peter young’s listopia

44) Ian McDonald, Brasyl, 2007
Read over three days while in São Paulo, three words repeatedly kept coming to mind: Context Is Everything. When embedding a reader in the environment of a novel becomes almost as important as the plot, a difficult trick is to strike the right balance between the background and the story itself (another writer who come to mind who is almost as proficient as ianmcdonald at this is Richard Calder). Brasyl is, as expected, content-rich and context-heavy, at times overwhelmingly so, the details not so much in the minutiae of the characters lives and thoughts but more the environments that they inhabit, and this is what raises Brasyl far above and beyond what might otherwise be (in another universe at least) a fairly standard 'alternate universes' tale. Very memorable indeed, and the particular way by which Ian is taking SF out into the world (next stop: Turkey) is one I often wish others would follow.