Ian McDonald's Terminal Cafe (known in the UK as Necroville) is all atmosphere and no drive. In McDonald's dystopian vision of the far future, nanotechnology has allowed people to resurrect the dead, leading to a huge underclass of working stiffs. Immortality aside, the dead don't seem to be different from living humans in any significant respect (they don't crave brains, for instance), but they've nevertheless developed some weird customs, most of them centered around their ability to recover from any lethal encounter by immersing themselves in "Jesus tanks." Somewhere in the middle of this odd mix is Santiago Columbar, a hallucinogen trafficker, and a couple of his friends--Sebastian (I think), who hooks up with a very wise but very dead whore; Trinidad, who goes hunting; and Yo Yo Mok, a lawyer. (Yay!) Over the course of a single day, they have to deal with dead people invading from space, dead people rebelling on Earth, and the worst lawsuit ever.

McDonald creates a terrific setting for Terminal Cafe. His far future is a grimy hallucination filled with sex, violence, and ultra-tech, and his feverish prose sheds a sick light on a world rotting away at its core.

The problem is that the book is so damned boring. It has a meandering and fragmented plot. It has no interesting characters, despite offering a surfeit of them. And it's filled with too many events that are gorgeously described but ultimately pointless (e.g., the Hunt). Terminal Cafe has plenty of interesting scenery. (The best is his description of how the dead live in space.) But it's a hard slog to get through.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu