Queen City Jazz
by Kathleen Ann Goonan | Science Fiction & Fantasy | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0812536266 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0812536266 Global Overview for this book
2 journalers for this copy...
I never really managed to finish this book; I think I read about half-way a couple of years ago, and then moved on to something else, fully intending to finish it but never getting around to it. I doubt I ever will. It's not that it's a bad book, it just failed to engage me... Somehow...
*****
Reviews from www.amazon.com:
From Publishers Weekly
This impressive first novel by an experienced story writer combines hallucinogenic visions, historical personae and an original futuristic dystopia. Young Verity has been raised by a reconstructionist Shaker group that bases its religion on the American cult that banned sex and believed in "simple" virtues. The adolescent has strange powers and mysterious compulsions that cause her to seek out and learn things from technologies that her adoptive community has forsaken. After tragedy strikes her "family," Verity packs up several precious burdens and repairs to the technologically superior but dangerously insane "enlivened" city of Cincinnati. There she meets the passionate jazz musician Sphere and becomes embroiled in mutating versions of a nanotech plague and overlapping views of the historical facts that led to the destruction of rational civilization. In Cincinnati she learns her true identity and how to affect the city's destiny. Highlights of the book include a scene in which Ernest Hemingway gets kicked off a baseball team because he's not a "team player" and a mini-lesson in the communication techniques of bees. Also a pleasure is watching the intelligent heroine grapple with responsibility, passion and artistic creation. While overly dense in detail, Goonan's work is powerful and richly textured.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In a future warped by nanotechnology-gone-mad, a young woman leaves the protected community of Shaker Hill and embarks on a journey to the "enlivened" city of Cincinnati. Hoping to find answers to questions long forbidden by people who learned to reject the technology that betrayed them, Verity discovers the key to the future within herself. Goonan's first novel combines gentle Shaker philosophy with kaleidoscopic images drawn from Cincinnati's Jazz Age. The resulting heady blend deserves a place in most sf collections.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The setting for Goonan's richly imagined first novel is an almost surrealistic future Ohio in which sophisticated nanotechnology has first elevated civilization to a splendor approaching the utopian, then exterminated half the population with a rampant nanoplague. After her brother and dog are killed by another sibling, 16-year-old Verity leaves her puritanical, Shaker-indoctrinated family and sets out for Cincinnati with the preserved corpses in tow. She hopes to uncover there a lost method of reviving the bodies but discovers that the city is now an otherwise deserted place completely enlivened by self_regulating nanotechnology that produces its own flesh-and-blood homages to forgotten culture with resurrected Ernest Hemingways and Charlie Parkers. With her own ability to tap into the surrounding information network, Verity must claim the city for her own before she can benefit her brother as well as the outside world. Goonan displays a rare gift for grounding far-reaching ideas in beautifully crafted, almost magical prose. Carl Hays
From Kirkus Reviews
In Goonan's medium-future world, space radiation prevents all broadcast communications, so communities are isolated. The wholesale application of nanotechnology, or ``nan,'' has led to dreadful wars, plagues, and a population crash. Young Verity, one of a small community of Shakers subsisting near deserted Dayton, Ohio, finds she has the ability to talk with the still extant, computerized Dayton library. She learns of the existence of the Queen City, Cincinnati, which is ``Enlivened,'' constructed and run by nan, governed by a hive mentality composed of huge genetically tailored Bees and Flowers that have become trapped in a hormonal feedback loop. After various adventures, and aided by her musician friend, Sphere, Verity enters Cincinnati and learns that she is only the latest of a series of clones programmed by one of the Enlivened city's vanished architects. Her function is to help the city out of its mindless, seasonal cycle of creation and destruction. So Verity must join the city's hormonal-informational network and become the queen Bee--a transformation that the city's mad creator is determined to prevent. Fuzzy, overlong, often poorly controlled, but flavorsome and wonderfully inventive, the centerpiece being Goonan's dazzling vision of new technology run riot. An exceptionally promising debut novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Unforgettable."
--William Gibson
"A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech."
--The New York Times
"An unforgettable vision of America transfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology. Greg Bear's Blood Music is perhaps the only other novel to have dealt so unflinchingly with the paradigm-shattering possibilities of a functioning nanotech. If a science fiction writer's job is to conceive the inconceivable, Goonan has arrived with an immaculate version of the traditional tool-kit--and the nerve to use it hard."
--William Gibson
"Goonan is one of the most imaginative authors in the literature of the imagination."
--David Brin
Praise for Queen City Jazz and Kathleen Ann Goonan
"Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan is a dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech. ...For Ms. Goonan, the freedom to remake the world in one's own image poses a terrible temptation. ... a first novelist of enormous talent and energy ...In the end, what saves her novel from self-destructing through sheer exuberance is the way that she grounds her apocalyptic vision in a few short, finely detailed scenes that reveal how personal failings can become writ large in the great events of history."--The New York Times
"[In] this already-celebrated debut . . . Goonan has written one of the most original, thought provoking novels to emerge from American writing in some time."--Des Moines Register
"Richly imagined...Goonan displays a rare gift for grounding far-reaching ideas in beautifully crafted, almost magical prose."--Booklist.
"In the hands of Kathleen Ann Goonan, the science of science fiction becomes something lyrical and vividly human, and the intricately imagined future she presents is thus rendered completely plausible and poignant in the extreme. Queen City Jazz is hands down the best first novel I've read in the genre in the past ten years."
--Lucius Shepard
"Kathleen Goonan is one of the very few writers of science fiction, today, willing to work with the unfettered vistas of abject weirdness presented by the apocalyptic potential of really new technologies."--William Gibson
*****
Reviews from www.amazon.com:
From Publishers Weekly
This impressive first novel by an experienced story writer combines hallucinogenic visions, historical personae and an original futuristic dystopia. Young Verity has been raised by a reconstructionist Shaker group that bases its religion on the American cult that banned sex and believed in "simple" virtues. The adolescent has strange powers and mysterious compulsions that cause her to seek out and learn things from technologies that her adoptive community has forsaken. After tragedy strikes her "family," Verity packs up several precious burdens and repairs to the technologically superior but dangerously insane "enlivened" city of Cincinnati. There she meets the passionate jazz musician Sphere and becomes embroiled in mutating versions of a nanotech plague and overlapping views of the historical facts that led to the destruction of rational civilization. In Cincinnati she learns her true identity and how to affect the city's destiny. Highlights of the book include a scene in which Ernest Hemingway gets kicked off a baseball team because he's not a "team player" and a mini-lesson in the communication techniques of bees. Also a pleasure is watching the intelligent heroine grapple with responsibility, passion and artistic creation. While overly dense in detail, Goonan's work is powerful and richly textured.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In a future warped by nanotechnology-gone-mad, a young woman leaves the protected community of Shaker Hill and embarks on a journey to the "enlivened" city of Cincinnati. Hoping to find answers to questions long forbidden by people who learned to reject the technology that betrayed them, Verity discovers the key to the future within herself. Goonan's first novel combines gentle Shaker philosophy with kaleidoscopic images drawn from Cincinnati's Jazz Age. The resulting heady blend deserves a place in most sf collections.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The setting for Goonan's richly imagined first novel is an almost surrealistic future Ohio in which sophisticated nanotechnology has first elevated civilization to a splendor approaching the utopian, then exterminated half the population with a rampant nanoplague. After her brother and dog are killed by another sibling, 16-year-old Verity leaves her puritanical, Shaker-indoctrinated family and sets out for Cincinnati with the preserved corpses in tow. She hopes to uncover there a lost method of reviving the bodies but discovers that the city is now an otherwise deserted place completely enlivened by self_regulating nanotechnology that produces its own flesh-and-blood homages to forgotten culture with resurrected Ernest Hemingways and Charlie Parkers. With her own ability to tap into the surrounding information network, Verity must claim the city for her own before she can benefit her brother as well as the outside world. Goonan displays a rare gift for grounding far-reaching ideas in beautifully crafted, almost magical prose. Carl Hays
From Kirkus Reviews
In Goonan's medium-future world, space radiation prevents all broadcast communications, so communities are isolated. The wholesale application of nanotechnology, or ``nan,'' has led to dreadful wars, plagues, and a population crash. Young Verity, one of a small community of Shakers subsisting near deserted Dayton, Ohio, finds she has the ability to talk with the still extant, computerized Dayton library. She learns of the existence of the Queen City, Cincinnati, which is ``Enlivened,'' constructed and run by nan, governed by a hive mentality composed of huge genetically tailored Bees and Flowers that have become trapped in a hormonal feedback loop. After various adventures, and aided by her musician friend, Sphere, Verity enters Cincinnati and learns that she is only the latest of a series of clones programmed by one of the Enlivened city's vanished architects. Her function is to help the city out of its mindless, seasonal cycle of creation and destruction. So Verity must join the city's hormonal-informational network and become the queen Bee--a transformation that the city's mad creator is determined to prevent. Fuzzy, overlong, often poorly controlled, but flavorsome and wonderfully inventive, the centerpiece being Goonan's dazzling vision of new technology run riot. An exceptionally promising debut novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Unforgettable."
--William Gibson
"A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech."
--The New York Times
"An unforgettable vision of America transfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology. Greg Bear's Blood Music is perhaps the only other novel to have dealt so unflinchingly with the paradigm-shattering possibilities of a functioning nanotech. If a science fiction writer's job is to conceive the inconceivable, Goonan has arrived with an immaculate version of the traditional tool-kit--and the nerve to use it hard."
--William Gibson
"Goonan is one of the most imaginative authors in the literature of the imagination."
--David Brin
Praise for Queen City Jazz and Kathleen Ann Goonan
"Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan is a dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech. ...For Ms. Goonan, the freedom to remake the world in one's own image poses a terrible temptation. ... a first novelist of enormous talent and energy ...In the end, what saves her novel from self-destructing through sheer exuberance is the way that she grounds her apocalyptic vision in a few short, finely detailed scenes that reveal how personal failings can become writ large in the great events of history."--The New York Times
"[In] this already-celebrated debut . . . Goonan has written one of the most original, thought provoking novels to emerge from American writing in some time."--Des Moines Register
"Richly imagined...Goonan displays a rare gift for grounding far-reaching ideas in beautifully crafted, almost magical prose."--Booklist.
"In the hands of Kathleen Ann Goonan, the science of science fiction becomes something lyrical and vividly human, and the intricately imagined future she presents is thus rendered completely plausible and poignant in the extreme. Queen City Jazz is hands down the best first novel I've read in the genre in the past ten years."
--Lucius Shepard
"Kathleen Goonan is one of the very few writers of science fiction, today, willing to work with the unfettered vistas of abject weirdness presented by the apocalyptic potential of really new technologies."--William Gibson
Journal Entry 2 by Findabair at Kaffe & Krem, Vika in -- wild release somewhere in Oslo, Oslo fylke Norway on Monday, December 17, 2007
Released 16 yrs ago (12/17/2007 UTC) at Kaffe & Krem, Vika in -- wild release somewhere in Oslo, Oslo fylke Norway
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
RELEASE NOTES:
On the shelf, sometime this evening.
On the shelf, sometime this evening.
I shouldn't have, I know ... but I have been curious about this book for a while and when it was still on the shelf when I arrived for meetup today, well, I couldn't resist. :-) We'll see if it appeals more to me than it did to Findabair ... ;-)
