Planesrunner by Ian McDonald

Have you read my paeans to McDonald? There isn't just one but three separate sycophantic posts to his genius on this blog. So expectations were set pretty high when I started out on his latest offering, a YA novel swimming down the science fiction stream as opposed to the speculative plots with non-Anglo world settings that are familiar McDonald territory.

Planesrunner is the first installment in the Everness series. Normally, I would be skipping with glee at the thought of the certain promise of book after book of this prodigy's magic. The truth is that I didn't really enjoy Planesrunner. Before you scream blasphemy and blue murder, hear me out.

Actually, I don't really remember why I didn't quite like it. I read it months ago at the very beginning of my review hiatus. I do remember skimming over portions. Sacrilege. I know.

Planesrunner starts off auspiciously with the mysterious kidnapping of Everett Singh's father, a renowned quantum physicist. Although Everett is astute enough to take pictures of the pop-snatching, the police return the images to him after deleting any incriminating evidence. He starts getting followed, receiving threats and to top it all, a mysterious application is mailed to him by an automated mechanism that becomes activated when his father is offline for a certain period of time. The application is the Infundibulum, an atlas of parallel earths and the bad guys want it, desperately. Pretending to play into their hands, Everett discovers that nearly ten parallel Earths have been discovered and a number of them are in contact with each other. He then uses a Heisenburg gate which his father has helped built to spirit himself to an electropunk version of the earth, one whose sky is dominated by electric airships. His father is being held somewhere in this world's London and he has to gather a  crack team to help get him out.

Thumbs up for the vernacular McDonald invented for the airship crews (forgotten what they were called). Another thumbs up for giving us a half-Indian protagonist (who incidentally spends an inordinate amount of time cooking Indian food). What was not so impressive was the way in which the story progressed. Where was the smooth interweaving of disparate strands? Where was the measured tension before a dive that I admired so much in McDonald's writing? All compromised on the altar of a linear plot, easy denouements and irritating perfectionism from the protagonist.

I suppose writing YA fiction means making compromises. Planesrunner disappointed but my admiration for McDonald is as strong as ever, whether on this earth or any parallel world.