Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone
and The Tear
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Cyberpunk’s first lyrical poem, mixing Kabbalah, manga, pop-culture trivia and Zen with enough style and dexterity to actually pull it off . . . [McDonald] does more in a page than most writers do in a chapter.” —Neal Stephenson
Words can control you, words can make you act against your own will...and words can kill.
Ethan Ring discovers computer graphics with profound effects on human minds—fracters. Dark political forces want his power, and Ethan must face the consequences of his creation, and his actions.
In search of redemption, he embarks on an ancient thousand-mile pilgrimage, but can he ever escape the forces that once controlled him, and can he resist the power of the deadly images tattooed onto his hands?
This ebook edition also includes the 2008 novella, The Tear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McDonald's fifth novel is a slim but powerful vision of 21st-century Japan and a guilt-ridden man's journey through it toward redemption. Ethan Ring, introspective and plagued by the sins of his past, embarks on the ancient Shikoku pilgrimage--an overland trek to visit the 88 sacred sites of Shingon Buddhism--with his friend Masahiko, hoping to find some peace from his painful memories. Those memories return in flashbacks along the route, and Ring's crimes are revealed: he and some fellow students developed a series of ``fracters,'' superpowerful psychological images that can hypnotize, enrage, heal, blind and even kill on sight. When the security arm of the European common government learns of them, they force Ring to use the fracters as an interrogator and assassin. On the pilgrimage, Ring turns the fracters to good purposes when he can, and searches for a way to escape their curse. McDonald ( The Broken Land ) effectively blends Ring's personal story with his depiction of a future Japan reverting to technological feudalism and haunted by reconstructed ``ghosts'' of the dead preserved in virtual realities, and he keeps this fine novel tight and well focused.
