Planesrunner

Planesrunner was a light, entertaining read; which is to say, considering it was written by Ian McDonald, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was well-written, beautifully described, and fast-paced, but there was just something missing in the end.

The book started strong when it introduced its protagonist, Everett Singh. McDonald showed how deft he is with multicultural characters and settings when creating his main character: his mixed ethnicity makes him unique without making him exotic, and father's Punjabi background added color and interesting detail. Everett is smart, sensitive, and resourceful. He's a great character to watch, and I'm glad there is room for the likes of him in modern YA fiction.

Likewise, the main concept of the book seemed to promise the impossible: a young adult hard SF story. Ultimately, it's mostly window dressing, but it's fun and solid science fiction that doesn't talk down to kids. The beginning of the story reads almost like a hard SF thriller, and has some great verisimilitude and tension.

Unfortunately, as soon as Everett jumps to another dimension, things take a turn for the baroque. The world is nicely realized, and McDonald's imagination is in full display. I liked the descriptions of clothes, hats, and buildings in this alternate London. The characters, though, suffered greatly from the jump. Oh, they were fun in their way, but they were mostly cartoon characters. None of the secondary characters, from Sharkey the gun-totin', Bible-quotin' American, to brave, infallible Captain Anastasia felt fully realized. They were just cool sketches without a dramatic core.

Sen herself was quite problematic to me. She seems to exist mostly for Everett to pine after. She's visually striking, witty, resourceful, impossibly beautiful, quirky... But you get no sense of who she really is, deep down inside. She felt hollow somehow, with her silly Tarot cards and her Airish dialect. A cool character sketch without a dramatic core.

Ah, but then again, there's airships, and dimension-hopping politics, and treachery and dueling airships. Maybe I'm just too old to fully appreciate YA literature to its just measure. I hate to have to turn my brain off, especially for a book; and all that talk of Heisenberg Gates and parallel universe was firing up my neurons before I was asked to turn them down again. And that's too bad.