The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 September 2005
by Kathleen Ann Goonan
In this complicated and somewhat uneven book, we enter the technical near-future in the Hawaiian Islands, a world of DNA manipulation, nanotechnology, and a vast consortium putting together mankind's first interstellar journey. Interspace is a giant organization, a collection of all the world's space programs, privatized. It has its own secret police, and early in the book, the reader knows that it is responsible for several murders and assassinations. This is Hawaii in the near future, too, and its native independence movement has been given all of the Kohala peninsula on the Big Island, while carrying on a guerilla battle against Interspace, which has largeley taken over the island chain. One of two protagonists is Lynn Oshima, a young woman who once worked for Interspace, and who is the daughter of its founder. It is 2034, and she lives in Honolulu, now a dense city controlled by Interspace. She stumbles across a plot to clone the great Hawaiian king Kamehameha, has a miscarriage and is whisked away to Hong Kong and Tibet. All in the first forty pages. Lynn is buying Mao's DNA for her personal collection and is chased across the globe, but not for reasons she assumes.
Meanwhile, back in 2007, Century Kalakaua, remote descendent of Hawaii's king Kalakaua, is discovering for himself a magical quality of time and space. He is having visions of the last princess Kaiulani, and is convinced she is somehow traveling forward in time. This leads Cen back and forth across the globe, himself, in service to Interspace, and in search of his own solutions to the fractals of spacetime. Maybe he can "jump the fractal", and join Kaiulani in a parallel universe. Lynn goes to Tibet in 2034, meets the new Dalai Lama, who happens to be a woman and a physicist who is working on solving Cen Kalakaua's "Kaiulani Proofs". Lynn doesn't get to learn much before having to flee again with Akamu, Kamehameha's clone, to Nepal and Thailand. Eventually, these two plot lines in two time periods converge in the battle against Interspace and the yearning to travel through space and time. The book is somewhat of a mess, with its two plots feeling a little pasted together. However, Goonan does depict Hawaii and the Hawaiians with sympathy and accuracy. As much as one might expect from a haole, after all. The islands and these people are brought to the page with care. For that alone, this book is a worthwhile read. There aren't that many fiction books about Hawaii, really, and even fewer science fiction books set there. Her trip to Tibet is less convincing, and the technological Shangri-La she portrays enters fantasy. Lynn Oshima's trials are punctuated too frequently by moments in which she's finally going to be told what is really going on, only to be interrupted by gunfire. This causes the book to drag and become repetitive. One can imagine the same inventive plot further streamlined. A final critique is that, for a book with mathemeticians as heroes, precious little math of convincing depth is given. Stretches read as if lifted whole from The Dancing Wu Li Masters and the time travel device is left to the imagination. Nevertheless, Goonan's descriptions of Hawaii and its characters earn this troubled book a recommendation.