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Amazon.com Review What would it feel like to live through a biological revolution? Many science fiction writers chronicling a vast technological shift lose sight of the people who would have to deal with it. Not so Kathleen Ann Goonan, whose Crescent City Rhapsody is the third of her Nanotech Cycle novels. Each of her characters is profoundly real, and the things that happen to them are as confusing, awe-inspiring, and terrifying as you might expect. Goonan's story begins with the assassination of Marie Laveau, New Orleans cyber-entrepreneur and grand-niece of the famous voudoun queen. By prior arrangement, Marie is resurrected into a cloned body and prepares for revenge, but she awakens into a world beset by the Silence--periodic bursts of microchip-destroying radiation from space. Enter Dr. Zeb Aberly, a bipolar astrophysicist whose manic episodes help him understand that the Silence contains an alien message and perhaps the potential to change humanity's biology radically. Meanwhile, in Japan, a young biotechnician seals her fate when she helps steal the recipe for a Universal Assembler, a nanotech tool of fearsome power and destructive capability. The stage is set for a revolution, and Goonan delivers, with complex, interwoven story lines that resemble the rhythms and structure of a jazz composition. Brightly colored lines were inching their way up buildings like plants in a fast-growing jungle. She moved briskly, but her heart was lifeless. She was looking at her past and seeing a future that she was not a part of. People sat leaning against buildings here and there, which was the hardest to see. They were not begging. Their brains were changing. They were adapting to the new city. As cities become organisms, a new generation of profoundly different humans comes of age and hope dawns in Crescent City, and Goonan directs the show with artistic flair. Crescent City Rhapsody is confusing and delightful, a swoony harmony of words swirling around crisply melodic ideas. --Therese Littleton From Publishers Weekly In 2012, a mysterious alien signal from space strikes Earth, sending the Information Age into a horrifying tailspin. An intermittent Silence descends on the planet, disrupting all electronic devices and sparking a virus that nine months later produces mutated children with a heightened receptivity to electromagnetic forces. In New Orleans--home of the improvisatory jazz that has clearly inspired Goonan's extrapolation of current scientific trends--Marie Laveau, a mob chieftain and mulatto descendant of voudoun priestesses, is murdered by hit men, but then resurrected through the new science of nanotechnology. She launches a complex 20-year plan to save her city--and her world. Seceding from the Union, Marie's New Orleans becomes the jumping-off place for a new nation, Crescent City, a Caribbean island she creates. Marie eventually brings together Kita, a brilliant Japanese research scientist; Kita's lover, Hugo, who's Marie's faithful assistant; Zeb, the psychologically disturbed astrophysicist who first realized that an alien intelligence lay behind the Silence; Tamchu, a Tibetan refugee and terrorist; and Jason, one of the gifted mutant children. Like Marie, all have to risk extinction while they brave the apocalyptic storm unleashed by ecoterrorists and governments gone xenophobically mad. Their separate stories eventually intersect with Marie's attempt to birth a brave new world that someday will send humanity to the stars. Highly imaginative, peopled with intriguing characters and as intellectually demanding yet emotionally satisfying as Duke Ellington's best, Goonan's literary rhapsody continues her highly praised Nanotech Quartet (Queen City Jazz; Mississippi Blues; to be concluded with Light Music), which imaginatively explores the scientific perils and promises lying at our very doorstep. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space--and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.

And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau--a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess--is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie's vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her...and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.

Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born aroundthe world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.

"Crescent City Rhapsody is marvelous! Goonan carves out her own future territory with passionate conviction; her Jazz novels show her to be a master of speculation and of character, as well."(— Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Greg Bear)

"Kathleen Ann Goonan has written a great big gumbo of a novel, full of freewheeling extrapolation and invention, where dozens of exotic people-whether they know it or not-help push humanity into a future of miraculous blinding clarity." (— Multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Joe Haldeman)

"Crescent City Rhapsody takes us into a 21st century made nearly unrecognizable by biotechnology, with exciting, disturbing, intriguing aspects. Anyone concerned with how our ideas and our very selves will change, as biology bites deep, should enjoy this swift, smart tale." (— Nebula Award-winning author Gregory Benford)

When an electromagnetic pulse from space triggers a total communications blackout on Earth, astronomer Zeb Aberly tracks the signal to an intelligent alien race, but the government will stop at nothing ensure his silence. A woman mob boss, a Tibetan refugee, a nanotech spy, a New Age believer, and representatives of a dying alien race intersect and entwine as Goonan's tale of the birth of a brave new world unfolds