Ian R. MacLeod

Ragged Maps no es la típica colección de cuentos de "naves espaciales y rayos láser". Es más bien un viaje por los pliegues del tiempo y la memoria. MacLeod nos propone que todos somos viajeros temporales que navegamos el presente usando mapas gastados —nuestros recuerdos— que a veces nos engañan. Tampoco es un libro para leer de un tirón. Cada relato de MacLeod es un mundo entero con sus propias leyes. Lo mejor es leer uno, dejar el libro en la mesilla y rumiarlo un par de días.

A show more lo largo del libro, verás mundos que se parecen al nuestro pero tienen "truco": una Segunda Guerra Mundial donde la maternidad es casi una cuestión de estado mística, futuros donde las máquinas son las únicas que recuerdan a Beethoven, o pueblos donde el tiempo se rompe y un relojero puede ser la persona más peligrosa del lugar. Es un libro sobre cómo el pasado siempre está mordiéndonos los talones y cómo el futuro nunca es lo que esperábamos.

Ian R. MacLeod es un tipo curioso y un auténtico artesano de las letras. Aunque ha ganado los premios más importantes del género (como el World Fantasy), no es un autor de consumo rápido. Si algo define su carrera es su gusto especial por las ucronías y las historias alternativas. MacLeod disfruta deformando la realidad histórica para ver qué queda de nosotros cuando el pasado cambia de rumbo. Ya lo demostró en sus novelas más famosas, donde reimaginó una Inglaterra victoriana movida por éter mágico en lugar de vapor, y aquí, en Ragged Maps, vuelve a jugar con ese "qué pasaría si..." para diseccionar la condición humana con una elegancia envidiable.

Aquí dejo una pincelada de cada una de las historias que componen este volumen. Cada uno de los quince relatos cuenta con un epílogo escrito por el propio MacLeod. En estas breves notas, el autor nos explica de dónde surgió la idea, qué buscaba transmitir o qué estaba pasando en su vida cuando lo escribió:

-The Mrs Innocents: Una periodista embarazada viaja al Berlín de 1940 en una realidad alternativa donde existen los "Birthplaces", lugares casi sagrados y burocráticos para dar a luz. Es una ucronía fascinante y perturbadora.

-The Wisdom of the Group: Un relato que juega con la precognición aplicada a algo tan poco poético, pero tan humano, como la bolsa y las inversiones.

-Ephemera: Una inteligencia artificial llamada KAT custodia los restos de la cultura humana en una estación espacial mientras espera una señal de una Tierra que quizá ya no exista.

-Lamagica: Una aventura con sabor a expedición antigua por las selvas de Centroamérica, buscando un lugar donde la magia —o una energía llamada "aether"— todavía funciona de forma salvaje.

-Ouroboros: Como su nombre indica, es un relato sobre ciclos y retornos, donde el tiempo se muerde la cola.

-Stuff: Una reflexión sobre nuestra adicción a las "cosas", a acumular objetos para intentar que el tiempo no nos borre.

-The God of Nothing: Un cuento con aire de fábula sobre un administrador real que debe enfrentarse a un vacío que, paradójicamente, lo contiene todo.

-Downtime: Trata sobre esos huecos en la memoria, los tiempos perdidos que intentamos recuperar a toda costa para saber quiénes somos.

-The Roads: Un relato muy emotivo que mezcla los recuerdos de la Primera Guerra Mundial con la figura del padre y la sensación de volver a un hogar que ya no existe.

-The Memory Artist: En un futuro lejano y colorista, un artista crea obras usando fragmentos de recuerdos ajenos, explorando la identidad como si fuera un collage.

-Sin Eater: Un relato potente sobre un robot que debe absorber los pecados (y los recuerdos) de un Papa moribundo, sufriendo en sus circuitos el peso de toda una vida.

-The Visitor from Taured: Basado en una leyenda urbana real, MacLeod lo lleva al terreno de la física cuántica y los universos paralelos de una forma muy inteligente.

-The Chronologist: La historia de un niño fascinado por un relojero en un pueblo donde el tiempo parece estancado, hasta que se desata una tormenta temporal.

-Selkie: Una vuelta de tuerca al mito escocés, donde la nostalgia y los cambios sociales se mezclan con lo fantástico. Una muy buena ucronía.

-The Fall of the House of Kepler: El telescopio Kepler, dotado de consciencia, se vuelve loco de soledad en el espacio profundo mientras descubre que la humanidad ha desaparecido. show less

Song of Time is a melancholy reflection of life and legacy. Roushana Maitland is preparing to die, or more accurately shed her physical body and enter digital immortality. In the middle of her preparations, a young man with amnesia washes ashore on the cliffs below her house.

The meat of the book is is Roushana reflecting on her life through the tumultuous 21st century, and the role of art in a world. A talented concert violinist, Roushana provides a frame to ask if art gives life meaning, show more and if not art, then what. The biography is a clever way to provide a future history that is just short of apocalyptic. A new disease claims Roushana's brother. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan almost kills her mother. Global warming threatens everything, until the Yellowstone Volcano erupts and cools the plnet, at the cost of North America. Somehow, life goes on.

The book is best when it explores Roushana's relationship with the artistic people around her. Her piano prodigy brother, the gender-ambiguous critic Harad, her husband and conductor Claude, in his talent and weakness. The glimpses of the future are both chilling and believable. The 'present' timeline, with the amnesiac young man, doesn't do as much, and the odd unlife of the digitally immortal is sadly wasted as it relates to what the world looks like. Still, this is a satisfying, sophisticated, and melancholy yet optimistic book. show less

This won the Clarke Award back in 2009, and is I think the first novel-length fiction I've read by MacLeod. Although I know of his work, and have read several shorter pieces, and met him a couple of times at cons, his books are not ones I usually read. And… Well, Song of Time is quite good… but just not very interesting.

Roushana Maitland was a world-famous concert violinist. She is spending her last days in her isolated house in Cornwall, when she finds the body of a young man on the show more beach. He’s still alive, so she nurses him back to health. He’s amnesiac, with no idea of his identity, or how he came to be in the sea. Roushana is trying to decide whether or not to accept being uploaded and turned into a “ghost”. She tells the young man - naming him Adam - her life-story.

The two timelines - from Roushana’s early teens late last century going forward; and somewhere near the end of the twenty-first century - more or less alternate. Roushana’s musically-gifted older brother commits suicide after contracting some sort of engineered disease that causes complicated, and compiled, food allergies. She studies to be a violinist, and moves to Paris. Where she ends up in a relationship with Claude, a famous composer from the US, and joins a sort of artistic belle monde. Meanwhile, her mother gets involved in charity work in Gujarat, and is blinded when a nuclear bomb is dropped on Ahmedabad.

And so it goes. The couple’s fame grows, there’s a huge volcanic eruption which causes a nuclear winter, Roushana and Claude have kids, Claude dies in a car accident. There’s a messianic figure in Paris, who threatens to overturn an upcoming election before the eruption, but then he disappears.

It all feels like less than the sum of its parts. The narrative solves the mystery of Claude’s death, but it was never presented as a mystery. The christ-like figure disappears from the story, and seems to have served no purpose. Even Adam’s identity Roushana manages to work out in the last few pages of the book, and it barely qualifies as a plot twist.

On the other hand, the writing is very good, and the characters are well-drawn. The world-building seems weirdly old-fashioned in places - a nonbinary character is presented as “he or she” throughout, Indian cities are referred to by their old names (such as Bombay, which changed to Mumbai in 1995), and most of the cultural references are mid-twentieth century. Having said that, classical music is really not my thing, so any novel which features it so heavily is going to struggle to keep my interest.

Looking at the Clarke shortlist for 2009… the award could have gone to any of the nominated books. It was nice to see a small press, PS Publishing, take the gong, and perhaps Martin Martin’s on the Other side by Mark Wernham would have been considered too left-field to be a popular winner… Song of Time was not an unhappy choice. but I can’t say it inspired me to seek out MacLeod’s other novels. show less

I generally don’t read vampire books (Octavia Butler not withstanding), but this being Ian M. MacLeod, an author I have followed over his career, I could not resist. My immediate response after finishing this book was a kind of shell shock. Did my husband understand anything as I, wild-eyed, babbled away (possibly incoherently) while my brain was still putting the pieces together? Probably not.

Reaching across several historical time periods, and focusing on three well-drawn main show more characters, the author weaves a complex and engrossing story of love, longing, obsession, violence, blood lust …and more. This might suggest the standard vampire thriller, and while there is action, sufficient bloodletting, and some other weird stuff, McLeod does not overdo and contains the story elements well; his writing elevates the story beyond what one might expect. His often descriptive passages vividly evoke place and time, and there is an unexpected sense of melancholy that pervades the story—the reader never loses touch with the characters’ humanity.

This is quite a ride, perhaps a bit confusing at times, but a haunting and worthy read if you are up for it. show less