A trip through past, present and future

REVIEWS BY GAVIN J. GRANT

The latest novel from Ian McDonald comes with high hopes. His previous novel, River of Gods, was short-listed for most of the genre awards and won the British Science Fiction Association Award for novel of the year in 2004. Does his new book, Brasyl live up to the expectations? The short answer is yes. This tripartite novel is set in South America's largest country during three different eras—last year, 25 years from now and 300 years before that. In the present day, a reality TV producer is looking for her next big hit (as well as what to do with her own life, but that concern is submerged so well she hardly realizes it herself). The only time she moves slowly is in the breaks between the bouts of martial arts she uses to focus and calm herself. When she learns that the goalkeeper who missed a save for Brazil in the 1950 World Cup is still alive, she immediately wants to make him the focus of a mock TV trial. In the future section, rogue physicists use quantum computers to access parallel universes and find codes to turn off radio chips in stolen goods. This pursuit isn't the main interest of the physicists, but it's the one that brings petty thief and imaginative talent scout Edson into their circle.

Moving back into the 18th century, the reader encounters Father Luis Quinn, who has been sent to locate another Jesuit priest who disappeared up the Amazon. Others have sought him but none have returned. Quinn quickly sees the truth in what everyone has been telling him—that Brazil is different from anywhere else on earth. McDonald gleefully pounds away at the ways in which Brazil is unique, but he is also after larger targets: the nature of the universe, free will and predestination, what happens after we die. Brasyl is a fantastic, fast-moving thought experiment packaged as a novel, wrapped in a love story. The best line in the book? "Physics is love."


Body double

In Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9Tail Fox San Francisco cop Bobby Zha discovers after he dies that everyone thought he was a jerk. Zha, shot while investigating a break-in, wakes up in someone else's body: a body that has been in a coma in New York for more than 20 years. But Zha can't stop to ask too many questions or he might get another visit from the celestial nine-tailed fox who talked him through moving between bodies. He shocks the care facility into letting him go free and finds that the boy whose body he now inhabits was awarded a fortune from the accident that put him into a coma. Zha can't feel the boy's presence, but he doesn't try too hard. He heads back to what had been home ground where, of course, no one recognizes him now. There, he uses his connections to investigate his own death and the case he had been working on before he died—an 11-year-old girl, granddaughter of an extremely well-off Russian émigré, apparently shot an intruder. Zha knows the girl didn't do it and her grandfather is an unlikely suspect because he's blind.

9Tail Fox rushes to its end and doesn't stop to tie up every missing string along the way. There is much enjoyment to be had in following Zha as he loses and finds himself and tries to put a small part of the world to rights.


Reality check

Kelley Armstrong's No Humans Involved is part of her Women of the Otherworld series and, like Brasyl, features reality TV. Jaime Vegas is one of three mediums brought to a house in Los Angeles for a TV special on raising a ghost. But when Jaime finds some secret cameras and discovers that the producers have been giving out false information, she realizes the mediums are being set up as the unwitting cast of a different kind of TV show. Jaime has another reason for not wanting too much scrutiny: She's a necromancer who can see ghosts, raise the dead and knows all about the existence of vampires, werewolves, witches and so on. She is on an interspecies council that watches over (and keeps apart) humans and supernaturals. Jaime feels peculiar and unfamiliar presences in the garden that turn out to be partial ghosts. She has to find out how these wounded spirits were created as well as keep an eye on her partner, a werewolf she may be falling for. With its fast-paced action and steamy scenes, Armstrong's novel is a must for fans of Laurell K. Hamilton and other paranormal romance authors.


Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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