Crescent City Rhapsody
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| Author(s) | Kathleen Ann Goonan |
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| Publisher | Eos |
| Honors | |
| It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space—and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs.… | |
It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space—and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.
And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau—a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess—is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie’s vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her…and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.
Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born around the world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.
The eye of the apocalyptic storm is a radically transformed New Orleans, where Marie Laveau works feverishly to build a safe haven for the hunted and oppressed, gathering the best and the brightest to build her utopia dream. But time is running out. With the military might of a new and repressive world order ranged against her, Marie’s only hope lies in the most dangerous piece of nanotechnology ever devised: A technology capable of saving the human race—or destroying it
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
What would it feel like to live through a biological revolution? Many science fiction writers chronicling a vast technological shift lose sight of the people who would have to deal with it. Not so Kathleen Ann Goonan, whose Crescent City Rhapsody is the third of her Nanotech Cycle novels. Each of her characters is profoundly real, and the things that happen to them are as confusing, awe-inspiring, and terrifying as you might expect.
Goonan’s story begins with the assassination of Marie Laveau, New Orleans cyber-entrepreneur and grand-niece of the famous voudoun queen. By prior arrangement, Marie is resurrected into a cloned body and prepares for revenge, but she awakens into a world beset by the Silence—periodic bursts of microchip-destroying radiation from space. Enter Dr. Zeb Aberly, a bipolar astrophysicist whose manic episodes help him understand that the Silence contains an alien message and perhaps the potential to change humanity’s biology radically. Meanwhile, in Japan, a young biotechnician seals her fate when she helps steal the recipe for a Universal Assembler, a nanotech tool of fearsome power and destructive capability. The stage is set for a revolution, and Goonan delivers, with complex, interwoven story lines that resemble the rhythms and structure of a jazz composition.
Brightly colored lines were inching their way up buildings like plants in a fast-growing jungle. She moved briskly, but her heart was lifeless. She was looking at her past and seeing a future that she was not a part of. People sat leaning against buildings here and there, which was the hardest to see. They were not begging. Their brains were changing. They were adapting to the new city.
As cities become organisms, a new generation of profoundly different humans comes of age and hope dawns in Crescent City, and Goonan directs the show with artistic flair. Crescent City Rhapsody is confusing and delightful, a swoony harmony of words swirling around crisply melodic ideas. —Therese Littleton
