Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan

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Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan.
pub: Gollancz. 424 page paperback. Price: Ł 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-85798-889-2.

check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk

Crescent City is in crisis. The time approaches when it wishes to leave the Earth and launch itself into space. The city is alive and supports its human population by providing all of its needs.

However this paradise is brutally invaded by pirates. Lacking the ability to help itself, the city enlists Jason Peabody, the last radio engineer. Peabody has been listening for years it seems, but mostly there is radio silence.

While he is linked to the Consilience, a disruption to the system causes his personality to be overlaid by that of Radio Cowboy who is keener to get to a rodeo than help the city.

Peabody/Radio Cowboy’s quest is for the city’s guidance system left in Johnson Space Centre in Houston many years previously. His travelling companion is Dania a woman healed and remade by the city.

They are both traumatised and by the time they have left Crescent City they have forgotten their quest, and split up in a seemingly random pattern of travel. Peabody, who fights with Radio Cowboy for control of his personality, meets ‘old’ children growing younger by the day due to pollution in their water systems. Dania meets the 'nows' and experiences the strange travelling lights that seem to absorb people.

There are other characters in this novel that are all destined to get to the city. Io is from the Unity Moonbase and following visits from the lights she finds herself alone apart from Su-Chen who has also resisted the pull of the light beings. Su-Chen seems to be autistic but with an incredible ability to create music.

Angelina travels from her ranch in Argentina to find her son Louis. Her encounter with a mysterious book, containing the ‘Hopscotch’ programme, changes her outlook on life quite radically. Along the way she meets Chester the sentient doll who just wants to be real.

All this takes place in a world that may be our near future. The world was first created for Goonan’s novel ‘Crescent City Rhapsody’. In that book the Internet and satellite era was ended over night by pulse transmissions of apparently alien origin.

This silent world has different kinds of technology where money literally grows on trees and many other things besides. It should be a world of plenty but many are suspicious of nanotechnology and prefer a traditional way of life. The population that lives outside treats the great ‘flower cities’ with suspicion and the cities are choosy whom they let in.

This book has an almost dream like quality to it. Far from the discussion of hardware it very much concentrates on the ‘soft’ wear of human and sometimes machine interaction. There are many debates about what the meaning of life is and the constantly changing nature of existence.

There are music, mathematics and light and a sense of trying to reach towards some conclusions about where man is going. Goonan’s use of certain concepts as the Consilience, the living heart of the city, which gives and receives from its human inhabitants, has echoes from many sources. The difficulty of determining where life begins and ends has been plaguing humanity for the longest time.

The book is about a journey and it is an exciting one. It is a warm and living story and richly describes each physical location. Goonan creates likeable characters but the story drives them rather than vice versa. The book is peppered with strange occurrences that emphasise how much the world has changed.

A pair of sunglasses that, recognising her DNA provides her with extensive details of her divorce case. The details scroll down the glasses every time she puts them on. The Radio Cowboy does not shoot bullets but show tunes from his guns causing one attacking pirate to burst into a rendition of ‘Oklahoma’.

The whole of it is an intriguing and tantalising mix of references to literature, music and physics. It makes a pleasing change from the doom-laden scenarios of so many books set in the future. Ideally, the Crescent City Rhapsody should be read first but do not dismiss this as just a sequel it stands up well on its own.

Sue Davies

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