mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
Cyberabad Days, (Pyr)


So, Mr. McDonald, we meet again.  I'll say right up front this may be the most coherent McDonald story I've ever read.  It is completely intelligible, has a beginning middle and end, and even a plot, all of these qualities that much of his work, I feel, seems to lack. I must of course admit that while I'm usually left scratching my head at the end of a McDonald story, unsure of any tangible fact taken from the text, it nevertheless goes on to be nominated and often to win several awards.  Or maybe I'm just finally starting to get the hang of his style.  It helps that this story is set in the same future-India as several of his other recent nominated work, and it also helps that this story is half again as long as the novellas from those prior entries, giving him more room within which to work.  But those features alone would not supplant or obfuscate structure, or plot, or enlightenment, so there must be something else that brings it all together this time.

This mostly earthbound story concerns the narrator Vishnu, who is reflecting on his life story to some unspecified audience.  The title here does the reader no favors, the cat circus is merely Vishnu's last career, he has cultivated a group of housecats who can walk nose to tail in a circle and can also walk on a tightrope.  His story begins with his parents, who met during a monsoon-induced flood.  Years later, India has broken up into several small republics, and the monsoons no longer appear, so water is in short supply.  But things haven't changed all that much, Indian families still want the best for their children, and in particular want them to have more privileges than those of their neighbors.  So Vishnu is conceived as part of a cutting edge genetic modification process that not only allows his parents to select for intelligence, but also for longevitiy, giving him at least twice the natural human lifespan.  The downside to this is that he matures at half the rate of normal children, and McDonald does a nice job of highlighting some of the challenges and contradictions produced by this elongated childhood and adolescence, both for Vishnu and his immediate family.

Vishnu's older brother Shiv is arguably brilliant also, without any genetic enhancements, but Shiv is largely ignored in favor of his gifted sibling and is justifiably jealous.  As they grow up, Vishnu really only interacts with others subjected to the same program.  For someone who is this brilliant, the normal pursuits of math and science aren't that appealing, and Vishnu finds his main area of interest to be in politics, a supremely chaotic system which he understands enough to enable him to exert some level of control.  One of his friends, to whom he is arrange to be married,  just spends all her time creating complicated card games.  Eventually Vishnu grows disaffected with all of it and ends up spending most of his life just wandering around the country, observing and interacting with people.  There's some food for thought there about the relative levels of intelligence and where the blessing/curse line may be and what really is important to people anyway.

Meanwhile Shiv has grown up and started his own company to develop nanotechnology that basically allows all of humanity to attain the singularity, effectively bypassing Vishnu's own genetic enhancement with something even more profound.  McDonald again has some interesting insight into how this would work for Vishnu, set on a certain path from birth and then before it can really reach fruition seeing it eclipsed by the next generation's own improvements.  So in the end maybe the cat circus has another meaning, from the viewpoint of uplifted humanity who are the cats and in what kind of circus do they find themselves?  Or maybe I'm making that part up, but while there's plenty of introspection here, McDonald doesn't supply any homilies or spell out any great wisdom, he just tells his story and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.  He has worked very hard and very thoroughly realized this non-western future society, giving it a density of detail and complexity that makes it seem more realistic.  It's not what I would call a fun read, but it's not difficult, and I don't see anything else out there that's anything like these stories that McDonald puts forth.  But it's all starting to make sense, one of us is starting to coalesce with the potential merit and stature of this body of work, and I have a feeling it's me.
posted by Mark at 11:14 PM