Brasyl

Starred review from March 26, 2007
British author McDonald's outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America's largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all. McDonald sets up three separate characters in different eras—a cynical contemporary reality-TV producer, a near-future bisexual entrepreneur and a tormented 18th-century Jesuit agent. He then slams them together with the revelation that their worlds are strands of an immense quantum multiverse, and each of them is threatened by the Order, a vast conspiracy devoted to maintaining the status quo until the end of time. As McDonald weaves together the separate narrative threads, each character must choose between isolation or cooperation, and also between accepting things as they are or taking desperate action to make changes possible. River of Gods
(2004), set in near-future India, established McDonald as a leading writer of intelligent, multicultural SF, and here he captures Latin America's mingled despair and hope. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance.

April 15, 2007
In 2006, TV producer Marcelina embarks on a search for the next big reality show; instead, she tracks down an elusive former soccer star and unearths a conspiracy. In 2032, talent scout Edson comes into contact with an illegal technology that traverses the realms of probability and parallel universes. In 1732, Jesuit missionary Father Luis Quinn seeks out an errant priest who has created his own empire in the Brazilian jungle. The stories of three people at three different time periods and in three unique Brazils come together in a grand novel spanning centuries and realities. Philip K. Dick Award winner McDonald ("Desolation Road") imagines a history of Brazil that challenges all preconceptions, and he has a gift for wordsmithing, creating lyrical passages of superb storytelling that move with the times while remaining both current and timeless. Libraries of all sizes would benefit from adding this title to their sf collections.

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