I've found McNeil's world-building intriguing and occasionally frustrating; she has extensive notes in the Library editions but tends to focus on anthropological details, which never come anywhere near answering my questions about the world. (This time out, the big one is: how are these domed cities actually constructed? Her notes talk about "towns stacked on top of each other" and looking up at the "undersides of buildings," without any hint of a superstructure to keep those buildings up in the air. [1] There are also streets with fast vehicle traffic in the middle of these cities, which makes it seem more like a blown-up version of downtown Chicago than a traditional futuristic domed city. My central concern keeps being that everything feels contingent and jury-rigged, that nothing in this world was ever planned or organized or engineered by anyone, that there's no government or controlling authority of anything, anywhere.)
On the other hand, this is the book where series hero Jaeger is finally called out on his (central, annoying) bullshit. So, even though I'm reading this close to twenty years after McNeil made these stories, she anticipated at least some of the things that I've been writing about Finder.
Speaking of which, here's the back-links: Library Vol. 1, Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, and The Rescuers. Oh, and also Talisman, which I read as a one-off a decade ago and then re-read in the first Library edition.
So: I'm going to take as read all of the background questions and arguments I've been having with this series, in all of those old posts.
This time, Jaeger is back in Anvard, and looking to find some girl to sleep with for a day or so, as he always is. The book is called Five Crazy Women, but, frankly...well, you know the old saying? Meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. Meet assholes all day long, you're the asshole.
Every girl Jaeger meets, everywhere, all the time, is crazy. You get it. [2]
There's a loose frame story of Jaeger talking about his woman troubles with an old friend - who is a gay guy, so McNeil can side-step any sense of competition or immediately relevant "here's what I would do."
As usual with McNeil, there are anthropological reasons behind everything. Jaeger is a half-Ascian (the name-swapped Noble Savages Native Americans of this far-future world), whose central, unbreakable fate in life - Finder is stuffed full of such things, on every goddamn page - is to be a sin-eater. That means he's seemingly even more nomadic than normal for Ascian men, and that the hot young Ascian women - I may be reading between the lines here - are not interested in him, though their aunts may be.
But hot young city girls see him as exotic and exciting - at least the crazy ones do, since he's the kind of guy who comes to town unexpectedly, crashes at a girl's house to fuck her, clean up, and disappear in the morning, and repeats with as many girls as he can manage before running off somewhere else to do some violence.
At the beginning of this book, though, his little black book is failing him. He calls some expected good prospects, but multiple girls - presumably previously hot and young and crazy, conquests in a previous trip to town - have settled down enough that unpredictable sexy asshole from the sticks calling her out of the blue looking for a piece of bed and a piece of ass is no longer an enticing proposition. So he gets called out, he gets shouted at, he gets the "how dare you" reaction.
And, of course, this means they are crazy.
Luckily for Jaeger, he's still young enough - I'm thinking maybe thirty here, probably not quite that - and enticing enough that there's still a solid number of hot young crazy girls willing to take him home. He meets a new crazy girl in the course of this story, and is stuck with her for longer than usual because he managed to get himself seriously injured.
In the end, he doesn't learn anything, as we expected. He will get older, though - I think, he has some kind of minor healing factor that might keep him young-looking semi-permanently, which would alter my predictions - and find that hot young crazy city girls who also have daddy issues are not just even more crazy but also somewhat scarcer. And their aunts and mothers will probably start warning them about Jaeger...which, come to think of it, is probably enticing to the craziest ones. But that's all concerns for the future: right now, Jaeger got his wick dipped and he's about to head out of town, just like always.
I found this to be lighter in tone than a lot of the Finder stories; Jaeger has plot armor in ways the other characters don't, so we know he'll always come out in the end, exactly the same as he went in. Though, in the end, he may be a charismatic, talented, interesting asshole...but he's still an asshole.
[1] Though, at work, I've just been connected to someone who used to work for a company that I'm told figured out how to "build skyscrapers from the top down," so maybe it's me that's unimaginative here.
[2] From the evidence here, I also tentatively conclude that crazy girls have an expressed preference for cowgirl. Further research is clearly warranted, so if the committee funds this grant request, I will....
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