering intellect who seeks books that challenge, cause you to analyse your position in society, make you wrestle with your conscience and grind you through the mill of the full range of human emotions, then go and buy something else. If you, like me, are content with being engaged and thought-provoked on a more basic level then this should prove to be an entertaining read. Marshall Smith's Spares is a bleak and fairly crude dissection of modern culture: A runaway train of scientific advancement; huge buisness corporations with questionable morals and widespread social decay. Jack Randall is the pathetic, self-centred, though not entirely malicious anti-hero from the dismall lower reaches of this futuristic cityscape. With Randall as a corrupt ex-cop and former 'Bright Eyes' (a G.I.-come-Marine) Marshall Smith allows himself scope to introduce narcotics by the bucket-load and 'The Gap', a metaphor for Vietnam that is played out in a parallel dimension. While the book does contain one or two cliched tools of the sci-fi writer's trade, Marshall Smith employs a lightly comic touch that one should consider when questioning the depth and gravity of the story. While Spares lacks the breathtaking foresight of Huxley's 'A Brave New World' it remains a pleasing and essentially entertaining read.