A review by nwhyte
Mindscape by Andrea Hairston

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/04/the_2007_philip.shtml[return][return]Andrea Hairston's Mindscape is an intriguing first novel. Her future earth has been divided into feuding zones by the alien-imposed Barrier shades of Greg Egan's Quarantine or Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, but with the planet itself being geographically fragmented rather than merely isolated from the rest of the universe. The Barrier itself can be crossed, but only by people with the correct training, which of course includes our viewpoint characters. The future world is richly realised and politically complex, with a strong African element in its culture and a cynical take on the future development of the entertainment industry. It is easy to read into it a metaphor for the continuing apartness of black and white in contemporary America the dividing Barrier is difficult to cross, but music is one of the ways of crossing it.[return][return]But there were a couple of elements that I found improbable. I would have liked a better sense of how large the zones are supposed to be and how (if at all) they fit together geographically. The entire premise of the book is that an interzonal peace treaty is both necessary and fragile yet it seemed unlikely that given the resources available and the impenetrability of the Barrier, serious conflict could ever really break out between the zones rather than within them. Indeed, most of the violence in the book is perpetrated by on one another by people who are coresidents of the same zone. The second point is about language: Hairston's use of English is great, and one character memorably affects twentieth-century African American dialect. But her characters also use plenty of Yoruba and German phrases, and while these are always (as far as I can tell) in context and used with confidence, the presence of these combined with the complete absence of any other African or European languages from her future world struck me as anomalous.