This is a popcorn book with very few surprises. Play a game with yourself: twenty pages in, guess what caused everything. Chances are, you nailed it. ( )

This was amazing! I'm quickly revising my growing list of books that should be nominated for next year's Hugo, and this one certainly fits the bill. :)

The ideas are really awesome. Two big ones, slamming against each other in a truly horrific and out-there way, and all the while, our MC, Faller, falls through the skies on his quest.

The book has a parallel structure to it. The present mess and the past slowing catching up to where the present mess began. Revealing the events that made a world that has been broken into city-sized chunks that are repelled from each other as if we were all a part of quantum physics was nearly as fun as jumping and falling from each one of these lands.

And what's the other big idea? A virus that wipes everyone's memories. That reveal was pretty amazing, too, as was the epic battle between two old friends, one of whom blames the other for his wife's death and the Faller, who has lost all his memories.

Each world-island is just a dystopian present-day world that we know, with no one remembering how to use technology, no power to run things, and not even the ability to read. It feels pretty hopeless, but Faller has the picture of his wife and a map directing him far, far below, through the clouds and islands, to where he might find the answers. Any answers. It's a pretty sweet setup, and the adventure is downright awesome.

But how could something like this, the inclusion of a duplication machine, a singularity, and an Earth turned into a macroscopic version of quantum fields actually resolve into a glorious story, rather than a cool premise? Ah, don't worry about that. It does. Rely on the author to walk you through the cool reveals and set us up for one hell of an awesome resolution. :) He pulls it off.

I'm really excited for this year's best SF, and this one certainly fits that bill. :) This was really gloriously cool SF.

Great concepts, fearless execution and a very solid story with characters that I can't help but love.

Woo Hoo!!! :)

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC! ( )

I'm a big fan of McIntosh and have read all but one of his non-YA books, so he's definitely a Must Read for me. I have to say, I don't think this one is his best (I think that title is still safely held by Love Minus Eighty, if you're wondering). I liked how the story was told in tandem (with Faller, awaking after some apocalyptic event where everyone's memories have been summarily wiped and the world broken up into seemingly floating islands in the atmosphere & the past thread centering on Peter Sandoval & other scientific researchers having made a seminal breakthrough) but the science was a bit... thin in explanation so I felt this was skirting more the fantasy category. I'm not the biggest fantasy fan so that likely explains my reticence here. To be clear, I didn't need this to go hard scifi but this needed a bit more firming up for the central characters to be so steeped in physics. Still, this was full of interesting ideas and imagery and that's something I definitely think McIntosh excelled at. There are quite a few things that will remain with me for a bit so this wasn't a wasted read in any way.

I'd recommend this but not as your entry to McIntosh's books (try Defenders or Love Minus Eighty). It's a quick read and not a bad weekend book.
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(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 illegally.)

Although it's certainly a valid trick that can occasionally be put to very good use (Memento comes to mind, for example), genre authors need to be very careful when when deploying the "selective amnesia" trope within their fantastical stories; because when done wrong, you get something like Will McIntosh's disappointing science-fiction novel Faller, whose logic often feels like the author just flat-out confessing, "For the purposes of my badly constructed plot I just happened to need this character to forget this random thing at this particular random moment, which is why they did; then for the purposes of my badly constructed plot I just happened to need this other character to remember this other random thing at this particular random moment, which is why they did." That always feels like a cop-out because it always is, an internal logic that makes no sense merely because the author is trying to hide a weak storyline; in this case, a story that begins with a big chunk of Manhattan floating in space and the people on it having no recollection of who they are or why they're there, but who for some inexplicable reason do remember that violent gangs string up their enemies on telephone poles as a way of intimidating everyone who's left, which is exactly what the violent gangs start doing the moment this chunk of New York starts running out of food.

The whole novel is like this, full of lazy moments of random remembrances and forgetfulness based on what McIntosh needs to have happen on that particular page of the story: humanity has apparently completely forgotten the very concept of English proper names, yet remembers enough about English to assign themselves poetically symbolic names like "Clue" and "Orchid" and "Steel;" humanity has forgotten what cars and planes are, but seemingly remember every single stereotype about small-town rural people being conservatively superstitious and their children plaintively playing hopscotch on the sidewalk with chalk like something out of a bad alt-country song. That makes it even more of a disappointment, then, when the cause of the planet-busting and mass amnesia is finally revealed and it turns out to be a trendy explanation that anyone even vaguely familiar with particle colliders can already guess; and this doesn't even take into account the pre-explosion situation McIntosh invents to get our players all into a place where they're taking such desperate measures in the first place, one whose details defy any and all believability whatsoever (including a ground war in which enemy combatants have invaded California yet not a single nuclear weapon has been used in retaliation; a global conflict that has left tens of millions dead over a final grab for the planet's last fossil fuels, yet with not even a single word said about the current state of solar, water and wind power; and a world in which a coalition of barely functioning third-world nations like Russia and North Korea can somehow completely overpower the endlessly vast and all-powerful US military complex).

The whole thing feels like a case of McIntosh getting one great image in his head one day (and to be fair, the image of a hollowed-out Midtown Manhattan free-floating in the sky is a great image), but then never seeming able to dream up 60,000 words of credible three-act story to wrap around that central image, which unfortunately is the case with way more science-fiction novels than any of us genre fans care to admit. It's getting a minimally decent score for at least being well-written and a fast read, although with a plot that only the most undiscerning hardcore SF fan could love.

Out of 10: 6.9 ( )