Book: Kirinya
Nov. 13th, 2012 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Ian McDonald
Details: (c) Ian McDonald 1998; Pub Millennium 1999; ISBN 1-85798-876-0
Verdict: Kirinya is breathtakingly impressive.
Reasons for reading it: McDonald is one of the most skillful writers I'm aware of; I don't absolutely love all his stuff, but it's all very well written, and Terminal Café and River of Gods are two of my favourite books ever.
How it came into my hands: I was poking about in the frighteningly good Oxfam in Saffron Walden, and was very pleasantly surprised to come upon a McDonald I hadn't heard of.
Kirinya is almost a combination of all McDonald's diverse strengths. The basic description of the theme is that it's explicitly nanotech-as-magic. So it has some of the lyrical, fantastic feel of his early magic realism in space stuff like Desolation Road, some of the astutely observed and portrayed politics of the aliens-in-Ireland books, and some of the sensawunda and frenetic, amazingly detailed SF worldbuilding that McDonald has been developing in more recent books.
Kirinya anticipates the recent and very welcome trend of more global SF. It conveys a sense of a really geopolitical scale, with tribes, countries, ethnic groups and transnational alliances all having plausible interplay, war, diplomacy, cultural transfer, migration etc. The book is set in a world literally divided into north and south, with a massive barrier (Terminum) across the Equator. The South is full of alien nano-magic, called Chaga, meaning it's completely post-scarcity – designs and ideas are valued whereas material resources and objects are worthless. The Chaga is also altering all the inhabitants of the southern half of the globe to give them superpowers, starting from making them amortal and very fast healing but also conferring various psi powers. The North is pretty much a few decades ahead projection of the current Euro-American culture, including racism and fear of the southerners as well as the Chaga and its associated powers. I generally liked the choice to set the story in Africa, with only glancing references to the North, but it is a very literal presentation of the first versus third world dichotomy, and it doesn't completely avoid presenting Africa as one exotic land rather than lots of distinct cultures. Also the main characters are Gaby, a white Irish expat and Serena / Ren her white,(though Africa-raised) daughter, which again fits with some perhaps unfortunate tropes.
The story is delightfully complex and multi-threaded. I was completely caught up in it, it's one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in ages. I also loved the way that the world is showcased through glimpses of all kinds of different groups and subcultures, making it really seem as if there's an entire planet worth of stuff going on, all of it affected in different ways by the Chaga. The aliens who seeded the world with all this magical nano-stuff are never really encountered, so it's up to the characters and the reader to speculate about them, giving a sense of a broader, galactic or even bigger scale behind the events directly described. By the time I got to the end I had a clear idea of how all the different subplots fit together into a well-crafted whole, but most of the time when I was reading I just felt as if I was getting to play in this really cool and original and fascinating world. The stakes are definitely high; important, well-developed characters get killed, and there is a background of international and intertribal warfare including acts of genocide, so it's not purely happy fun.
My one complaint about an otherwise really wonderful book is that it contains some really egregious examples of rape as character motivation. There's a multi-page scene where the evil abusive partner is shown to be really really evil via an excessively detailed description of how exactly he went about raping someone. It just keeps piling on extra evil stuff, just to make absolutely one hundred percent certain that the reader can't make any mistake, this is rape-rape, this is legitimate rape, it's violent and sadistic and perverted and monstrous and overrides the victim's consent in multiple ways. I would prefer the whole interaction not to exist in the first place, it adds nothing that couldn't have been conveyed in more subtle and less clichéd ways, and if it must exist it could very easily have been off-stage, and if it had to be described in order to make the victim convincingly traumatized, surely her being raped by the man she loves would be bad enough without all the gratuitous extra details.
So there's that, which is a pretty huge downside in my eyes. Otherwise the book is just really really good, it contains all the elements I most like, characterization, poetic but still readable language, imaginative worldbuilding, exciting twisty complex plot, thinky political and philosophical ideas without being overwhelmed by Message.
I can't believe I never heard of this book before!
Details: (c) Ian McDonald 1998; Pub Millennium 1999; ISBN 1-85798-876-0
Verdict: Kirinya is breathtakingly impressive.
Reasons for reading it: McDonald is one of the most skillful writers I'm aware of; I don't absolutely love all his stuff, but it's all very well written, and Terminal Café and River of Gods are two of my favourite books ever.
How it came into my hands: I was poking about in the frighteningly good Oxfam in Saffron Walden, and was very pleasantly surprised to come upon a McDonald I hadn't heard of.
Kirinya is almost a combination of all McDonald's diverse strengths. The basic description of the theme is that it's explicitly nanotech-as-magic. So it has some of the lyrical, fantastic feel of his early magic realism in space stuff like Desolation Road, some of the astutely observed and portrayed politics of the aliens-in-Ireland books, and some of the sensawunda and frenetic, amazingly detailed SF worldbuilding that McDonald has been developing in more recent books.
Kirinya anticipates the recent and very welcome trend of more global SF. It conveys a sense of a really geopolitical scale, with tribes, countries, ethnic groups and transnational alliances all having plausible interplay, war, diplomacy, cultural transfer, migration etc. The book is set in a world literally divided into north and south, with a massive barrier (Terminum) across the Equator. The South is full of alien nano-magic, called Chaga, meaning it's completely post-scarcity – designs and ideas are valued whereas material resources and objects are worthless. The Chaga is also altering all the inhabitants of the southern half of the globe to give them superpowers, starting from making them amortal and very fast healing but also conferring various psi powers. The North is pretty much a few decades ahead projection of the current Euro-American culture, including racism and fear of the southerners as well as the Chaga and its associated powers. I generally liked the choice to set the story in Africa, with only glancing references to the North, but it is a very literal presentation of the first versus third world dichotomy, and it doesn't completely avoid presenting Africa as one exotic land rather than lots of distinct cultures. Also the main characters are Gaby, a white Irish expat and Serena / Ren her white,(though Africa-raised) daughter, which again fits with some perhaps unfortunate tropes.
The story is delightfully complex and multi-threaded. I was completely caught up in it, it's one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in ages. I also loved the way that the world is showcased through glimpses of all kinds of different groups and subcultures, making it really seem as if there's an entire planet worth of stuff going on, all of it affected in different ways by the Chaga. The aliens who seeded the world with all this magical nano-stuff are never really encountered, so it's up to the characters and the reader to speculate about them, giving a sense of a broader, galactic or even bigger scale behind the events directly described. By the time I got to the end I had a clear idea of how all the different subplots fit together into a well-crafted whole, but most of the time when I was reading I just felt as if I was getting to play in this really cool and original and fascinating world. The stakes are definitely high; important, well-developed characters get killed, and there is a background of international and intertribal warfare including acts of genocide, so it's not purely happy fun.
My one complaint about an otherwise really wonderful book is that it contains some really egregious examples of rape as character motivation. There's a multi-page scene where the evil abusive partner is shown to be really really evil via an excessively detailed description of how exactly he went about raping someone. It just keeps piling on extra evil stuff, just to make absolutely one hundred percent certain that the reader can't make any mistake, this is rape-rape, this is legitimate rape, it's violent and sadistic and perverted and monstrous and overrides the victim's consent in multiple ways. I would prefer the whole interaction not to exist in the first place, it adds nothing that couldn't have been conveyed in more subtle and less clichéd ways, and if it must exist it could very easily have been off-stage, and if it had to be described in order to make the victim convincingly traumatized, surely her being raped by the man she loves would be bad enough without all the gratuitous extra details.
So there's that, which is a pretty huge downside in my eyes. Otherwise the book is just really really good, it contains all the elements I most like, characterization, poetic but still readable language, imaginative worldbuilding, exciting twisty complex plot, thinky political and philosophical ideas without being overwhelmed by Message.
I can't believe I never heard of this book before!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 05:51 pm (UTC)I'm pretty much in sympathy with all your reactions to this book; are you aware it's the second in a series, though ? The first one, Chaga, I read first - I was already a devoted McDonald fan at the time it came out - and I think it would be worth your while; they both strike me as solid middle-ranking McDonald rather than hos very best, but that still ranks them very highly compared to many things out there. I believe it was originally intended as a tilogy, but there's been no third novel; there is a novella in that universe, "Tendeleo's Story", which I have read but quite some time ago and it did not well stick.
Also, in re Terminal Cafe, I only recently realised that there's a novella in that setting, "Days of Solomon Gursky", which is brilliant and inventive and makes a philosophical statement to which I am absolutely opposed; it's been collected in the Dozois Year's Best for 1999 and also in the Furthest Horizon far-future SF anthology, also by Gardner Dozois.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 06:49 pm (UTC)