Review of Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone by Ian McDonald

It's no secret this blog has a love affair with Ian McDonald. The author displays an excellent mix of lexical agility, fertile imagination, and themes human and existential in nature. (If I had to build the strongest science fiction house, those are the three pillars I would start with.) On top of this, McDonald has shown incredible range, from gonzo (Out on Blue Six) to staid (King of Morning, Queen of Day), magic realism (Desolation Road) to mainstream (Luna trilogy), and beyond. In the novella Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (1994), McDonald shows what he can do with cyberpunk.

Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone centers on a man named Ethan, who at the start of the story is on a pilgrimage in the remote parts of Japan, hoping to find direction in life. Ethan is in possession of fracters, a technology more advanced than subliminal messages, which has the possibility of subconsciously altering people's minds. Fracters are a highly sought after technology, naturally.  In what Ethan describes as a previous life, government agencies and organized crime were doing the seeking—not always with the best of intentions, his life in danger. It's in trying to reconcile this past life that Ethan struggles with his current one. Throwing a spanner into these spinning works is the fact Ethan is not entirely sure he himself hasn't been affected by fracters.

The primary focus of Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone is Ethan's quest for self-identity. McDonald mixes in healthy amounts of cyberpunk and near future paraphernalia. This is done through the crucial pieces of backstory edited into the main story and the development of the real-time chapters. But things revolve around Ethan. More than flashy tech, chips, chrome, and nethackers, the reader discovers who Ethan is as a person and comes to understand the truly existential circumstances he finds himself in.

Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone is noticeably reserved. Where McDonald can sometimes struggle to contain his lexical exuberance, the novella is not gonzo in style. I find this to be McDonald at his tip-top best—when he forces himself to apply his zealous thesaurus stylistically. Rather than just splashing it across the canvas, he applies bright dabs here and there for effect. In such a character-centric story, this amount of reservation suits the bill—drawing out the inner world of Ethan while not distracting from it.

If there is anything to challenge the novella on, it's the core concept of fracters. Illogical, monopolies exist in a world whose technology is industrialized at a global scale. It can nag at readers looking for that level of consistency, and more mainstream readers of sf will likely wish that McDonald had dug deeper into their potential. I agree with the idea that a monopoly would not exist, but at the same time focusing more on the tech would have diluted the personal story McDonald was trying to tell. Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone would not pack the humanist punch it does were the focus elsewhere.

In the end, Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone is an underrated work of Ian McDonald, and cyberpunk in general. It easily sits aside Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson's efforts. Diction reined in (at least for McDonald), it offers readers a compact cycberpunk tale whose prose sparkles more than explodes. The central plot element of fracters is perhaps not as developed as much as it could have been, but McDonald is not as interested in eye kicks as he is ensuring the humanity in Ethan's tale comes through in the manner in which fracters have altered him and society. Cyberpunk? Cyberpunk.