Subject: Review: THE BONES OF TIME by Kathleen Ann Goonan

From: "Michael I. Lichter" <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 May 1998 10:11:16 -0400

THE BONES OF TIME by Kathleen Ann Goonan
              TOR, March 1997, ISBN 0-812-55746-8, 401pp, US$6.99
		Review Copyright 1998 Michael I. Lichter

Interspace, a multinational quasi-governmental monster, was formed in
order to make human interstellar travel a reality. Headquartered in
Hawaii, IS (as it is known) is a power unto itself, gobbling up land,
performing covert medical experiments on willing but uninformed subjects,
assassinating political enemies, stealing scientific knowledge, and
generally acting like a multinational corporation aught to. IS' main
opposition is the Homeland Movement (HM), a group of native Hawaiians
which has been able to secure a portion of one of the islands as an
autonomous zone.

Though one of the last of the line of royal kahunas (priests), Cen
Kalakaua is a destitute fifteen year old runaway, working for a fisherman
and sharing a room with a soft-hearted prostitute. In the year 2007, Cen
somehow makes contact with Kaiulani, the historical Hawaiian princess
whose claim to the throne was eventually pushed aside by the American
annexation of the islands. Cen knows that Kauilani is fated to come to a
tragic end, but when he discovers that *his* Kauilani is from a parallel
universe rather than the past or his imagination, he embarks on a quest to
learn the mathematics and physics he needs to know in order to cross over
and save her. So no, despite the title, this is not a time travel novel.

Seventeen years later, Cen has earned a reputation as a mathematical
genius -- but he has also disappeared. Lynn Oshima, a young third
generation Japanese-Hawaiian, is a geneticist, runner, computer hacker,
sometime composer, and prospective single mother. Her father and brothers
are bigwigs in IS, but she only deigns to deal with the corrupt
corporation when lured, for instance, by a chance to explore Mao Zedong's
DNA. When she accidentally endangers the life of Akamu, a young clone of
the great Hawaiian King Kamehameha, Lynn's life is turned upside down, and
she must struggle to save herself and the boy, and to aid a dashing secret
agent, the first female Dalai Lama, and the native Hawaiians' grand plans
for their future.

The storytelling here is a bit uneven, and the characters are not as
compelling as those in Goonan's QUEEN CITY JAZZ. The fact that Goonan is
neither Japanese-American nor Hawaiian comes out in her distance from her
protagonists. In its attempts to grapple with history, ethnicity,
cosmology, biology, and destiny, BONES is an ambitious and mostly
successful book. In form and style it is mostly derivative -- I would
place it somewhere between Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. The bottom
line: a good vacation read, recommended especially for Hawaii buffs and
those who are sick of cyberpunk that further marginalizes already-
marginalized people.

	%A	Kathleen Ann Goonan
	%T	The Bones of Time
	%I	TOR
	%C	New York
	%D	March 1997
	%G	ISBN 0-812-55746-8
	%P	401 pp.
	%O	paperback, US$6.99

Michael Lichter, UCLA Department of Sociology, and
UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty
e-mail: mailto:[email-masked]  WWW: http://www.ben2.ucla.edu/~lichter/