Paradox – John Meaney (2000)

‘With its vast subterranean cities and extraordinary organic technologies, Nulapeiron is a world unlike any other. However, such wonders mean little to the majority of its inhabitants, ruled over by despotic Logic Lords and the Oracles, supra-human beings whose ability to truecast the future maintains the status quo.

But all this is about to change.

In a crowded marketplace Tom Corcorigan is witness to the brutal killing of a fleeing woman by a militia squad. His shock turns to horror when he recognises her as the stranger who, only the day before, had presented him with a small, seemingly insignificant info-crystal. Only now, as the fire in her obsidian eyes fades, does he realise who – or what – she really was: a figure from legend, a Pilot.

What Tom has yet to discover is that this crystal holds the key to mu-space, and so to freedom itself. For he has been given a destiny to fulfil – nothing less than the rewriting of his future, and that of his world…’

Blurb from the 2001 Bantam paperback edition

Meaney’s marvellous and intricate tale of the rise and fall of Tom Corcorigan begins somewhat blandly, but soon shifts into high gear and rampages along to the brilliant finale.
The fourteen year old Tom is the son of a market trader on (or rather in, for this is set in a subterranean world of class-based levels somewhat like Wingrove’s Chung Kuo) the planet Nulapeiron. One day he meets a strange woman who gives him a gift, only later discovering that she is a forbidden Pilot when he sees her killed in public by the local police.
There’s an odd Dickensian aspect to this novel. It’s almost a futuristic David Copperfield. Tom loses his parents (his father dies after his mother is seduced away by an Oracle, one of the rulers of the world, who can see into the future) and not being old enough to be eligible for housing is sent off to a school.
There he is bullied by both teachers and pupils and one day is falsely accused of stealing, has one of his arms removed at the order of the local aristocracy and is indented into the Lord’s household.
This is the turning point in Tom’s life. He begins to exercise and to learn martial arts from Maestro DaSilva, and here is born a plan to murder the Oracle who took his mother away and ruined his life.
Tom – who has devoted as much time to the development of his mind as well as his body (partly being taught by Modules stored within the Pilot’s crystal) is awarded a rare accolade and elevated to the aristocracy as Lord Corcorigan.
Only then does he achieve his aim and finally (in a complex and convoluted plan) kill the Oracle.
This however, awakens hope in the underground revolutionary groups who wish to remove the Oracles from power, and Tom becomes the figurehead and chief-architect for a plan to bring down their rule.
The novel is interspersed with excerpts from a kind of diary of a Pilot which Tom finds within the Pilot’s info-crystal.
There are echoes of Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance here with the weird but oddly credible mixture of feudal society and advanced technology.
Meaney however is a very individual and stylish writer and will no doubt be another important British writer of the 21st Century.