Venturing into Brasyl

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.