Type : epub |
Size : 513.04 KB |
English |
9780380803507 |
Descirption:
Amazon.com Review
What would it feel like to live through a biological revolution? Many science fiction writers chronicling a vast technological shift lose sight of the people who would have to deal with it. Not so Kathleen Ann Goonan, whose Crescent City Rhapsody is the third of her Nanotech Cycle novels. Each of her characters is profoundly real, and the things that happen to them are as confusing, awe-inspiring, and terrifying as you might expect.
Goonan's story begins with the assassination of Marie Laveau, New Orleans cyber-entrepreneur and grand-niece of the famous voudoun queen. By prior arrangement, Marie is resurrected into a cloned body and prepares for revenge, but she awakens into a world beset by the Silence--periodic bursts of microchip-destroying radiation from space. Enter Dr. Zeb Aberly, a bipolar astrophysicist whose manic episodes help him understand that the Silence contains an alien message and perhaps the potential to change humanity's biology radically. Meanwhile, in Japan, a young biotechnician seals her fate when she helps steal the recipe for a Universal Assembler, a nanotech tool of fearsome power and destructive capability. The stage is set for a revolution, and Goonan delivers, with complex, interwoven story lines that resemble the rhythms and structure of a jazz composition.
<blockquote>Brightly colored lines were inching their way up buildings like plants in a fast-growing jungle. She moved briskly, but her heart was lifeless. She was looking at her past and seeing a future that she was not a part of.
People sat leaning against buildings here and there, which was the hardest to see. They were not begging. Their brains were changing.
They were adapting to the new city.
</blockquote>As cities become organisms, a new generation of profoundly different humans comes of age and hope dawns in Crescent City, and Goonan directs the show with artistic flair. Crescent City Rhapsody is confusing and delightful, a swoony harmony of words swirling around crisply melodic ideas. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
In 2012, a mysterious alien signal from space strikes Earth, sending the Information Age into a horrifying tailspin. An intermittent Silence descends on the planet, disrupting all electronic devices and sparking a virus that nine months later produces mutated children with a heightened receptivity to electromagnetic forces. In New Orleans--home of the improvisatory jazz that has clearly inspired Goonan's extrapolation of current scientific trends--Marie Laveau, a mob chieftain and mulatto descendant of voudoun priestesses, is murdered by hit men, but then resurrected through the new science of nanotechnology. She launches a complex 20-year plan to save her city--and her world. Seceding from the Union, Marie's New Orleans becomes the jumping-off place for a new nation, Crescent City, a Caribbean island she creates. Marie eventually brings together Kita, a brilliant Japanese research scientist; Kita's lover, Hugo, who's Marie's faithful assistant; Zeb, the psychologically disturbed astrophysicist who first realized that an alien intelligence lay behind the Silence; Tamchu, a Tibetan refugee and terrorist; and Jason, one of the gifted mutant children. Like Marie, all have to risk extinction while they brave the apocalyptic storm unleashed by ecoterrorists and governments gone xenophobically mad. Their separate stories eventually intersect with Marie's attempt to birth a brave new world that someday will send humanity to the stars. Highly imaginative, peopled with intriguing characters and as intellectually demanding yet emotionally satisfying as Duke Ellington's best, Goonan's literary rhapsody continues her highly praised Nanotech Quartet (Queen City Jazz; Mississippi Blues; to be concluded with Light Music), which imaginatively explores the scientific perils and promises lying at our very doorstep. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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