manda Kolby-McAllister is almost 30, frozen in pre-adolescence by a culture that uses long childhoods to prepare its citizens for an almost eternal life as twenty-somethings. On the verge of a lightning-fast transition to full adulthood, Amanda is brilliant, daring and bored out of her skull. Determined to make the most of her legal status—as long as she is still a minor, her most outrageous and illegal stunts are barely prosecutable—she comes up with a reckless scheme for a thrill ride that will make her, as she puts it, a Mall God.
Unfortunately for Amanda, the first phase of her plan requires access to a tunnel that is on restricted land. The Valley of the God of One's Choice is a haven for people who reject the high-tech civilization surrounding it. Mule-driven carts and conservative values flourish in this tiny sanctuary.
Its inhabitants,
unlike anyone else on earth, forgo the life-extending medical enhancements available to them. They are born, age and die normally.
Amanda can see that getting into the Valley will require insider assistance, so she strikes up a relationship with a young man named Mathewmark. Superstitious, innocent and earnest, Mathewmark is
half-convinced that Amanda is a minion of Satan, but even so, he is quite unable to resist her eccentricity and outsider charm. Soon enough—against his better judgment—the young man finds himself facilitating the young daredevil's invasion of the Valley. In doing so, he opens himself to
expulsion from the only home he has ever known, not to mention the great possibility that Amanda's stunt will get him killed.
Exciting, funny and brimming with passion
Damien Broderick's Transcension is a complex book, one that braids Amanda and Mathewmark's separate coming-of-age stories with a third—even as they grow up, a dangerous artificial intelligence is also reaching maturity. The book offers a multi-faceted view, then, of the process of becoming an adult. It is a fuzzy transition and the author knows it—plenty of the other alleged grown-ups who cross paths with the young protagonists have maturity issues of their own.
The setting is sketched out in bold lines and then brought to life less through an exhaustive level of detail than by the strength of the characters inhabiting it. Mathewmark makes an excellent foil for the boisterous Amanda, with her worldly ways and outrageous mode of speaking. The two youngsters are the backbone of a story which is much bigger than either of them. As their friendship progresses, it also provides a down-to-earth human element that anchors the AI's transformation.
Transcension shifts from a focus on the two young people to the AI's world-spanning crisis, a move which is in some ways as bumpy as the growing-up process of its subject matter. The lighthearted action moves into the murkier waters of genuine human emotion. Jealousy, terror and love are all dished up in the latter sections of the novel, as Broderick ably steers readers through what may be SF's most optimistic Armageddon scenario. Along the way, Transcension provides a tour that will give
rise to laughter, fear and plenty of wonder, too.
