Hyper cyberpunk action set in decadent far-future, near-future and past Brazil. Rich in culture and style, Brasyl is non-stop vibrant energy. It’s subversive and defies expectations, delivering many surprises. A lot of fun.

DNF at 30%.Brasyl started out good, but at 30% I still couldn't figure out what the story was about, and the stop-start prose started bugging me: chaotic & jumbled. I started reading some reviews on Goodreads, and came across this by Ian James: "the description of being able to see into parallel worlds was not at all believable, and it made no sense that the poison from a frog conferred the ability to do so in humans, just because that frog's retina is supposedly capable of detecting a single qu...

I fell madly in love with Ian McDonald with Dervish House, so I pounced when I found Brasyl at the bookshop the other day. Given his other novel is Cyberabad Days, he's an author who is clearly very keen to explore non-traditional settings for SF written in English - in a way that, as far as I can tell, is as true to those non-Anglo locales as he can be.(NB: isn't the cover a riot? There's a mask, and a lizard, and tail feathers, and stars, and circuitry, and a butterfly...)As with Dervish House...

While waiting for Ian McDonald's Luna: Wolf Moon to come out later this year, I decided to dive into his back catalog with Brasyl. I sure thought Luna: New Moon was flavored with Brazilian culture (the main family are Brazilian immigrants to the Moon), but Brasyl is, well, all about it!Three people in three times are sucked into the dangerous world of quantum computing and parallel universe conspiracies: reality TV producer Marcelina in 2006, flamboyant go-go-go! entrepreneur Edson in the 2030's...

As constant (some may say obsessive) readers, we have all come to know our individual tastes rather well. We know what books will hit our literary G spots and which will leave us feeling cold and dirty, like the regretful afterglow of a one night stand. We learn to savor those reads that are a “sure thing,” that guaranty a night of debauched pleasure. This is how it was when I first heard of the publishing of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl. There is no doubt that I am a scifi junkie. Few books scratch my...

This winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for 2008, has three storylines, each set in a different era of Brazil's history. In 2006, the plot is centered on an aggressive producer of a reality tv show from Rio. Marcelina pursues her idea of a show that would focus on whether to forgive a disgraced, and now aged World Cup star. In 2033, the plot is centered on a young man Edson risen from the slums, and now playing the quasi-legal underworld of future Sao Paulo. In 1732, Father

So, you know that author who constantly comes out with deep characterizations and even deeper worldbuilding, flitting about from one huge idea concept to another but always keeping the narrative tight to the MC's? The one who wrote Luna and it's sequel, not to mention an earlier favorite Desolation Road? Or Dervish House?Yeah. Him. He who dazzles with amazingly detailed characterizations in wildly descriptive settings, be it a luna colony done as the Godfather, or an extended future Mars colony

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)Regular readers know that I ended up lucking into a cool situation this month; I just happened to be able to get my hands on half of the ten books nominated this year for either the Philip K Dick Award (recognizing the best experimental science-fiction novel of the year) or the Hugo Award (acknowledg...

This book leant heavily on Brazilian culture and vocabulary in an attempt to make it more interesting. The science was not at all convincing to me: the description of being able to see into parallel worlds was not at all believable, and it made no sense that the poison from a frog conferred the ability to do so in humans, just because that frog's retina is supposedly capable of detecting a single quantum of light (and is thus able to see into the quantum world). Also, just because you can see bi...

Wow ! What a marvelous book. Isaac Newton once observed that he stood on the shoulders of giants. So too does Ian McDonald stand on the shoulders of giants such as Asimov, Clarke, Stephenson and Gibson. It is also truly refreshing that a modern author can accomplish a work of such staggering imagination in under 400 pages. Like Stephenson's Anathem, this is a book that requires some effort to truly appreciate. As a liberal arts major, I found the concepts relating to quantum mechanics and McDona...

Edit. Everything is edit, cutting down those endless tapes of footage to meaning… Take a sample here, another there, put them together, smooth over the joins with a little cutaway. A new reality.A simple enough recipe for achieving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Throw into the mixture a handful of spices: quantum computers, quantum knives, quantum tattoos. Sprinkle in some Gaian Goddesses and robotic surveillance angels; add a dash of Cosmic Christ. But don’t let anyone know that t...

Ian McDonald is one of my favorite authors. He probably has more imagination than any other author out there. He creates futures that are totally bizarre and makes them completely believable. In my opinion, "Brasyl" is one of his best novels. It's been nominated for the Hugo award and deserves to win."Brasyl" explores the concept of multiple universes in a whole new way. The end was a total surprise. I will definitely be re-reading this book.

I really enjoyed this book. The language was sometimes hard to understand and I had to google a lot of Portuguese words/places/people to find out what was going on, but the authenticity and historicity always checked out! I actually thought that only understanding 80% of what was going on at any one time actually added to the frenetic, hallucinogenic story. Great, easy sci-fi, in a really novel setting. Highly recommend!

Storyline: 2/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 4/5My conclusion upon reading River of Gods was that Ian McDonald was a remarkably talented world-builder and author who picked an unfortunate (for my tastes) writing style and science fiction subgenre. I read Brasyl wondering if he was versatile. He's not. At least, he doesn't showcase versatility here. Like River of Gods this is a cyberpunk, near future, Third World, multiple-character, intertwining plotline, pushing-the-envelope romp throu...

Is the term "epic" overused? Maybe, but I cannot say any less about Brasyl. The book starts out at a nice pace and picks up speed along three parallel scenarios (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and the northeast of Brazil, transitioning into the Amazon) and three timeframes; though common themes are suggested, it is not until well into the book that these threads begin to converge. The finale in the jungle of trees echoes the greater finale among the many worlds of the multiverse. Local colour is cons...

This is the first novel I've finished in 3 months. I'm glad it was good. Here are the bullet points:THE GOOD-Masterful handling of the exposition problem. For example, two characters talking about science, while a third listens from another room. The third character is not a scientist and doesn't fully understand what is being discussed. Furthermore, he has been/wants to be in a romantic relationship with the others, and he feels jealous or hurt that he's being excluded from the conversation. Al...

The summary on the jacket for this book says, “Think Blade Runner in the tropics.” That’s wrong. It’s not Blade Runner, it’s more like if you took Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Baroque Cycle trilogy and Anathem, the basic plot from Apocalypse Now and some concepts from a crappy Jet Li movie called The One and put them in a blender and mixed them up to come with a unique story, you’d start to have an idea of what this book is like.There are three parallel stories told in different time frames in

Extremely difficult intro, largely due to the language barrier (and my own stupidity). The author uses large numbers of Brazilian words that would take whole phrases to describe in English since they don't have direct translations, so I ended up figuring out most of them purely through context. The reason I'm stupid is because there was a brief dictionary in the back of the book that I failed to notice until I finished it.Besides that, you definitely still need to give this book some time to dra...

From a sample size of two, I deduce that what McDonald is interested in writing and what I am interested in reading have very little overlap. Despite the frenetic pacing, fights, explosions, sex, and drugs, I mostly found this book, well, boring. It's not a bad book. It's just not targeted for me. I enjoyed some of the quantum computing and many-worlds metaphysics, but just as that started getting interesting, the book ended, leaving me with no sense of pay-off for the many pages of action-witho...

Ian McDonald is a marvellously skilled writer. He writes prose like a musician, and, like a musician with an interest in finding different sounds, he plays with new and exciting instruments from faraway lands... Well, he certainly immerses his novels in local lingo and speech rhythms. Hats off and massive kudos to that.His novels - the two I have read - are set in relatively near futures, in unconventional settings: Brazil, or Turkey, or other nations that are neither USA / Europe (nor Japan or