The Annunciate

Park ambitiously transposes her characteristic topics--power, drug use, lesbian relationships and racial hatred--into a sinister, far-future universe in her third novel (after Hand of Prophecy). Some 3000 years after humanity has settled the multiplaneted triple-star system ThreeSys, a vicious caste war has broken out among its inhabitants. The Jackless, who cannot plug into ThreeSys's vast information resources, and the Jacked, who have surgically implanted limited access, are both trying to exterminate the elite Meshed, who can access all knowledge, enter a virtual dimension and alter the others' reality. Annmarie, her conniving male lover Corey and the novel's 21-year-old protagonist, Eve, are Mesheds who make and sell Staze, an addictive drug that immobilizes its users. After Eve falls in love with Naverdi, a Jacked Staze smuggler and addict, all four travel to ThreeSys's first settlement, the now ruined Paradise, where they encounter a seductive, female alien who can meld VR, dreams and reality, and thus eliminate the distinctions that fuel ThreeSys's war. The succubus arranges to be birthed by Naverdi as a new Annunciate--the first settler of an entirely new kind of reality--but whether this development will save or destroy humanity, no one knows. Park's dizzying plot occasionally founders because the nanotechnology on which the story's progress depends is fuzzily drawn. None of her characters achieve much life as they constantly shift between the virtual and ""real"" universes. Moreover, her treatment of the romance between Naverdi and Eve, which is integral to her theme of growing up enduring prejudice, suffers from a strident tone unrelieved by the saving grace of humor. Parks's ideas seem crowded here: they stifle one another, while distorting her undeniable literary fecundity. (Nov.)