This is beautiful writing! Since reading this book, I have thought this writer should be far better known - though I have come to understand that most of his work is in a different genre, and perhaps he is much better known there. To illustrate the style, this is the opening to chapter 10 of 'The Memory of Fire', a relatively random selection of text except for being an opening:

"And the form came out of velvet blackness, the figure so human in the way it folded toward what concerned it - toward the square in which people framed views they could control.
"But the square was flat, uniform, evenly lit, in a way a window was not.
"And the viewer was not Dolores but a man, fat and yellow of face, leaning toward a sequence of small screens hung overhead.
"In most of those screens, caught from a top-down point of view, a woman lay curled in sheets, short black curls stark against the pillow, mouth wound tight into the roller of her cheekbones. Stiff and silent and eyes fixed on the thin screens, as well as on an overhead camera lens that stared straight back at her, its red ON light aglow, completing the electronic circle.
"And so Soledad came awake, in the most twenty-first-century of ways, watching herself watch herself come awake.

'Memory of Fire' is science fiction, but is rather moody, highly literary, and is intended as a social commentary rather than an exposition of invention and scientific thought. I've never read anything else quite like this book, with its combination of style, treatment of plot line, future setting, and emphasis on the human spirit. It's not a book in which the plot has a clean line, pulling you ever forwards to resolution. Rather, it's a book that leads you in exploration of a culture, of a kind of life, of a place (some of the book takes place in South America). There is great sensitivity towards art and music in this book, and towards the lives of the people who make it.

Not that there is no plot! As at many times and places in the past, it is the artists, writers, and songmakers who carry forward resistance against the oppressive ruling class and government. Soledad MacRae with the rest of her community have been burned out of their South American enclave, and she has moved on to California. She finds herself with an unexpected power to make a real difference in the next clash. She is not a hot-blooded revolutionary, but a musician. Yet she knows what is right and she stands by it.

When I said the plot does not have a clean line, it is because there are many portions of the book that take place from Soledad's memories. There are two stories running in parallel for much of the book, the present and the past. That makes it a little hard to keep track of, and together with the use of language has a surreal effect. This book is not for everybody. It is definitely not for the hard SF aficionado who looks for a basic story with scientific gadgetry or aliens. Rather, it is for the reader who looks forward today to an immersion in language, a new experience of our world, an interesting and mysterious vision of our future, and especially one who appreciates the fundamental connection between human expression through the arts and the spirit's struggle for freedom and a better world. These readers will find in 'Memory of Fire' a uniquely pleasurable and highly memorable work of science fiction. ( )