The Dervish House

'''McDonald, Ian. The Dervish House.''' Amherst, NY: Pyr, 2010. Reviewed by Ellen M. Rigsby. SFRA Review #295 (Winter 2011): 15-16. Reviewed by Jason Pettus. "Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]" at the Goodreads page for the novel.

Cyberpunk novel set in Istanbul in 2027, further classified by Pettus as "'third-world cyberpunk' (or 'Khyberpunk,' as one of his fans once called it); or in other words, cyberpunk tales set not within the shadowy, rainy alleys of London and New York like such '80s authors as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, but rather such developing regions as Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia [...]." After sketching out the rich setting, characters, and themes of this novel, Pettus continues, that also in good cyberpunk fashion, McDonald eventually combines all these disparate threads into one giant uber-plot that all comes to a head by the novel's climax, which is where the book's science-fiction elements finally come into play; because much like how 2004's River of Gods is ultimately about artificially intelligent sentience, and 2008's Brasyl is ultimately about quantum-fueled time travel, so too is The Dervish House ultimately about the subject of nanotechnology and the coming "Singularity," of the various ways that the mechanical and biological are meshing in our lives more and more, through the now sometimes microscopically tiny devices that can be literally released by the millions into the air or injected into the bloodstream, capable of both fun consequences (the coolest temporary tattoos in history) and unbelievably dangerous ones (like an entire new class of ultra-deadly military weapons).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 10/12Jan19