Queen City Jazz

Author: Kathleen Ann Goonan

New technologies are the life blood of science fiction as we imaginatively explore the effect they are likely to have upon the way we live our lives. One of the new technologies that started to attract interest in the 1990s was nanotechnology. In fiction, however, it was all too often presented as a sort of magic, a click of the finger and anything is transformed into anything else. It was Kathleen Ann Goonan's enthralling Nanotech Cycle that first began to picture how we would live, what society would be like, in a nanotech world. The first of the four novels to be published (though not the first by internal chronology) was Queen City Jazz, and encountering the book for the first time was a shock to the system. Everything had been transformed, so that the reader is constantly having to ask whether we are witnessing a disaster or a benefit, whether each new thing we meet is a threat or an aid. Often it could be both at once. Written in a free-flowing, jazz-tinged prose that would become typical of her work, the central story tells of the quest of a clone to revive her dead boyfriend and recover her telepathic dog. In a world where even the cities seem to have acquired a sort of transcendent sentience, the novel is crowded with invention and strangeness. It was one of the most arresting sf debuts of the 1990s. Why it's on the list: The novelty, the quality, the imagery, everything that we look for in science fiction is in this novel.