Planesrunner [Hardcover]

I'm a pretty big fan of Ian McDonald, so when I learned that a brand new novel by the author was on the way, I got suitably excited. Then, when I found out that the new novel would be the start of a series, and that this series would deal with alternate dimensions and multiverse-type ideas (very different from his last few books), I got really excited. And then, when I discovered that the series would be a young adult series -- well, it took me a while to come down from that one.

So, here it is: Planesrunner, book one in Ian McDonald's brand new EVERNESS series, which -- based on this first novel -- I hope will be a very long series of YA science fiction novels. Boy, this book was fun.

One night in London, fourteen-year-old Everett Singh is witness to his father's kidnapping. The man disappears without a trace, and the authorities seem strangely unmotivated to pursue the investigation. Everett's father, who is a theoretical physicist, left him the Infundibulum, a mysterious app which turns out to be the map of an infinite number of parallel universes. Armed with nothing but the Infundibulum and his wits, Everett sets out on a multi-dimensional quest to find his father....

Everett Singh is a wonderful main character who balances the delicate line between normal and awesome. On the one hand, he's a fairly average, somewhat geeky British teenager. He's the goalkeeper for his school's soccer team. He likes Tottenham Hotspur. His parents are divorced, and he's clearly still trying to cope with the break-up of his family. On the other hand, his dad is a genius physicist specializing in quantum theory, and it so happens that Everett has inherited his dad's massive intellect -- as well as his love of cooking. (Some of their get-togethers are soccer games, others are science lectures, and all of them are followed by spectacular cook-outs themed around one country's cuisine. Like some of Steven Brust's VLAD TALTOS books, this novel frequently made me really hungry.) Everett is occasionally a bit too perfect to be believable, but reading about his exploits is definitely never boring, and Ian McDonald throws in enough human touches to make Everett believable.

Ian McDonald tones down his usual, elegant prose to a more simple, functional style in Planesrunner, maybe because this is a YA novel. Sometimes the prose is downright chatty and occasionally funny, like when Everett thinks that a female constable looks "like a male comedian playing a female police officer." Still, McDonald occasionally can't help himself and throws in gorgeous lines like "She moved like a golden silk scarf falling through water" or "His signature looked like a spider car crash." Combine this with the fast, fun dialogues that fill this novel and you have a book that practically reads itself.

Planesrunner is one of those novels that grabs hold of you from the very beginning and then just never lets go until the very end. The kidnapping happens on page 2, and it's full speed ahead from that point on, with Everett trying to discover who is responsible, how the Infundibulum works, and ultimately how to retrieve his father. This will take him through a Heisenberg Gate to an alternate dimension, landing in a steampunk-like London that's, pardon my fanboy, so insanely cool that it just about blows any other steampunk London clean out of the water. It comes complete with its own supremely entertaining vernacular, the wildest clothing style ever, and the most realistic airships I've ever read. (I could read an entire Aubrey-Maturin series of books about Anastasia Sixsmyth and her Merry Men.) And that's not even mentioning the fact that Planesrunner really only covers one world -- two if you count our own -- out of the Plenitude of Ten Known Worlds. Can we have ten books, please?

One of the best aspects of this novel is its cast of side characters. As I mentioned above, Everett occasionally got on my nerves a bit with his supreme intellect and his perfect Indian appetizers, but like a movie in which the lead actor is outplayed by the supporting cast, this novel is sometimes completely taken over by the people surrounding Everett. Especially Sen Sixsmyth, the wild, bratty, mysterious navigator of the Everness is an attention grabber, but the rest of the crew of the airship is equally entertaining. Even back on our Earth, Everett's mother is hilarious, first embarrassed at being caught in her tracksuit over breakfast by the detectives who are investigating her husband's disappearance, then indignantly declaring that "this is a hi-fibre household" when one of the cops tries to mooch some toast and finds there's only wholegrain available. These perfect little slice-of-life scenes juxtapose perfectly with the vivid, weird multiverse material and really highlight how solid even the minor characters are. My only complaint would be that the villains are a bit too over-the-top villainy, but really, in a novel that features a teenager crossing dimensions to rescue his kidnapped quantum physicist dad, you'd expect the contrast to be turned up a bit.

To top it all off, if this YA novel finds its way into the hands of the adults who are impatiently hovering in the periphery of its target audience, they'll discover several fun little side-jokes and references that may not make sense (yet) to people born in the last few decades, and that's not even mentioning some of the subtleties and recurring themes that fans of the author will recognize. This is a YA novel that definitely has a lot to offer to not-so-YA readers.

It's rare when a book is more or less exactly what you hoped it would be, but Planesrunner is just that. I had a blast with this novel, and I can't wait for the next book in the EVERNESS series. As Sen Sixsmyth would say, this book was utterly bonaroo.

Ian McDonald, the many times award-nominated author of The Dervish House and Brasyl, has always been on my bucket list. I love near-future Science Fiction. I love speculative works set in cultures foreign to me. I love slim stand-alone novels. McDonald hits on all of these fronts and every time he releases a novel it seems to do a fair round of the awards circuit. Yet, I'd never read any of his work. Part of my hesitancy, I think, was due to McDonald's reputation for writing labyrinthine, intertwining plots featuring dense prose and asking the reader to work for the story. It takes dedication to read fiction in that manner and, well, I'm often lazy. But when McDonald announced that his next novel, Planesrunner, the first volume in the Everness series, would be a world-hopping Young Adult (YA) novel set in an alternate London full of airships and sky pirates, I knew I finally had an opportunity to give his work a fair shake. And I'm bloody glad I did.

The prose in Planesrunner was simpler than I expected, likely due to the YA audience, but also doesn't speak down to its younger readers, weaving some wonderful imagery and thoughtful themes through the narrative. Like all literature, the best YA respects its readers and Planesrunner embraces that mentality.

It's clear that McDonald put a lot of effort into what really makes an appealing novel for younger readers, and in the process peels back the layers to examine what makes YA so much more enjoyable than a lot of `adult' fiction. Most interesting is the idea that younger readers have an improved mental agility that allows them to jump around the story, absorbing different ideas, concepts and plot strings without needing the constant infodumps and explanations that bog down so much of adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. When a reader trusts the author, as McDonald suggests that younger readers are more capable of doing as compared to older readers, the author is freed up to concentrate on a fun, exciting story that's able to develop its themes and characters rather than hand-holding its reader through a new world. Often you're left just having to accept that things fall easily into place for Everett, the titular protagonist, but the reward is McDonald being free to throw him into some sticky situations without the reader losing their sense of reality.

McDonald's prose is very stream-of-consciousness, which also suggests an intentional connection to his thoughts above, but never becomes turgid or difficult to read, in fact, the novel blazes by and its difficult not to feel like you're alongside Everett for the entire ride:

"The car was black. Black body shell, black wheels, black bumpers, black windows. The rain sat on its shiny skin like drops of black oil. A black car on a black night. Everett Singh zipped his jacket up to his chin and flipped up his hood against the cold wind and watched the black car crawl behind his dad, pedalling his bicycle up the Mall. It was a bad bike night. Tree branches lashed and beat. Wind is the cyclist's enemy. (p. 1)"

The setup is somewhat reminiscent of Tad Williams' classic Otherland series: many varied worlds waiting for our protagonists to explore, each offering its own set of rules and dangers, but controlled by a powerful (and likely nefarious) corporation that wants to use the secrets of these worlds for its own means. Unfortunately, Planesrunner itself, in all its 269 pages, fails to live up to the promise of infinite worlds.

For all the worlds waiting to be explored by Everett via the Infundibulum (basically an iPad app that allows the holder to unravel a map of the multiverse), it's with some measure of disappointment that the reader only gets to explore one of these alternate Earths, a sorta-Victorian, sorta-Steampunk world that features a London whose skies are filled with airships. This alternate London is fascinating and McDonald plays with familiar Steampunk devices, but mixes in just enough technological advancement (Everett's iPad-like device, laser-like weaponry) to convince the reader that they are playing in a new playground, but often left me feeling like I wanted to see more of these worlds, rather than an extended trip through a singular version of London. The ending to the novel promises big things, but also suggests that Everett's world-hopping will be confined to a single world at a time, rather than traipsing through and exploring a mosaic of alien Earths, really allowing McDonald to plumb his imagination. Previously comparing this opening volume to Williams' Otherland series, in which the real world hopping didn't begin in earnest until the second volume, forces me to consider that that when the Everness series is said and done, and the infinite worlds of the multiverse have been plumbed, this complaint might be negligible.

The novel's most intriguing mystery, the shadowy and technologically superior `Earth 1,' is barely touched upon in Planesrunner. In a long running series (and it looks like this series will stretch beyond a trilogy), it's important for the author to dangle a carrot in front of the reader, but when that carrot is hyped by the narrative as being a more interesting dish than what we're being fed, it can be hard for the reader to swallow. I often found myself thinking, "Man, this London is pretty neat... but what's on Earth 1? When do we get to go there?" It's either a brilliant move by McDonald to ensure that I'll read further entries in the series (and I certainly will) or a frustrating tease.

Everett himself is a little magoo and often falls into Gary Stu-territory, especially where his god-like soccer-honed agility and hyper-intelligence are concerned, and McDonald adds some flavour to Everett through his relationship with his missing father (and their mutual love for Tottenham Hotspur), but its the cast of characters around him that really shine. From his cute sister, Victory Rose, to Sen, the firecracker/love interest/sky pirate, to the crew of the airship Everness, Everett is surrounded by friends and foes that remained with me well after I turned the final page and helped both Everett and the reader transition to Planesrunner's strange new London.

Planesrunner grabs the reader from the first page, launching Everett straight into a multiverse-spanning conspiracy and doesn't let up until the final page. It clocks in at a slim 296 pages, but McDonald fills those pages with so much action, so many tremendous set pieces and mind-twisting concepts that the reader will have to consciously force themselves to come up for air. The loose stream-of-conciousness prose creates a frenetic pace that ensures Planesrunner will be over before you know it.

Often time, Planesrunner reads like the novelization of a teenage daydreaming during math class. There's a frustrating love interest who's charming, capable and endlessly interesting, airships, death-defying leaps of faith and more than a little responsibility heaped on the shoulders of a 14-year-old who yearns to break away from the shackles of youth. There's a certain suspension of disbelief necessary from adult readers, but like the daydreams of our youths, Planesrunner is a cracking adventure, full of likable characters, endless promise and a fascinating imagination. The sequel, Everness is already finished and slated for release in 2012, and I'll be on board for the ride.

I loved every single minute! The story line is unique and the characters are believable. It was bittersweet when I realized I was reaching the end of the book. I wanted desperately to know what happened. THEN I discovered there was a sequel. Ahhh. Now I have to wait to find out what happened!