ason Peabody was born at the end of the Information Age, conceived right around the time that transmissions from outer space disrupted electronic communications grids. The transmissions brought the Silence, shutting down the Internet, television and radio—and taking the global village with them. Thanks to life-extending nanotechnology, Jason has survived the fall of his civilization, living long enough to see the old world fall into anarchy.
Now he lives in Crescent City, a nanotech island floating in the Caribbean whose mission is to continue to advance science and technology until humans can venture into space to seek the source of the Silence-bringing broadcasts. Unfortunately, the city is attacked by pirates shortly before it is due to launch, and one of the casualties of the battle is its critical cache of navigation data. Jason is conscripted to venture out into post-Silence North America to retrieve the navigational data from
Houston ... to restore, in essence, humanity's best chance for continued survival.
Jason and his companion Dania are far from the only pair on a quest in Kathleen Ann Goonan's Light Music, though. Two women from the moon colony are trying to make it earthside in time for the city's launch into space, while a woman named Angelina searches for her missing son ... even after she finds evidence that he has been turned to pure light. Travelling with Angelina is a sentient doll, Chester, who wants to become fully human. All of these seekers are aimed—one way or another—at Crescent City. Each has information critical to the launch. Whether the city will wait for them, though, is anybody's guess.
A tour through an SF candy store
Light Music is the last book in Goonan's Nanotech Quartet, and like its predecessor relies less on smooth narrative flow—which is impossible in such a chopped-up setting—than on ceaseless attention-grabbing details which pull readers into its world. Unregulated wonders of science and bizarre subcultures proliferate by the dozen, each rising up just long enough to offer readers one good look before vanishing. The story bounces across the globe, from Texas to Los Angeles to Paris and
back, all while displaying the effects of various runaway nanotechnologies.
The characters are similarly broken down. Peabody is carrying Crescent City's backup archive of information on the American West, which manifests itself as a cowboy persona uninterested in his search for the navigational data. Angelina has overdosed on literature, using nanotech to absorb a heaping portion of fiction and folklore all at once. The young moon colonist, Su-Chen, is an autistic musician and recently orphaned. This doubled fracturing of both setting and characters may make Light Music hard going for readers who prefer to have something to ground them in its story.
Goonan is an extremely strong portrait artist, though, and even in their shaken state, the people who inhabit this novel are compelling. The development of the relationship between Angelina and Chester is one of the standout delights of the book—unique, offbeat and always touching. Jason's struggle to keep his inner cowboy on task is charming and pathetic by turns, and what he finds when he finally reaches Houston is both a surprise and completely logical.
With so many standout moments and the big fireworks at its conclusion, Light Music is a good bet to please readers, especially those who have followed this low-key apocalypse since it began to unfold in Queen City Jazz.
