Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (Mass Market Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McDonald's fifth novel is a slim but powerful vision of 21st-century Japan and a guilt-ridden man's journey through it toward redemption. Ethan Ring, introspective and plagued by the sins of his past, embarks on the ancient Shikoku pilgrimage--an overland trek to visit the 88 sacred sites of Shingon Buddhism--with his friend Masahiko, hoping to find some peace from his painful memories. Those memories return in flashbacks along the route, and Ring's crimes are revealed: he and some fellow students developed a series of "fracters," superpowerful psychological images that can hypnotize, enrage, heal, blind and even kill on sight. When the security arm of the European common government learns of them, they force Ring to use the fracters as an interrogator and assassin. On the pilgrimage, Ring turns the fracters to good purposes when he can, and searches for a way to escape their curse. McDonald ( The Broken Land ) effectively blends Ring's personal story with his depiction of a future Japan reverting to technological feudalism and haunted by reconstructed "ghosts" of the dead preserved in virtual realities, and he keeps this fine novel tight and well focused.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Ethan Ring is a former graphic design student with a dark and powerful secret. As an undergraduate, he and some classmates developed the ultimate in high-concept visual art: computerized images capable of bypassing rational thought and controlling the mind of the perceiver, whether for good or ill. When the reigning intelligence agency gets wind of Ethan's handiwork, he is forced into its service via the most potent of the images being tattooed on the palms of his hands. Now on a spiritual pilgrimage through twenty-first-century Japan, a guilt-ridden Ethan grapples with the responsibility his power implies and determines to use it for the greatest good by ridding the country of its ubiquitous crime syndicate. A past winner of sf's Campbell Award for best new writer, McDonald now ranks among the genre's leading stylists. In this brief but surprisingly satisfying tale, the full range of his versatile talent is on display as he merges Zen philosophy with cyberspace performance art in a high-tech contemplation of good and evil. A rare combination of suspenseful storytelling and thought-provoking ideas. Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Spectra (January 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553561162
• ISBN-13: 978-0553561166
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,558,233 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What I Tell You Three Times Is The TRUTH!!!, August 7, 1998

By A Customer

This book is great. This book is great. This book is great. The only problem with it is the same problem with just about any great cyberpunk novel, the ending is weak and unimaginative. I read it three months ago and I don't remember how the bloody thing ends. Ian McDonald has done an outstanding job with this novella though. I highly recommend it to anyone, even if you don't like sci-fi.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful., May 6, 1998

By	Geenius at Wrok (Albany, N.Y.) - See all my reviews

I'm a big Ian McDonald fan, and this is my favorite Ian McDonald book -- even if it is just a novella.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but not very original, October 23, 2002

By	Glen Engel Cox "www.engel-cox.org" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is the J.G. Ballard version of Count Zero, or maybe it's the Ballard condensed Snow Crash, which is to say that McDonald continues in his tradition of writing in the style of another writer while sampling the plot and characters of yet another. His publisher should make more of this: IAN MCDONALD--the best science fiction rapper! In this one, lead character Ethan Ring is a Molly-like (from Neuromancer) freelancer who is on a pilgrimmage to try and recover his lost "soul," taken from him when he became a tool of the EC. This is latter-day cyberpunk, where the computer revolution has once again become a thing of fear rather than the power of freedom that was implied in the early days of the subgenre. McDonald also takes a page from Sterling by mixing in an incredible post-political world that isn't all that unbelievable.

What struck me most about the book was the Ballardesque nature of it. McDonald's always been enamoured of style, and as style in SF goes, Ballard is somewhere between the high priest and the holy ghost. McDonald uses the quick flips between scenes, the sentence fragments that contain only the most important nouns and verbs, and paring down the plot so that the book contains only the most important scenes and actions, the in-between bits to be filled in by the reader's imagination. However, a true Ballard pastiche would have been only 13 pages rather than the 130 here (see Brian Aldiss' recent Ballardesque "FOAM"). McDonald hasn't given up totally on the idea that a story is told in length. SCPWS is not bad, but still not the startingly original novel that I'm expecting one of these days from McDonald.