John M. Ford’s Web of Angels bears the same relationship to Neuromancer as Cordwainer Smith’s…
John M. Ford’s Web of Angels bears the same relationship to Neuromancer as Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind stories bears to Dune: containing all the core elements of that genre-defining work, and coming first, but containing too much extra strangeness to be easily categorized or to become the template for later work.
Where the Instrumentality stories introduce Dune’s epic-scoped space-feudalism political intrigue surrounding a backwater planet’s monopoly on the supply of a naturally-occurring immortality drug (Spice, the effluvia of a sandworm, in Dune and Stroon, the cancerous growths of mutant sheep, in the Instrumentality stories), the Instrumentality also adds to the mix:
- uplifted animals and their political struggles
- space australians
- a thief’s guild
- a prison planet (Sheol) where people are cronenberged as punishment for war crimes
- the use of algae and mussels to protect sub-light-speed ships from the psychological effects of cosmic rays
- the use of cyborg cat-human-hive-mind gunners to fight hyperspace dragons
Likewise, where Web of Angels gives us Neuromancer’s loser protagonist, corporation- and government-run automated deadly cyberspace attackers, dense dive into the underworld, and cross-planetary chase corresponding to a cyberspace heist, it also gives us:
- immortal but incredibly fragile patriarchs, whose immortality comes from slowing cell metabolism by a factor of thousands
- networked portable computing devices modeled on flutes and harps
- tarot imagery
- an eighteenth century style dandy subculture who fence with real swords in a complicated dance as an elaborate form of gambling/suicide
Web of Angels is a book I started in high school (literally fifteen years ago now) and that fascinated me, and at the time, I never finished it (because I excitedly lent it to someone who never gave it back). I recently bought a new copy, and I look forward to seeing all the things I missed.