From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon May 18 21:23:15 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed1.news.luth.se!luth.se!feed2.news.erols.com!erols!netnews.com!eecs-usenet-02.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!not-for-mail From: "Michael I. Lichter" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: THE BONES OF TIME by Kathleen Ann Goonan Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 18 May 1998 10:11:16 -0400 Organization: Software Agents Group Lines: 60 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:1906 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:lichter@ucla.edu WWW: http://www.ben2.ucla.edu/~lichter/