Each tower had … specializations. In Tower 7, it was advanced and aggressive genetic manipulation and cloning. In Tower 7, people and creatures were invented, altered, or both. Some were deformed, some were mentally ill, some were just plain dangerous, and none were flawless. Yes, some of us were dangerous. I was dangerous. [loc. 158]
After a lightning storm in the desert and a glimpse of a winged figure, an old man named Sunuteel explores a cave and discovers an ancient text. The ambience is Biblical, but the setting is centuries from now, and that text tells of genetic manipulation, science indistinguishable from magic, a winged man who cannot die and the eponymous Phoenix, who dies to rise again.
Phoenix's book tells us that she was created only a couple of years ago in Tower 7, by a company called LifeGen, but has the appearance of a woman in her forties. She reads immensely fast, though most of the books she's given don't reflect her self-image. 'I’d wondered if I was made from inferior DNA. Then I started mixing books written by Africans about Africans into the ones I was reading. These stories were different...' When the man she's starting to love, Saeed (who can't metabolise human food, and thrives on a diet of rust and stone), dies, Phoenix's grief and rage becomes destructive, and Tower 7 is destroyed. She flees to Africa, where her ancestors came from, but is hunted down again. And she encounters a woman named HeLa, whose blood confers immortality -- for those who can pay.
There is a lot in this novel, and I probably didn't register all of it. (For one thing, it's the prequel to Who Fears Death, which won the World Fantasy Award but which I haven't read.) But the racism, misogyny and colonialism of Phoenix's future is all too familiar, and her fury and vengefulness ring true. For much of the novel, even she can't decide whether she's heroine or villain. But she creates this record of apocalypse -- and when it is found by Sunuteel many years later he 'declared the authors dead and did with the information what he would'.
I found that element of the framing narrative disturbing, and there were points where the novel felt as though it had been assembled from shorter pieces: but it was a compelling read, with mythic imagery and some fascinating characters. Also: 'artificially intelligent Nigerian robots ... travelled across the Atlantic to the land of the co-financiers of their creation. They were explorers. In their brains of wire, electricity, and metal they were probably colonizers'. Perhaps more frightening a concept now than when this novel was published in 2015...
I bought this in June 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.
No comments:
Post a Comment