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A review by apatrick
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
4.0
I think I could read this four or five times and keep uncovering gems. The stories nest inside each other, a little like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but not exactly. The whole book is also about questioning what identity and reality are, and those are some heavy questions.
As with Angelmaker and Edie Investigates, Harkaway writes strong women well; not all men do. The key? They're just normal people, with the same kinds of internal drives as anyone else. Fundamentally, we're all very different, but we're also fundamentally all the same. Many male writers, especially in science fiction, write their female characters as the literary equivalent of cartoon characters -- add a bow or some eyelashes, and presto, your character is now a "girl". The problem with that approach is that is assumes the default "person" is male. As a very un-girly girl, it always drives me crazy. You don't have to give a character a shoe-shopping habit in order to make her female; just write about a person.
Anyway, Harkaway is one of my favorite authors, and this book doesn't disappoint.
As with Angelmaker and Edie Investigates, Harkaway writes strong women well; not all men do. The key? They're just normal people, with the same kinds of internal drives as anyone else. Fundamentally, we're all very different, but we're also fundamentally all the same. Many male writers, especially in science fiction, write their female characters as the literary equivalent of cartoon characters -- add a bow or some eyelashes, and presto, your character is now a "girl". The problem with that approach is that is assumes the default "person" is male. As a very un-girly girl, it always drives me crazy. You don't have to give a character a shoe-shopping habit in order to make her female; just write about a person.
Anyway, Harkaway is one of my favorite authors, and this book doesn't disappoint.