Book Alert: The Dervish House

Ian McDonald's The Dervish House is rich and beautiful. It is a tale of nanotechnology, faith, the illusions of the world and their impact on humanity. It is a very human novel, firmly grounded in hüzün, the melancholic sense of decline which appears unique to Istanbul, once Constantinople, once Byzantium.

The novel begins with a suicide bomber on a crowded tram who kills nobody but herself, and unleashes angels of all kinds.

It's the story of Ayse, owner of a gallery of antiquities; Can, the almost permanently earplugged boy who controls nanobots; Georgios, an old radical 'experimental economist' who deals in information and probability; Adnan the rogue trader who is about to pull off the deal of the millennium with a little help from some friends; Necdet, who has begun to see the djinn and, more disturbingly, Hizir the Green Wanderer.

Most of all, it is a novel of Istanbul, mother of cities, daughter of its own rape.

It deserves its BSFA award. It is so much better than anything of William Gibson without having to descend into jargon, and it is a proper novel too. It will appeal to people who study development and post-colonialism and all that. Most of all, it will appeal not only to hardcore techie SF readers, but those who love good writing with character development and a sense of atmosphere. Rating: at least 9/10.

Rainbow Club: The Year In Review

I wasn't really awake until about noon today, having stayed up to welcome in the new year, been subjected to an indignity which was actually quite fun, and then collapsed totally unconscious into bed. The power supply was cut around 3 am, according to some accounts from reliable sources, but I knew nothing till this morning.

The noon bells are pealing now, from a renowned coastal church. I love those noonday bells; they are almost as iconic to me as the noonday gun in Hongkong. But my vision of the world is a splintered kaleidoscope of a myriad (Greek: 'ten thousand') colours, all shifting and somehow managing a tolerable, even if not entirely beautiful, blend.

Of all things, I was awoken by this article about colours. Amazing. I'd always thought that the reason blue was an outstanding hero costume colour was that early colour separation had no true black. Perhaps I was wrong. I always enjoyed Power Man, Iron Fist though. It was even cooler than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon decades later.

If I had a superhero costume, I'd dress in shades of grey and greyed colours. Dirty-winter colours – dove grey, arctic fox, ermine, vair; dashes and blotches of pale disenchanted blues, slate, dusty green, dusky rose and raven to break up the silhouette. I think I might even be invisible in public housing, the way things are these days. I would be the ultimate urban ghillie, armed with ballistic wrath and shiny steel sharpness. Ha, then again, I'd feel more comfortable taking down the symbols of empire from the shadows of the catacombs.

Perhaps it is easier to expose fables from the corridors of cyberspace, as the 'stainless steel rat' so beloved of Harry Harrison. Sometimes one feels sympathy for one's fellow inmates in the institution one has been committed to for so long. Sometimes one feels the need to take a stand on the shifting ground.

And of course, sometimes one despairs of the world, only to find delight in the light – as, for example, when one thinks of the egregious uses to which the word 'holistic' has been put. Sometimes one notices that some people seem to have turned their eyes upon the wrong kind of shininess. And of course, then one turns to the fellow-workers who shine by doing their work well, and one celebrates them; for like Housman's mercenaries, what God sometimes seems to have abandoned, we defend, and save the sum of things for pay.

Thank God that He does not truly abandon. Thank God that the world remains a kaleidoscope – a 'vision of beautiful images' as the direct transliteration might show. And thank God for rainbows, which assure us that the world will not be whelmed by water ever again.