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The Nature of Smoke

This struck me as a rather schizophrenic book, as it tries to meld hard-edged adventure with semi-mystical musings on chaos theory. At times, it's fascinating. At other times, it's haphazard.

The Nature of Smoke's protagonist is Magnolia, a young escapee from the bombed-out slums of Detroit in the near future. Finding herself in New York, she's roped into the role of victim in a slasher/porn film, but she manages to turn the tables, stab her attacker, and escape. She's then enlisted by Rahul, a man who saw her 'performance' and wishes to study her strong, unpredictable behavior to pattern his line of artificial humans after. But some of Rahul's underlings, for reasons of their own, hide her away in a Siberian mansion, where she begins a relationship with Cid, a woman doing research there into Rahul's one successful effort to create artificial consciousness.

All this probably suggests that the book tends to take a lot of unexpected twists and turns, and it does, not always gracefully. The individual pieces stand well on their own, but getting from one segment to another is often rather jarring. Magnolia herself is a peculiar dichotomy, a strong woman capable of certain forms of action, but very much out of her league in the world of Cid and her co-workers. Although intellectually plausible, something about her character just didn't feel right to me; I think it had to do with the rather spotty background given Magnolia, a background which focused mainly on events she'd witnessed, and only abstractly on what she thought or felt or wanted as a result of those events.

Nature's scientifictional hook mainly has to do with Tumcari, the aforementioned artificial consciousness, whose cells seem to have a direct link to events happening elsewhere in the world, a connection likened in the novel to the quantum behavior of subatomic particles. The novel uses this hook by "infecting" Cid (and a few others) with the same ability, which lends some segments an eerie feeling of predestination to them; things happen the way they do because Cid (or someone) perceives the patterns of human motion around them, and understand the ends to which that will lead. But this element isn't really explored to any great depth.

Ultimately, it didn't seem to me that Nature aspired to be a whole lot more than a sharp techno-adventure, although it was peppered with tidbits that fell outside that boundary, but the whole didn't hold together all that well, for me. Of course, it's certainly possible that I fell enough outside its target audience that I didn't pick up on points that might engage other readers. But my personal assessment is that it's an interesting curiosity more than anything else.