Crache [Mass Market Paperback]

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I was looking forward to this, after enjoying Budz's strong debut novel, CLADE:
"Decent hard-SF that makes a serious attempt to extrapolate the medium-term future is never in oversupply... so I was very pleased to discover CLADE." -- google for my review at infinityplus.co.uk

CRACHE is set in the same well-thought-out universe as CLADE, and there's some good stuff here, including some neat asteroid habitats. But I keep stalling out, currently (and perhaps permanently) at p. 140 (of 368).

Especially since I just read Gerald Jonas's negative NY Times review (google) :
"Unfortunately, any suspense generated by the struggle to save the solar system from a new kind of plague soon dissipates amid the torrents of verbiage necessary to explain what is happening."

Plus, there's a Really Dumb subplot: a Hispanic folksinger named L. Mariachi(!) can sing the deadly bioelectronic virus into submission....

Sigh. Hopefully, next time Budz will concentrate on the storytelling, and KISS [1]. In the meanwhile, if you're a hard-SF fan who hasn't tried his CLADE, you should. And then wait for his #3 book.
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[1] Keep it simple, stupid!

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman

The structure on the asteroid Mymercia starts to collapse while a rogue pherion causes a virus that is making people ill. Of the workforce only Fola Hanani survives, but she is quarantined so that she can be tested to make sure she is not a carrier. The people who run the government use pherions to control what the masses feel and think so this unauthorized use worries them especially when another one is released into the atmosphere.

Fola contacts L. Mariachi of earth, a migrant worker who can stop the virus from spreading. She communicates with him through his guitar, trying to get him to sing a particular song that will render the virus harmless. Before L. Mariachi can sing, Bean agents arrest him as they believe he is part of a conspiracy to release the pherion. He must escape if he is to stop the virus and restore the AIs, who are vulnerable to the disease, to their former state.

In this future earth, people live under the rule of a repressed regime run by big business and government who keep the masses docile through drugs in a closed atmosphere. The populace is confined to specific geophysical regions and not able to leave their specific Clade zone due to varying pherions. Off planet Fola and on planet L. Mariachi are the exceptions as they illegally are able to move about more freely as the pherions do not seem to harm them. CRACHE, the sequel to the equally intriguing CLADE, is a fascinating look at Orwellian society.

Harriet Klausner

Crache continues the fresh vision of the BioPunk future pioneered in its predecessor Clade, but beyond inspiring the naming of a new sub-genre in SF, both novels are also full blown revivals of the New Wave of the 60s and 70s. Comparisons to other authors within or outside of SF from Gibson and Orwell to Steinbeck show that Budz not only innovates within the genre of SF, but also signal that Budz seeks to emancipate SF from its self-imposed ghettoization and engage the larger world. This approach was the hallmark of New Wave writers like Delany, LeGuin or Zelazny and has been largely absent from the field for almost a quarter century. In fact, Budz work is most similar to that of Samuel Delany, in that he carefully adheres to the essential traits of the form (in this case hard SF) whlle reforming or innovating over a broad range of story elements. Since this is a feature of Budz's work that I haven't seen adequately covered in other reviews, I'll look at Crache as a New Wave novel.

One of the key features of both Crache and Clade is that the reader is immersed in the future like a castaway rather than the more touristy experience of most contemporary SF. This immediacy of experience starts with the BioPunk trope, a technology that flows from our intimate experience and knowledge of our own bodies and immune systems (like allergies for example).

Probably the first thing a reader notices is the profusion of jargon and jingle-like punning, a lot of the puns are obvious, like `tattunes' for programmable tattoos which can play music, while the technical language is rarely defined and has to be picked up largely from context. The standard SF "Tour Guide/Guidebook" provided for the benefit of early 21st century readers is almost totally absent. This is one way that Budz immerses his reader in the experience of living in the future he envisions. The language is intended to be evocative not definitive, experts in Crache use their language like experts, people use the commonplace words about their everyday life casually. Futuristic terms of our time are twisted around like `IA' for what we would call an `AI' to show that we're not in a comfortable, familiar future. Another aspect of this immediacy of experience shows up in several scenes when a character's emotionally intense or disturbing experiences and memories are described in unblinking detail, they aren't just glossed over or alluded to. There's a great example of this, where the scientist Rexx remembers a horrifying trip to a bordello with his father, the scene would be disconcerting even without the bizarre futuristic elements. Characters are also defined in social/psychological/historical dimensions, this makes them more sympatheitic or relatable and potentially closer to the reader. By building the characters in these dimensions there is an additonal benefit, Budz brings his world to life in a way that is almost impossible for much current SF which is largely populated with Ahabs, orphans and tourists.

Next, the treatment of plot and character in Crache is the result of a radical streamlining of the contemporary SF schema. So for people habituated to this format, Crache might feel a little `light' in its handling of plot and character. Now to see what's going on in Crache, I'll have to describe my impression of a typical SF novel's elements. This schema, which covers most of the recent field, is built-up from three largely independent parts. There is an event driven plot, character development beyond what the plot would require, and world building. As the form is mostly practised now, readers follow the broken spoor of the plot through vast tracts of encyclopedia like exposition (or at best a Tour Guide's spiel) and they also have to hack through much superfluous/redundant and sometimes-counterproductive elaboration of characters. In some sub-genres of SF, the elements that are normally subordinate to the story telling have experienced a fetishistic growth to ludicrous proportions similar to what we've seen with monster trucks, where a few parts have grown beyond any reasonable sense of beauty or function. The innovations in Crache have to do with the function, structure and relation of the elements. Crache's plot is a hybrid of an event driven and a character motivated plot, these have been very rare since the subsidence of the first New Wave (examples from the 70s would include `Triton' or `The Dispossessed'). By integrating character elements in the plot, it's possible to elaborate character as the form demands, but also to move the plot and as suggested above, facilitate the world building. This integration also allows Budz to pare down the event driven share of the plot. One of the key hinges of the plot is that a burnt out, maimed guitar player who has a mental block against playing the guitar has to play it again. It's not necessary to create a series of events and obstacles that keep him from playing the guitar; he can walk around with it until his internal struggle is resolved. Most SF I've seen over the last 25 years or so would do both, a condition referred to as `overdetermination' in other literature, for instance, a case where a character both wants to and is compelled to act in certain way. All this restructuring of the standard schema probably causes some people to perceive holes in Crache as a work of SF, but it's kind of like comparing the Eiffel Tower to the The Great Pyramid, the holes are a result of architectural efficiency, not a deficiency.

In closing, I'd suggest that Crache would have made a splash even at the height of the New Wave, since Budz has managed to define a new sub-genre/trope (Biopunk), apply New Wave ideals to hard SF (another example doesn't immediately come to mind) and transfuse new blood into the accepted form . I hope that this is a harbinger of a new New Wave.

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