Pretentious and self-indulgent
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Aeleysi, or ALIC, is in a future India taking a vacation from her off-world habitat home. Humans on Earth have become not only segregated from an Earth healing from its rape by Humanity, but tagged and controlled by omnipotent computer systems. ALIC becomes attached to a young jockey called Millie, one of the Subs (i.e. inhabitants of the subcontinent) and in a misguided attempt to help her out of what ALIC imagines is a bad situation, becomes embroiled in a revolution against the computer technocracy.
Millie, it turns out, may or may not be an immortal - possibly alien - Messianic figure, tales of whom are becoming gospel as the novel progresses,
It is by no means an easy read. Jones is a stylist who is at the opposite extreme to those writers who infodump ad nauseum in order to acquaint the reader with the back story, added to which is Jones' decision to write this as first person narrative from a character who speaks a variation of English peppered with acronyms and invented vernacular. To attempt to capture the flavour of an evolved language is not a new thing, since Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' and Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange' successfully established a dialect within the text with which the reader gradually comes to terms. There was, however, a certain beauty and poetry in these books which is lacking here.
The rather daunting blocks of CAPITALLISED words which pepper the pages restrict the flow of the eye and one would have thought that the language would have evolved (as languages do) to shorten the acronyms into more acceptable sounding words, or at the very least would have lost the capitals. One feels one is being intermittently shouted at while reading.
In Jones' defence, it has to be said that this is a brave and relatively successful attempt to construct a narrative as it would have been written in ALIC's time. Jones does not condescend to explain the situations to her readers. The clues are there, and it is up to us, the readers, to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
I have never been fond of novels which need a glossary of terms as an appendix, unless they contain additional information not immediately pertinent to the novel. In this case however, despite the fact that a glossary is vital to one's understanding of the text, some of the definitions are vague and incoherent and leave one more perplexed than ever.
ALIC is, one might say, the naive middle-class tourist who has never seriously thought about how the other half live, although the message would have been more powerful were it not for the ponderous style and the seemingly inflexible feminist ethic which allows only one - quite insignificant - male character in the entire novel. Historically, SF has served female readers, writers and characters badly. This is a sad fact which most authors now accept and deplore and, in most cases, have sought to change. If Jones were writing a novel in which the absence of male characters could be justified it would not be an issue, but it seems as if this is an intentional device to prove some unspecified point. It only succeeds in further lessening whatever point the novel is attempting to make, which itself is obfuscated by the obscurity of the text.
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