- Paperback: 465 pages
- Publisher: Voyager (16 Nov 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006483178
- ISBN-13: 978-0006483175
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,074,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Queen City Jazz
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Kathleen Ann Goonan's first novel is an impressive sci-fi debut, combining the themes of post-holocaust America and rampant nanotechnology. This imagined technology of molecule-sized machines and computers has excited many science fiction writers with its possibilities for total control of matter, atom by atom--including human flesh and DNA. In Goonan's future America, cities brought to life with nanotechnology or "nan" have mutated in strange, threatening ways. Rural areas, meanwhile, were devastated by nan-based plagues. Our heroine Verity, raised by a rustic Shaker community that rejects most technology, feels a mysterious compulsion towards learning machines and the closest transformed city. This is Cincinnati, whose skyscrapers have blossomed into exotic nan flowers between which huge artificial bees carry pollinating information. Verity's adventures there are complex, flickering between real-life action, virtual reality and chemically induced all-senses hallucinations. Eventually--the old, old sci-fi story--Verity realises that she herself was created to redeem the malfunctioning city. Its inhabitants are trapped in pleasant but futile cycles of dreams and play-acting (living the roles of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and others): Verity must somehow free them. Well written and colourfully imagined, the story requires close attention to thread its maze of realities and unrealities. --David Langford
Review
‘An unforgettable vision of America tranfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology. Greg Bear’s Blood Music is perhaps the only other novel to have dealt so unflinchingly with the paradigm-shattering possibilities of a functioning nanotech. If a science fiction writer’s job is to conceive the inconceivable, Goonan has arrived with an immaculate version of the traditional tool kit – and the nerve to use it hard’
William Gibson
‘A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech… For Ms Goonan, the freedom to remake the world in one’s own image poses a terrible temptation [but] she grounds her apocalyptic vision in a few short, detailed scenes that reveal how personal failings can become writ large in the great events of history’
New York Times
‘Spectacular… Goonan moves far beyond Bear’s horror-story scenario and shows that the possibilities of this theme are at least as powerful as those of SF’s more popular current preoccupation, virtual reality. A first novel of startling virtuosity and complexity’
Locus
‘Goonan’s achievement in this book is impressive… It is certain that no reader will ever regret accompanying Verity on her fascinating journey of self-discovery, nor forget it’
SF Eye
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First Sentence
John was blue, steady as the blue light far down the abandoned maglev track; Verity and Cairo had walked down it one spring day when Verity was only ten though she was forbidden by Evangeline. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
John was blue, steady as the blue light far down the abandoned maglev track; Verity and Cairo had walked down it one spring day when Verity was only ten though she was forbidden by Evangeline. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I thought this book was rather wonderful. I don't usually read proper sci-fi, as I don't get all the techie stuff, but in this book the prose itself, with it's beautiful descriptions, conveyed an otherwordly feel brilliantly. The writing, particularly the description of Verity's intial home and then moonlit, flower-filled nights of Cincinatti, were strong enough to carry me through all the pheromones and nanotechnology stuff.
The book is set some years in the future in a radically changed USA. The magical strangeness of this place is all the more effective because of the air of psuedo normality at the beginning. As the novel progresses the degree to which everything is different is revealed.
The causes of these cataclysmic alterations are a nice varitation on more standard "how the earth ended up being dead werid" fare and the story of how things happened is worked in seamlessly.
If you like evocative writing or interesting sci-fi, then I really recommend this book. The only reason for 4 stars instead or 5 is that I have to confess to not actually understanding much of the ending, which does get a bit bizzare.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have to say that the last few chapters might rank amongst the finest literature ever written, but I'll probably never know. I loved the beginning, as a girl reaches adulthood among a pastoral community of neo-Shakers. I admired the second section, as she is driven to leave the community and travel to the nano-corrupted city. But I hated the third section, as she enters and starts to interact with the living city.
Sure, intelligent cities and nano-engineering will produce societies radically different from today, but the protagonist's journey through the city is lost in its own cleverness and lazily written to boot. I've tried, I've really tried to read this, but each time I get to that last section I end up flinging the book angrily at the wall (OK, so I should switch to decaf).
This could have been a wonderful book with a more aggressive editor, but it ain't. If you finish it and liked it, email to tell me how it ends - I can't afford the wall repairs.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Near miss.
12 Aug 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
After the first 150 pages I was entranced. Goonan wove such a wonderful backdrop. I wanted it to go on and on.
Well, be careful what you wish for-- it does go on and on.
Shakers pulled together by plague and fear, a city full of arts run by bees and flowers, a little girl with nodes behind her ears and a strange sense of destiny, a world gone nanotechnology mad where sick people flow like lemmings down the river.
The ideas are exactly as magical and wonderful as they sound, but the plot is not able to live up to their weight. By the time Verity had been running around Cincinnati for a while, I was heartily sick of the whole thing and found there to be *way* too many pages to string out her secret. I would have far preferred that everything in the book happen (condensed) in the first half of an even longer book that took you some place beyond Cincinnati itself.
I still plan to read the sequel.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Aims high, almost makes it
3 Sep 1999
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Mix together a bit of Alice in Wonderland, the Shakers, jazz improvisation, nanotechnology, plus traditional post-apocalypse sci-fi and you get Queen City Jazz.
It sounds like a mess and it almost is. However, scientifically implausible ideas are kept together by a keen sense of the surreal and the absurd. While the book is too long, there are passages full of evocative beauty.
All in all, a very ambitious first novel, whose ambitions are so high that it is bound not to reach them. It isn't as good as the best bio- / nanotech sci-fi, in particular Paul J McAuley's 'Fairyland', but remarkable enough to merit 4 stars.
(On a final note, I wonder whether Jeff Noon read this before writing 'Pollen'. Although unavailable in the UK at the time, it had already been published in the USA, and there are enough similarities to make me suspicious... perhaps it is just coincidence?)
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Interesting ideas dragged down by a ho-hum plot
16 Sep 1998
Format:Mass Market Paperback
"Queen City Jazz" wants to be several things: a post-apocalyptic cautionary tale; a voyage of discovery; an exploration of the human condition. Unfortunately, it does none of these particularly well. Part of the problem is that the book's pace is so slow; I could hardly keep interested as the heroine, Verity, slogged through her (seemingly) interminable adventures. And I really have to object to the author's overuse of the tired phrase, "I've said too much already."
There are some good ideas in this book, but they are buried in some long-winded, not-very-interesting passages. And that's a shame.
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