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Ian McDonald's "Necroville"
Oct. 4th, 2003 03:14 pmDo you have those books that you for some reason like far more than is reasonable? The ones that no matter there more objective qualities just happens to hit all the right spots for you and become the sort of text you'd kill to be able to write?
Ian McDonald's Necroville is one such book for me (and his debut Desolation Road is another). It's a good book by any criteria, I think. It's the really good sort of Science Fiction, the kind that posits some kind of technological change and then dives deep into the human changes that follow from it. In Necroville (called Terminal Café in the US, for some reason) the technological change is the maturation of nanotechnology and its use to resurrect the dead. It's set about 35 years after the resurrection process was perfected, and there are many millions of resurrected around. A pivotal court case, the Barantes Ruling, has established that the dead are dead and thus has no standing whatsoever under living law. This combined with the usual way of paying for resurrection, the signing of a contract to work off the cost for centuries (the resurrected are pretty much immortal, barring very serious violence) has made the walking dead into a slave caste. As the numbers of the dead grow, so does the dissatisfaction with their situation, and during the course of the novel things come to a head.
McDonald is, in my opinion, a master of prose. He has a way to evoke scenes with far fewer words than should be possible. Much of the content of Necroville is the stories of various people, giving us their views of the world of the future. Some of those passages are the sort of writing I'd personally give body parts to be able to write. Example, the story of one person whose contract was bought by a deep-space mining corporation:
Call me Quebec.
I awoke from my second rebirth as the sun rose over the twenty metre horizon of Tessier 813 stroke 18 stroke C, a cratered potato of carbonaceous chondrite eight hundred meters long by seventy broad following an elliptical orbit that took it within three hundred thousand kays of Martian orbit at perihelion and just short of Jupiter on the return lap. While I was still coughing the gluey placental fluids out of my lungs, the sun set. Twenty-three minutes, fifteen seconds from dawn to dusk, and it was the first day.
Or this, from a substory about dead who hunt each other to death for sport (dying isn't permanent for them):
With pheromones they hunted her, with those same subtle pathways of chemicals in the air that guide the Luna moth across tens of kilometres to sex and death. In the warren of service roads and backlot alleys they found her, frozen in their headlights, skin the exact colour of night and concrete, eyes twin pools of glitter. The eyes of the cornered animal. By the light of a thousand launch-lasers they trapped her between high walls of fire escapes with ten metres of razor-topped chain link fence at her back. Crouching like a cat, the girl screamed at them, and threw herself up the wire fence.
Blue steel, unsheathed, gleaming in the neon light. The hunters were fresh, the hunted run down to exhaustion. In two bounds Anansi and Duarte overtook her and neatly hamstrung her. She screamed the pain scream which is unlike any other cry of man. Blood streaked her beautiful hexagon-patterned skin but she clung, she clung to the mesh, howling at the unreachable stars wrapped in razor wire.
They broke her fingers to get her down. She could not stand so her mutilators held her. The girl did not struggle, did not make a sound. Her eyes were dull and unfocused with the terminal passivity of the animal that understands it has seconds to live, hypnotized by the play of light along the edge of Miclantecutli's blade.
Miclantecutli gently lifted the girl's chin, opened her mouth. She kissed her. The tip of her tongue traced the girl's lips.
"I love you," Miclantecutli whispered.
