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    Nekropolis
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    Nekropolis
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    Nekropolis
    Ebook273 pages3 hours

    Nekropolis

    By Maureen F. McHugh

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Fleeing an empty future in the Nekropolis, twenty-one-year-old Hariba has agreed to have herself "jessed," the technobiological process that will render her subservient to whomever has purchased her service. Indentured in the house of a wealthy merchant, she encounters many wondrous things. Yet nothing there is as remarkable and disturbing to her as the harni, Akhmim. A perfect replica of a man, this intelligent, machine-bred creature unsettles Hariba with its beauty, its naive, inappropriate tenderness . . . and with prying, unanswerable questions, like "Why are you sad?" And slowly, revulsion metamorphoses into acceptance, and then into something much more. But these outlaw emotions defy the strict edicts of God and Man -- feelings that must never be explored, since no master would tolerate them. And the "jessed" defy their master's will at the risk of sickness, pain, imprisonment . . . and death.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061828775
    Unavailable
    Nekropolis
    Author

    Maureen F. McHugh

    With her groundbreaking novel, China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. She is the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.

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    Reviews for Nekropolis

    4/5

    11 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book, set in a future Morocco, shows that, regardless of advances in technology, the basic human experience often changes very little. Her main character, the young Muslim woman Hariba, has voluntarily sold herself into servitude; her loyalty to her employers assured by chemical/biological means. However, when she falls in love with Akhmim, a lab-created biological "AI" who seems all too human, the two escape their employer/owners, risking jail or death...
      Regardless of the book's exotic tech, Hariba's experiences are those shared by all too many refugees, poltical and otherwise, today. McHugh speaks delicately and effectively about the realities of life in an oppressive regime, the fact that even those who are extremely conservative can fall afoul of the law in such situations, about the difference in perception between well-meaning liberals with high political ideals and the priorities and concerns of those they are trying to help, about the difficulties faced by those who have left others behind to face the repercussions of their rebellion....
    • 4/5
      Well written and powerful, but I stalled out after it told the stories of several characters, and kept finding new ones, to whom bad things kept happening. I do want to finish it sometime.
    • 4/5
      I really liked it... up til the end. Totally just personal preferences on this one, but there wasn't much resolution at the end, and no one lived happily even for now. The storytelling and worldbuilding itself were pretty good, and the POV shifts were done nearly seamlessly. On that alone it gets the 4.
    • 3/5
      I loved the world-building in this science fiction dystopia set in near-future Morocco. I could have read twelve more stories set in this world. Sadly, the story never really went anywhere interesting, which is always even more disappointing when you can plainly see that there's so much that might be done.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating book, albeit somewhat depressing. Excellent characterization.
    • 5/5
      This is a powerful and subtle book, one whose lovely prose had me simply hooked so that I could barely put it down and was reading the whole day. The story is set in the not too distant future in Morocco. Hariba, a young woman who sees no future for herself in the poor neighbourhood slums of the Nekrpolis has herself "jessed" - a procedure that makes servants loyal to their employers - so that she can take up a job in the household of a rich man. There she encounters a harni, a biologically-engineered slave. What could from here be a run-of-the-mill romance story is instead a wonderfully well-told character study and tale of different types of oppression.
    • 4/5
      Solid, thoughtful sci-fi, in the post-cyberpunk mode. The eastern and western settings are both very realistic and effective.
    • 4/5
      Something about this book really resonated. It’s more literary, character driven science fiction, but the relationship between the two main characters is amazing. Hariba has been “jessed,” had her brain chemistry altered so that she feels a particularly loyalty to her master. Akhmin has been created, he’s a type of biological AI, and he is programmed/bred to make people happy. His programming overrides Hariba’s, in a sense, and she is enticed to escape her jessing. While both their situations sound extreme, it is the subtleties of their relationship, the ways in which they need each other, and the ways in which they realize they don’t need each other, that shine. How can two people (one not human, the other, “jessed,” not human in a free-will kind of sense) that exist in a world so far from our own elicit such human emotions in the reader? That, to me, is the beauty of science fiction. NEKROPOLIS may be wildly fictional, but it tells the truth.