Paradox
John Meaney
Bantam hardback, 416 pages, £16.99
Published June 2000
ISBN 0593045734
Review by Mike Don (2000)
Set in the same near future history as To Hold Infinity, Paradox again displays Meaney’s original style. The reader is at once plunged into an exotic, rigidly stratified society (quite literally; questions about such practicalities as waste heat disposal are best ignored) with decadent Lords and Ladies on top and a Dickensian underclass in the depths. Very Dickensian, indeed, in plot terms too, the poor boy clawing back his inheritance and finding a place in the sun.
But, while Tom Corcorigan’s tale is conventional enough in fictional, even science fictional terms, the rest of the book certainly isn’t. The nanotech-invoked wonders of Nulapetron’s upper levels, and its decadent aristocracy, have a baroque richness usually found only in fantasy, or in the works of Jack Vance (but Vance’s amused aloofness has no place here). Entirely unique, though, is Meaney’s use of abstract mathematics: as a plot driver (the means of his protagonist’s advancement; as a polt resolver (the MacGuffin finally links the two, apparently unconnected, plot strands; and as an ends in itself, creating, in tandem with martial arts mysticism (another of Meaney’s specialties), something akin to prose poetry.
When this comes off, it’s brilliant, and doesn’t require a PhD to appreciate – when it doesn’t it’s just embarrassing. Exotic and colourful, but a bit too baroque for me.