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Napier’s Bones

by Derryl Murphy

So much has already been done in the realm of speculative fiction that merely taking the reader somewhere new is an ­accomplishment. Napier’s Bones heads off into uncharted territory via the notion of magical mathematics. Licence plates, credit cards, telephone numbers, and even baseball statistics are all sources of power for the “numerates,” those born with the ability to make magic with numbers. But instead of using this gift to become, say, rich financiers, the heroes of the novel are grifters, scraping by on society’s edges while they ­accumulate more numerical artifacts.

The story follows Dom, a numerate who has just survived a battle with an extremely powerful rival in the American southwest. That rival is now after Dom and his new companions: a young apprentice named Jenna, and Billy, an apparition that inhabits Dom’s body. Their journey takes them across the continent, in pursuit of the artifacts that can defeat their opponent. Along the way they eat fast food, crash at cheap hotels, and try to avoid the numbers, equations, and logarithms that periodically rain down from the sky, intent on cutting them to pieces.

While this makes for an exciting journey, the book’s true pleasures lie in how committed it is to its premise, continually unfolding new permutations, including the discovery of sentient number-creatures and a particularly Canadian conundrum involving a statistically powerful hockey puck used by the Toronto Maple Leafs in their last Stanley Cup game.

This also threatens to be the book’s undoing, however, as each new variation requires additional exposition. This is a problem encountered in certain ambitious hard SF stories, where the intricacies of the science run against the grain of the narrative. Rather than bogging things down in details, Murphy would have been better off trusting his reader’s suspension of disbelief, particularly as the plot gallops toward its exciting climax.

Still, Napier’s Bones is a consistently ­compelling and inventive read. Think of it as literary prog-rock, stretching the bounds of what is possible, if at times a little too earnest.

 

Reviewer: Ian Daffern

Publisher: ChiZine Publications

DETAILS

Price: $17.95

Page Count: 300 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-92685-109-9

Released: March

Issue Date: 2011-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels