Necroville reviewed by Paul J. McAuley

Review of Necroville by Paul J. McAuley. Originally published in Interzone #89 (November 1994), page 56. © Interzone 1994. Reprinted with permission.

No one applies the cultural logic of late capitalism to SF with as much gusto as Ian McDonald. While commercial SF is content to tell the same story over and over, and some of the best contemporary SF is engaged in refurbishing one or another of its ancestral templates (the dying Earth of Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, or the space opera paradiddles of Simmon's Hyperion). McDonald ransacks not only the entire treasure store of old sf images and tropes, but also the whole range of popular culture, from movies through TV, pulp fiction to pop songs. His rich prose conveys the strangeness of the future with a thrilling urgency and carries a dense freight of echoes, alliusions and borrowings - sometimes so dense that the structure beneath is hard to glimpse. This textural overload can obscure the fact that, unusually in sf, McDonald's fictions are rooted in a conviction in the rights of ordinary people to live out their lives as they wish. His characters must struggle, not to gain power (or even to back onto a throne by mistake), but for survival against the disinheriting forces of totalitarism and the schemes of those corrupted by power. Their voices are the voices of everyman, singing to be heard over the whirlwind of history.

In Necroville (Gollancz, £15.99), the dead (and we all are ultimately disinherited by death), live again through the magic of nanotechnology, which here drives the multistranded plot as the magic of biotechnology drove the plot of Hearts, Hands and Voices. And it is magic. McDonald is not one to clutter his fiction with handwaving explanations of a new technology, but instead prefers to explore the raw excitement of extrapolating its consequences. He wants to get down and party in the carnival of the future.

The dead, then, are infected with myriads of tiny machines which have given them immortality. Although death becomes them - the nature of their resurrection gives them rebuilt, much-improved bodies - they are contracted into a kind of serfdom to the corporation which controls entry into life after death. Necroville is the story of the revolution of the dead against their living masters. It is told over a single day and night in an hispanicized Los Angeles where the dead now ocucpy the ghettos, the necrovilles of the title. The revolution is led from on high, by the dead who have taken the high ground of space and who now threaten the Earth.

McDonald's template is not so much Silverberg's Born With the Dead as the movie Bladerunner. His dead are not elegant sybarites, but rebellious working stiffs, replicants (quite literally, they have been rebuilt molecule by molecule, and at intervals must renew themselves by breaking into a kind of soup) seeking to free themselves from the ruthless exploitation to which they are subjected. The Deckard figure is a streetwise lawyer, YoYo Mok, kind of like Neuromancer's Molly with subpoenas instead of razorblades under her fingernails. YoYo is McDonald's everyperson, caught up not only in the revolution of the dead, but also in the schemes of an omnipotent Artificial Intelligence born in the data web, freedead assassins who wear the faces of the living, and the consequences of the back histories of five people who are attempting to meet in the Terminal Café, in Necroville, in the middle of the festival of the Day of the Dead.

McDonald's future LA is hectic and crowded and colourful, a carnival set through which he drives a multi-stranded plot which centres on, and is resolved by, skeleton-in-the-closet revelations about the family that controls the corporaion that controls the afterlife. It is a bravura performance that holds itself together by sheer momentum. As long as things keep on happening - and a lot of things keep on happening for most of the novel - the unlikely conjugation of coincidental plots are kept from flying apart by centrifugal force. That's not to say the resolution doesn't neatly tie up the considerable number of loose ends; despite the intense flak of borrowed images, quotes and hip references, McDonald brings the various plot strands together with skill. But there's a suspicion that he sometimes deploys his cutups and verbal fireworks not because he needs to but because he can: he's not doing it for his readers, but for himself, and the resulting chorus of echoes and echoes of echoes often drowns out his own voice. Indeed, the strongest and most satisfying sense of strangeness comes from those scenes set in the cold quietus of space, in which the revolt of the freedead and glimpses of an eternal, posthuman future are limned with considerable precision. In space, you can hear McDonald dream.

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