Author: Linda Nagata
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: TBD
This is volume one in the loosely-connected Nanotech Succession quadrilogy. I've read Deception Well and Vast, but not Tech Heaven, so I'm pleased to be able to review the first of this group for the blog. Even though this is not a new novel (indeed, it was the first Nagata ever published!), it is new to me, and hopefully I'll enjoy this as I have the other two. It begins in Asia (and the choice of typeface imbues the novel a rather Japanese aura) where a few members of a local 'tribe', trying to eke out an existence in an abandoned mill by a river, discover a dead body in the water. Jensen Van Ness has apparently been murdered and robbed, but his body still bears clothes which might be traded in the city for food. As two of the tribe, the petite, retiring Phousita and domineering and cruel Arif haul the body to shore, something sharp slides out of his chest and stabs Phousita, the diminutive woman who looks like a child, infecting her with the Bohr Maker, an illegal and self-directing genetic enhancer.
I confess I found that while it was an acceptable read, and engrossing in parts, I did not find myself enjoying this novel as much as I had the other two, and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the Bohr of the title was the fictional Leander Bohr, not Neils Bohr, who was neither an engineer nor a biologist, which is probably fueling my lack of complete enthusiasm! Neils Bohr was a giant in the wild early days of particle physics. I read a charming, sad, and amusing account of this in Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segrè, which contained the picture I reproduce below, which I find really extraordinary. The sheer magnitude of brainpower concentrated in this one instant in time in this photograph is as humbling as it is inspiring. The ones most interesting to me are identified by the red numbers in the list below.
- Paul Ehrenfest
- Erwin Schrödinger
- Wolfgang Pauli
- Werner Heisenberg
- Paul Dirac
- Arthur Compton
- Louis de Broglie
- Max Born
- Neils Bohr
- Max Planck
- Marie Curie
- H.A. Lorentz
- A. Einstein
Meanwhile, somewhere slightly off-planet, the Chief of Police, Kristin, cruelly abuses a dead man, whose brain patterns have been preserved by a cutting-edge scientist before laws were enacted which severely circumscribed such experimentation. The dead man, Nikko Jiang-Tibayan, is now dying again - the license for his existence is about to expire. This is an era which has declared that thou shalt not mess with the human genome, and he represents the last such experiment - a human consciousness in a ceramic body. Kristin, living in luxury at the top of one of many Earth-space elevators uses his body for her own perverse and abusive sexual pleasure (yes, this made no sense to me either!).
Nikko puts up with this in the desperate hope that she will relent and help him to continue his existence. She cruelly taunts him over his impending doom, refusing to grant him a reprieve even as she pleasures herself with his ersatz body and causes him pain by biting his kisheer - an augmentation to the body which permits him to survive in a vacuum by recycling CO² in his blood. She has affixed above her bed a collage made from the confiscated body parts of the human experiments she has personally terminated and mentions that she would like to see his skull up there eventually.
Nikko unfortunately involved his brother, Sandor Jiang-Tibayan in his theft of the Bohr maker and now Kristin is hunting Sandor, too, and she doesn't care if his involvement came about in Sandor's ignorance or not. But Phousita's transformation, under the refurbishing power of the Bohr maker is startling. She becomes a Messiah to her people and so well-known that both she and Arif must go on the run to escape Kristin - a run which takes them into the cold of space and the the bizarre artificial world at the top of the elevator - the one created by Fox Jiang-Tibayan, Nikko and Sandor's dad.
That's all I'm going to reveal about this novel. I am rating this worthy although I have to say I was not as impressed as I had been with the other two. But Nagata can write inventively; she had surrogates before Surrogates had surrogates, and she has some really interesting sci-fi scenarios on display.
