Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone reviewed by John Clute

Review of Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone by John Clute. Originally published in Interzone #81 (March 1994), page 61. © Interzone 1994. Reprinted with permission.

Like its title, Ian McDonald's Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (Bantam Spectra, $3.99) goes in circles in the imperative voice. It is meant to. The protagonist, a burnt-out case recycling his guilt through imagined conversations with the girl who loves him, goes on a circular pilgrimage in 21st-century Japan, doing so on a bicycle, and everything turns out to connect in the end. The style invokes TechnoGoth brutalisms, sensorium burn, the sense of a world (cycles of worlds) accessed through VRs, simulacra, artifactual memories and visions. It is very good. The plot is perhaps overneat in a way that conflates too kindly with the author's need to make sense of all this stuff: each of the main protagonists has invented a world-shaking gizmo or two: and the central cyclist retains, absolutely most improbably, sole access to his discovery of True Writing: "fracter" calligraphy which sidesteps the filters which keep human consciousness from burning up at the sight of God, thus allowing him to utter absolute commands couched as words from the mouths of the ten Sefirot of the Hebrew Cabala. The idea is too big, of course, for the book, and it burns it out when looked at (whenever I tried to understand what kind of book would be necessary to embody the concept, I felt like Semele). But the protagonist's cycle from burn-out to renewed love, and the guided tour of future Japan, both fit into the smaller book which is all we have, or should need.

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