The future is a strange and savage place in Clive Warner's gonzo futuristic novel, Rebody. Hugh Toffle, a bitter and somewhat wimpy English college professor at a San Antonio college in 2003, has a disastrous affair with a not so bright but extremely hot student, is murdered by her father and wakes up 300 years in the future in a different world and alien body. While on a date with his student, Hugh wins a cryogenic option on his head, which proves a blessing and curse. Three hundred years in the future, the corporation that manages his head decides to unfreeze him and start reclaiming its assets.

In the future, Hugh discovers, every trace of humanity has vanished, and robots rule the world— or at least, the city of San Antonio. With humans gone, other “uplifted” species roam free, including various apes who act as the police force mediating the uneasy truce between sentient cats and dogs, while rats manage the taxis that transport these beings around the city. Meanwhile, he must serve as an indentured servant to robot owners, his human head connected to a machine somewhat like a vacuum cleaner. Waking in such a state might send the most balanced of us into a state of shock, or perhaps gibbering insanity, but Hugh manages to persevere. Amid fantasies of his dalliance 300 years in the past, he struggles to think about the future. If he earns enough credits perhaps he might be able to buy enough parts of a body to re-attach his head and become human again.

When circumstances throws a wrench in his plans, he escapes his servitude and ends up amid the apes, who transplant his head onto the body of an orangutan. Things go from bad to worse, as he lands in the middle of a canine/feline war. While trying to survive this and maybe find some order in his chaos he falls back into the hands of the robots, who subject him to further changes. Although little of his humanity appears to remain, Hugh assembles the uplifted animals into a last-ditch battle against the robots, where the fate of all beings hangs in the balance.

While the concept and plot certainly show promise, the style of the novel lacks polish, and the pacing at times seems unfocused. For a professor of English literature, Hugh's narration comes across as crude, as if the author hasn't fully absorbed his protagonist's character. Typos appear at odd times, such as in the names of San Antonio highways (as a resident of the city I noticed these, though casual readers might miss them), and in the year of Hugh's death. The book has a definite first-novel feel to it. The ideas alone can't carry the novel, but if Warner manages to smoothen out his dialog and narrative style, his subsequent books may bear watching.