To Hold InfinityJohn Meaney
Bantam paperback, 556 pages, £5.99
Published April 1998
ISBN 0553505882
Review by Mike Don (1998)
Ever more intimate brain-computer interfacing is an obvious subject for SF. John Meaney’s Luculenti carry the concept as far beyond cyberpunk plugheads as they are beyond the sad anorak with a keyboard. With awesome processing power nanowired surgically into their brains, with instant access to a planet-wide super-Web, they have godlike intellectual powers. But, (and this, I feel, is the crux of To Hold Infinity), such powers are not matched by emotional or moral advances. Meaney asks how such a self-centred, arrogant, aristocratic society would cope with the murderous psychopath in its midst.
To Hold Infinity sparkles with ideas and dayglo-bright writing, but sometimes over-eggs the pudding with details and some ornate, purple prose. And would the computer-enhanced – cyborged, in a sense – Luculenti really behave exactly like every languidly elegant, decadent aristocracy in SF? Even so, John Meaney is an author to watch.