Kathleen Ann Goonan’s first novel, Queen City Jazz, propelled her into the front ranks of speculative fiction. Her lyrical and imaginative renderings of a near future transfigured by the wonders and dangers of nanotechnology provide readers tantalizing glimpses of scientific advances just beyond the cutting edge...and the unpredictable human consequences following in their wake. Now comes Goonan’s most ambitious, penetrating look yet into the exotic future already flowering around us--and perhaps within us.
It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space--and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.
And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau--a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess--is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie’s vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her...and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.
Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born around the world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.
The eye of the apocalyptic storm is a radically transformed New Orleans, where Marie Laveau works feverishly to build a safe haven for the hunted and oppressed, gathering the best and the brightest to build her utopia dream. But time is running out. With the military might of a new and repressive world order ranged against her, Marie’s only hope lies in the most dangerous piece of nanotechnology ever devised: A technology capable of saving the human race--or destroying it.
448 p
