Hal Duncan, Vellum
May. 4th, 2006 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienWell, that was different. Weird, amazing, disturbing, brilliant book.
Maybe you remember Alan Garner's Red Shift, where the story plays out over three different generations and 'red shift' is a pun, with different meanings in different times. Vellum does something like that, but with many more layers. It's hard (at least, I didn't entirely manage it) to sort out who's who and who's whose archetype, avatar, memory, echo or dream; names and characters and situations morph and echo in a crazy collage of images, in prose that's more than half poetry, shot through and shimmery with puns. It's ugly, grim, obscene in places, bewildering, but always compelling. It's a story of war, rebellion, revolution, love and death, woven out of myth and history and a powerful imagination. Also nanotech.
The initial image of the Vellum reminds me of what happens when you zoom all the way out in Google maps, until the continents repeat themselves across the screen ... only the world is fractal, intricate and self-similar as a Mandelbrot set. It gets stranger from there, though.
Maybe you remember Alan Garner's Red Shift, where the story plays out over three different generations and 'red shift' is a pun, with different meanings in different times. Vellum does something like that, but with many more layers. It's hard (at least, I didn't entirely manage it) to sort out who's who and who's whose archetype, avatar, memory, echo or dream; names and characters and situations morph and echo in a crazy collage of images, in prose that's more than half poetry, shot through and shimmery with puns. It's ugly, grim, obscene in places, bewildering, but always compelling. It's a story of war, rebellion, revolution, love and death, woven out of myth and history and a powerful imagination. Also nanotech.
The initial image of the Vellum reminds me of what happens when you zoom all the way out in Google maps, until the continents repeat themselves across the screen ... only the world is fractal, intricate and self-similar as a Mandelbrot set. It gets stranger from there, though.
