RADIX [Mass Market Paperback]

There is no doubt in my mind that Attanasio is a sci-fi visionary. In a field that unfortunately is filled with pulp, bad fan fiction and shamless rip-offs (particularly the post-Herbert Dune books), this novel -- and the energy he devoted to it -- really shines. His ideas are challenging, sometimes frustrating, but always rewarding. There are very few books in this genre that I would ever consider "life-changing" or even worth re-reading. But Radix is one of them.

Whether your literary tastes run along the lines of sci-fi, fantasy or mysticism, this is a worthy addition to your collection. If this is your first foray into Attanasio or sci-fi, and since this is a hard volume to find, I highly suggest borrowing a copy first.

I thought about reading Radix because I like to pick out older and overlooked science fiction books and I have found some gems in the past, like David Zindell's Neverness and Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite. But this book nearly drove me crazy. It started out all right, with the protagonist Sumner Kagan gaining revenge against various gangs. Although it didn't hook me, it was enough to keep me reading. But once the novel introduced the voors, telepathic entities, it started going downhill into an endless stream of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. The plot, if it could be called such, veered off into a hundred different directions and I couldn't buy Sumner's development from fat, picked-on punk kid to Nietzchean superman. The novel might have been better if it just stuck to the pre-developed Sumner. And the climax and ending were so scattershot and confusing, I felt like I was reading Mad Max meets Monty Python meets Nietzche. Half the time I didn't understand what was going on. And when I did, it didn't interest me.

Reading this book was also an exercise in frustration, as a hundred different characters keep popping in and out. You need a score card to keep track. And terms. He sticks together so many words and phrases and similes that my eyes glazed over trying to read them. Psynergy, eo, Delph, godmind, voors, starglass. It's annoying to have to go back and forth trying to figure who's who and what's what. The only reason I even finished this book was because I had already read half of it and wanted to see if it got any better.

A lot of people have compared this novel to Dune by Frank Herbert. Perhaps it has a few similarities, but Dune is a vastly superior work. Dune may have some metaphysical aspects, but it gradually and slowly introduces you to Arrakis and its world culture instead of bludgeoning you full force on the head like Attanasio does in Radix.

Perhaps the worst thing of all is that Radix is well written. Attanasio's prose is direct and clean and uncluttered, without a lot of useless adverbs. But this was all in vain, since the story itself was so confusing and unengaging.

Overall, I felt more of a sense of boredom and aggravation rather than any sense of wonder reading Radix. And why this book is rated so high, I have no idea. I didn't get any entertainment or even enlightenment out of reading this book.

I am glad that I read the later, harder-SF "Centuries" before "Radix". Attanasio operates well as either a hard SF writer or as a metaphysical fantasist. In this, his first book, he tries to be both at once and it doesn't quite work. "Radix" is a saga of a far-future Earth in which mutation has gone rampant after a cosmological cataclysm. Daringly, lead character Sumner Kagan starts off as a screwed-up, homicidal, obese urban teenager. Through the several hundred pages, he transforms into a battered-but-charismatic hero and troubled demigod. Kagan, the divers supporting characters and some of the Big Ideas are great: I was satisfyingly creeped out by the concept of a powerful AI spying on the world through the senses of millions of synthetic "wild animals". However, the highly metaphysical treatment of the nature of once of the species, and of "life force" generally leaves something to be desired, the "Love Reigns Supreme" moral is a tad heavy-handed, and the pseudoscientific rationalisations that appear here and there are bogus enough to break belief for any reader with any scientific nous. Then there is the writing style. Later Attanasio is lyrical and reads beautifully and easily. Here, he overdoes it. Some sentences are elliptical to the point of incoherence. Pretentiously florid adjectives are piled on top of hopelessly inappropriate metaphors. The overall effect is a bit like "Covenant"-era Stephen Donaldson trying to write a Greg Bear novel by channeling acidheads from Zeta Reticuli. Appeals to some, I suppose, but I am glad he grew out of it. NB: the extensive esoteric internal dialog of some characters, and the names-dates-and-glossary appendix. I can see why some readers are reminded of "Dune"...