FROM GREAT HEIGHTS

McBee’s post-apocalyptic tale follows three separate timelines in this SF thriller.

In Kuridian, a bleak dystopian landscape of primitive settlements and suspicious rustics, a “gris-gris man” called Rance drifts from community to community dispensing mystical services and favors. He is not a shaman or hoodoo soothsayer but rather a long-lived holdover from the previous century, when vat-spawned people were infused with wonder-working nanotechnology—a necessity for survival and settling the harsh terrain of another planet. After an apocalyptic “Breakdown,” subsequent generations have largely forgotten these origins. Rance and scattered other “Watchers” like him try to revive the lost high-tech civilization, but it appears to be a futile struggle. In the same setting, a woman called Regaline tries to round up and train nano-gifted children who show signs of being able to control their latent nanite powers. But a conquest-minded city-state called Interland is also on the move, enslaving all such “casters” and weaponizing them as drone-soldiers for their invasions. In a third narrative thread (one with strong Philip K. Dick overtones), Kinney works for the giant HelixCom company on a nanotechnology base on an alien world, participating in terraforming the ecosystem for human life. He is sent by his shadowy superior to infiltrate a poorly run sister installation in search of possible espionage and sabotage, and he is met with hostility by new fellow employees, especially the beautiful Astrid Free. The three parts eventually tie together in a satisfying, if not entirely clear, sequence set in a milieu in which deep-space colonization requires long-range projections of “capsules containing payloads of programmable matter” and downloaded minds rather than the SF genre’s typical astronauts and colony ships. The unintended consequences are cleverly explored; nanotech becomes a sort of all-purpose magic, enabling wizardlike elemental combat and even something approximating vampirism (though this latter quality goes largely unexplored). The intricate, time-looping structure allows the author to drop numerous shocking reveals on the reader.

A multitiered SF story cunningly rendered in nonchronological fashion.