Film noire murder mystery meets off-the-wall sci-fi meets strange drug trip. The technology is all quite odd: animal species geneticaly enhanced to near human sentience, news told with music, babyheads (humans with the bodies of infants but the minds of full-grown adults) - it all seems silly to the point of being hard to take as anything but a joke, but strangely I found that suspension of disbelief was not too difficult. The take on drug use (widespread designer chemicals, licensed and encouraged by the authorities as a way to control the populace) is both fun (the main character stops to snort a line every five pages) and strangely plausible. I would call this book humorous but not farcical.