To Hold Infinity by John Meaney

advertise.

	EUROPE'S MOST VISITED SF/F WEB SITE

To Hold Infinity by John Meaney

Pub: Bantam. 554 page paperback. Price: £ 5.99 (UK), $11.95 (AUS) and $17.95 (NZ). ISBN: 0-553-50588-2.

Check out website: www.randomhouse.cm

If confessions were good for the soul then I'd be a Catholic. As I'm not and just plain honest, I'll confess here and now: The main reason I bought this book was because of the Jim Burns cover.

Having seen the reproduction on the cover and in 'Transluminal' plus Burns' tendency to base his painting on the book's content, I was curious to see who was the oriental lady with the tasselled belt. I've had this book several months now and just waiting for a gap in my review schedule to fit it in.

So, what have we got? The oriental lady on the cover is biologist Yoshiko Sunadomari. A renown practically a pensioner - but youngish due to her health treatment - aged mother and widow, who has left Earth to visit Fulgar to assist in the seeking of her kidnapped son, Tetsuo.

He, in turn, wins the trust of his kidnappers, the Shadow People, as they seek to find out that one of the Luculentus, people who've been cybernetically enhanced to communicate across computer networks, is taking over the system.

Yoshiko finds her involvement has to cover more than finding her son but also beating this menace as she examines this society.

For a first novel, Meaney has certainly taken the bull by the horns here. One could classify this book as 'CyberTech' mainly cos of the number of times computer jargon is incorporated as its users open up various surveillance modules littered throughout.

I have a suspicion that many readers will probably gloss over this window-dressing as an irrelevance although it does come a little into its own later a little in the book. The real problem with this cyber-link is that we don't see enough of it to understand the full implications other than it's like being linked to your computer all the time.

You'd also have thought that in the future, software instruction would have been humanised rather than computer jargonise. We see the villain's perspective who is greatly enhanced but none of the regular Luculentus to really draw comparison.

The reader is brought running into this reality and you have to understand the implications as it is unravelled. Nothing wrong in doing that in itself although a scorecard might have been useful occasionally.

Yoshiko is supposed to be our eyes and ears into this world yet we rarely see enough of what she knows either. Certainly her background as a biologist plays little here other than a connection to the ubiquitous space pilots who owe more to her dead husband than to her.

Towards the end of the book, the pace moves rather too fast. Having spent so long in building up to the final confrontation, it's almost as though author Meaney realising the novel has gone on for too long is eager to bring it to a finale. Indeed, the villain of the piece isn't even seen for a greater part of the book after being introduced.

Surely someone who is supposed to be having such an impact on everyone's lives would be doing a lot more than just manipulating the odd personality to suit his own ends. Not seeing much of his motivations over than a greed for power doesn't really help understand the character and makes him more cut-out than formidable.

Using the novice Yoshiko as the means to his downfall when there are undoubtedly more experienced Luculentus around doesn't help neither.

Undoubtedly, there is some hidden metaphor here and probably worth spending a week of your time reading but a lot more could have been done in raising this novel to a more classic proportion.

GF Willmetts

FREE SF MAGAZINE
Sign up for the Crowsnest SF e-magazine - full of funny reports and gossip. Be the first to find out about hot science fiction happenings & news!

more on the magazine...

CHAT ABOUT THIS STORY

NEWS ARCHIVE