ISBN 0-00-648023-3 (UK pbk)

"Better than sex, better than drugs, plasm is the solvent of mind and matter once called magic. In the worldwide city of the future, generating plasm is a science, its deployment a technology -- and it's metered at the domestic end. That is, the rich have plenty, the poor next to none. Aiah is a bored clerk with the Plasm Authority until she stumbles upon an unmapped well of the coveted stuff. A thousand Angels of Power sing in Aiah's mind.

"Constantine, Metropolitan in exile, mage and revolutionary, is happy to buy, illegally, all the plasm Aiah has to offer. But he wants more than plasm from Aiah. Along with ambitious wizards, human dolphins, gene twisted avians and a demon living in the plasm mains, Aiah can help Constantine to challenge the Ascended Ones themselves. Unless she burns out." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1995]

"Having decided to create an entirely urban fantasy system, I then went to think about magic, and how magic could be derived from an urban setting. I settled on geomancy or feng shui , in which the power is derived from the architecture and the mass of the buildings themselves, and the relationship of the buildings to one another and to the natural terrain." --Walter Jon Williams (in Locus , Issue 428, Vol.37, No.3, September 1996).

"Like futuristic steampunk... more than electricity, this far future society uses plasm -- a geomantic energy that can be tapped and channeled. Computers with cumbersome dials and switches, telephony using patchcords and ceramic earphones, recording devices of etched cylinders. The whole planet is a vast urban sprawl living beneath a shield which emits heat and light...

"Not sure what to make of this book. Somehow I was expecting more. Oh, it's well written, full of interesting detail, and very readable... but what is it trying to say? And what about the shield? I was left with more questions when I finished it than I had two-thirds of the way through. Perhaps the story is too remote, too different, too detached for personal involvement. Then again, perhaps I just need to re-read it." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 22 December 1995).