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stevev
, July 10, 2020
(view all comments by stevev)
This is my favorite of Linda Nagata's novels. Its narrator, Jubilee, lives in a world that seems magical. Floods of a fog-like "Silver" often rise at night, reforming the landscape and dissolving anyone caught in it. One night, her younger brother Jolly somehow calls the Silver to himself and vanishes into it, and years later she encounters a stranger looking for Jolly who can somehow pass through the Silver unharmed, and then gets word that Jolly is still alive, sending her on a quest to find him and possibly even to bring the Silver under control. Nagata portrays Jubilee's world as a beautiful, ancient, and dangerous place, but the reputed gods who created it were masters of nanotechnology, not magic, and the Silver is the nanotech that maintains the world run amok.
I recently re-read Memory in preparation for reading her new novel Silver that is set on the same world, and that also ties it in to her earlier Nanotech Succession series (The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, Vast). It was just as wonderful the second time as the first.
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