The bones of time

Dense with information and ideas, and rich in characterization. I enjoyed it the first time through, but I want to read it again in a year or so to get what I'm sure I missed. Goonan manages to gather such disparate ideas as past Hawaiian culture, multiple universes that are related to human consciousness, a love story, and more into a cohesive and at times lyrical story. She writes beautifully, and often I could suspend reality and experience the tropical scents and the sounds of the ocean or the wind through the jungle.

Meh. The book is OK, but one thing I struggled with is that the science is butchered so badly. At some point we have one of the characters (in an infodump) exclaiming that "Solving this math problem is non-computational. Godel proved it so. No computer could possibly solve it! Not even our AI. Only a human can solve this!" In one paragraph, this betrays a misunderstanding of Godel's incompleteness theorem, of artificial intelligence, and of the nature of human intelligence. Sigh. I know I shouldn't get caught up in this, as the book's main theme lies in the characters and their interactions, not the pseudo-science underpinnings, but in a science fiction book, it's distracting. At one point during the infodump, our hero says "I don't show more understand." and the other character just responds with "maybe you will someday" and continues on. I felt a certain sympathy for our hero at that point... show less

Lynn’s family runs Interspace, a company that is on the cutting edge of scientific technology. She saves a youngman named Akamu who is a clone of King Kamehameha and they escape to China where they are pursued by IS. Cen is a mathematician who is trying to prove the metaverse exists so that he can be with the woman he loves, Princess Kaiulani. The stories of these two characters come together when the Homeland Movement, the Hawaiian resistance group that cloned Akamu, uses the Kaiulani proofs to take their people to a new world.

Kathleen Ann Goonan weaves history, sociology and science fiction into an enjoyable story. She brings the characters to the fore-front and leaves the science fiction elements as tools to reach human goals; such show more as finding a true love or creating a better world. Hawaiian history plays a part in the story with Princess Kaiulani, a romanticized royal who would have been queen if the U.S. hadn’t made Hawai’i a territory. She died tragically at the age of 23. King Kamehameha also figures prominently in the storyline because the kahunas consider his bones to be magical and the Homeland Movement uses them to clone new Kamehamehas. Some of the science fiction elements of the story are time travel, nano technology, cloning, gene manipulation, a generational space ship, and the metaverse. Technology used to alter human beings is considered evil whereas living a simple life like the original Hawaiians is good. At times the mathematical jargon was hard to comprehend, but I understood where the story was going so I didn’t let it slow me down. show less

This book is slow to work through, but rich. Some sections move more quickly than others. Set in a plausible near future, with mega-corporations, cool tech toys (I loved the roll-up keyboard), shifting time, a man on a quest, and a woman on the run.

Three and a half stars.

It was an easier, more accessible read than [b:Queen City Jazz|597159|Queen City Jazz (Nanotech, #1)|Kathleen Ann Goonan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312056498s/597159.jpg|583815], but there were some structural similarities.
This feels like one of those books for which my opinion might change later; I'll have to see what persists and what fades over time.

Hawaiian mathamatical genius Cen figures out the Kaiulani Proofs that allow movement between different worlds in time. Good!

Tiptree longlist 1996