From rec.arts.sf.reviews Thu Jun 25 13:39:34 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed1.news.luth.se!luth.se!erix.ericsson.se!fci-se!fci!news.maxwell.syr.edu!netnews.com!eecs-usenet-02.mit.edu!ai-lab!news.media.mit.edu!not-for-mail From: agapow@latcs1.cs.latrobe.edu.au (p-m agapow) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: "The White Abacus" by Damien Broderick Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 24 Jun 1998 15:18:03 -0400 Organization: Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Biologists Lines: 81 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:1940 "The White Abacus" by Damien Broderick A Postview, copyright 1998 p-m agapow It is the distant future. Within the solar system, humans and AIs lead an idyllic existence aided by near-universal availability of teleportation and the AI super-mind, the Gestell. But the Asteroid Belt, cut off from teleportation, has given rise to a divergent warring society full of superstitions and plotting. Ratio, a neonate AI, is ordered to do the unthinkable - cut itself off from the Gestell so it may befriend a Belter heir, infiltrate Belter society and thwart an ambitious warlord who threatens all sentient beings. "The White Abacus" collected a Ditmar this year. Although I am unfamiliar with most of its competitors, this can't be a bad thing. It's a rollicking, enjoyable space opera with quite a few slabs of intelligent speculation that stumbles only a few times. According to the back cover, even Roger Zelazny liked it. (Hasn't ol' Roj gotten opinionated since he died?) Style-wise, "The White Abacus" (the meaning of the title is oblique and revealed only at the novel's end) is initially a hyperactive, overblown melodrama in the style of Alfred Bester, especially "The Stars My Destination" and "The Demolished Man." Other obvious comparisions are Shakespearian tragedy and Walter Jon Williams' "Aristoi." One half of the starring cast, the disenfranchised Telmah Lord Cima spirals about in an emotional maelstrom from torment to hate to torment to passion to torment and then torment a few more times for good measure. His adversary, the assassin Feng Lord Cima (of course he's called Feng, we already have a Fu Manchu), practically twirls his mustache while spouting purple lines like: "You posturing martinet! Talk of courage? You toy with your blades and guns. I rode a geodesic on the event horizon of an active metric defect!" Insert maniacal laughter. A style like this is easy to make fun of and difficult to get right, but Broderick pulls it off and makes the over-the- top histrionics readable, fun and interesting, usually without descending into absurdity. It clangs once or twice with lines like "In a wild rhapsody, he apostrophizes his enemy." He did what? The AI Ratio, the other half of the starring cast, provides the necessary balance to the wild Telmah. A melancholy figure caught in a terrible form of exile from his own kind, it provides narration and an outsider's eye on the strange Belter society. There is also a range of suitably colourful supporting characters and settings, from a spaceship-piloting chicken, the perverse Lord Brass (who has regressed into a giant baby) and a gravity- defying giant aquarium captured in the heart of an asteroid. A minor quibble here - Telmah meditates at one point on a protein sequence, including the strange abundant amino acid "Gin". Uh-uh. "Gln" - Glutamine. Us biologists are tetchy about these things. As the inevitable bloody finale erupts, the book is disrupted by the rather bizarre inclusion of a piece of 20th century email pontificating on the nature of interpretation and narrative. Bizarre, because while this text makes perfect sense in context (two AIs exchange notes on whether humans are preprogrammed to act against their own best interests), it is the signal for a sub-plot or extended discourse to spring up and largely take the place of the collapsing plots of conspiracy and revenge for the final 100 pages. To be fair, this theme has been brewing the whole novel. However it takes a bit of wind out of the climax, without even having enough space to develop itself fully. All the scenes from this point on feel rather abbreviated. One wishes this theme was more fully integrated into the main plot or given the room to unwrap its rather difficult questions. I fear that some readers may be put off by the Nietzschean dimensions of the plot, as happened with Williams' "Aristoi." This is unfortunate, because they will be missing out on what is a good story, and a little bit more. [***/interesting] and "Elsinore 90,210" on the Sid and Nancy scale. %A Damien Broderick %T The White Abacus %I Avon %C New York %D 1997 %P 342pp %G ISBN 0-380-78559-5 %O paperback, Aus$15.95 Paul-Michael Agapow (agapow@computer.org), La Trobe Uni "There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire."