o this is a story about a young girl in a world where nanotech ran amuck, where cities are now haves of nanotech, constantly building themselves anew, ever expanding, and infecting the humans around them with strange new personalities and improvements. And like Dorothy being drawn to the Emerald City (not “like” but rather “exactly”), a young farm girl brings her dead boyfriend and dead dog, preserved in status, to this place to see if she can possibly revive them (so that’s “Brain” and “Heart”, I guess).

And I know that author Kathleen Ann Goonan went on to even greater things, writing all sorts of novels and winning all sorts of awards before recently passing away.

But the thing is, I couldn’t get into this story. Flamed out halfway through.

Scifi in the eighties (yeah, forty years ago) was different from scifi today. It was the age of 2001, and scifi sometimes got into drifty imagery and impressionism. Thinks were not directly stated but implied in dreamlike descriptive states. Everything was like a pot dream. And really, at midpoint, I wasn’t even sure what was going on.

It was, with all respect to a great American author, tedious. And that’s on me.

So yes, if you find an old copy somewhere, give it a look if you like that sort of thing. It really lost me.

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