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In the House of Aryaman a Lonely Signal Burns (2012)

door Elizabeth Bear

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503509,400 (4)4
A man has been turned inside-out. Fifty years in the future, in the sleek modern city of Bangalore, a scientist working on revolutionary bioengineering techniques has been discovered inside his own locked home, his body converted into a neat toroidal package of meat. It's up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to unearth the victim's complicated past and solve the crime, despite the best efforts of the mastermind behind the murder, aliens beaming signals from the Andromeda Galaxy, her overbearing mother, and an adorable parrot-cat who is the only witness.… (meer)
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A half-century in the future, in Bangalore, Police Sub-Inspector Ferron is called to the home of scientist with a checkered past, who has been reported missing. What she finds is a toroidal mass of meat that, when DNA tested, is identified as the missing scientist. She also finds the only witness, his parrot-cat--a genetically engineered talking cat.

Whose memory, unfortunately, has apparently been wiped. Ferron talks to the cat, gives her food, and calls her Chairman Meow, and the cat imprints on Ferron. This isn't what Ferron intended or inspected, with no previous expereince with parrot-cats. Besides, she already has a pet--a domesticated silver fox, the pet her mother got bored with. Anyway, she has a murder to investigate!

She soon has the police department's AIs, Doyle and Conan, digging up the scientist's background, and is talking to his coworkers at the laboratory, where they've been working on world-changing biotechnology developments. The more Ferron learns about the apparent victim in this crime, the more questions she has.

Meanwhile, she's also dealing with her overbearing, demanding mother, and the neighbors in the kin-based apartment building they both live in (in, blessedly, separate aparments.) Ferron's mother is, along with more standard Indian mother obsessions like getting her daughter married, is addicted to the immersive online world now available--with compolete archives of your activity, if you can afford the storage. And since her mother can't really, she's been bullying her daughter to pay for it.

Ferron is juggling an apparently horrific murder, no obvious murderer because, while he had many enemies, most of them aren't anywhere nearby, an American private, but bonded and very professional cop chasing entirely different crimes related to the dead scientist, her own mother, and also being distracted by a supernova, or maybe something more startling, in the Andromeda galaxy--and a growing collection of evidence that says something else entirely is going on.

I found it engrossing, and fun, and along with good characters, there's also excellent world-building.

Recommended. ( )
  LisCarey | Nov 9, 2022 |

There were a lot of things in this 132-minute audiobook novella set in a near-future Bangalore that I enjoyed but there were a couple of things that jarred with me and prevented this from becoming an I-must-read-the-rest-of-this-series-at-once experience.

So what was good?

It's jam-packed with ideas on near-future life, not just the technology that people use but how they choose to live. The ideas are woven into the story rather than being info-dumped. There's no future-tech porn lusting after bright new toys, just a taken for granted use of things we don't have yet, much the way people under twenty pay no attention to how extraordinary smartphones would have seemed to those of us who were under twenty in the 1970s.

The so-that's-how-they-dealt-with-climate-change stuff is tantalising because it's vague but plausible. The geopolitical changes that bring Americans to India, virtually or physically, looking for high-tech work were amusing (and plausible). The various ways in which people stretched the boundaries between virtual reality and real-life to create an experience that was an alloy of both were fascinating as was the mainstream use of drugs to control moods and sustain attention for days at a time-

I also liked that, behind the main narrative, like a bass guitar behind a lead singer, was a wider contemplation of where we all sit in the universe. This was done partly by the way the police inspector's classical education remained part of her day-to-day experience of this very modern world and partly by considered a strange pattern of light coming from a star millions of light-years away. What I heard of this, I liked but I would have preferred to have heard more of it, perhaps by cutting back on the time given to the lead singer.

The mystery part of the book was clever and kept me guessing but had that Issac Asimov 'I, Robot' feel of a cunning puzzle that had little or no emotional content. In the apartment of an American working for an advanced biotech firm in Bangalore, a body has been found, turned completely inside out and with nothing missing. The only witness, a bio-engineered talking parrot-cat appears to have had its memory wiped. It's up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to discover what has happened and who is responsible. It was a good vehicle for learning more about Ferron and the world she lived in. It was relatively complex but never either tense or threatening. I was sure that Ferron would solve the problem as if it was an equation or as should determine the meaning of a piece of epic poetry.

So, what didn't work?

There was something off about the narration. The narrator had the right accent and the right speed but my ears weren't comfortable. Then I realised that the problem was that I wasn't hearing any Indian speech patterns that I recognised. I was listening to American English being delivered in an Indian accent. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't right either.

I also felt that the novella was a little over-stuffed with content. At times it was like standing in front of an open fire hydrant. I'd have liked not to have to run so fast to keep up. But that may just be a sign that I'm getting old.

Although this wasn't all that I'd hoped for, it was still good Science Fiction and it has whetted my appetite for Elizabeth Bear's novels.
( )
  MikeFinnFiction | Aug 27, 2021 |
2724
  freixas | Mar 31, 2023 |
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A man has been turned inside-out. Fifty years in the future, in the sleek modern city of Bangalore, a scientist working on revolutionary bioengineering techniques has been discovered inside his own locked home, his body converted into a neat toroidal package of meat. It's up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to unearth the victim's complicated past and solve the crime, despite the best efforts of the mastermind behind the murder, aliens beaming signals from the Andromeda Galaxy, her overbearing mother, and an adorable parrot-cat who is the only witness.

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