Radix by A. A. Attanasio - 1981

New York: William Morrow & Company - Quill. Near Fine 1981. First Paperback Edition. Softcover. Fine Like New acidfree1st time in softcover, same plates as the 1stEd, same cover design by Fred Marcellino. This is a handsome qual trade, looks unopened. Certainly attanasio's best book. ; 6 x 9.25 in.; 467 pages; Ambitious, cosmic-scale-but-flawed first novel, Aug 7, 2001, Reviewer: AndyC from Canberra, Australia: I am glad that I read the later, harder-SF "Centuries" before "Radix". Attanasio operates well as either a hard SF writer or as a metaphysical fantasist. In this, his first book, he tries to be both at once and it doesn't quite work. "Radix" is a saga of a far-future Earth in which mutation has gone rampant after a cosmological cataclysm. Daringly, lead character Sumner Kagan starts off as a screwed-up, homicidal, obese urban teenager. Through the several hundred pages, he transforms into a battered-but-charismatic hero and troubled demigod. Kagan, the divers supporting characters and some of the Big Ideas are great: I was satisfyingly creeped out by the concept of a powerful AI spying on the world through the senses of millions of synthetic "wild animals". However, the highly metaphysical treatment of the nature of once of the species, and of "life force" generally leaves something to be desired, the "Love Reigns Supreme" moral is a tad heavy-handed, and the pseudoscientific rationalisations that appear here and there are bogus enough to break belief for any reader with any scientific nous. Then there is the writing style. Later Attanasio is lyrical and reads beautifully and easily. Here, he overdoes it. Some sentences are elliptical to the point of incoherence. Pretentiously florid aDJectives are piled on top of hopelessly inappropriate metaphors. The overall effect is a bit like "Covenant"-era Stephen Donaldson trying to write a Greg Bear novel by channeling acidheads from Zeta Reticuli. Appeals to some, I suppose, but I am glad he grew out of it. NB: the extensive esoteric internal dialog of some characters, and the names-dates-and-glossary appendix. I can see why some readers are reminded of "Dune"... .