In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, she finds her happy life changing course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped in a nanotech cocoon, Verity sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati. It is a place of legend, where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings. It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death. But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule—or die.

The journey of Verity across the wonderfully altered landscape of mid-America began in Queen City "A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech," said The New York Times . Now it continues down the river in Mississippi Blues. Verity takes the wildest cast of characters since Philip José Farmer's Riverworld, both living and resurrected, down the river to possible salvation in New Orleans and beyond in a great SF epic.

A novel about death and grieving, about Afro-Caribbean culture and Voodoo and about the four waves of Nanotechnology development. The world of CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY is a world that is being changed by the day by advances in nanotechnology; it is a world where radio has died, of vastly increased lifespans and where extra terrestrials will play a pivotal role in everyone's life.

In a concluding volume to the Nanotech Quartet, people begin vanishing in the wake of unearthly lights, and Jason Peabody, one of the few people who remember the Internet and accompanied by the resilient Dania, makes a startling discovery that prompts him to investigate the disappearances. Reprint.