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| 0671774778
| 3.81
| 850
| Jun 2001
| Jun 2001
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liked it
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2021 reads, #52. This is book #2 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happ
2021 reads, #52. This is book #2 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happens to be my first-ever read in my life of any of the now 850 Star Trek non-canon novels that exist, which gave me an excuse to write in much more general terms on the subject in my review of book #1, S.D. Perry's TOS-set Cloak, for those who might be interested in getting a primer on the topic. Following chronologically by show, this one is set during Jean-Luc Picard's Next Generation Enterprise, and unfortunately this time you see a lot more of the traits that lead so many non-fans to dismiss the entire genre of franchise non-canon novels, whether Star Trek in nature or Star Wars, Buffy or Resident Evil, Aliens or the X-Files; that is, writing that can get quite sloppy at times, featuring characterizations that just beat you over the head in order to remind you of characters you already know and love, peppered with unfunny jokes and overexplained exposition, married to an uninspiring plot, with a scope that doesn't exploit the "all made up in the reader's mind" aspect of a novel to increase the stakes dramatically, but instead feels like a pedestrian one-hour TV script trying to cut corners on the budget, despite there being no obligation to actually film it. Most annoyingly, however, is the book being guilty multiple times of a common red flag you often see in mediocre science-fiction: where the author is writing within an "enlightened future" that has done away with organized religion, but wants to have their cake and eat it too by being allowed to let these enlightened characters from the future slip religious cursing into their dialogue, as a simplistic way for the author to allow the character to express annoyance or anger, which leads to these awkwardly cartoonish phrases in a lot of these types of novels like "Oh my rational stars!" and "Curse the ancient ones!" and "If there WAS a hell, and such a thing as damning a person to that hell, I would certainly damn you to this hell that we agree does not exist!" I mean, I agree with what you probably want to argue, that it's not actually a cardinal sin or even a fatal one -- if a so-so franchise non-canon novel author wants to slip in a few "damn you"s and "go to hell"s into this future's apparently atheistic society, the Federation will certainly still stand -- but to me, it's microcosmic evidence of a sloppy writer, one not only taking the easy way out of a situation but deliberately doing so, so awkwardly that they're not even trying to hide it. I hate sloppy writers, and I detest it when they demand that I somehow owe them time or money simply because they exist, so I'm certainly not going to have a lot of tolerance for it within a genre specifically known for its high concentration of sloppy writing. One thing I know for sure from the world of non-canon novel fandom is that there definitely exists lists of who most fans consider the best of these series authors and who are the ones to avoid; so it looks like, even here after read #2 of a possible 848 more, I'm already starting one myself, and already have a team name to add to my list of those to not read again. Sigh. ...more |
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Aug 03, 2021
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Aug 03, 2021
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| 0671774719
| 9780671774714
| 0671774719
| 3.83
| 804
| Jul 2001
| Jul 2001
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really liked it
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2021 reads, #50. I've recently found myself going through a period where I'm once again binging through all the various Roddenberry-era "Star Trek" sh
2021 reads, #50. I've recently found myself going through a period where I'm once again binging through all the various Roddenberry-era "Star Trek" shows (that is, the ones he was either alive for or that were run by people he originally hired, including the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, but not including the unwatchable crap the suits at Paramount have been greenlighting in the last several years, such as Discovery and Picard), and I found myself once again really intrigued by the concept of "Section 31," first introduced by the subversive writing staff over at the franchise's "black sheep" of the family, Deep Space Nine. For those who don't know, this was an attempt by that staff to add some much needed darkness to Roddenberry's squeaky-clean vision of the United Federation of Planets, positing that there is actually a secret CIA-type "dirty tricks" wing of the Federation that goes around making the tough decisions that the oh-so-noble public-facing side of Starfleet can't bear to do themselves, when things like political assassinations or industrial sabotage needs to take place in order to further the Federation's high-minded agenda. (Unsurprisingly, much of its original development was spearheaded by Ronald Moore, who would eventually go on to create the Peabody-winning dark reboot of Battlestar Galactica, as well as the equally dark Apple+ show For All Mankind.) I eagerly enjoyed all these Section 31 episodes yet again during this most recent binge, for the third or fourth time now; and when I found myself with a desire for yet more Section 31 stories once I was done, I decided to turn for the first time in my life to the infamous collection of "non-canon" Star Trek novels that have been published over the decades, where I learned that there has actually been a four-book series in the past dedicated specifically to this subject. (All four are currently out of print, so to read them I was forced to turn to The Pirate Bay, where I ended up downloading a super-torrent containing over 700 Star Trek novels in a single ZIP file; even more incredibly, this torrent is several years old at this point, so doesn't even reflect the grand total of over 850 Star Trek novels that now exist.) I say "infamous," of course, because all these novels, just like non-canon novel series from any popular TV show, have a sketchy reputation among the general population, to put it mildly; that is, that they're mediocre quickie crap, pumped out by the wheelbarrow-full in order to make an easy buck off that franchise's "true believers," who don't care what the actual quality is as long as it satisfies their fetishistic obsession for more, more, more, executed by hiring a bunch of dilettante freelancers who all wished they could get the "real" jobs on the actual TV show's writing staff but simply aren't good enough to do so, and who are paid so little for these that they must dash off a 50,000-word book every week or two just to be able to afford baby's little redshirt jammies. I admit, in my youth I used to be one of these critics; but as I've gotten older, and especially as I've gotten more and more involved in the actual publishing industry, I've come to realize that there isn't actually much difference between the writers of an "official" TV franchise and the cadre of freelancers who write all the "non-canon" companion novels, other than the obvious fact that there are less TV positions available and that they pay a lot more, and therefore there's a lot more competition for them. But when all is said and done, the writing staff of a TV franchise is just like any other literary community: there are a few great writers, there a few terrible writers, and there is a giant middle of so-so writers, and once in a blue moon all the stars align and you get a consistently amazing show like Deep Space Nine or Battlestar Galactica, but much more often you get something like Stargate: SG-1, where you end every episode sorta frowning and thinking, "Well, I guess that was entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon where I was laying around on my couch eating Cheetos with nothing better to do." As my enjoyment of contemporary literary fiction has dropped more and more in the last decade (all of them starting to feel more and more like interchangeable garbage about hipster idiots whining about their entitled middle-class lives), and as my appreciation for genre literature seems to just be going up and up with age, I find myself drawn to things like Star Trek novels for the first time in my life; and this is especially helped by the fact that I'm now personal friends with several people who write these kinds of projects for a living (over in the world of Star Wars roleplaying games, to be specific), and have come to realize that there's actually a fine art and a specific talent to pumping out a 50,000-word book in two weeks in a way so that it both satisfies the true believers and isn't unreadable crap. So in this, then, this first Section 31 novel of the series, retroactively set during the original Kirk/Spock era, which first aired decades before the Deep Space Nine staff ever came up with the concept to begin with (which of course is one of the pleasures of non-canon novels, in that "non-canon" is basically a fancy way of saying "it doesn't officially count," and so therefore a lot more liberties can be taken than in the "official" TV episodes*), we see both all the great things about this medium and all the things people complain about, rolled up together. On the plus side, author SD Perry delivers the Section 31 goods, inventing a rollicking story that with its expanded page count allows for the sweeping scope of a full-length movie, and also does a great job at examining such inner-dialogue activities like the famous Vulcan "mind meld" in a beautiful and poetic way that you simply can't get from a TV show's visual interpretation of one pointy-eared nerd grabbing another pointy-eared nerd's head and staring at them intensely; but on the minus side, the exposition is often clunky, the jokes are often forced and not very funny, and the personality traits of the various crew members are often overemphasized to the point of exasperation, for the sake of delivering the well-worn characters the true believers already know and love (I get it, Perry, Chekov is Russian, Jesus Christ I get it already). I could complain about these things if I wanted to, and others undoubtedly will; but since the whole reason I picked it up was because I wanted a brand-new story about Section 31, and by God I got a brand-new story about Section 31, I will instead consider myself officially mollified, haters be damned. For sure I will be reading the other three novels in the Section 31 series, and you can expect their reviews here over the next few weeks; and given that I now own another 696 Star Trek novels besides these four, I strongly suspect that more of them are fated for my future in the coming months and years. I guess this now officially makes me a true believer myself, just like those I used to make fun of back in my twenties; but if so, then so be it, I guess, because Jesus Christ I can't take even one more novel for the rest of my life about an ennui-filled MFA professor sleeping with one of his students, I swear to God I can't. *It is in fact this opportunity to take liberties that leads to one of the more notorious edges of the non-canon world, the so-called "slash fiction" actually written mostly by fans, sometimes legally and sometimes not, which is when two or more characters from a franchise are depicted in a sexual relationship together in a way that they'd never be presented in the "official" show. Kirk/Spock is one of the oldest and still one of the most popular; note the slash between their names, which is how this genre gets its name. ...more |
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Jul 24, 2021
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Jul 24, 2021
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| 9781937894283
| 3.33
| 7,515
| Mar 25, 2014
| Mar 25, 2014
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2021 reads, #48. DID NOT FINISH. I woke up the other day and realized that I now had over 70 contemporary fiction novels in my To Be Read list, some n
2021 reads, #48. DID NOT FINISH. I woke up the other day and realized that I now had over 70 contemporary fiction novels in my To Be Read list, some now on that list for over three years; and that the reason it had piled up so high was because I've just come to dread taking on these books so much, in that the vast majority of contemporary fiction I read anymore (easily 95 percent of it) seems to just be an endless recycling of stories I've already heard, featuring characters I can't work up any interest in. So I made an agreement with myself, that I would try to get this list back down to a reasonable length by the time Christmas rolls around, by committing to only the first 50 pages of each one; and that, even if it's well-written, if the story hasn't grabbed me enough by that page-50 mark to make me want to read more, I would abandon it altogether and not even bother writing a review, but instead copy and paste this paragraph you're currently reading. So, that's what's happened here with my abandonment of this book; not necessarily that it's badly done, but that I simply found it bland and derivative, interchangeable with one of a thousand other contemporary novels I've already read. Keep it in mind when deciding whether or not to check it out yourself.
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Jul 23, 2021
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Jul 23, 2021
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| unknown
| 3.55
| 448
| unknown
| Jan 2021
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really liked it
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2021 reads, #34. This is a solid if not particularly remarkable thriller, probably best put in the "New Weird" category although it contains a lot of
2021 reads, #34. This is a solid if not particularly remarkable thriller, probably best put in the "New Weird" category although it contains a lot of sci-fi elements as well. Set in the capital city of Armenia, its premise is essentially a combination of the premise behind Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind (one night a group of five friends stay up all night drinking and cooking, then discover the next morning that the vast majority of the city's population has mysteriously disappeared) with the premise behind Stephen King's Under the Dome (in that they also discover that their entire city is now, um, under a dome). Like those two books, author Suren Hakobyan is less interested here in the plot mechanics of what happened and how our heroes will escape, and more interested in exploring the personalities of these characters and how their interactions would change under a situation of extreme stress like this one. I have to admit, I was originally going to give this book 3 stars, but I came to really appreciate Hakobyan's commitment to ending this book in an ambiguous way that provides no easy answers, a deeper and darker look at the human condition than its genre trappings may make it seem at first. It comes with a mild recommendation to general audiences, and a much stronger recommendation to fans of such New Weird authors as Jeff VanderMeer and others.
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Jun 01, 2021
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| 1941072895
| 9781941072899
| 4.09
| 11
| Mar 16, 2021
| Mar 16, 2021
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liked it
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2021 reads, #24. This is the third of the so-called "Lovelace" books by Felicia Watson, named for the spaceship whose adventures we're following durin
2021 reads, #24. This is the third of the so-called "Lovelace" books by Felicia Watson, named for the spaceship whose adventures we're following during the series. I've read all three of them now, and like 2019's We Have Met the Enemy (my review) and 2020's Spooky Action at a Distance (my review), I found this newest one to be only so-so; for while there's nothing particularly wrong with it, there's nothing particularly great either, the entire series set up episodically like a pre-"Peak TV" cable show might be set up, where essentially each book can be described as "a group of characters you know and love stumble across a random adventure, then come to a resolution to the adventure by the end, in a way so that the adventures can be read in pretty much any order and still make sense." That's...you know, that's fine, and Watson does a serviceable job with these sorta bland people and the "pew pew"-type space-opera antics they always seem to be stumbling into; but like the other two books, I reached the end of this one sort of shrugging and saying, "Okay, that was I suppose not a complete waste of two days of my life," even while acknowledging that I will likely be completely forgetting about the book's existence in just a few weeks from now, like I have with the other two books. (It's telling that each time I receive another one of these books from the publisher for review, the first thing I have to do is go back and read my reviews of the previous volumes, just to remind myself of what this series is about in the first place.) If you're a fan of people like Joss Whedon, then for sure you'll enjoy this; but I can take Whedon or leave him, so books like this one get not much more from me than a "meh" and then a quick move forward into more of my unending TBR pile. ...more |
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Apr 23, 2021
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Apr 23, 2021
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| 9780385541336
| 0385541333
| 3.31
| 486
| Jan 25, 2018
| Aug 14, 2018
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2021 reads, #21. DID NOT FINISH. Although I've been getting increasingly comfortable in recent years with giving up on a book if I'm not finding anyth
2021 reads, #21. DID NOT FINISH. Although I've been getting increasingly comfortable in recent years with giving up on a book if I'm not finding anything engaging about it in the first 20 or 30 pages, this might be the very first time in my life when I gave up on a book I was looking forward to right on the very first page, when I cracked open the 500-page Connect by Julian Gough (whose biggest claim to fame is that he wrote the poem that appears onscreen in Minecraft after defeating the Ender Dragon), and was forced on page 1 to sit through the experience of our hero, biologist Naomi Chiang, calmly observing her severely autistic teenage son pop a boner through his pajamas after winning the boss level of his latest virtual-reality obsession. Jesus Christ, Gough, no fucking thanks, I thought, shutting the book and hopping on here at Goodreads to see the thoughts of people who actually read through the whole thing, to make sure I wasn't accidentally missing a modern masterpiece that just unfortunately begins in about the most unpleasant way humanly possible. It was at that point that I learned that the novel is guilty is three different major literary sins; that is, if you don't count the minor sin of delivering the most cringey look at sexuality in the entire history of 500-page books with cringey sexual references on the very first page. First, by making this a book about an Asian woman who accidentally discovers a cure for autism, just to have a collection of white male soldiers immediately try to steal it for the purpose of turning it into a weapon, Gough is guilty of the 21st-century crime of writing the most Wokety Woke story the Wokety Wokes ever Wokety Woke, which is apparently fine for others but to me is like fingernails down a chalkboard; then, by indicating that the treatment not only cures autism but actually turns the affected person into a cartoonishly hyperintelligent Superman figure, Gough quite nakedly rips off the storyline of the much more famous Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Commandment #1 of avoiding bad writing is, "Thou shalt not rip off novels that are actually better-written than thine own;" and third, based on the multitude of disappointed reviews by others here, I get the sense that Gough is an example of the absolutely worst type of science-fiction author there is, the "Full-Time Academe Science-Fiction Author" (perhaps most typified by Ian McEwan's unreadably fucking shitty 2019 Machines Like Me , a book that gives me Vietnam flashbacks just by mentioning its title again), in which said writer declares that they're a real author, not like those lasergun-obsessed hacks who usually write sci-fi novels, and therefore his sci-fi novel isn't going to be about such contemptuous subjects like robots and spaceships but instead will be a good science-fiction novel, one about real things, important things! Like injustice! And...um, autistic people who experience injustice! And...er, autistic people's single mothers who also experience injustice! Nope, no 'pew-pew' or 'take me to your leader' here, folks, no sir! I have an MFA! I actually know what I'm doing! Ugh, Gough, NO THANK YOU. A badly written genre novel is one thing, disappointing for sure but something I can usually blow off fairly easily; but it's when literary authors start openly implying that there's never been a decently written genre novel in history, because writers with MFAs have never written in that genre, that's when I cross the rubicon into personally offended, not only because of the implication but because the data leading to the implication is plain wrong. (There are plenty of hoity-toity writers cranking out great sci-fi these days, even if your dissertation advisor has never heard of them.) All this added together was just enough to make me take the unheard-of action of abandoning a novel I was looking forward to after reading less than one page of it; and I gotta say, based on what I read about it afterwards, I don't regret my decision a single bit. ...more |
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Apr 04, 2021
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Apr 04, 2021
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| 9781393000440
| 4.37
| 92
| unknown
| Jan 06, 2021
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really liked it
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2021 reads, #7. As someone who was a big fan of the original wave of cyberpunk authors in the late 1980s and early '90s, one of the things that deligh
2021 reads, #7. As someone who was a big fan of the original wave of cyberpunk authors in the late 1980s and early '90s, one of the things that delights me the most about our current times is the wave of retro popularity this genre has seen in recent years; and Grant Price's Reality Testing is a fine example of a cyberpunk nostalgia novel, so pitch-perfect to the genre's tropes that I was expecting to read a review of it afterwards in Mondo 2000, right next to R.U. Sirius's interview with Lydia Lunch conducted on the set of Survival Research Laboratory's latest performance piece. Set in a gritty futuristic Germany with lots of shades of William Gibson's famous "Sprawl" trilogy (for example, like Gibson's portrayal of a futuristic American Eastern Seaboard, in Price's world the entire area between Dusseldorf and Bonn is essentially one giant megapolis), the main nod Price makes here to the book actually being written in the 21st century is the fact that our own age's utopian "green smart buildings" have become the new slums of Price's universe, in a world where carbon credits have become the new de facto currency and "cloud computing" is done with human brains among a permanently cowed lower class. Other than that, though, nearly every other beat of this fun, fast-paced thriller follows all the tropes first established by people like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling now 30 years ago, essentially starting with a mysterious death on the first page and then falling down the rabbithole of its investigation as the novel continues, revealing conspiracies among self-autonomous corporations, back-alley wetware engineers, freakishly alien-looking sex workers and a lot more. If you don't already like cyberpunk, there ain't even a single chance you're going to like this book; but if you do, you'll find a great exercise in time-capsule pastiche here, a book that had me reaching for my pleated pegged pants and 33k modem the entire time I was reading it. It comes with a limited but spirited recommendation to this specific audience. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2021
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Mar 24, 2021
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| 1623174104
| B07QGQBMDY
| 4.41
| 1,023
| unknown
| Jun 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #4. This is the big hot book among leftist hipsters right now (it literally took months for my reserve of it at the library to come up), i
2021 reads, #4. This is the big hot book among leftist hipsters right now (it literally took months for my reserve of it at the library to come up), in reality just another general guide to Zen Buddhism, specifically focusing in on the sensation of anger and how Buddhism teaches you to transform that sensation into something productive; but the gimmick here is that author Rod Owens looks at that anger specifically through the lens of social justice activism, asking for example how we can properly honor the very much legitimate rage we feel over something like the deliberate police murder of George Floyd while still transforming that rage into something healthier and more productive in our lives. Spoiler alert: It's through meditation, gratitude, compassion, and the other building blocks of a mindfulness-based Buddhist practice, and so this makes the book an almost perfect choice for those who know little about Buddhism and have always wanted to learn more, while also worrying about learning more because they feel that righteous fury over injustice is not something that should be dismissed or discounted. That said, I've read probably 50 books about Buddhism over the last several years, and have been engaging in secular mindfulness-based meditation daily for the last half-decade, and this book still provided several new insights about the practice I had never thought about before (for example, that one of the biggest benefits of having friends is that they regularly remind you of your better qualities, while spending too much time alone encourages you to obsessively focus on every worst trait of your personality, which a year into the pandemic I would know nothing about whatsoever); and so unlike a lot of books about mindfulness that are good for beginners, this is simultaneously a great read for veterans of the practice too, from a smart and engaging contemporary writer who dispenses with a lot of the supernatural woo-woo that's often found in these kinds of books, which as an atheist I really appreciated. It's destined to be eventually considered a classic in the field of Western guides to Eastern philosophies, and there's a very good reason it's been flying off the shelves these days. It comes with perhaps my strongest general recommendation I've given a book in the last year. ...more |
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Mar 23, 2021
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Mar 23, 2021
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| B00O7X626W
| 4.44
| 100,275
| Jun 02, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #3. Wow, is it really time for another season of The Expanse? I originally came to the "Expanse" novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (w
2021 reads, #3. Wow, is it really time for another season of The Expanse? I originally came to the "Expanse" novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who write together under the pen name "James S.A. Corey") through the Amazon Prime Video adaptation; so before each new season starts, I make sure to read the novel it's based on first, although that of course will become more complicated starting next year, now that Amazon has announced that they're ending the adaptation in 2022 after finishing only six of the book series' nine volumes. This year was season 5, which existing fans know is a particularly fascinating moment in the series, because Corey pulls off what seems like two inherently contradictory things simultaneously: after a volume 4 that was widely criticized for being too frenetic and plot-obsessed, the authors slow way down here to essentially give us a character study, separating our main heroes so that we can examine their pasts and personalities one by one and chapter by chapter; but in the middle of this slowly plotted character study, the authors introduce what promises to be the single biggest plot shocker in the series' entire history, one so momentous and paradigm-changing that it's difficult sometimes to believe the authors actually got away with it. That makes this book magnificent, because it not only deepens our understanding of all our principal characters and what makes them tick -- a topic sorely missing from a lot of novels published within specific genres like science-fiction -- but it also provides a very dramatic "this is where everything changes" moment for the universe's mythos as a whole, and I think now in hindsight it's no surprise that said "everything has now changed" moment happens at almost the exact middle point of the entire nine-book uber-plot. For these reasons this makes Nemesis Games easily my favorite "Expanse" book since the very first one that originally got me hooked, and a great shot in the arm at a point in the saga where so many other sci-fi series start to falter. Although I'm sad that there seemingly will never be a resolution to the story in the realm of TV, the good news is that we all have the original novels to still follow; and this one halfway through was the exact rallying experience I needed to keep my interest in the "Expanse" universe high and passionate. I look forward to tackling the next book in the series, 2016's Babylon's Ashes, next year in anticipation of Amazon's sixth and final season of the TV adaptation. ...more |
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Mar 22, 2021
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Mar 22, 2021
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| 038071177X
| 9780380711772
| 038071177X
| 3.60
| 192
| 1989
| Jan 01, 1990
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liked it
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This is one of the many novels I've read in the last few years through a recommendation from the ongoing "Five Great Books About..." series at sci-fi
This is one of the many novels I've read in the last few years through a recommendation from the ongoing "Five Great Books About..." series at sci-fi publisher Tor.com's blog, in this case recommending interesting titles that all have to do with ways civilization might continue on in the face of societal collapse. But while this was at least better than the other book from that list I decided to read, Waubgeshig Rice's disappointingly flat Moon of the Crusted Snow (my review), it wasn't actually that much better, which ironically made it extra-disappointing since author Joan Slonczewski is a two-time winner of the Astounding Award (formerly the John W. Campbell Award). The problem here is that it's a one-trick-pony book, setting up an admittedly intriguing idea at the beginning (after a nuclear war that devastates most of Earth, a group of space aliens show up and save a series of small communities around the planet by enclosing them in impenetrable clear domes, but no one knows why the aliens did it, what they want out of it, or when they're going to let the humans go again); but then we go an entire 250 pages before there's even a single other development regarding the central idea, the pages in between being essentially a look at a Quaker community in Pennsylvania and how life would both change and stay the same for them under such a situation (apparently a common theme in Slonczewski's work, in that this 65-year-old biologist and Kenyon College professor is a lifelong Quaker themselves). The eventual answer to what exactly the aliens are doing was interesting enough, in a sorta obvious way; but I have to admit, I'm much more intrigued by the central premise behind the books Slonczweski is most famous for, the idea that perhaps the fabled "technological Singularity" is actually underway already, but that instead of it transforming humans into new super-creatures, we're destined to be merely the mitochondria for whatever super-machine is fated to replace us. This is the concept they explore in their newest novels, so I think I might possibly take these on in the future as well. For others, I recommend you do the same, and skip this minor '80s book of theirs altogether. ...more |
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Feb 03, 2021
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Feb 03, 2021
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| 0345431626
| 9780345431622
| 0345431626
| 4.16
| 10,395
| 1980
| Oct 12, 1999
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it was amazing
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Like the rest of the planet, I was blown away by the recent Netflix miniseries adaptation of The Queen's Gambit; and that reminded me that it's been l
Like the rest of the planet, I was blown away by the recent Netflix miniseries adaptation of The Queen's Gambit; and that reminded me that it's been literally decades since I last approached the work of the criminally underrated Postmodernist author Walter Tevis, who in a perfect world would be as famous and revered as his '60s through '80s peers like John Updike, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, etc. (Although let's not feel too bad for him -- even while alive, he got to witness successful film adaptations of three out of his six novels, including the pool-hall character drama The Hustler, its sequel The Color of Money, and the science-fiction tragedy The Man Who Fell to Earth, which as a bonus was the Hollywood debut of the then white-hot David Bowie.) I've already read The Hustler and Fell to Earth, and thought I'd put in a little more time before reading The Queen's Gambit, so instead picked up his second of his three sci-fi novels, Mockingbird from 1980. (For what it's worth, the only novel of his that hasn't been mentioned at this point is 1983's The Steps of the Sun, in which he predicts an early 21st century where the planet is dealing with an energy crisis, China has become a global superpower, and the American government has become overrun by corrupt members of organized crime, with the planet's last hope resting on a tech-industry billionaire who's built his own spaceship. Are we sure Tevis didn't have access to a time machine?) And although more far-fetched, Mockingbird also often deals in "nailed the prediction" territory, as we enter a United States in the 2400s that's on the brink of genocide; not from war or hunger, but literally from human laziness and sloth, because of a centuries-long program to replace all human labor with computers, robots and other automation. It's now led to a world where AIs run virtually everything, from janitor positions to college deans to elected government offices; and for centuries it's left humans with little else to do but guzzle marijuana and tranquilizers 24 hours a day, forget that written language even exists (because of all communication for the last century being exclusively through video and emoticons), and spend their days passively watching either pornography or Tevis's surprisingly accurate description of rave music and fractal graphics. It's easy to think, as I did at first, that Tevis is writing a damning indictment of modernity here; so it was surprising to read some interviews with him after the fact and realize that he actually meant for this to be a parable about drug addiction, and especially the alcoholism that he himself struggled with and eventually overcame in his real life, which as Queen's Gambit fans know is a subject that pops up over and over and over again in his short six-book oeuvre. (Tevis tragically died at the age of 57, from lung cancer brought on by a lifetime of smoking.) But it makes perfect sense once you do learn this, because what this book is really about is not the futuristic status quo Tevis sets up as the novel's milieu, but rather the handful of individuals who eventually decide to rebel against this status quo, quitting their habitual barbiturates cold-turkey and eventually "waking up" to the reality of the world around them (including the disquieting realization that the AIs have been occasionally putting sterilization drugs into the populace's unlimited free marijuana, in an attempt to keep the global population at an algorithm-optimized perfect balance; but that a minor assembly-line breakdown at the drug factory has led to these sterilization drugs being given out without pause for the last 30 straight years, leading to the looming extinction of the entire zonked-out human race, with not a single person now educated enough or even sober enough to realize that the problem is occurring or how to fix it). So when all is said and done, Mockingbird is not tragic as much as it is hopeful, because it's not actually about drug addiction but rather recovery from drug addiction. But of course there's a lot more going on besides this, including lots of pointed examinations of the justice system, race, corporate consumerism, the ironic "Monkey's Paw" style danger of getting what you wish for, and a lot more. That's perhaps the main reason to read Mockingbird in the first place; because much like Queen's Gambit, Tevis creates a very real-feeling, very detailed, very lived-in world in which to place his metaphorical story, making it easy not just to "grok his message" but to luxuriate inside the universe he's built in order to convey this message. Like his other books, it's in this way that I most recommend reading it, as a story with a message for us to learn and internalize but with Tevis clearly meaning for us to get lost inside the setting he's created as well, and to revel in the deliciously unexpected turns his plots always take (including one of the most devastating final paragraphs in the entirety of modern literature). One of the best books I've read this year, and coming in right under the wire at that, it makes me more excited than ever to take on The Queen's Gambit for the first time later this winter, and eventually all four of his other books as well. ...more |
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| 0449912558
| 9780449912553
| 0449912558
| 4.14
| 77,133
| Sep 09, 1996
| Sep 08, 1997
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did not like it
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I picked up this 25-year-old book because of a recent article at the science-fiction blog Tor.com, examining a series of supposedly great books about
I picked up this 25-year-old book because of a recent article at the science-fiction blog Tor.com, examining a series of supposedly great books about space aliens who behave in a way unfathomable to human understanding, expecting a novel along the lines of Peter Watts' brilliant Blindsight. But The Sparrow was most certainly not that, and I suspect now was never meant for a reader like me in the first place, in that it's actually mostly a book about religion but just cleverly using a sci-fi setting to examine the subject. Much like Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (my review), it's about humanity discovering the existence of extraterrestrial life over at our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, although author Mary Doria Russell doesn't bother to do Liu's hard-science examination of how exactly to get there, instead simply declaring that it took 17 years to travel the four light years and not bothering to explain it in any more detail than that. The much bigger problem, however, is that the entire conceit of Russell's book is that it's actually a group of Jesuit priests and their friends who make the trip to the neighboring planet, prompted solely by the fact that the alien communication vaguely sounds like people singing hymns, and with the Catholic Church having the resources and infrastructure to actually build and launch their own spaceship years before the United Nations can get to the point of even acknowledging that such a trip would be worth taking. That decision then causes all kinds of basic structural and logic problems in the book, including the ludicrously untrained nature of the ship's crew (who are literally just random private citizens who happened to be personal friends of the dude who discovered the the ET signal, a developing-nation social justice activist who is only put in charge of the mission in the first place because he happened to be the first person to discover the signal, neither fact of which makes even the tiniest bit of sense); Russell's habit of giving these untrained crew members endless amount of annoying Seinfeld Schmoopy dialogue ("I love you, Schmoopy!" "No, I love you MORE, Schmoopy Poopy!"), which is like fingernails down a chalkboard to someone like me; the fact that, even after a 17-year journey, the crew still doesn't have any better plans for first contact once there besides to just wing it on the fly and hope it all works out; the similar fact that, once they are there, it's not so much that the aliens behave in a way that's incomprehensible to the human mind, but simply that it's not in the vein of the pious Christian crew's belief in what was going to await them (instead, you can picture the aliens more like a tribe of villagers in rural Afghanistan, even down to the vaguely Middle Eastern names Russell gives all of them); and most criminally, telling the story largely through flashbacks and flash-forwards, meaning that for a book supposedly all about the disastrous miscommunication between humans and an alien culture, you have to wade through 300 fucking pages of a 500-page book before you even get to the first moment of actually seeing the humans interact with the aliens. I suspect the reason so many people passionately love this novel is because it's such a unique way of examining the subject of religious faith; but as an atheist, the whole thing just left me really empty by the end, and I found myself with no other response besides, "Yeah, you dumb fucking Christians, you got exactly what you deserved for being a bunch of goddamned space missionaries to begin with. Next time stay home, you xenophobic idiots." That's not the kind of response I want to have after investing a month of my life into reading a glacially slow, dull-as-dishwater story, and the whole thing just left me angrily disappointed by the time I was finally finished with the big long stupid thing. Based on the amount of glowing 5-star reviews here, your results may very well differ; but if you're looking for an actual intelligent examination of how aliens might behave in a way totally incomprehensible to the human experience, The Sparrow is tragically not it. ...more |
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| 4.41
| 169,855
| May 2008
| Aug 11, 2015
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it was ok
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This is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I'v
This is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I've already done a long write-up of that book, so I recommend checking that out if you want to see my thoughts on the overall themes and concepts of the entire trilogy. Much has been made about these books being the centerpiece of what a growing amount of people are calling the "Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction" currently transpiring as we speak, with Liu and his peers having a reputation among native Asians that roughly corresponds to how we Americans think of the Holy Trinity of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein back in our own country's golden age of the 1950s. But there's a big problem with these so-called golden-age authors, which is that in their zeal to legitimize a genre that at the time had virtually no respect, these often self-taught writers (and very often full-time scientists, who did creative writing simply as a hobby) leaned way too heavily into the goal of introducing realistic hard science into their fictional stories, at the expense of ignoring much more basic literary issues that are required to make for actual good fiction stories, such as realistic and complex characters, a well established three-act plot that moves not too fast and not too slow, and dialogue that sounds like it came out of the mouths of actual human beings, and not space aliens who are just taking blind guesses at what humans actually sound like when they talk to each other. And yes, you've probably guessed by now that this is the exact problem with The Dark Forest; now that Liu has already set up the fascinating concepts that allowed the first book to glide so smoothly despite its faults, his creaky Heinlein-like basic literary problems are much more noticeable here in the second book, which like most second volumes of a trilogy is much more devoted to ploddingly putting the pieces into place for the coming third volume, and not nearly as much to luxuriating in the complex, fascinating world-building details that made the first book such a success. (But for another recent example, see my review last week at Letterboxd.com about recently rewatching all four "Hunger Games" movies, a story series that suffers from this exact same problem.) And this is not to mention another similar problem as the work of Asimov and Heinlein, which is the growing complaints about the undisguised sexism and lack of female-character agency in this book, best explained here in this review by The Book Smugglers. This may fly with Chinese audiences, whose authoritarian government as recently as the 1990s had banned all contemporary American genre writers newer than Asimov and Heinlein in the first place, thus providing an explanation for why this kind of clunky, mediocre prose has exploded in popularity there (and the fact that the country's sci-fi authors seem to be getting away with more openly criticizing the government than mainstream writers I'm sure doesn't hurt). But here in the US, we've already gone through not one, not two, but three entire generations of subsequent SF literary developments since the popular height of our own golden age (including the "New Wave" of the '60s and '70s, typified by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick; the "Cyberpunk" era of the '80s and '90s, led by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; and the "Singularity/New Weird" writers of the '00s and '10s like Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and China Mieville); and not only that, we're currently in the middle of our fourth new generation of post-golden-age genre writing, the so-called "Woke Age" best typified by unprecedented threepeat Hugo winner N.K. Jesmin. I know this is going to sound arrogant, but 70 years of subsequent progression and complexity in this genre, under a democratic government that's not allowed to just blanket-hide entire sections of the library from its citizens, simply makes American sci-fi readers more sophisticated in 2020 than their Chinese counterparts; and that makes books like The Dark Forest simply more problematic for readers like us, a novel I found intriguing but unfortunately just not very good, and with all its seams and holes openly showing now that it doesn't have the admittedly fascinating concepts from the first book to hide them. It makes for a book I want to root for (I'm as much for the increasing diversity of this genre as anyone else), but unfortunately can't, and calls into serious question now whether I'll actually read the concluding volume Death's End (to say nothing of the author-approved fan-fiction fourth novel, one-named author Baoshu's 2019 The Redemption of Time). If you're to read it at all, it's best approached in a similar way, with low expectations and patience for its problems, certainly not the kind of grand follow-up to the much more riveting The Three-Body Problem I was expecting. ...more |
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Sep 22, 2020
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| 4.08
| 385,746
| May 01, 2006
| Nov 11, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #11: A book currently being adapted into a movie or TV show I had heard about this science-fic The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #11: A book currently being adapted into a movie or TV show I had heard about this science-fiction novel here and there over the last several years, after its 2015 English translation officially became the first book in history to garner a Hugo Award for a native Asian author, and kicked off the whole meme about how we're currently living through the so-called "Golden Age of Chinese Sci-Fi;" but after Netflix recently announced a few weeks ago that they're making a brand-new high-profile adaptation of the entire "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy (being co-produced by no less than the showrunners of Game of Thrones, Brad Pitt, Rian Johnson, and Rosamund Pike), I thought it was finally time for me to read at least the first book of the trilogy myself and see if it's deserving of all its hype. And the answer, thankfully, is yes, yes it is! I don't think it's a spoiler at this point to reveal that the book is centered around the concept of humans learning of the existence of extraterrestrial life for the first time, then quickly realizing that this far-advanced extraterrestrial life is currently on its way to Earth to invade us. But a lot of attention has been given to the conceit here that the first people to learn this information are Chinese scientists in the middle of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, one of the most shameful moments of the entire 20th century outside of the Holocaust itself, and a story concept that should at least inspire you to read the Wikipedia page on the subject, if like me you barely know anything about it. It's there that you'll learn that one of the hallmarks of the Cultural Revolution was that every single subject in human existence was forced to be parsed through the prism of far-left political ideology, so much so that even basic scientific facts were deemed to be "untrue" by Mao's homegrown army of radically liberal teenaged fanatics, since they came from "Western Capitalists" and therefore were inherently "decadent" and could not be trusted (a situation that doesn't remind me of any current American counterpart whatsoever, oh God please don't "re-educate" me, Wokes). This is what's garnered the book so much attention in Western circles, the mere novelty of imagining a sci-fi story through the kinds of Eastern filters that are so unknown and new to us (including not just Maoist politics but a fair amount of ancient Chinese mythology too); and I was worried that when I read it myself, I was going to learn that this novelty is the one and only thing going for it, with it otherwise being just a so-so genre tale on its own merits. But thankfully this turned out to be much more interesting than that, a story that can hold itself up no matter what its background, because of its dual dedication to hard science and soft sociology. Namely, a huge chunk of this book is dedicated to a logical examination of the physics problem of the book's title, the idea that when three stars of varying sizes are locked in a gravitational orbit around each other, any poor planet that might be stuck between them (such as the homeworld of our invading aliens, for example) would be tossed and turned in such a chaotic and random way that it's virtually impossible for scientists to develop a stable prediction of where it would be knocked around next, leading in their case to a series of deadly hot and deadly cold seasons (some lasting for days, others for centuries) that essentially wipe out the entire "Trisolaran" species over and over and over, leading to a spiritual crisis by the 200th iteration in which they decide that their only remaining option is to abandon the planet for good, and go move permanently to the nearest habitable planet they can find (which unfortunately for us is Earth, located just four light years away). But then the other big concept that Liu bandies about -- and frankly what I as a non-scientist found much more interesting -- is the way the human race might react if they actually do discover at some point in the future that extraterrestrial life exists. We pretend that it's going to be a unifying moment for all of humankind, either benign (as we collectively sob in awe of the universe's majesty) or malignant (as we collectively build a world army to combat the invaders). But what if it instead unleashes a planet-wide civil war that easily crosses national borders and socioeconomic levels, one that threatens to destroy the human race long before the aliens actually get here? What if millions of defeated, cynical intellectuals and environmentalists react to the news with, "Good, let them invade us, humanity has proven itself to be worthless anyway, so they can't do any worse of a job running this planet than we have"? And what if these defeatists build their own army for the purpose of laying the groundwork for the coming alien invasion, precisely because their technology is so advanced that we can only perceive it through godlike religious terms? It's essentially Liu taking the old joke of "I for one welcome our new alien overlords" then examining it in the most realistic, most terrifying way possible; and it's actually this development that drives most of the book's plot (or at least the first book; I haven't gotten to the other two yet). When you combine it, then, with this hard-science look at the coming aliens and why they're leaving, and the uniquely Chinese history and culture from which the whole story is filtered and presented, it results in a really unforgettable book, a dense and sometimes hard to follow story that I nonetheless devoured in three days of fevered, almost addicted eight-hour reading sessions. I can see why the Game of Thrones dudes would be interested in this, because Liu presents some really flabbergasting mental images along the way of telling this story; but unlike a lot of Hollywood-friendly sci-fi tales, I can also see why the nerdiest nerds of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (aka "Worldcon") would award this the Hugo, because it's a grand return to the hard-science-based 1950s and '60s novels of such American Silver Age masters as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of Chinese science-fiction, in which all the way up to the 1990s it was still only these '50s Silver Age authors who were widely available to read in the first place). I still suspect that this novel's overwhelming love and success is due more to the specific moment in history we're living through, and that writers like Liu and his Chinese peers will come to be thought of in another 20 or 30 years as just another group of interesting but not outstanding genre writers; but as long as we are living through this moment, I encourage Americans to take full advantage of it, and to enjoy this novel for exactly what it is, a chance to read a really ripping genre actioner but told from a cultural standpoint you're never experienced before. It's best thought of in these kinds of terms, as a decent story with a unique perspective instead of a mindblowing story just on its own; and those who can embrace this attitude will find a lot here that's worth your time and attention. ...more |
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Sep 15, 2020
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Sep 15, 2020
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| 3.88
| 239,578
| Jul 16, 2019
| Jul 16, 2019
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DID NOT FINISH. I picked this up merely because of all the hype it's received, now being the winner of the BSFA, Nebula and Hugo awards, and currently
DID NOT FINISH. I picked this up merely because of all the hype it's received, now being the winner of the BSFA, Nebula and Hugo awards, and currently in development as a high-profile TV adaptation. But after getting to the 25 percent mark and noticing that there still hadn't been a single actual plot development, I then jumped on Wikipedia and read the synopsis of the entire book; and that's when I learned that there is no plot at all, but rather that this book's single and sole purpose for existing is to show how two immortal beings end up falling in love with each other, mostly because they've never met someone else powerful enough to resist their powers, only in this case cleverly told through letters the two leave for each other on the various battlefields across time and space where they wage their Eternity War against each other. Bluuuuuurrrgghh. No thanks, Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; I prefer my three-act books to have...you know, three acts. (Also, for a manuscript that's just barely long enough to be published in book form to begin with, be warned that an entire half of it has nothing to do with even the minimalist story being told, but rather is overblown purple-prose exposition about each and every random battlefield across space and time where the two find each other's letters, which you can entirely skip over and not miss even a single important bit of the story itself.) Obviously a lot of other people are loving this book exactly for the reasons it drove me crazy, but I'm not one of them, and I recommend skipping it altogether. Yet more evidence that the current science-fiction community who hand out these industry awards have collectively lost their fucking minds, which unfortunately keeps becoming more and more my evidence-backed opinion, the more genre novels from the last few years I read.
...more
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Sep 10, 2020
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| 1492338508
| 9781492338505
| 1492338508
| 3.10
| 10
| unknown
| Mar 16, 2019
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it was ok
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I picked this up because the book's promotional material promised that it's similar to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, which I'm a hesista
I picked this up because the book's promotional material promised that it's similar to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, which I'm a hesistant but legitimate fan of. But not only did this turn out to be nothing like that book, it turned out to not really be a three-act novel at all, but rather a series of writing-workshop exercises that one might do in preparation for writing a novel, which author Roberta Park seemed to give up on and say, "Screw it, I'll just publish the exercises instead." Specifically, the entire first two-thirds of this already short book is nothing more than the kinds of first-person monologues by each major character (and there's over a dozen of them) that you might pen in a writing class while you're trying to get a feel for who exactly these characters are and how they might behave in your eventual novel about them; but there's no plot in these monologues, no story development at all, just an endless series of personal essays by a bunch of strangers who all consider themselves environmentalists, and who are only connected by their increasing dread that something bad is going to happen to the environment soon. Then in the last third, we skip entirely ahead to some unknown point in the future (30 years? 100 years? It's difficult to exactly tell), at which point the environmental apocalypse that everyone was dreading has already completely come and gone, and with enough time passing that not only have the survivors written a book about their experiences, but it's now old enough that the generation after them now generally shuns that book and considers it a forbidden topic of conversation. So when the then next generation of children of this already next generation of survivors decide to make a school play out of the book, it makes no narrative sense whatsoever, other than that it gives Park an easy excuse to refer to the events of the verboten book without having to actually write any of the book itself; and in the meanwhile, there are literally dozens of off-handed references to the events between these two sections that we never see or hear about ourselves, making it feel like there's a giant 300-page middle section of this manuscript that's completely missing. I found it a very dissatisfying read, as if the author had collected up their notes for a book they gave up on and decided to just lazily foist those notes on me instead, and it does not come recommended to other readers. ...more |
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Sep 04, 2020
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| B07CWT59DC
| 3.44
| 1,762
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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DID NOT FINISH. I've wanted for a long time to become a regular reader of Jesse Ball, if for no other reason than that he's so prevalent on social med
DID NOT FINISH. I've wanted for a long time to become a regular reader of Jesse Ball, if for no other reason than that he's so prevalent on social media and at Goodreads, it's pretty much impossible to be in the indie-lit community without knowing who he is. But alas, this turned out to be the wrong book of his to start with, a short and deliberate literary experiment that feels so tossed-off that it's nearly impossible to fully get into. Basically a wholesale ripoff of The Handmaid's Tale, combined with a few elements from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, it's set in a fascistic future in which society has decided to deal with the dual problems of refugees and an overflowing prison population by essentially watching Escape from New York too many times, and blocking off huge sections of land as their own lawless autonomous states where the "undesirables" are forced to live, which all people (citizens and non-citizens) are allowed to enter and leave at will, but once inside is a place where anyone can be raped or murdered legally. Then the way they deal with these dangerous elements out in the middle of civilized society is by...I think laying a system of pipes everywhere that can spew out poison gas whenever it's needed? And then giving every legitimate citizen a gas mask that they carry around with them at all times? And personal canisters of poison gas that they can throw down whenever feeling threatened? And then forcing them all to memorize nursery rhymes about how great the gas masks are? Or, um, something like that? None of it makes very much sense, and Ball very purposely writes it with such a complete abandon of basic logic that it's impossible to read it as a realistic story taking place in a realistic world; so the only way you can read it is as a fairytale for grown-ups, a prose style I have little tolerance for, further emphasized by the fact that everyone in the future apparently has reverted back to the kind of stilted, overly formal speaking style of Quakers or the King James Bible. (But for more, see James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand , in which Thy Apocalypse Hast Made Thou Survivors For Some Reason Speaketh With Noeth Contractions Whatsoevereth!) Ultimately the whole thing just feels like another one of those endless "Aren't Those MAGAs Crazy and Horrible?" books of the 2010s; and I've gone on record many times about how dissatisfying I find the entire "Aren't MAGAs Horrible" genre, in that these well-meaning liberal authors just get so overwhelmed by their hatred and frustration with the alt-right, nearly none of them can exercise the patience and discipline to churn out a truly good book on the subject, but instead almost always devolve into the fairytale-like "And then, boys and girls, the glorious Trumpian revolutionaries strung all the nasty liberals up on crucifixes!" nonsense like is seen here too. It made me lose patience with this book really quickly, literally at the 20 percent mark according to my Kindle, at which point I skipped ahead and read the last 20 percent and realized that it never gets any better (in fact, arguably it gets even worse), at which point I gave up for good. I still want to be a fan of Jesse Ball, so if you're a well-read fan of him yourself, I'd love it if you would recommend what you consider his two or three best among his now 15 books in the comments below. Looking forward to reading some work by him that was better than this one! ...more |
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Sep 04, 2020
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Sep 04, 2020
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| 068800265X
| 9780688002657
| 068800265X
| 3.74
| 155
| 1974
| Apr 1974
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it was amazing
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I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I though
I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I thought I'd track down the original story by William Harrison it was adapted from, which was first published in book form the same year as the movie, and was very nicely still available on a dusty back shelf of the Chicago Public Library. So what a surprise, then, to learn that Harrison wasn't actually a sci-fi author at all, but rather a veteran of literary fiction, a big admirer of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene whose own stories are mostly similar examinations of masculinity among world-weary globetrotters, but who dabbled in experimental science-fiction in the '70s (mostly through commissions from Esquire magazine) because it was the Countercultural Era and this is what literary fiction authors did during the Countercultural Era. So in this particular collection, the pieces are sometimes straightforward Modernist-style tales, set in a variety of interesting locations (Montana, the south coast of Spain, a small town in Missouri); but sometimes they reflect the magical realism that was so trendy at the time because of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (see for example the story of the magician who can literally make himself disappear), with only one or two pieces in this book that stretch all the way out into actual genre writing. And as far as the title piece, it is way, way darker and more violent than the movie, which fans of the film will find hard to believe. In his original story, the balls are as heavy as bowling balls and are shot out of cannons at 300 mph, spinning around the top edge of the stadium track like a roulette ball and tempting players into possible suicide in order to get an edge over their opponents; and the whole point of the sport even existing is that somewhere between one and fifteen people are killed at every single match, thus better explaining the original story's title, "Roller Ball Murder" (as in, it's a combination of a roller derby, basketball, and murder for sport). He also makes the world that created this game a lot clearer than the movie does, picturing a time in the future in which a debilitating war between Europe and Asia has resulted in private corporations now being the new city-states (displaying shades of premonition that cyberpunk writers like William Gibson would grab and run with a mere decade later), and those corporations having had their own war of attrition that has resulted in a total of six global enterprises now running the entire world, which all now have Orwellian names like ENERGY, FOOD and LUXURY. Like all these stories, it's really not much more than a character sketch drawn out into a little longer of a piece; but Harrison was quite good at these elongated character sketches, and I found this entire book to be fascinating and really readable. It comes recommended to those who want to go to the trouble of tracking down this long out-of-print title. ...more |
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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| B072NXSB14
| 3.81
| 13,314
| Jan 21, 2020
| Jan 21, 2020
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson [As always when it comes to William Gibson and this completist challenge, first a technical note. Although I have already read the first seven books of Gibson's oeuvre, I did so decades ago when the books were first released; so I am not counting them here yet as part of my completist challenge, even though you may see me occasionally make references to them in my contemporary reviews.] Back when I read William Gibson's 2014 The Peripheral soon after it came out, I have the clear memory of having to rush my way through it, because of it being a library book that was just about to expire; so to be honest, I can't tell you if I reacted much more favorably to its 2020 sequel Agency this week because it's objectively a better book, or merely because I had a chance to take my time with this one and savor it more fully, which of course is always a requirement if you want to truly enjoy the work of this complex, genre-hopping genius. And yes, I know that he claims that it's not actually a sequel, but instead a standalone story that simply takes place in the same milieu as the previous one; but given that it shares a lot of the same characters, and also builds on the storyline of the previous one, with a growing ur-plot that's clearly leading to a massive showdown in the coming third volume (but more on that in a bit), I myself think it's fair to call it a sequel against Gibson's wishes, and to caution you that you should really read The Peripheral before taking on this one. To give you a brief primer, we're visiting an Earth 150 years in the future, that has undergone and barely survived a series of disasters that are collectively known as a "slow apocalypse" they call the "Jackpot," in which 90 percent of the former human race is now dead and nearly every animal species extinct, but with the remaining humans now living in a technologically maintained utopia, albeit one now entirely controlled by a kleptocracy of Russian oligarchs who essentially purchased the inner core of London (a real-life "semi-autonomous" state known as "The City of London," which exists outside UK jurisdiction because of an obscure Medieval decree). The only place on Earth not now under their control is China, which rolled up its welcome mat at the beginning of the Jackpot and hasn't interacted with the rest of the world since, becoming in recent decades a secretive wonderland of technology so advanced as to seem like magic. This includes a mysterious new generation of quantum computers that have accidentally achieved the goal of establishing communication contact with the past; although with each new contact, a new branch of alternative reality is now spun off, meaning that that Earth's future is now no longer guaranteed to be the Jackpot-suffering future of the "main Earth" that serves as the center of our trilogy's setting. And since these bored Russian oligarchs no longer have anything to do besides keep collecting their money and fighting with the other oligarchs, a bunch of them have started the habit of spinning off new alternative Earths and then purposely fucking with them just for fun, using their ability to email and video chat with the past to turn those alternative Earths into miserable nightmares, total global dictatorships, full-on nuclear war, and the other kinds of dark amusements you would expect from bored Russian trillionaires. So both of the books so far, then, use their storylines to hop back and forth between this "main Earth" and a different "alternative Earth," each essentially being about the struggle of the goodies from Earth Prime to fix the disasters that the baddies caused there, for no other reason than that they're humans and they feel the obligation to help out fellow humans, even ones who seem to be barely beyond imaginary constructs in a theoretical reality that can be winked out of existence again at any moment. In the first book, this alternative Earth was set about 30 years in our current future, in which a long-standing alt-right domination in politics has turned the American Midwest into a nearly lawless state of violence and anarchy, our heroes being a series of blue-collar workers and PTSD-suffering military veterans who essentially work out of a fictionalized version of an abandoned Walmart warehouse; and this might be one of the reasons I cared for this book less, because I simply didn't like the milieu that Gibson chose to tell that story, painting this near-future with overly broad strokes that belies Gibson's inability to talk about the Trump era without resorting to inane and obvious stereotypes, which to be fair is a problem just about every liberal author is having these days. (But for more, see my disappointed reaction to Neal Stephenson doing the same thing in his own latest novel, the muddled mess Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell.) This time, though, our alternative Earth is set in 2017, one that's almost exactly like ours except that Hillary Clinton won their 2016 election, and the British public voted to stay in the European Union instead of exit; and our heroes are all located in the tech startup community of the San Francisco Bay area, including our main protagonist who has become mainstream famous for being "The Greatest App Beta Tester In History," which is what starts her down the rabbithole of artificial intelligence, military wetware, and other insane concepts that make up the heart of the plot. To be frank, Gibson's much more in his natural wheelhouse with this setting, a community that in real life he spends a lot more of his own time in, which is what makes this book more exciting, more precise, and just plain more fun than the first (or at least, like I said, if my memories of The Peripheral are to be trusted). I'll let the actual story remain a surprise, which I couldn't in reality recap easily anyway, since it's because of the famously dense plots that so many people become fans of Gibson in the first place; but like I mentioned, of growing interest in this second book more than the first is the Earth Prime's goodies feeling the increasing desire to figure out how to stop the Russian kleptocracy of their own reality from having the unbreakable stranglehold over the planet's resources that they currently do, and it seemed clear to me that the coming third book in the trilogy is going to concern itself a lot with trying to use the lessons learned and friends made in these various alternative-reality "stubs" in an attempt to change the history of Earth Prime itself. That's what makes me call this a true sequel, and not just a standalone story set in the same universe like both the author and the publisher insist; I suspect things are coming to a head here, and that we're going to get a concluding volume that's going to require you to have read both of the previous books to truly understand the magnitude of the stakes involved. That's why you should do yourself a favor and just go ahead and read both of these books now, instead of skipping The Peripheral and heading straight to this one, a 1-2 punch that I suspect will be a lot more satisfying when read right in a row, instead of six years apart like I did. (If nothing else, it will prepare you for the coming TV adaptation from Amazon Prime Video in 2021.) In any case, I think it's undeniable to opine that Gibson is on the absolute top of his game here, a book that in pure adrenaline and pure entertainment easily rivals the '80s "Sprawl" trilogy where he first made his name. Although it threatens to go over the heads of casual fans of this genre, any hardcore science-fiction reader would be wise to pick this up right away. William Gibson books now read: Agency | The Difference Engine | The Peripheral ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Aug 27, 2020
not set
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Aug 27, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0374520968
| 9780374520960
| 0374520968
| 3.60
| 4,499
| May 1966
| May 01, 1988
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really liked it
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So with 1966's The Crystal World, I now finally finish up my reading of JG Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels, the Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward science-fiction books that first gained him a fan following at the beginning of his career, before the Postmodernist era ushered in a culture that allowed for him to write the much weirder, much darker "Ballardian" novels that he's now much more famous for. (To give you a sense of the timeline, with this book we're now currently seven years away from Crash, and nine years away from High-Rise.) Like the other Catastrophe novels, this book is centered around a natural disaster that threatens to destroy all life on the planet within the next decade (in this case, something in space is starting to convert all of Earth's swampy areas from organic matter into crystals, which scientists have determined is proceeding at a rate of 400 new yards every single day); and like the others, Ballard comes up with a "scientific" explanation for this that barely makes sense and that he almost immediately shrugs off (in this case, writing about a decade after the real-life discovery of "antimatter," he proposes that a phenomenon called "antitime" is turning the most primordial areas of Earth back into the state they were in when the planet was first formed trillions of years ago); and like the others, Ballard pays only lip service to traditional Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi story elements (a James-Kirk-like protagonist; a love interest for this Kirk-like protagonist; an armed conflict between rival groups that this Kirk-like protagonist finds himself stuck in the middle of), which feels at all times like it's something his publisher is forcing on him but that he has zero interest in writing about; and like all the others, the only time the book rises above ho-hum to truly interesting is when Ballard is writing about the growing amount of people who feel like humans should actually be embracing the catastrophe, in that they believe it will usher our race into our next natural stage of evolution, which comes off to everyone else like they've gone psychotically insane. (And yes, like the others, this group of psychotically insane "true believers" includes at least one Catholic priest who has interpreted the catastrophe as proof that God has abandoned his children.) I've found it fascinating to read these novels long after the fact, and to see that they clearly show a young Ballard who is itching to write about the black pit at the heart of the human soul, but who in the early 1960s is simply not being allowed by his publisher to just go full-out into such territory, but is instead boxed in by the Silver Age genre expectations that his more famous "hard science" peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had made such an unthinking norm by then. (Let's never forget, after all, that after Ballard attended his first Worldcon science-fiction convention in 1957, he became so depressed by the state of the genre that he completely stopped writing altogether for an entire year.) As such, then, all of these Catastrophe novels come with only a limited recommendation, suitable only for Ballard completists who like me are interested in seeing how his Ballardian elements started peeking out here and there during the start of his career. (If you're only going to read one of them, make it the book before this one, 1964's The Burning World, which is very clearly the best out of all four; and like me, you can entirely skip the first Catastrophe novel altogether, 1961's The Wind From Nowhere, which later in life Ballard entirely disavowed as "unreadable paycheck garbage" just as soon as he was famous enough to get away with it.) Apparently, though, the one place Ballard was getting a chance to go "full Ballardian" in these years was in the decidedly less commercial world of short fiction; and it's this medium that I'll be exploring next, in his 1970 linked story collection The Atrocity Exhibition, the first book of his oeuvre that most fans point to as finally showcasing Ballard in his mature form. I hope you'll join me here again later in the year for my look at that. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 11, 2020
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Aug 11, 2020
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.81
|
liked it
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Aug 03, 2021
not set
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Aug 03, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.83
|
really liked it
|
Jul 24, 2021
not set
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Jul 24, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.33
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Jul 23, 2021
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Jul 23, 2021
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||||||
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| 3.55
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really liked it
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Jun 2021
not set
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Jun 01, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.09
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liked it
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Apr 23, 2021
|
Apr 23, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.31
|
Apr 04, 2021
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Apr 04, 2021
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||||||
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| 4.37
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really liked it
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Mar 24, 2021
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Mar 24, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.41
|
it was amazing
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Mar 23, 2021
|
Mar 23, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.44
|
it was amazing
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Mar 22, 2021
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Mar 22, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.60
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liked it
|
Feb 03, 2021
|
Feb 03, 2021
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|||||
|
| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Dec 10, 2020
|
Dec 10, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.14
|
did not like it
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Oct 12, 2020
|
Oct 12, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.41
|
it was ok
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Sep 22, 2020
|
Sep 22, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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Sep 15, 2020
|
Sep 15, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.88
|
Sep 10, 2020
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Sep 10, 2020
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||||||
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| 3.10
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it was ok
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not set
|
Sep 04, 2020
|
|||||
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| 3.44
|
Sep 04, 2020
|
Sep 04, 2020
|
||||||
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| 3.74
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 02, 2020
|
Sep 02, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 27, 2020
not set
|
Aug 27, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.60
|
really liked it
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
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