- Title:
- Mississippi Blues
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Tor Books, 1997
- ISBN
- 0-312-85917-1
Mississippi Blues is one of those books that I read, wishing I'd read many more books than I have. It makes quite open use of allegorical references, allowing, for example, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to guide its progress for long stretches of the book. I am fairly certain that many other references to literature with which I am not familiar were lost on me.
Goonan continues the story started in Queen City Jazz in this book. The story has continuity through two characters that were central to the earlier book, and through the main plot device, nanotechnology, a pervasive form of technology that is changing humanity as we watch.
Nanotechnology is the maguffin of science fiction these days. Almost every science fiction story includes some role for nanotechnology. But Goonan takes the science fiction cliché far beyond its gadget building status, to contemplate the nature of humanity.
Like Twain's trips down the Mississippi, Goonan's story reflects a certain fatalistic attitude, waiting for what comes around the next bend. She shows us an uncertain future, but at the same time she apparently wants us to believe that things will get better.
Verity, the clone of a woman long dead, haunted by the memories of that woman, finds herself leading the inhabitants of Cincinnati out of a kind of slavery. Their goal is "Norleans"; this goal is as artificial and involuntary as the life they had been leading in Cincinnati, but Verity hopes that at the end of the journey will be release for everyone.
Goonan peoples their journey with strange visions of different kinds of manmade hell. She illustrates that it isn't the new technology that is evil, but the use that people make of it. She paints a past in which this technology served only the rich and powerful, but now it has gotten away from everyone.
Various characters join Verity on her journey. There are Jack and Lil, two mysterious people that reminded me of the Duke and the King from Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Mattie, a young Black girl who is infected with a teaching program that is slowly turning her into Mark Twain, guides their journey through its last stages. Peabody, the mysterious man from Chicago, seems to know more than anyone else, and keeps the ship running even as it disintegrates around its passengers. Blaze, the musical prodigy, is the only character who tells his story in first person, and goes off to take the reader along on a journey to a Los Angeles that has truly become a city of angels.
Goonan asks a question I find many authors asking these days, even authors writing in fields far removed from the speculative nature of science fiction.
"What is human?"
It isn't a new question. Other authors often answer this question by resorting to authoritative sources like religious dogma, or by romanticizing our primitive past. Goonan grips the bull by the horns; she will not hide behind platitudes. We can change ourselves, she points out. Whether we change in a minor way or in a major way is besides the point. All changes challenge our nature. Blaze eventually explains it, speaking, very likely, for the author.
"We are matter."
Goonan argues that our nature is determined by our bodies, and that if we change our bodies, we will change our nature. More significantly, she suggests that if we want to change our nature, we may need to change our bodies. This, she says, won't necessarily make us less human, but it may allow us to become more of who we want to be.