Hope for Science Fiction

I wandered into the local public library this afternoon and a book caught my eye: Brasyl. I didn't know the author, Ian McDonald, but I read less and less SF these days. The dust-jacket copy alone is enough to warn me off most of it.

But this novel's set partly in São Paulo, which I vividly recall from a brief visit in 2002. So I brought it home, and it threatens to engulf my Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend.

Forget the publisher's blurb, ""Think Bladerunner in the tropics"—McDonald has plenty of hommages and quotes, but they're from better stuff than Bladerunner. I keep seeing Gabriel García Márquez slipping around the corners, with Neal Stephenson and Bill Gibson looking out of upstairs windows. But those are inside jokes decorating a strikingly original story.

McDonald understands that something is going on in Brazil that most of us have no clue about. He shows us big trucks on São Paulo's 2032 highways, carrying quantumeiros who exploit the computing power of countless universes. I well recall the motoqueiros who shot through the congested traffic of those highways in 2002 on motorcycles...the price of delivering stuff was about one motoqueiro's life per day.

I'm not very far into it, and I'll report on Brasyl more fully when I've finished it. But I don't expect to be disappointed, and I commend Ian McDonald to anyone who wants to write SF that takes its readers in new directions.