Subject: Review: "The White Abacus" by Damien Broderick

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 24 Jun 1998 15:18:03 -0400

"The White Abacus" by Damien Broderick
		A Postview, copyright 1998 p-m agapow

It is the distant future.  Within the solar system, humans and AIs lead an
idyllic existence aided by near-universal availability of teleportation
and the AI super-mind, the Gestell.  But the Asteroid Belt, cut off from
teleportation, has given rise to a divergent warring society full of
superstitions and plotting.  Ratio, a neonate AI, is ordered to do the
unthinkable - cut itself off from the Gestell so it may befriend a Belter
heir, infiltrate Belter society and thwart an ambitious warlord who
threatens all sentient beings.

"The White Abacus" collected a Ditmar this year.  Although I am unfamiliar
with most of its competitors, this can't be a bad thing.  It's a
rollicking, enjoyable space opera with quite a few slabs of intelligent
speculation that stumbles only a few times.  According to the back cover,
even Roger Zelazny liked it.  (Hasn't ol' Roj gotten opinionated since he
died?)

Style-wise, "The White Abacus" (the meaning of the title is oblique and
revealed only at the novel's end) is initially a hyperactive, overblown
melodrama in the style of Alfred Bester, especially "The Stars My
Destination" and "The Demolished Man."  Other obvious comparisions are
Shakespearian tragedy and Walter Jon Williams' "Aristoi."  One half of the
starring cast, the disenfranchised Telmah Lord Cima spirals about in an
emotional maelstrom from torment to hate to torment to passion to torment
and then torment a few more times for good measure.  His adversary, the
assassin Feng Lord Cima (of course he's called Feng, we already have a Fu
Manchu), practically twirls his mustache while spouting purple lines like:

	"You posturing martinet!  Talk of courage?  You toy with your 
	blades and guns.  I rode a geodesic on the event horizon of an 
	active metric defect!"

Insert maniacal laughter.  A style like this is easy to make fun of and
difficult to get right, but Broderick pulls it off and makes the over-the-
top histrionics readable, fun and interesting, usually without descending
into absurdity.  It clangs once or twice with lines like "In a wild
rhapsody, he apostrophizes his enemy."  He did what?

The AI Ratio, the other half of the starring cast, provides the necessary
balance to the wild Telmah.  A melancholy figure caught in a terrible form
of exile from his own kind, it provides narration and an outsider's eye on
the strange Belter society.  There is also a range of suitably colourful
supporting characters and settings, from a spaceship-piloting chicken, the
perverse Lord Brass (who has regressed into a giant baby) and a gravity-
defying giant aquarium captured in the heart of an asteroid.  A minor
quibble here - Telmah meditates at one point on a protein sequence,
including the strange abundant amino acid "Gin".  Uh-uh.  "Gln" -
Glutamine.  Us biologists are tetchy about these things.

As the inevitable bloody finale erupts, the book is disrupted by the
rather bizarre inclusion of a piece of 20th century email pontificating on
the nature of interpretation and narrative.  Bizarre, because while this
text makes perfect sense in context (two AIs exchange notes on whether
humans are preprogrammed to act against their own best interests), it is
the signal for a sub-plot or extended discourse to spring up and largely
take the place of the collapsing plots of conspiracy and revenge for the
final 100 pages.  To be fair, this theme has been brewing the whole novel.
However it takes a bit of wind out of the climax, without even having
enough space to develop itself fully.  All the scenes from this point on
feel rather abbreviated.  One wishes this theme was more fully integrated
into the main plot or given the room to unwrap its rather difficult
questions.

I fear that some readers may be put off by the Nietzschean dimensions of
the plot, as happened with Williams' "Aristoi."  This is unfortunate,
because they will be missing out on what is a good story, and a little bit
more.  [***/interesting] and "Elsinore 90,210" on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Damien Broderick
%T The White Abacus
%I Avon
%C New York
%D 1997
%P 342pp
%G ISBN 0-380-78559-5
%O paperback, Aus$15.95

Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked]), La Trobe Uni
"There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire."