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Maul Paperback – March 1, 2006

by Tricia Sullivan (Author)

3.8 22 ratings

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Sheri S. Tepper meets Neal Stephenson (and kicks his ass!) in this feminist-cyberpunk thriller by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Tricia Sullivan.

In a mall like any other, two gangs of teenaged girls are about to embark on an orgy of shopping and designer violence. In the battleground of cool, they'll fight for their lives to prove that "image is everything." But it’s not only their own lives they will have to fight for—it’s that of a man trapped in another world, with very different enemies; a man they haven’t met, but who could change the future of the human race.

And in that other place, within a sealed room, a lone man fights an equally desperate war against a new virus and the scientists who have developed it.

If anyone gets out alive, it will be a small miracle.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Sullivan (Dreaming in Smoke) neatly threads two seemingly unrelated coming-of-age stories together—one of "girlz" rumbling in a Jersey mall, the other of a future in which males are nearly extinct—in this fantasy that evenhandedly explores gender issues. What unites these stories is the author's concern for their underdogs, represented by Sun, a Korean-American suburban teenager who fights for her friends and their honor in gun battles amid Clinique and Calvin Klein, and by Meniscus, an autistic charity clone who's subjected to tailored microbial infections. Sun, in learning to negotiate the various powers that rule her world, the Garden State Plaza mall, helps Meniscus, whose efforts to fight the designer microbes and escape the lab are built around his access to a VR game called "Mall." With an eye on scientific ethics and teenage codes, Sullivan invests her high-risk narratives with relevant discourses on the power of sex, just and unjust authority, when to rebel and when to cooperate. The only risk to the reader is disappointment that her most engaging character is a fiction within a fiction. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Meniscus lives a guinea pig's life. Originally dedicated to science before the y-plagues decimated the male population, he is most recently infected with Az79 Y-assassins, which have the side effect of turning him blue, and spends much of his time in a virtual mall. Head researcher Madeline becomes a blackmail target after Meniscus nearly dies. Her boss demanded that she look the other way when another man was placed in Meniscus' habitat to die from the azure y-plague. Her reward was sperm from a most coveted donor. Besides all that, a girl gang shopping in the NoSystems Mall confronts rivals, and things get violent over the last container of a certain lipstick. Thereafter, the lives of Sun and Suk Hee, trapped in a mall made weird by bloodshed and the rules of the game, and of Meniscus in his habitat entwine toward a conclusion that will rattle the outside world. Sullivan's near-future fascinates, the pace of the conflict in the mall and Meniscus' personal development contributing to a very satisfying read. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Night Shade; First American Edition (March 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1597800376
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1597800372
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,573,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,423 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #20,591 in Coming of Age Fantasy (Books)
- #38,065 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 22 ratings

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3.8 out of 5

22 global ratings

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Dave Herman

Great quality, on time

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2021

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Received the book as described, prompt delivery.

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Björn Ahlström

Feminist cyberpunk turns out to be pretty awesome!

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2015

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Reminiscient of Margaret Atwoods "Oryx and Crake" series but way more over the top. My expectations for "Maul" werent that high to be quite honest and i guess that is part of the reson i was so positively surprised. To be fair its not perfect either. Specifically i dont like the way tempus is varied throughout the text but hey, there are som truly neat ideas to make up for it storywise. All in all id havet to say its a cool read. I never knew "feminist cyberpunk" could be so interesting.

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2016

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A bit disappointed in the story.. I didn't finish it.

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Anissa Annalise

The Estee Counter Will Never Be the Same

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2012

Maul is told with two parallel stories. Teenage fashionistas in a mall getting their fashion & gunplay on & a male test subject plugged into a game in a habitat at a research facility in a female dominant society. They're fascinating threads on their own that converge in a very interesting way.

Sun Katz is the main teen we follow at the maul & she's a great character. From the first page, it's pretty clear that she's got other things going on than just what shoes & lip gloss she's going to wear for the day. Sun & her girlfriends wear holstered guns as fashion accessories & the inherent problem in this becomes apparent when a typical squabble at the Estee Lauder counter between two groups of girls goes all hail of bullets & smashed up perfume displays. It's all a bit video game & pulpy but it's fun & engaging to read what happens as Sun flees the scene & has other "adventures" in the maul. I know that this is just half of the story but I found it all so engaging that I quite feel it could have stood on its own.

Meniscus is the test subject in the other story & he's been infected with Az97. He's often in pain & he's blue. He has an experience that almost kills him & he's basically taken out of NoSystems (the Mall game). His handlers are women who work at the research facility & I can honestly say, they're all odious. But in a deliciously terrible way that you can't stop reading about. We learn about the society in which they live & a bit about how women's ascendancy & men being relegated to something called a Pigwalk came to be. It's a twisted society but not so different in some ways from the one in which we exist so it's relatable. There's a murder-by-passive-infection plot that is put into motion by one of the women at the research facility & Arnie Henshaw (a prime Pigwalk contender) & we meet Starry Eyes/Carerra. He is a lot of the worst of people in general but he's also one of the most unvarnished & honest players here, so you don't really want him to die. I admit that I did tire of him abusing Meniscus rather quickly & no one giving a damn. In fairness, SE was treated mercilessly as well by the handlers & society in general. This side of the story is a little slow going at first but by the middle of the book you can see how both sides are running in tandem & where they converge. Then it's a ripping time where everything in both stories is amped up to the finish where both wind up on a highway with a lone wolf. Game over.

I would say there's a "big reveal" where you realize what is real & what isn't but I didn't really have that (maybe others do). The hallmarks are there throughout & it just winds tighter & tighter between the stories as you go along. I found it satisfying but have to admit that I was a little sad that some of the characters I adored were only virtual. Funny thing to say about characters in a book. It was a nice bit of mind twisting to try & determine what was influencing who & when from each side of the story.

This was the first book I've read by Tricia Sullivan but it won't be my last. I bought my copy in paperback as it wasn't available on Kindle (but is being reissued on Kindle for the AmazonUK store). I hope Ms. Sullivan will be offering her titles on the US Amazon Kindle shop soon.

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Robert Beveridge

You will either love this or hate it.

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2008

Tricia Sullivan, Maul (Night Shade, 2006)

Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's "A Lifetime" or Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want". It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious.

The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book.

What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B-grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite tell. ****

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asgardindustries

Dystopian sci-fi at its very best

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 17, 2021

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Tricia Sullivan surely ranks among the top two or three writers working in science fiction today. While her work is uniformly inventive and deeply thought provoking in its extrapolation of where present trends might take us, one can see why she has said that she regards Maul as her finest work. It is reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses not only in the entire narrative covering just a single day, but in the quality of its writing. The characterisation is superb – seldom have I seen the teenage female mind done better, flitting from utter conviction to desperate uncertainty and back in an instant. Sun, the heroine, has a stronger moral compass than she knows, and manages to remain deeply likeable despite bouts of questionable behaviour. The dialogue crackles, the fast paced plot has so many twists and turns that the reader had better be concentrating, and the science and data science are spot on. This is sci-fi as literature, and that work of this quality is not currently in print is an indictment of both the current state of British publishing, and the public’s perception of the genre. Thankfully it is still available as a Gateway e-book, so buy it, read it, and let’s see if we can get it back in print – I want Maul on my bookshelf as a keeper.

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