n the 1970s, college buddies Jonathan Wilde and David Reid shared a
passion for leftist politics, science fiction and a woman named Annette.
Centuries later, Wilde and Reid are mortal--or rather immortal--enemies,
locked in a struggle for the fate of humanity.
When Wilde wakes up in the deserts of New Mars, he remembers having
died in the mid-21st century as Reid looked on. A robot named Jay-Dub
claims to have resurrected Wilde, though it does not tell him how or why.
Wilde dutifully follows Jay-Dub to Ship City, a bizarre metropolis of
humans, robots, intelligent apes and entities that defy easy
classification.
Ship City is also home to David Reid, whose android, or "gynoid," sex
toy has run away. Dee Model, as she is called, has a cybernetic brain but
a body cloned from Annette, Wilde's late wife. Wilde discovers this
during a brief, chance meeting in a Ship City bar, and he's not happy at
all.
Wilde files charges against Reid for having killed the original Jon
Wilde. Meanwhile, a woman named Tamara, a crusader for the civil rights
of artificial intelligences such as Dee, faces charges from Reid for
stealing his gynoid. New Mars is a libertarian society, so the plaintiffs
have to hire a commercial judge. It's sort of like Mad Max meets Judge Wapner.
Wilde's resurrection, Dee's fight for freedom and the courtroom
showdown, it turns out, are all part of a larger scheme engineered by an
unknown party for an unknown and quite possibly sinister purpose.
Slow, but a riveting finale
The Stone Canal begins and ends brilliantly, but bogs down in the middle. Chapters alternate between Wilde and Dee's
adventures on New Mars and scenes from the "original" Wilde's life. The
plot is complex, and rendering it in two asynchronous narratives is a
tricky juggling act. MacLeod drops a few balls before finding his rhythm.
While MacLeod describes Wilde's transformation from obscure left-wing SF
buff to powerful 21st-century anarcho-capitalist in bewildering detail,
he offers only sporadic insight into the man's inner life. The New
Mars chapters move in circles for a while, as if marking time to keep
pace with the lumbering flashbacks. Dee and a friend go on a pointless
killing spree, inconveniencing their generally deserving victims, who
suffer extended "down time" while new bodies are cloned.
After this lull the story moves at a furious pace. MacLeod offers a
frightening, plausible picture of a balkanized Great Britain and a
nuclear war in Europe. When the long-contained genies of artificial
intelligence and nanotechnology escape from their bottles, a strange era
of "posthuman" life begins.
MacLeod deftly merges the stories of the pre- and post-death John
Wilde in a gripping finale. But the ending too obviously functions as a setup for The Cassini Division, the 1999 novel that marked MacLeod's American debut. Those who haven't read The Cassini Division, which is actually a sequel to The Stone Canal,
may want to get their hands on a copy as soon as possible.
