Crescent City Rhapsody - Softcover

Kathleen Anne Goonan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857988884 ISBN 13: 9781857988888

Publisher: Millennium Paperbacks, 2000

Synopsis

A novel about death and grieving, about Afro-Caribbean culture and Voodoo and about the four waves of Nanotechnology development.

The world of CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY is a world that is being changed by the day by advances in nanotechnology; it is a world where radio has died, of vastly increased lifespans and where extra terrestrials will play a pivotal role in everyone’s life.

About this title

Review:

What would it feel like to live through a biological revolution? Many science fiction writers chronicling a vast technological shift lose sight of the people who would have to deal with it. Not so Kathleen Ann Goonan, whose Crescent City Rhapsody is the third of her Nanotech Cycle novels. Each of her characters is profoundly real, and the things that happen to them are as confusing, awe-inspiring, and terrifying as you might expect.

Goonan's story begins with the assassination of Marie Laveau, New Orleans cyber-entrepreneur and grand-niece of the famous voudoun queen. By prior arrangement, Marie is resurrected into a cloned body and prepares for revenge, but she awakens into a world beset by the Silence--periodic bursts of microchip-destroying radiation from space. Enter Dr. Zeb Aberly, a bipolar astrophysicist whose manic episodes help him understand that the Silence contains an alien message and perhaps the potential to change humanity's biology radically. Meanwhile, in Japan, a young biotechnician seals her fate when she helps steal the recipe for a Universal Assembler, a nanotech tool of fearsome power and destructive capability. The stage is set for a revolution, and Goonan delivers, with complex, interwoven story lines that resemble the rhythms and structure of a jazz composition.

Brightly colored lines were inching their way up buildings like plants in a fast-growing jungle. She moved briskly, but her heart was lifeless. She was looking at her past and seeing a future that she was not a part of.

People sat leaning against buildings here and there, which was the hardest to see. They were not begging. Their brains were changing.

They were adapting to the new city.

As cities become organisms, a new generation of profoundly different humans comes of age and hope dawns in Crescent City, and Goonan directs the show with artistic flair. Crescent City Rhapsody is confusing and delightful, a swoony harmony of words swirling around crisply melodic ideas. --Therese Littleton

About the Author:

* QUEEN CITY JAZZ was chosen as one of the eight best novels of the year by the New York Times

* ‘A startlingly original and energetic imagination’ Paul McAuley

Goonan is one of the rising stars of world SF Regarded as Goonan’s best novel yet Mass market edition many months in advance of US mass market

About this edition

• Publisher: Millennium Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1857988884
• ISBN 13: 9781857988888
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576