Wonderful heroic fantasy, in a thin veil of 'hard SF'.
I do not mean insult, although I know some people would take it so. I don't care, in speculative fiction, whether the unlikely powers are coherent with modern science or not: I care whether they're internally consistent. It helps if they don't provide too many deus ex machina or machina ex deus.
That brings us back to Memory; there are divinities and avatars, illimitable wealth, insidious dangers, a wounded world and a mad goddess - a quest across lifetime and chasms - really, heroic fantasy. Slghtly , and as in much Vance, the world runs on something like science - in this case, nanotech sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. Which is in its extravagances delightful, like the swoonier descriptive scenes from Yeats or Keats or Swineburne, but as with Vance's novels, the heroic quest is the better part.
I liked lots of techniques in the writing. They probably have names I don't know: the reuse of terms common now for clever futuristic devices, in ways that only slowly become clear; in fact, the uses of the items themselves only slowly become clear. But, however nifty, the supertech doesn't suddenly appear to get over difficulties we had been led to think insuperable challenges to our heroine. On the contrary, the most impressive capabilities are usually described in the heat of the action as the devices finally prove insufficient to the adventure. And this, of course, is how we experience most real technology: by the time we're running it flat out we usually need more than it can do.
I liked the language, too; precise and very slightly archaic, which fits the half-understood high-technology world on both its sides. And the young heroine leaving home is neither insipid nor dislikeable, and yet is a credible adolescent.
ISBN: 0-312-87721-8
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