NYPD 2025: A Reappraisal

NYPD 2025, by Hal Stryker

May, 1985  Pinnacle Books

Back in April 2014 I first read and reviewed NYPD 2025, and at the time I declared that it was “either a work of warped genius or a bunch of fascist drivel.” Well, now that it is 2025, I thought I’d take another look and find out which one it was. 

I first thought of reading this book again back in 2021, back during the Covid pandemic, when wearing masks in public was a necessity – a sign, it occurred to me at the time, of this novel’s prescience. But then I decided to wait until the actual 2025 to read the novel again, just for the sake of completeness…and then 2025 came and went and I only just remembered to read the book again like a few days ago…so fittingly enough, this will be the last post of 2025. 

First of all, the main thing I want to state is that I enjoyed NYPD 2025 even more this time than I did when I first read it; this time I friggin’ loved it, and truly wished there had been a followup volume or series. For as I mentioned last time, this was clearly intended as the start of a series – author “Hal Stryker” (aka prolific genre writer George Henry Smith) even drops clues in the text of what the next volume(s) would entail, like for example a mention that the titular NYPD would go up against drug kingpins, or that there might be a traitor in their midst. 

I still greatly admire how George H. Smith so carefully treads the line between parody and seriousness; while there is a lot of intentional comedy in the narrative, the events are real as death to the characters themselves…which is just how I like my pulp. As I mentioned last time, there is some wildly exaggerated violence in the novel, complete with detailed descriptions of bodies being torn apart, chopped up, and in general mutilated – excessive carnage the equal of Phoenix. (Though no sex, which is plumb curious given Smith's background in sleaze paperbacks.) 

And, just as with that David Alexander series, the author’s tongue is clearly in cheek; for example, there’s a part where hero Captain Zack Ward is looking at a row of “smudge masks,” ie the rubbery full-face masks people must wear in this 2025 due to pollution (aka “smudge”), and we’re told that the masks are “replicas of great lovers of the past – Clark Gable, George Burns, men like that.” In 1985 the “George Burns” reference would’ve been seen as an obvious joke; today, in the actual 2025, many younger readers might not even know of that once-famous (and famously old) comedian. 

The same holds true of the fictional 2025 itself; Smith goes for wild exagerration, giving us a United States where all creativity is legal, even if it entails real murder, where “there are no immigrants” due to erased borders, where cops are criminals, and where war is shunned but the US is constantly in a state of war…not realizing how close he was to predicting the actual 2025. Whereas NYPD 2025 might have seemed absurd in 1985, likely selling in low numbers because readers thought it was too far-fetched, today there is a lot about the book that rings true. 

True, there is much that has not aged well: there’s no space exploration on the scale Smith mentions – we have minor tidbits of space voyages to Mars and beyond, and also cloning is to such an extent that one of the NYPD is a four-armed, two-headed “monster.” And snuff films are not mainstream entertainment as they are here in the novel: “solidios,” which are movies where viewers can have sex with actresses (or actors), and where the actresses can be killed – for real – in the viewing comfort of a person’s living room. And yet, this blurring of fantasy and reality is somewhat similar to our modern TikTok culture, if not with the snuff and the gore, but at least in how social media bleeds into the real world…if you don’t believe me, spend about five minutes with a kid and tell me how quickly you get sick of hearing them say “6-7.” 

Speaking of endless war, our hero Zack is a career soldier, having spent the past twenty-some years out of the country fighting wars. Lately he’s been in Mexico, helping that country “fight for its freedom,” in particular fighting the USSR (which still exists in this 2025). When I posted my original review of NYPD 2025 in 2014, a commenter named Halojones-fan mentioned that “It’s interesting how many of these stories assumed that the next big US military deployment was going to be in Central and South America.” Well, we see how that has changed in the past year.  Again, Smith’s prescience about the actual 2025 is sometimes uncanny. 

But then, his 2025 isn’t so much the one we got, but the one we could have gotten. This is demonstrated most clearly in the never-seen character that is President Buchanan, aka “The Mahatma,” a “Flower Child” who has erased all borders, declared there are “no immigrants,” and has rewritten the Constitution as he sees fit. Indeed, Zack at one point notes all the “brown people” on the streets, and comments “the Melting Pot seems to be overflowing.”  Portia informs Zack that “America is said to be the largest of the Third World countries, with immigrants making up at least half the population and illegals a third. But then the Mahatma ruled there were no illegals.” That’s right, folks; George H. Smith predicted the Great Replacement Theory, or whatever it's called.

It’s also interesting that Smith even predicts the tiresome “politics from the bench” of the real 2025, where circuit court judges think they can coutnermand the duly elected President of the United States with the bang of a gavel. But in NYPD 2025, it’s the good guys who push back against federal policy; Judge Portia van Wyck, the thigh-length robe-wearing hotstuff blonde who pulls Zack out of a fatal solidio shoot (and immediately thereafter tells him she’s putting him on trial for his life), takes it upon herself to declare “The Mahatma’s” various rulings unconstitutional; a prefigure of Extreme Federalism (from a New York City judge, no less!).  

President Buchanan certainly would have appeared in a future volume; in this one, the only one, it’s his daughter, Indira, who appears; she’s been abducted, and Portia suspects she’s about to become the unwitting star of a snuff solidio. But Buchanan is always on the periphery, always being mentioned; I got a big chuckle out of the off-hand comment that one of Zack’s (many) opponents is “probably one of the many immigrants who made up nearly a third of the President’s Green Party, which had elected him President-For-Life.” One wonders if any of them embezzled billions of dollars in childcare fraud or ate wildlife in the park... 

I went over the plot in my original review, so won’t go into detail this time. I did have the same issues as my first reading, though; NYPD 2025 starts off strong, if a little derailed by scenes that go on too long, but slightly loses its footing in the final quarter, when Smith throttles back on the gory action and instead turns in a sci-fi mystery sort of thing, with Zack trying to figure out who has kidnapped Indira Buchanan…and what the true identity of solidio star “The Slasher” might be. This latter element brought to mind nothing less than The Spider, with its similar red herrings and “you’d never guess it was this minor character who is really the main villain,” and given that Smith was born in the 1920s I’m going to go ahead and assume he was a young reader of the pulps. 

But then, even some of these too-long sequences struck more of a chord in my second reading of NYPD 2025. For example, the over-long bit early on where Zack has to climb across the face of a building, fifty floors up, to try to escape some goons who are closing in. Back when I first read the book, I surely skimmed this sequence. This time, however, I couldn’t help but notice the eerie foreshadowing of September 11, 2001, when people trapped in the Twin Towers attempted this very thing, to escape the burning buildings, many of them falling to their death (the most horrific images of a horrific day – and, curiously, something that has been whitewashed in 9/11 retrospectives). In fact I’m surprised I didn’t notice this when I first read the novel several years ago…at the time I also didn’t notice the curious fact that, despite many New York landmarks being referenced in NYPD 2025, the Twin Towers are never mentioned. 

I also wish more time was spent with the team Zack would lead in the future volumes that were never written; again given the book a pulp vibe, Zack is to become “Captain Death,” and wears a skull mask when in this guise. Or at least he’s supposed to; he never actually wears the damn thing in the book! Smith certainly would have brought the NYPD cops to life in future books; I hate to say it, but there’s even more unwitting presience here, as the NYPD must work undercover, operating out of a secret headquarters – because the police are so hated in this 2025. Talk about “defund the police!” 

In fact, there’s even more prescience, as the NYPD is defunded at the end of the novel, or at least we’re told it soon will be, thanks to an angry President Buchanan. I’d forgotten the end-of-the-novel gimmick that Foxxy van Pelt, twenty-two-year-old bimbo star of solidios, announces that she’s not only going to join the NYPD but also fund them with her billions of dollars. I wonder if Smith would have kept her in the books; Foxxy is not a memorable character, just the cliché of a dimwitted, big-boobed valley girl (in other words, a very ‘80s cliché), but yet at the same time she brings to mind the vapidity of the average social media-obsessed Millennial of today, so props to William Henry Smith for once again predicting the actual 2025. And I still think it’s curious that Smith put a “van” in the name of both female characters – Judge Portia van Wyckk and Foxxy van Pelt – and I wonder if this was a mistake or if he was going for some sort of trendy “future” naming convention. 

Speaking of the ‘80s, the gory and sex-filled snuff solidios are clearly a reference to the slasher flicks that were popular when Smith was writing the book; the villainous Slasher could come out of any of those movies, save for the fact that Smith really drops the ball with his character design (basically he’s a Muslim terrorist in purple tights who wields two swords). But the solidios are slasher flicks to an exaggerated degree; in technology that is never adequately described, the solidio actors actually appear in the living rooms with viewers…and you can have sex with them, if you want. This raises many questions, questions that Smith does not answer. Unfortunately, Zack is so disgusted by the charade that he pushes away the solidio actress who offers herself to him as part of the scripted movie. 

It was hard to buy the “real” killing of the snuff solidios, though; what I gathered was that the actors were killed on a studio somewhere but the death and ensuing gore would splatter the living rooms of the viewers in some sort of virtual reality bit (though to be sure, “virtual reality” is not a term Smith uses). This still begs the question of how viewers could have sex with the actors and actresses, but I guess I should stop thinking of that. 

I also got a chuckle out of how President Buchanan has declared all art to be a protected right, with no such thing as censorship, thus even snuff films are legal…Smith getting wild and absurd with his predictions of the future, of course, but again there’s a slight bit of the real 2025 here, at least in regards to the wonderful pushback our current administration is giving to the censorship efforts of hypocritical foreign tyrants. Sure, it’s not “actors getting gutted for real on screen,” but we’ll take it! And I also appreciated how Smith used Zack as a fish out of water, alternately shocked and disgusted by what the America of 2025 has become. 

Speaking of Zack, I realized this time we have no idea how old the guy is. Or at least if we are told, I didn’t catch it. Last time I assumed he was young, but this time I noticed that we are only told that Zack has been out of the country for the better part of the past twenty years, having gone off as “a fresh-faced recruit” to fight wars around the globe. This means that Zack would be in his late 30s or early 40s, which puts him more in-line with the average men’s adventure protagonist. And this is what he truly is, always rushing off to a fight and gorily dispatching his opponents; Smith makes it clear that there would be an ongoing bantering between Zack and Portia in future books, given the hotbodied blonde judge’s distaste for Zack’s “kill first” mentality, yet of course she is clearly attracted to him. In other words, Zack is a “toxic male,” a phrase Smith surely would have used if it had occurred to him. There’s no doubt there would be the ongoing gimmick that Zack and Portia might become an item in future installments. 

Overall, I think George Henry Smith got a lot of things right in NYPD 2025, and sometimes even inadvertently; for example, people fly “floaters” instead of driving cars, but there’s still a prediction of the electric cars of today when a character at one point says, “And where do you propose to find gasoline in this day and age?” Smith also did a good job of knowing what people would forget about in forty years; we’re told, for example, that President Buchanan is “a Flower Child in an era that has forgotten what a Flower Child is.” 

And need I elaborate on Portia’s off-hand comment that “although there are strict laws in this country, they apply only to police and security forces, not to criminals?” Let’s think back to the “Summer of Love,” shall we?  And speaking of social commentary, Sally Mondo, the rock-singing solidio newscaster with her perfect body that is covered in tattoos, almost seems like some wild take on a social media influencer – hell, there probably are TikTok influencers out there right now who are just like her.

So yeah, I’d say NYPD 2025 really is a “work of warped genius” – time has only proved that Smith was altogether too reserved in his predictions of an absurd future. And yes, it’s a damn shame we didn’t get more books in the series.