Astonishing world-building, but at the expense of character and plot. I put it down a few times, but finished it because I wanted to know what happened to the city, not because of the characters.

This was McDonald's first novel and the problems are teething pains, not permanent flaws. His River of Gods has a rich world, real characters, and a twisted, involving plot.
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Recommended for fans only. ( )

I've not read anything from Ian McDonald before, but if this book is typical of his skill, Imma fix that right away.

Take Douglas Adams, William Gibson, and Ogden Nash, blend them together and strain them through Lewis Carroll, and the result might vaguely resemble Out On Blue Six. Excellent, poetic, and zany as hell. ( )

There are several problems with this story of a failed utopia 453 years after “the Break” that brought our world to a close, but the main one was that McDonald’s prose and conceptions are untethered to the historical, cultural, and geographical realities he must extrapolate from in his rightly acclaimed later novels set in various parts of the world like India, Brazil, and Kenya.

The plot follows the adventures of Courtney Hall, cartoonist, whose satiric work runs afoul of the Office of Socially Responsible Literature of the Compassionate Society. She eventually finds herself in an underground kingdom and on a quest to go beyond the wall outside the city. The parallel plot follows Kilimanjaro West, an amnesiac man who shows up in that city and falls in with Kansas Byrne and her guerilla theatre troupe of the Raging Apostles. Of course, he has a destiny.

As is his wont, McDonald samples a bunch of cultural artifacts and mixes them into his story. I detected the Statute of Liberty, Mutant Ninja Turtles, Exorcist the movie, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Alice in Wonderland, and the movie Brazil.

That’s fine. What’s not fine is McDonald impressionistic prose. Its constant alliteration , repetition, and rhyming wears thin. The symbolic portions of McDonald’s story rest uneasy beside bits of relatively hard and detailed technological and biological speculation.

McDonald saved my opinion of the novel a bit in its last chapter though the answer to the central question, should an engineered society have the happiness of its citizens as its highest end and what are the consequences of that, was common and offered no new perspectives or observations. Or much in the way of plot twists either especially if you’ve read later McDonald novels.

The parts of the novel I liked best were the cutaways to media snippets, government memos, and one-scene characters, even a play, which show life in the Compassionate Society with more vigor and interest than the main plots. Part of that effect is because, in these sections, McDonald drops the annoying style of the rest of the novel.

On the whole, though, I can really only recommend it to McDonald completists. ( )

It’s always a great feeling to find a cyberpunk dystopia that I’d somehow overlooked.
Reminded me – just slightly – of Melissa Scott’s ‘Dreamships’ and ‘Dreaming Metal,’ – mostly because the story focuses on transgressive artists in a future, cyber city with strict caste rules.

Here, Courtney Hall, yulp (it’s the ‘yuppie’ caste), a successful cartoonist, wants to do a bit more with her comic strip, and introduce some social satire into it. She’s given a warning – but when she resorts to using a hacker to get her forbidden cartoon out to her readers, she suddenly finds herself a wanted criminal, on the run through the underground tunnels that she never knew existed.

Meanwhile, the Raging Apostles, in the chaos of a police raid, have picked up a new member. The Raging Apostles are a street performance art group, illegally made up of members from different social castes, that plans ‘flash’ style events. Their new member is Kilimanjaro West – a seeming amnesiac who picked his ‘name’ off the side of a building.

I have to admit, I’ve had mixed reactions to McDonald’s work. I loved his ‘Dervish House,’ but didn’t like (at all) some of his more surreal, absurd material, such as ‘Desolation Road.’ I further have to admit that I requested this book thinking it was a new title – it’s actually a rerelease; first published in 1989. There are bits here that I could do without – I’m just not a fan of the gene-modified talking raccoons, for example. However, many of the more ‘fractured’ elements here do eventually get pulled in – some of them very effectively. I do still feel that McDonald has improved as a writer over the past 20-odd years, but there’s a brilliance and originality on display here that makes the book more than worthwhile.

And hey – I totally agree with his message that art, and a bit of anarchy, are necessary for a vibrant, free society.


Copy provided by Open Road Media, through NetGalley. Thanks! ( )