Amazon.com: The Annunciate: Serverna Park, Severna Park: Books

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Severna Park, author of the related SF novels Speaking Dreams and Hand of Prophecy, turns to a new universe in The Annunciate. ThreeSys is a three-star system, and each star has 11 human-settled worlds. The humans are separated not only by vast distances but also by technology, divided into Jackless, Jacked, and Meshed. The Jackless have no access to the virtual reality of the Jacked. And neither caste has access to the nanotech-sculpted dimension that the Meshed can enter to control and manipulate them.

When Jackless and Jacked rise against their overlords, three Meshed survive and struggle to retain their mastery with Staze, a potent, immediately addictive drug that traps users in an overwhelming dream. But the dream may be the entrance to another world--one inhabited by a mysterious and powerful being that wishes to enter our universe. Is it the Unknown Child, the long-prophesied savior of ThreeSys? Or is it an alien predator that will destroy humanity?

The Annunciate is an interesting, ambitious consideration of love and need, power and responsibility, and the complexities of human bonds. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly
Park ambitiously transposes her characteristic topicsApower, drug use, lesbian relationships and racial hatredAinto a sinister, far-future universe in her third novel (after Hand of Prophecy). Some 3000 years after humanity has settled the multiplaneted triple-star system ThreeSys, a vicious caste war has broken out among its inhabitants. The Jackless, who cannot plug into ThreeSys's vast information resources, and the Jacked, who have surgically implanted limited access, are both trying to exterminate the elite Meshed, who can access all knowledge, enter a virtual dimension and alter the others' reality. Annmarie, her conniving male lover Corey and the novel's 21-year-old protagonist, Eve, are Mesheds who make and sell Staze, an addictive drug that immobilizes its users. After Eve falls in love with Naverdi, a Jacked Staze smuggler and addict, all four travel to ThreeSys's first settlement, the now ruined Paradise, where they encounter a seductive, female alien who can meld VR, dreams and reality, and thus eliminate the distinctions that fuel ThreeSys's war. The succubus arranges to be birthed by Naverdi as a new AnnunciateAthe first settler of an entirely new kind of realityAbut whether this development will save or destroy humanity, no one knows. Park's dizzying plot occasionally founders because the nanotechnology on which the story's progress depends is fuzzily drawn. None of her characters achieve much life as they constantly shift between the virtual and "real" universes. Moreover, her treatment of the romance between Naverdi and Eve, which is integral to her theme of growing up enduring prejudice, suffers from a strident tone unrelieved by the saving grace of humor. Parks's ideas seem crowded here: they stifle one another, while distorting her undeniable literary fecundity. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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