Queen City Jazz - Softcover

Goonan, Kathleen Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006483178 ISBN 13: 9780006483175

Publisher: Voyager, 1998

Synopsis

Quality, cutting-edge science fiction ablaze with new technologies and a vision of their impact on us. Queen City Jazz delivers a powerful, moving story and a state-of-the-art answer to the traditional science-fiction question ‘what is reality’?

Kathleen Ann Goonan’s debut book is a big, rich, hard sf novel of nanotechnology comparable to Greg Bear’s classic Blood Music. The heroine’s quest to save her friend’s life in the Enlivened City (Cincinatti) is transformed by the City itself into a fabulous story of discovery and revelation.

About this title

Review:

Kathleen Ann Goonan's first novel is an impressive sci-fi debut, combining the themes of post-holocaust America and rampant nanotechnology. This imagined technology of molecule-sized machines and computers has excited many science fiction writers with its possibilities for total control of matter, atom by atom--including human flesh and DNA. In Goonan's future America, cities brought to life with nanotechnology or "nan" have mutated in strange, threatening ways. Rural areas, meanwhile, were devastated by nan-based plagues. Our heroine Verity, raised by a rustic Shaker community that rejects most technology, feels a mysterious compulsion towards learning machines and the closest transformed city. This is Cincinnati, whose skyscrapers have blossomed into exotic nan flowers between which huge artificial bees carry pollinating information. Verity's adventures there are complex, flickering between real-life action, virtual reality and chemically induced all-senses hallucinations. Eventually--the old, old sci-fi story--Verity realises that she herself was created to redeem the malfunctioning city. Its inhabitants are trapped in pleasant but futile cycles of dreams and play-acting (living the roles of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and others): Verity must somehow free them. Well written and colourfully imagined, the story requires close attention to thread its maze of realities and unrealities. --David Langford

Review:

‘An unforgettable vision of America tranfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology. Greg Bear’s Blood Music is perhaps the only other novel to have dealt so unflinchingly with the paradigm-shattering possibilities of a functioning nanotech. If a science fiction writer’s job is to conceive the inconceivable, Goonan has arrived with an immaculate version of the traditional tool kit – and the nerve to use it hard’
William Gibson

‘A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech... For Ms Goonan, the freedom to remake the world in one’s own image poses a terrible temptation [but] she grounds her apocalyptic vision in a few short, detailed scenes that reveal how personal failings can become writ large in the great events of history’
New York Times

‘Spectacular... Goonan moves far beyond Bear’s horror-story scenario and shows that the possibilities of this theme are at least as powerful as those of SF’s more popular current preoccupation, virtual reality. A first novel of startling virtuosity and complexity’
Locus

‘Goonan’s achievement in this book is impressive... It is certain that no reader will ever regret accompanying Verity on her fascinating journey of self-discovery, nor forget it’
SF Eye

About this edition

• Publisher: Voyager
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0006483178
• ISBN 13: 9780006483175
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 465