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A review by brizreading
The Mirage by Matt Ruff
5.0
What an inventive, illuminating spec fic book! This book really exhibited all that I love of well-made speculative fiction: by twisting only one aspect of our reality, it managed to provoke thought and delight. More often than not, I found myself smiling and shaking my head. "Oh my God, this is AMAZING," I kept thinking.
The twist (and it is pretty gimmicky, but what a payoff!): on November 11, 2001 (that is, 11/9), Christian fundamentalists ("Crusaders") crash two planes into the twin towers of Baghdad. Baghdad is one of the big cities of the "United Arab States" (UAS), the historical global superpower.
Everything falls from that. While our protagonist is Mustafa, a Homeland Security cop, we cross paths with everyone from Rumsfeld to Osama bin Laden. And, as the story eventually says, "A dark prince in one world is a dark prince in all worlds." Indeed, everyone's Bizarro!roles are at once familiar and strange: often illuminating on some aspect of their real world character or circumstances. And the whole upside-down world is an amazing mental exercise: I, at least, was constantly confronted with my Orientalist and War on Terror prejudices. Why does a broken-out Washington DC, where children throw rocks at (UAS) Marine tanks, strike me as so unbelievable? Why did the (no doubt intentional) over-familiarizing of the Homeland Security cops' stories constantly pull me back to "how American it sounded". And the way Christianity was treated; with the same post-colonial hegemonic condescension as the way the West treats Islam... Really a great book! It reminded me in style and inventiveness of Lydia Millet's equally strange and superb "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" (a story of atomic bomb scientists, Oppenheimer among them, waking up in 2003 New Mexico).
And what made me flip out, and give this the illustrious fifth star, is how - within this parallel worlds itself - our "real" world begins to push its way in. When the author introduced this, I was even more delighted - it was really exciting to see how he developed this.
Another thing this book did well (and a characteristic of my all-time favorite spec fic book, Gateway, by Fred Pohl) is the periodic primary document intervals: in this case, each chapter is prologued by a parallel-world Wikipedia article - here called the Library of Alexandria - on topics from women's rights to Saddam Hussein (here a mob boss) to 11/9 itself.
If I have one critique, it's that the story sometimes reads a bit too much like being TOLD (rather than shown) this amazing, strange place - especially when the author is establishing each cop's backstory (interesting as they all are). But that's a pretty small quibble, given how great the whole set-up and execution is.
SO. GOOD.
(Let it be known that my beloved Cory Doctorow first alerted me to this book via this Boing Boing post: http://boingboing.net/2012/02/07/matt-ruffs-the-mirage.html)
The twist (and it is pretty gimmicky, but what a payoff!): on November 11, 2001 (that is, 11/9), Christian fundamentalists ("Crusaders") crash two planes into the twin towers of Baghdad. Baghdad is one of the big cities of the "United Arab States" (UAS), the historical global superpower.
Everything falls from that. While our protagonist is Mustafa, a Homeland Security cop, we cross paths with everyone from Rumsfeld to Osama bin Laden. And, as the story eventually says, "A dark prince in one world is a dark prince in all worlds." Indeed, everyone's Bizarro!roles are at once familiar and strange: often illuminating on some aspect of their real world character or circumstances. And the whole upside-down world is an amazing mental exercise: I, at least, was constantly confronted with my Orientalist and War on Terror prejudices. Why does a broken-out Washington DC, where children throw rocks at (UAS) Marine tanks, strike me as so unbelievable? Why did the (no doubt intentional) over-familiarizing of the Homeland Security cops' stories constantly pull me back to "how American it sounded". And the way Christianity was treated; with the same post-colonial hegemonic condescension as the way the West treats Islam... Really a great book! It reminded me in style and inventiveness of Lydia Millet's equally strange and superb "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" (a story of atomic bomb scientists, Oppenheimer among them, waking up in 2003 New Mexico).
And what made me flip out, and give this the illustrious fifth star, is how - within this parallel worlds itself - our "real" world begins to push its way in. When the author introduced this, I was even more delighted - it was really exciting to see how he developed this.
Another thing this book did well (and a characteristic of my all-time favorite spec fic book, Gateway, by Fred Pohl) is the periodic primary document intervals: in this case, each chapter is prologued by a parallel-world Wikipedia article - here called the Library of Alexandria - on topics from women's rights to Saddam Hussein (here a mob boss) to 11/9 itself.
If I have one critique, it's that the story sometimes reads a bit too much like being TOLD (rather than shown) this amazing, strange place - especially when the author is establishing each cop's backstory (interesting as they all are). But that's a pretty small quibble, given how great the whole set-up and execution is.
SO. GOOD.
(Let it be known that my beloved Cory Doctorow first alerted me to this book via this Boing Boing post: http://boingboing.net/2012/02/07/matt-ruffs-the-mirage.html)