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| 0312944446
| 9780312944445
| 0312944446
| 3.99
| 1,124
| Feb 1981
| Dec 15, 1984
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really liked it
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I picked up this obscure 1981 novella by the insider-loved science-fiction author Vernor Vinge because of recently learning that it's demonstrably the
I picked up this obscure 1981 novella by the insider-loved science-fiction author Vernor Vinge because of recently learning that it's demonstrably the very first story to define the trope we now know as "cyberspace," and that the authors who eventually created the "cyberpunk" genre in the late '80s and early '90s (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, etc) were all passionate fans of this book and basically used it as a starting place for their own stories. And after reading it, I can attest that all this is very much true, and that you can see the seeds of all the cyberpunk novels that came after fully formed here in this one -- the internet as a 3D virtual reality space, connecting to it via biomech headgear that taps directly into your neurons, within a physical US that has become an endless sprawl of crappy exurban spaces hooking together all the major cities, which has led some people to enjoy the virtual version so much that they're happy to let their physical bodies entropy into immovable objects, and where the most talented hackers of this system achieve virtual godlike powers and battle entities that may or may not be self-sentient AI programs run amok. But there's something really interesting going on here from a historical perspective too, which you can directly compare to another transitional period in literary history -- namely, the years in the early 1800s when the Enlightenment was falling out of favor as the main cultural force in the arts, and Romanticism was just beginning its ascendency. For those who don't know, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein just three years after Jane Austen published Emma, 1818 versus 1815; and while both are great novels, one is definitely the last gasp of the previous age, while the other is the explosive beginning of the next. And so too was True Names published in 1981, while just three years later Gibson published his debut novel Neuromancer, with both of them sharing many details but hugely different in tone and spirit; for in what was perhaps the most interesting thing of all about reading this, Vinge's story is very much steeped in the murky countercultural mores of such '70s authors as Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, with his hacker protagonist being a frazzled ex-hippie living in the woods of northern California, the means to connect online relying more on EEG manipulation aided by meditation than computer graphics zapped straight into one's neural cortex, the virtual world he inhabits being a pretty faithful reproduction of a backwoods castle from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth (and with the hackers calling themselves "warlocks" instead of cyberpunk's "cowboys"), and the cabal of troublemakers he belongs to (who refer to themselves as a "coven") having much more the playful, chaotic spirit of old '60s phone phreakers and merry pranksters, there mostly to have fun and to gently Stick It To The Man, and all of them shocked and disconcerted when one of the people in their circle decides that it's time for them to seize some real power since, after all, the world's banks and military arsenals are on the same information web that they are. Gibson, Stephenson, et al take this jockeying for power and control as an act-one given in their novels, their own protagonists being skittish rail-thin speed addicts living in the grimy back corners of rainy London or a neon-lit New York, their virtual reality not a fairyland of castles and elves but the sleek black glass of a Brutalist fever-dream. So even though True Names undeniably lays the groundwork for the cyberpunk novels that came immediately after, it's not even close to being a book you could categorize in the same genre, instead being more of a bridge that helped science-fiction move from the hippie weirdness of the '70s to the slick grittiness of the '80s, exactly like how Joy Division, the Cure and the Smiths were doing so in the world of music in these exact same years. That's why it's not getting a full five stars from me today, because you can't rightly call it a "lost cyberpunk classic," and it simply can't stand as an equal in quality to those now beloved titles; but if you're an aging cyberpunk fan like me, or simply someone who enjoys doing a deep and wide look at the genre's entire history, certainly this is a must-read anyway, fascinating from a historical perspective even if the story itself contains flaws that were then corrected by the books right after it. It comes with a limited recommendation in this spirit. ...more |
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Oct 14, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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Paperback
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| 4.19
| 363,457
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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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 Currently in the challenge: Isa 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 To be clear, although I was blown away by Margaret Atwood's 1985 The Handmaid's Tale when I finally read it for the first time last year, I am most decidedly not a fan of the Hulu series that's been made of it; for after running out of source material at the end of the first season, the producers unwisely turned the whole thing into a silly #MeToo "Girl Power!!!" revenge fantasy, which is an insult to the point the original book was trying to make. The most powerful thing about Handmaid is the way Atwood reminds us that, once an authoritarian regime gains power over a nation-state, its schools and courts and military, it's almost impossible for an outside force to defeat it, with everyone from the Spartans to the Stalinists to Franco's Spain proving over the centuries that the only way these groups eventually crumble is through a combination of infighting, spreading themselves too thin, and the death of a cultish leader who was holding it all together in the first place. That's a dark but oh so necessary lesson that Atwood teaches in her bleak novel, and it's a slap in the face for the producers of the TV show to change that lesson into, "As long as you have enough plucky rebels, anything is possible!!!" So needless to say, I was wary when I heard that Atwood was about to release a long-awaited sequel to Handmaid, that it was to cover the dissolution and breakup of the Christian fascist state of Gilead that she so convincingly set up in the first book, and that she had consulted with the producers of the TV show to make sure none of her plot points clashed with the post-book canon they had already created. But after reading an early copy myself this week, I've thankfully learned that I had nothing to worry about; for Atwood is such a brilliant and original thinker, her exquisitely smart sequel here retains all the delicious darkness and despair of the first book, even while expanding the Gilead universe in clever and unexpected ways, without ever diluting the lesson about authoritarianism she's been trying to teach us all along, proving like Game of Thrones also did this year why genius authors are considered genius authors, and why mediocre showrunners are considered mediocre showrunners. The key here is something that Atwood's most feverish fans tend to gloss over about this author's long and varied career; that for all the groundbreaking work she's done over the last five decades in the field of feminism, she's spent an equal amount of time examining the violence that women perpetrate against other women, as well as many astute looks at why being too radically liberal is just as bad for society as being too radically conservative. You can see this all the way back in her debut novel, 1969's The Edible Woman which by coincidence I also just happen to be in the middle of reading right now (review coming next week), in which the Sylvia Plathesque main protagonist is perpetually rolling her eyes at her radicalized roommate who has decided to trick a womanizing friend of theirs into getting her pregnant, so that she can have a baby without needing the messy work of a marriage to one of those gross morons, and not particularly giving much of a fuck that said womanizer happens to be the easily bruised childhood friend of our narrator. And of course this subject is the out-and-out main theme of such later hits of hers as 1993's The Robber Bride, in which three female friends get together one day for a long lunch and to reminiscence about the woman who once stole all three of their boyfriends, a Rashomon-type tale in which we're never sure whether to revile Zenia for being a "traitor to her gender" or admire her for "saving" her friends from philandering romantic partners. (And not for nothing, but Atwood has declared in interviews that, of all the characters she's created in the 32 books of fiction she's written over the last 50 years, the one she most personally identifies with is Zenia herself, a telling statement that's often overlooked when fans with an agenda want to present Atwood as a champion of female sisterhood.) And so it is in The Testaments as well, when it comes to what is clearly the most fascinating of the three character threads we follow in the novel; that of "Aunt Lydia," that is, the taser-wielding schoolmarm-slash-prison-guard who serves as the main villain in Handmaid, and who has been turned into an eyerolling cartoon character during subsequent seasons of the TV show. In the original book, Lydia (who stands in for the entire "Aunt" class of this dystopian society, the one tier of women still allowed any power in this otherwise male-controlled nation-state, and the one group of females still given permission to learn how to read and write) is a sort of inscrutable bogey(wo)man, a supposed "true believer" who is given petty rewards for her willingness to violently dominate other women, clearly designed to echo the Jewish "kapos" of World War Two concentration camps. But as Atwood reveals in The Testaments, there's a lot more going on with Lydia than at first meets the eye in the previous book. A former family court judge, and therefore used to making daily decisions that by definition piss off half the people she deals with, and a child of rough hillbillies who financed her own way through college to the jealous murmurs of her kinfolk, Atwood sets Lydia up here to be a shrewd and intelligent manipulator who has no problem screwing over other people to ensure her own survival, and is happy to carry that chip on her shoulder all the way to her grave; and so when the educated, authority-figure women like her are pulled aside by the MAGAs of the Christian fascist revolution and offered the chance to be the new domineering force who rule all the other females, Lydia cleverly outwits her captors and convinces them to let her set up a self-governing autonomous organization outside of the usual patriarchal control, a closed-off order of nun-doctor-warriors whose ostensible job is to secretively maintain the genetic records of Gilead's population, in order to prevent accidental cases of incest and child mutation during their society's arranged marriages and forced pregnancies, but that effectively turn them into a "secret police's secret police" who have now built up a generation's worth of incriminating evidence about every single member of their society. And this, needless to say, is the perfect kind of group for affecting the downfall of a regime that seemingly can't be stopped by any outside force. And make no mistake, Gilead eventually falls, which isn't even close to being a spoiler; it not only serves as the unforgettably devastating finale to the original Handmaid (a novel now 34 years old, and therefore now outside the statute of limitations for federal spoiler preservation laws [aka 'The Crying Game National Act of 1992']), but it's revealed yet again in the first chapter of the newest book. It reinforces Atwood's main point in these novels, that even though fascists might be the loudest and most violent members of a given society, fascism itself is simply not a sustainable way of life, because the vast majority of humans on the planet at any given time will naturally yearn for human things -- love, sex, freedom, individuality, personal agency, a sense of justice, the right to be happy as they themselves define happiness. What sinks Gilead is not the actions of the MeToo-reminiscent Canadian activist group that we spend half this book with, a well-meaning organization but whose activities are a mere drop in the bucket. What sinks Gilead is that this nation of supposedly pious, supposedly teetotaling "true believers" still continue falling out of love with their partners, still continue getting horny for the wrong people, still continue wanting to get drunk and write poetry and fondle their neighbors, but now must do all these things secretly and while pulling as many strings of power as they possibly have to get away with them. And once someone has a record of all these secrets and then divulges them to the entire group at once, the first thing such people always do is immediately turn on each other, another lesson about authoritarian regimes that has been true since time immemorial. And best of all, Atwood accomplishes all this with the kind of playfully wicked spirit that most of the novels from the late part of her career exhibit. In particular, this will remind many longtime fans of what a lot of people consider the best books of her career, the rollicking action-oriented science-fiction "MaddAddam" trilogy of the early 2000s, and especially the superior first volume of that series, 2003's brilliantly gonzo Oryx and Crake. For although Atwood aims for the same rah-rah happy-ending fist-bumping of the Hulu series, she goes about it in a very different way, throwing us for an entire half of the novel into the funny and relatable contemporary world of Toronto's young liberal activists and their crunchy hippie grandparents just on the other side of the Gilead border. (And I should mention, speaking of science-fiction, genre fans will love that Atwood does quite a bit more world-building here than she did in the original Handmaid, making it a lot clearer that the main reason Gilead even exists is because they're only having to maintain a fairly small chunk of the Atlantic Seaboard, with big swaths of the American Midwest, South and West Coast that are essentially now independent republics, and thus better explaining the endless expansion wars that Gilead is fighting in the original novel.) For those like me who enjoyed Handmaid but was worn down by its endless doom and gloom, there's a lot to love in this sequel, as Atwood takes us on a bigger and crazier action adventure that among other interesting things relays the history of Quakers in the northern edges of New England being the unsung heroes of past historical movements like the Underground Railroad (and their next-door neighbors being the unsung heroes of Prohibition's rum-smuggling days, an unholy but practical alliance that is used to great effect here by Gilead's enemies). All in all, it adds up to about as perfect a book as one could even want -- a story that honors the despair of the original, yet provides the hope of the TV series, yet does it in a clever way that rewards intelligent fans, but with a sense of knowing humor and lightness that makes it perfect for casual and first-time Atwood readers. And all of this when she's 80 freaking years old, which blows my mind so much that it makes my head spin. Easily one of the best books of her career, it's astounding that it might also turn out to be the last book of her career, a cheering triumph that secures her place as one of the greatest writers of the entire Postmodern era. Margaret Atwood books being reviewed for this series: The Edible Woman (1969) | Surfacing (1972) | Lady Oracle (1976) | Life Before Man (1979) | Bodily Harm (1981) | The Handmaid's Tale (1985) | Cat's Eye (1988) | The Robber Bride (1993) | Alias Grace (1996) | The Blind Assassin (2000) | Oryx and Cake (2003) | The Penelopiad (2005) | The Year of the Flood (2009) | MaddAddam (2013) | The Heart Goes Last (2015) | Hag-Seed (2016) | The Testaments (2019) ...more |
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not set
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Sep 14, 2019
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Sep 14, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 3.96
| 34,536
| Jul 03, 2018
| Jul 03, 2018
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DID NOT FINISH. As both myself and my love of science-fiction have grown into adulthood, I've come to realize that the SF industry is actually split i
DID NOT FINISH. As both myself and my love of science-fiction have grown into adulthood, I've come to realize that the SF industry is actually split into two very distinct parts, which sometimes overlap but many times have a wide gulf between them: there are the truly amazing authors in that genre, whose names tend to reverberate throughout the ages and way beyond the insular community of SF fandom itself (think for example of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. Le Guin from the '60s, or China Mieville and N.K. Jemisin of right now); and then there is the much, much larger circle of writers who are only mediocre as storytellers, but happen to be heavily involved with the convention-going fandom aspect of the community, and so tend to sell as many books and win as many awards as the authors in the first category, despite writing bland novels that only a con-going nerd with little literary discernment could love. That's about the only way that I can explain why Mary Robinette Kowal's disappointing The Calculating Stars has managed to win this year's Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards, despite being so middlebrow that I gave up a third of the way through out of sheer tedium; because Kowal is a 30-year veteran of the convention circuit and about as intense an insider as one can even get, holding such positions since the '80s as art director of Weird Tales magazine, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and programming chair of Worldcon, the very convention that gives out the Hugo Award that Kowal just won. The book itself has an extremely clever and properly Woke premise, which I suspect is the reason it's gotten so much attention: in an alternative history in which Dewey wins the 1948 Presidential election over Truman, and instead of NASA the country establishes NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), a meteorite slams into the US eastern seaboard in 1952 and essentially kills the entire population of the east coast, starting a weather chain reaction that scientists come to realize will result in the oceans boiling over in another 50 years. This necessitates the world pulling together to quickly establish first a space program and then a plan to colonize the neighboring planets; and since most of the male scientists and test pilots were killed during the meteorite crash, women end up becoming this alt-history's version of Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn, adventurers full of derring-do but who can still come home and cook dinner for their nuclear family afterwards. (And it doesn't hurt that the only member of the Cabinet to survive the meteorite crash, a meek Secretary of Agriculture, just happens to be a Quaker and far-left liberal, who ushers in a wave of tolerance and diversity two entire decades before actual history's civil rights and women's lib movements, leading to a '50s space program full of women and African-Americans and Jews and Muslims and everyone else you can imagine.) The problem, though, is that Kowal's prose doesn't nearly hold up to this admittedly fascinating premise, a clear case of a book that's being loved by its fans much more for its concept than its execution; characters are two-dimensional, the dialogue is often sickly-sweet and fatally sentimental (lead hero Elma York's relationship with her enlightened husband might as well have been cribbed from the Seinfeld "I Wuv Ooh, Shnoopie!!!" episode), plot advancement is glacially slow, and much of the conflict essentially boils down to your great aunt Mabel in a poodle skirt, throwing her fist in the air and shouting, "GIRL POWER!" I admit, in the times we live in, just this alone is often enough for an artistic project to be hugely popular -- see for example the dreadful remake of Ghostbusters from a few years ago, which even its fans tend to justify with statements like, "Sure, it's half-baked crap, but it's half-baked crap with women!" -- but I myself simply have to have more than this before I can really get into a novel, with The Calculating Stars failing so quickly and spectacularly at its literary aims that I couldn't even make it to the halfway point, which I usually try to push myself to reach before giving up on a popular book for good. Based on all the fawning it's receiving, your own reaction has a big chance of being very different than mine, and more power to you if so; but if you've read my other reviews and trust my opinion on these matters, then you should do yourself a favor and go into this book duly warned and with expectations low. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 04, 2019
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Sep 04, 2019
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Paperback
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| 3.55
| 2,742
| 1964
| 1964
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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 | 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 For the last several years, I've ended up at the holidays with something like 20 to 30 book reviews still to write; so I've tended to just log them and give them scores so they'll count towards that year's reading challenge, but then move on in January to new books and not go back and review the ones from the previous December I didn't get around to. (Thankfully I'm keeping up with the reviews fairly well this year, so this hopefully won't be a problem again.) Anyway, as I sat down today to review JG Ballard's 1964 The Burning World, I realized that the book previous to this, 1962's The Drowned World, was one of those ones from last December that never got reviewed; and it's important to today's book that you know what I thought of the previous book, so it looks like today's one of those occasional days where I'll be doing two book reviews in one. Ballard is now mostly remembered for the freaky, transgressive tales he wrote in the '70s and '80s, so it'll be surprising to most to learn that he started his career with a quadrilogy of Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about ecology and natural disasters, which in the early '60s originally got him lumped in with writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, before heading off in much weirder and unclassifiable directions during the Countercultural Era. Per Ballard's wishes, I skipped entirely his 1961 debut The Wind From Nowhere, which he himself hated to the extent of literally omitting it from his bibliography while alive; so I'm instead starting with his trilogy of the similarly titled The Drowning World, The Burned World and 1966's The Crystal World, in which the planet Earth alternatively dies out from global flooding, a global drought, and an alien infection that crystallizes all organic matter it touches. (The Wind From Nowhere, meanwhile, is about the Earth dying out from an unending series of hurricanes and tsunamis, effectively making his first four novels concern global disasters via air, water, fire and earth.) And indeed, for an author I mostly currently know because of head-trippers like High-Rise and Crash, what struck me most about The Drowning World when I read it last December was how sober and grounded in science it is, with Ballard spending a huge chunk of the book simply looking at how the planet gets into the untenable position it's in, and only delving into his trademark weirdness at the very end, in which our James-Kirkesque hero falls in with a group of doomsday cultists who have decided to stay behind in a now flooded London in order to loot the city of random treasures for absurdist reasons. This left me thinking that Ballard was perhaps going to play all three of these novels with a straight face, until getting to what's widely acknowledged as his first transgressive book, the 1970 experimental story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (which was then followed with 1973's sex-and-car-accident fever dream Crash, which was such a force of nature that it singlehandedly changed his literary reputation into the one we still now have of him...but more on this in a few months). I was wrong, however; for if you define The Drowned World as a book mostly about the science of ecological disaster, which as a bonus delves a little bit into the bizarre ways some humans would behave during such a disaster, you can define The Burning World as the exact opposite, as mostly about the freakouts that people go through in the face of a world-ending disaster, with only lip service paid (literally only a few paragraphs in the entire book) to how the disaster came about in the first place. Or, I mean, to be fair, Ballard isn't looking here at how all humans would change in the face of a global disaster, with our story taking place well into the end-times and most of rational, sane humanity having already packed up and headed to the nearest ocean; instead, Ballard is interested in looking at the small amount of people who would choose to stay behind in their now waterless towns even after such a disaster took place, pointing a laser eye at the nihilists, criminals, mentally challenged, and cultishly religious who would voluntarily choose to end their existences under such dire circumstances, effectively making this a companion piece to the recent indie movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, only with Ballard damning his freak-flag-flying stragglers instead of celebrating them like the film does. For those looking for their expected Ballard bizarro fix, this is basically the earliest book of his career where you can find one, as the author serves up nightmarish visions of landlocked pirates, genocidal armed struggles on beachfronts, monstrously obese billionaire climate-deniers who have gone insane, developmentally disabled man-child animals who hunt humans for sport while wrapped in the bloody pelts of emaciated tigers from the local zoo, and all kinds of other chapters that will make you think, "Ah, right, there's the singular weirdo we all know and love." It makes me much more excited to delve into the final volume of the trilogy, and of course from that point on to throw myself into the New Weird books he's now much better known for. 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 |
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Aug 22, 2019
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Aug 22, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0441653049
| 9780441653041
| 0441653049
| 4.17
| 16,633
| Mar 28, 1967
| Jul 15, 1987
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did not like it
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I recently learned that back in 1966, when the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention chose Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" books to receive a
I recently learned that back in 1966, when the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention chose Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" books to receive a special Hugo Award for the best sci-fi series of all time, what came in second was Robert A. Heinlein's "Future History" series. For those who don't know, it's a collection of several dozen short stories and novellas that he published in random order and in a myriad of different magazines over twenty years, but that nonetheless are all set in the same persistent alternative future and share a common timeline, major occurrences and major characters, an impressive feat that became all the more so when they were finally collected and put in chronological order in a single massive thousand-page volume in 1967. And so I thought this would be a perfect way for me to start what I hope to be a pervasive overview of Heinlein's entire career over the next couple of years; after all, most of these stories were published in the 1940s and '50s decades when he was establishing his bona fides for the first time, and I've been told heavily influence his later more mature novels like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls that he's much better remembered for at this point. So what a profound shock, then, to start in on this earlier this year and realize that they are barely readable now, 50 to 70 years after they were originally published, not just dated but so objectively awful that it took me literally six months to finally force myself to choke my way through to the end. The main problem here is that Heinlein is famously known as one of the first popular proponents of what's now known as "hard science fiction," in which actual plausible scientific notions from our own age are implanted into fiction set in the future; but since he was one of the first people in literary history to do this, his technique for implanting this modern science is so awkward and blocky as to be ludicrous, with many of these stories essentially containing only a few paragraphs of actual fictional narrative, to serve as an excuse for Heinlein to write another 20 pages of nonfiction discourse about the latest the human race knows about nuclear fission, or jet fuel, or the effect of weightlessness on the human body. Then when he finally gets out of his own way and manges to actually write some narrative fiction, these particular stories turn out to be textbook examples of everything atrocious that made sci-fi such an unrespected and hacky genre in these years -- the characters are largely cardboard cutouts, the dialogue as stilted as a Tommy Wiseau script, gleefully embracing every sexual and racial stereotype that even existed in the Mid-Century Modernist era, setting the stage for the James Kirk "rah rah white males" trope that dominated this genre for decades after. If this was considered in 1966 to be one of the best science-fiction projects that industry had ever produced, then it's a profound reminder of just how far science-fiction has progressed and matured in the half-century since, as well as a virtual poster-child for how necessary the so-called "New Wave" of sci-fi that was in full swing at the time actually was for the revitalization of this genre. In this, then, reading The Past Through Tomorrow in the 2010s can be a very instructive experience, an enlightening look at why it took so long for sci-fi to gain mainstream acceptance and admiration in our society. But if you're simply looking to read some great work by Heinlein, do yourself a favor and skip this entirely, and go straight to the books from the late '60s through early '80s when he was at the height of his creative powers. ...more |
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Aug 10, 2019
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Aug 10, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0385353308
| 9780385353304
| 0385353308
| 4.07
| 539,798
| Aug 26, 2014
| Sep 09, 2014
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liked it
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To be fair, I didn't find Emily St. John Mandel's poetic post-apocalyptic tale Station Eleven as terrible as all the bad reviews here led me to believ
To be fair, I didn't find Emily St. John Mandel's poetic post-apocalyptic tale Station Eleven as terrible as all the bad reviews here led me to believe it was going to be; but to be fair to those reviewers, I didn't find it that great either, a book that mostly felt like a pleasant way to kill some time during bus rides and store queues over the last few days of my life, but whose very existence I suspect I will completely forget about by another six months or so from now. The problem here, as many others have pointed out, is simply that not much actually happens, with Mandel going to the trouble of setting up a quite intriguing milieu (a band of traveling Shakespearean actors make a constant circuit of the Great Lakes perimeters, twenty years after a mysterious disease which wiped out 99.9 percent of the population, sticking to this region because it has settled down into a series of mostly stable and violence-free small villages again), but then using the setup mostly to look at the interpersonal relationships that exist between these troupe-and-orchestra members, as well as flashing back Lost-style to what their lives were like before the apocalypse hit. Using an apocalyptic setting to present a character study is not in and of itself a bad thing -- the aforementioned Lost got a lot of mileage out of just a scenario -- but the second big problem here, and the thing that really kills the book from being more than just okay, is that Mandel introduces way too many characters and then never really differentiates them enough for us to get fully engaged, ultimately giving us an interchangeable mishmash of a cast who all blend into one amorphous plaintive soul who years for the past but understands the realities of the present, then yearns for the past a little more and then understands the realities of the present a little more. It's hard to root for any of the characters when you can barely tell them apart; and so by the time we get to the showdown climax of the slight amount of plot Mandel does have here (regarding simmering tensions between the modern humanist theater troupe and a backwards cult that has taken over one of the towns on the troupe's tour circuit), I found it difficult to care what the outcome was to be, leaving me at the end kind of shrugging and saying to myself, "Well, that was certainly a...way to kill three days of my life." It's still worth checking out, but only if you got through all the above and still think it intriguing enough to take a chance on. If not, do yourself a favor and just skip it altogether. ...more |
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Jul 2019
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Jul 01, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0062458736
| 9780062458735
| 3.58
| 18,961
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was ok
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So to establish my bona fides right away, let me mention that I've read and loved all 16 novels that Neal Stephenson has now written in his life (yes,
So to establish my bona fides right away, let me mention that I've read and loved all 16 novels that Neal Stephenson has now written in his life (yes, even his disavowed 1984 debut, the now out-of-print The Big U), and consider him one of my top-three all-time favorite writers currently alive and publishing new work. So what a profoundly heartbreaking thing, then, to finish his latest, the 900-page virtual-reality morality tale Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell, and have to be forced to admit to myself, "You know, that book was...well, it was kind of crappy, is what that book was." During the first half of the manuscript, I became convinced that this was because Stephenson turned in a clunker of an actual storyline here; because, for the first time in his career, Stephenson takes on here the very contemporary real-world issue of the "Red Pill" revolution of the 21st century (which I'm defining here as the interconnected throughline that links together the Bush administration, the rise of Fox News, the Tea Party, Gamergate, Sad Puppies, 4chan, the Meninist movement, incels, the alt-right, and the dark ascendency of "God Emperor" Trump). Seemingly not a single person in the last twenty years that opposes this movement has been able to write critically about the subject without just losing their shit and quickly devolving into lazy, badly written doomsday scenarios about the nightmarish hell our world will become if these people were to ever gain unstoppable power; and Stephenson too succumbs to this hacky temptation, painting an America 30 years from now that has essentially broken down into a civil war between "The Stupids" and "The Smarts*," in which the Stupids have forcefully overtaken large swaths of the Midwest through a Christian version of the Taliban (a brand-new strain of Protestantism which rejects the entire New Testament because it depicts Jesus as a "beta cuck," about the most lazily on-the-nose reference to the alt-right one can even make), who then proceed to literally crucify people from burning crosses for such Old Testament sins as wearing clothes that mix together different strains of animal fibers. [*Also, let me confess that I lost my patience quickly with Stephenson's attempts in this section to paint autistic people as superheroes, through his unending self-righteous declarations about how much better he and his little STEM buddies are than the rest of us mouth-breathers. Autistic people aren't fooled by fake news! Autistic people's feelings aren't hurt by blunt opinions! Autistic people don't feel obliged to engage in pointless small talk! Thank God we autistic people are around to save all you blathering morons from yourselves!] Then in the meanwhile, we also follow the fate of one of the characters from Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde, billionaire videogame developer Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, who unexpectedly dies one day at which point it's revealed that, earlier in his life, he got convinced by a startup buddy to have his body frozen, so that maybe one day in the future his brain can be brought back to life if science ever invents a way to do so. And through a convoluted series of events, science does in fact invent a way, and just two decades after his death at that, by essentially scanning a complete digital copy of the trillions of neural pathways in his brain, then letting those digital pathways virtually interact again within a town-sized complex of newly invented "quantum computers." But this being a game developer, the first thing Dodge's digital brain does to make sense of his situation is to start building out a World Of Warcraft-type fantasyland for him to place himself in, with Stephenson burning through literally hundreds of pages in describing in excruciating detail just what it must be like when a brain has its consciousness wiped, then starts filling it in again bit by bit from the retained memories of its subconscious. "What are these two fleshy appendages underneath my torso? What are these ten smaller appendages attached to the bottom of these two? What are these squiggly symbols I keep picturing when attempting to count these appendages? What is this locomotive motion I seem to be engaging in when placing one appendage in front of the other? What is this hard gravelly surface these appendages seem to be pushing against during its locomotion?" Jesus CHRIST, Stephenson, ENOUGH already, we fucking GET it, WE FUCKING GET IT ALREADY!!!!1!! It was at this point, already 400 pages in, that I finally lost my patience for good, and initially decided to abandon the novel altogether; but just out of curiosity I ended up flipping through the rest of it and reading the increasingly smaller non-virtual-world parts, because I was simply too interested in knowing how the story ends up finishing out. And that's when I realized that it's not actually the storyline itself that's the problem here; when you look at the overall plot in quick big-picture form, it's actually quite interesting, an attempt by Stephenson to do no less than retell the religious story of God's creation of the universe, his war with Lucifer, the manipulation of Adam and Eve as pawns of this war, the path towards self-sentiency and human technological progress that was the fallout of this war's manipulation, and the final battle between good and evil that's foretold in the Book of Revelations, but all seen through the filter of the speculative question, "What if our old religious stories actually came about because an alien race figured out a way to digitize themselves, and the first couple dozen people who got imperfectly digitized became the angels and devils of our Bible, and everything we know and experience in our universe is actually just the result of a giant computer running on this alien planet, and the aliens are actually watching and analyzing us in minute detail but have no way of communicating with us about it?" Seen in this light, then, the real problem of the novel becomes immediately clear; because while Stephenson has claimed in recent interviews that his intent with the virtual-world part of this manuscript was to "bury a fantasy novel within the middle of a science-fiction novel," what he actually did was write a slightly altered 500-page version of the King James Bible. And as anyone who was ever forced to go through this during Bible summer camp as a kid knows, reading big chunks of the King James Bible as if it were a narrative novel is the most tedious activity in the entirety of human existence, which sadly turns out to be the case here too with Stephenson's rewritten version of it. When examined in Wikipedia form, Fall actually has a lot of fascinating things to say, not least of which is Stephenson's ultimate conceit at the end, which is that maybe the human race's fate is to live on in body-free, pure-energy form, cruising the universe in a self-perpetuating and self-repairing Dyson sphere long after the fragile biological version of our species is dead and gone back on Planet Earth. If Stephenson had explored these topics through a tight, action-packed 350 pages, it could've been one of the best books of his already excellent career, exploring many of the same issues in his 2008 Anathem but through the prism of our real contemporary society. So what a shame, then, that he instead turned in this profoundly overlong, page-fluffing, endlessly rambling and pretentiously purplish version, a book that will be hard for even his hardcore fans to finish, and that everyone else will give up on long before that point. It pains me to have to admit that, because up to now I had thought of Stephenson as an author who could do no wrong; but alas, it turns out that he's just as capable of clunkers as every other author, his first major miss here in a career that's otherwise been full of hits. As much as I hate to say it, my recommendation here is to skip Fall altogether, and wait a few more years for what will hopefully be a return to his normal brilliancy. ...more |
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Jun 15, 2019
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Jun 15, 2019
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ebook
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| 0441009425
| 9780441009428
| 0441009425
| 3.99
| 56,996
| 2000
| May 28, 2002
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really liked it
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I'm going through a period of my life right now where, anytime I read an article about a book series that I find even mildly interesting, the first th
I'm going through a period of my life right now where, anytime I read an article about a book series that I find even mildly interesting, the first thing I'll do is stop by The Pirate Bay to see if the series is being offered as a torrent, and if so will then download the entire series to my Kindle with the aim of reading at least a few of the volumes, just to see if it's worth finishing the entire thing. That's how, for example, I ended up last week reading Alastair Reynolds' 2000 science-fiction tale Revelation Space, part 1 of what is now a series of six novels and two story collections all set in the same pervasive universe; and I liked it well enough that I am definitely going to continue on with the next several volumes, although I would not call the book itself exactly perfect or even a masterpiece. Reynolds is known in the fandom community for being a "hard" sci-fi author -- that is, all the elements in his fantastical, futuristic stories are based on actual real science that we really can confirm in our own times -- but unlike many other hard sci-fi authors, Reynolds is particularly loved for being able to marry this scientific exactitude to superior basic storytelling skills in plotting, dialogue and character-building, delivering books with the exciting thrills of a space opera like Star Wars but with an attention to realism worthy of a physicist. (And no wonder -- Reynolds actually studied physics in college, and worked for the European Space Agency for years before becoming a full-time writer.) Here, Reynolds imagines the human race 500 years from our own times, now finally starting to scatter across the Milky Way, but quite slowly in that faster-than-light travel is still a physical impossibility; this has created the need for city-sized spaceships in which hundreds of thousands of humans are sometimes frozen for centuries (invented by the population of Mars, which long ago went through the kind of transhuman "Singularity" bio-mecha melding that Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for years, now considered a new race that is different than "regular" humans), which in turn has created yet another new race of "not quite" humans that drive and maintain these ships, who live in space permanently, have swapped out most of their body parts for cyborg replacements, and essentially live for millennia because of their regular routine of cryogenics and rejuvenation therapy. Mind you, none of this has to do with the plot of the book itself, which is one of the things to really love about this book; Reynolds is an undisputed master of rich universe-building, including the fact that humans are starting to learn through their travels that there was once hundreds of other sentient races that used to exist in the Milky Way, but that for some unknown reason they all died out about a million years ago, and since then no intelligent life has developed anywhere but on Earth (thus cleverly addressing the Fermi Paradox from 20th-century astrophysics). Our story, then, looks at the moment in this alternative future when humans finally start to realize what happened to cause this situation, by complexly bringing together an archeologist/politician on a remote asteroid society, the bored crew of one of these "lighthugger" city-ships, and an assassin who's been hired by a shadowy cabal to kill this archeologist because he's getting too close to a conspiracy-laden hidden secret about the universe. That Reynolds manages to do all this while still faithfully sticking to a universe of realistic physics is an impressive feat, pulling it off by by presenting a day-to-day existence in the 2500s that is just plausible enough to our own times that we can successfully make the jump in logic to believe it, then presenting mysteries to these 2500s characters that's exactly as much of a jump ahead in logic to them as their lives are to us, building a relativistic milieu that allows us to emotionally invest in purely conjectural plot turns, ones that would come across like magical cop-out deus-ex-machimas in a lesser writer's hands. But I can also see why critics of this book are not fans of this technique, which is why I'm giving the book 4 stars instead of 5, despite having enjoyed it quite a lot; there are definitely entire chapters here that devolve into people sitting around explaining science to each other for thousands of words at a stretch, and the climax so intricately involves Reynolds trying to make a believable reality out of a current bleeding-edge theory about quantum physics that the results are almost impossible to understand, which threatens to ruin the payoff we patiently sat through 500 pages of narrative to finally get to. Still, though, I myself wasn't nearly as bothered by these details as others have been, mostly I suppose because I was so happy to finally come across a hard science-fiction writer who's also a decent storyteller, and who doesn't use his autistic genius as a way of self-righteously dismissing storytelling basics like plot, character and dialogue as "meaningless" in the first place. (But for more on this subject, see my heartbreakingly underwhelmed reaction to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, one of the more beloved sci-fi trilogies of the late 20th century but that I found so bad as to be almost unreadable.) It's for this reason that I'll definitely at least be reading the next novel in the series, 2001's Chasm City, as well as the six short stories set in this universe he wrote between 1990 and 2001. (I read book series in the order they were published, not in the chronological order of the universe itself.) As always, I hope you'll have a chance to stop by my account again when my review of that goes up next month. ...more |
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May 16, 2019
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May 16, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0393608530
| 9780393608533
| 0393608530
| 3.80
| 6,366
| Jan 23, 2018
| Jan 23, 2018
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it was amazing
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This is one of the more beautiful books I've read in some time, and a refreshing reminder that there are still occasionally brand-new pleasures to be
This is one of the more beautiful books I've read in some time, and a refreshing reminder that there are still occasionally brand-new pleasures to be found in contemporary fiction, even if you have to read a hundred novels with completely expected storylines to find the next unique exception. It's the story of a woman named Rachel, an Israeli Jew living in Roman times, who in a moment of grief is convinced to swear an obscure Hebrew vow that will cure her deathly sick child, but render her immortal and ensure death to anyone she reveals this info to; and sure enough, that's exactly what happens, with Rachel continuing to live through dozens of generations and hundreds of children, all the way up to our present time, heartbreakingly required to burn herself alive once every half-century or so and start all over again in another new 18-year-old body at yet another random place on the planet. Our story, then, is a cleverly plotted look at this two-thousand-year life Rachel has now lived, hopping back and forth across historical periods and doing a deep dive along the way of Jewish history and customs. (For example, as I learned in the afterword, Rachel's first child whose sickness inspires the vow/curse is an actual real figure from Roman Jewish history [the mystical prophet Yochanan ben Zakkai], and it was while pondering his life that author Dara Horn first envisioned this book's storyline.) Along the way, then, the novel has loads to say about family, love, aging and grief, taking a curiously Buddhist tone to these topics and weaving in such contemporarily trendy subjects as gene therapy and blockchain cryptocurrency, but while tying them back to the pagan magic and witchcraft of Rachel's Roman youth. It all adds up to an utterly unique and unexpected story, one with a hugely satisfying emotional payoff at the end, a novel that both informed me as a Gentile and that sparked my imagination in a way few other contemporary novels in the last year have. That's always a lovely experience to have, for someone like me who burns through so much contemporary fiction each year and is inevitably disappointed with 90 percent of it, and I was so impressed that I think I'm going to put Horn's four previous novels on my "to be read" list as well, something I almost never do with living authors. I look forward to seeing if the rest of them hold up to this enchanting, thought-provoking newest. ...more |
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May 13, 2019
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May 13, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 9781944850036
| 1944850031
| 4.31
| 32
| unknown
| Oct 2016
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DID NOT FINISH. At this point in my life, I have officially read one billion neo-Victorian neo-Westerns set in post-apocalyptic societies, and know ev
DID NOT FINISH. At this point in my life, I have officially read one billion neo-Victorian neo-Westerns set in post-apocalyptic societies, and know every single one of this genre's tropes by heart, so I tend not to pick up any new ones unless, like was the case with Eric Shonkwiler's 8th Street Power & Light, a bunch of people gush about how it's totally unique and unlike any of the billion that have come before. But alas, after starting it I realized these people were lying, and it is in fact exactly like the billion that have come before it. This alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker, but Shonkwiler then adds the infuriating habit of not marking his dialogue with quotation marks or even dashes, making it all run together with the narrative prose and making my reading speed plummet to nearly zero. I'm willing to put up with that for James Joyce, but not for a middling Mad-Max-meets-Deadwood small-press novel, which is why I gave up on this fairly quickly after starting. It's a perfectly fine book if you've never read a story of this type before; but if you're a veteran of the genre, you're not really missing anything by skipping this altogether.
...more
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May 03, 2019
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May 03, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0393652599
| 9780393652598
| 0393652599
| 3.18
| 9,145
| unknown
| May 01, 2018
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it was amazing
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It would perhaps be best to start my review of Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Adjustment Day, with a factual recap of the book's premise, since all m
It would perhaps be best to start my review of Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Adjustment Day, with a factual recap of the book's premise, since all my complex and hard-to-articulate opinions of the book stem from it. Namely, it posits a day after tomorrow in which the alt-right movement actually gets their shit together enough to pull off a successful armed revolution, after which they split the US up into a series of ethnostates (all whites in the north, all blacks in the south, all LGBTQ people in California, with Asians and Latinos and Jews shipped back to their respective homelands). And unlike most such tales written by academic liberals like Palahniuk, here he intimates that everything works out happily ever after for the men who pull this off, in large part precisely because the academic liberals who should've opposed them instead battle each other into extinction over the dwindling resources of the now abandoned urban centers of the US; and because all those angry Riot Grrrls and MeTooers promptly turn tail once the male population dwindles, women generally now spending their time competing with each other for the romantic affections of the few eligible men left in society. So yes, in other words, it's The Handmaid's Tale rewritten as a utopian fantasy by the people who won the revolution; yes, in other words, it's The Turner Diaries rewritten by one of our nation's best and most mature novelists, not the usual sloppy amateurish manuscript we expect of these kinds of storylines, but a polished and brilliant book that could easily be eligible for the Pulitzer Prize (that is, in an alternative world where such a thing could even be contemplated), and that makes the extremely persuasive argument that the alt-right have legitimate complaints about society that all of us really should be paying a whole lot more attention to, instead of our current policy of blanket-shunning the entire movement and everything they have to say as worthless drivel. Those are the inarguable facts about the content of Adjustment Day, an easy enough thing to put down on paper; so the much more complicated thing becomes the question, what exactly are we intellectual liberals to make of such a book? As my Twitter followers know, I for one went through a whole range of complex emotions while reading it, which is why this review is so hard for me to pin down: first a surprise sympathy for the revolutionaries, and a budding excitement over the idea that they will actually pull off their militarized coup; then anger at Palahniuk for tricking me into sympathizing with a bunch of backwards "toxic males;" then anger at the far-left academic liberals of the world who came up with terms like "toxic males" in the first place, in order to dismiss any opinion they don't particularly like; then the dawning realization that this book is not so much about supporting the alt-right than it is about profoundly criticizing the progressive left, for thinking that their farts smell like wildflowers and that they can quite naturally do no wrong; and then finally the realization by the end that, no, what Palahniuk is really doing here is simply examining the subject of men and masculinity, and specifically the question of how men are supposed to understand their masculinity better in a world that automatically shuns and vilifies the entire concept as "toxic," no matter how cursory the examination? After all, Palahniuk himself has said many times in interviews that this book is to his early hit Fight Club what Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is to The Fountainhead; in other words, in both cases the earlier novels are a look at one individual person in the world who lives a sort of theoretically perfect life when it comes to the philosophy being discussed, while the second book in both cases are more sweeping looks at what might happen if an entire society starts thinking and behaving like the hero of the first book. And 23 years later, it's pretty common knowledge by now that Palahniuk's still remarkable debut novel Fight Club is one of the most astute and transgressive looks ever done of masculinity, of the violent and chaos-embracing blood-eating black soul trapped inside the heart of everyone with a penis ever born, and what a man's proper response should be in order to tame this inner demon and put it to productive use in society. It's also a well-known fact by now that the alt-right movement has essentially co-opted Fight Club as a sort of "red pill" introduction to their cause, a gateway drug of sorts that gently introduces many of the main issues that drive the masculinist movement, and especially the fact that mainstream society, as currently dominated by a media friendly to far-left progressive liberalism, doesn't even allow these issues to be discussed as a valid topic of conversation, instead blithely dismissing the entire subject of masculinity as "toxic poison" to be shunned, shamed and ridiculed. Adjustment Day is essentially Palahniuk publicly acknowledging what has happened with Fight Club and the alt-right over the last two decades, and arguing that the alt-right and the election of Trump is exactly what happens if you try to will an entire subset of the population out of existence; that if you don't allow rational and well-reasoned discussions to take place about masculinity, men will instead embrace the most radical and least-reasoned discussions about the subject, will band together under a legitimate and very much earned feeling of threat. If you get angry while reading Adjustment Day, that's good because you should get angry. We should all be angry that we have created a society where the only way to even examine the issue of what makes men men is to angrily embrace the most extreme and violent view of the subject as possible. It's exactly for this reason, of course, that academic liberals have largely been dismissing Adjustment Day; The Guardian, for example, called it "feeble," "vapid" and "incoherent," while the New York Times didn't think it was good enough to even bother reviewing in the first place. That's a big mistake, and exactly the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy the book is warning liberals about in the first place -- that by utterly dismissing every single issue in the world that doesn't personally relate to you as "worthless," you give others who care about these issues no other choice than to force you to confront the issue, precisely by violently embracing the most extreme and cartoonishly terrible aspect of the issue and, say, voting him into the White House. That's why the eventual fates of the ethnostates in Adjustment Day is the most brilliant aspect of the entire book, because it's Palahniuk poking vicious fun of far-left liberals' towering sense of smugness and self-importance; namely, California's "Gaysia" almost immediately becomes a militaristic police state, as the LGBTQ community quickly realize that, for the first time in their history, they now have to start worrying about producing gay babies as fast as possible, and resort to conscripting all lesbians at gunpoint into forced artificial insemination; while once all the African-Americans finally gather together in the Deep South to inaugurate "Blacktopia," it's revealed that the common Hollywood scriptwriting cliche of the "Magical Negro" is in fact quite literal, and that the black community has had the capacity this entire time to bring about a science-fictional Wakanda-like golden age, in which giant pyramids float to the moon and nation-wide communal hymns bring an end to aging and death by natural causes. That's one of the most genius things Palahniuk could've done here, because he's taking every single fantasy progressive liberals have ever expressed about how much better the world would be if straight white males were no longer in charge, and basically throws them all back in their faces as the ridiculous cartoons they are. That will be a tough thing for liberals to swallow, which is mainly why they've been staying away from this fellow liberal, openly gay, Vancouver-residing author's new novel in droves. But you'll be a better human being if you buck this trend yourself and try to embrace what Palahniuk is saying here, and understand that he's not trying to glorify the alt-right in this book but rather point out that some of the things they complain about are legitimate complaints that should be taken seriously, not coldly dismissed in a crassly cynical effort to sell more shaving cream. If you want to be a better human being, read this book and try to understand it for what it is. If you don't, then keep dismissing it like everyone else, and hunker down in your ivory tower waiting for the armed revolution that will undoubtedly come in its wake. ...more |
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Feb 26, 2019
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Feb 26, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 4.34
| 144,304
| Aug 15, 2017
| Aug 15, 2017
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really liked it
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None
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1
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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Paperback
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| 4.30
| 170,293
| Aug 16, 2016
| Aug 18, 2016
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really liked it
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None
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1
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not set
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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Paperback
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| 4.30
| 283,039
| Aug 04, 2015
| Aug 04, 2015
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really liked it
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None
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0385528787
| 9780385528788
| 0385528787
| 4.02
| 78,056
| Aug 29, 2013
| Sep 03, 2013
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really liked it
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None
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0871403625
| 9780871403629
| 0871403625
| 3.48
| 18,908
| Jun 30, 1962
| May 20, 2013
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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 | 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 For the last several years, I've ended up at the holidays with something like 20 to 30 book reviews still to write; so I've tended to just log them and give them scores so they'll count towards that year's reading challenge, but then move on in January to new books and not go back and review the ones from the previous December I didn't get around to. (Thankfully I'm keeping up with the reviews fairly well this year, so this hopefully won't be a problem again.) Anyway, as I sat down today to review JG Ballard's 1964 The Burning World, I realized that the book previous to this, 1962's The Drowned World, was one of those ones from last December that never got reviewed; and it's important to today's book that you know what I thought of the previous book, so it looks like today's one of those occasional days where I'll be doing two book reviews in one. Ballard is now mostly remembered for the freaky, transgressive tales he wrote in the '70s and '80s, so it'll be surprising to most to learn that he started his career with a quadrilogy of Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about ecology and natural disasters, which in the early '60s originally got him lumped in with writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, before heading off in much weirder and unclassifiable directions during the Countercultural Era. Per Ballard's wishes, I skipped entirely his 1961 debut The Wind From Nowhere, which he himself hated to the extent of literally omitting it from his bibliography while alive; so I'm instead starting with his trilogy of the similarly titled The Drowning World, The Burned World and 1966's The Crystal World, in which the planet Earth alternatively dies out from global flooding, a global drought, and an alien infection that crystallizes all organic matter it touches. (The Wind From Nowhere, meanwhile, is about the Earth dying out from an unending series of hurricanes and tsunamis, effectively making his first four novels concern global disasters via air, water, fire and earth.) And indeed, for an author I mostly currently know because of head-trippers like High-Rise and Crash, what struck me most about The Drowning World when I read it last December was how sober and grounded in science it is, with Ballard spending a huge chunk of the book simply looking at how the planet gets into the untenable position it's in, and only delving into his trademark weirdness at the very end, in which our James-Kirkesque hero falls in with a group of doomsday cultists who have decided to stay behind in a now flooded London in order to loot the city of random treasures for absurdist reasons. This left me thinking that Ballard was perhaps going to play all three of these novels with a straight face, until getting to what's widely acknowledged as his first transgressive book, the 1970 experimental story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (which was then followed with 1973's sex-and-car-accident fever dream Crash, which was such a force of nature that it singlehandedly changed his literary reputation into the one we still now have of him...but more on this in a few months). I was wrong, however; for if you define The Drowned World as a book mostly about the science of ecological disaster, which as a bonus delves a little bit into the bizarre ways some humans would behave during such a disaster, you can define The Burning World as the exact opposite, as mostly about the freakouts that people go through in the face of a world-ending disaster, with only lip service paid (literally only a few paragraphs in the entire book) to how the disaster came about in the first place. Or, I mean, to be fair, Ballard isn't looking here at how all humans would change in the face of a global disaster, with our story taking place well into the end-times and most of rational, sane humanity having already packed up and headed to the nearest ocean; instead, Ballard is interested in looking at the small amount of people who would choose to stay behind in their now waterless towns even after such a disaster took place, pointing a laser eye at the nihilists, criminals, mentally challenged, and cultishly religious who would voluntarily choose to end their existences under such dire circumstances, effectively making this a companion piece to the recent indie movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, only with Ballard damning his freak-flag-flying stragglers instead of celebrating them like the film does. For those looking for their expected Ballard bizarro fix, this is basically the earliest book of his career where you can find one, as the author serves up nightmarish visions of landlocked pirates, genocidal armed struggles on beachfronts, monstrously obese billionaire climate-deniers who have gone insane, developmentally disabled man-child animals who hunt humans for sport while wrapped in the bloody pelts of emaciated tigers from the local zoo, and all kinds of other chapters that will make you think, "Ah, right, there's the singular weirdo we all know and love." It makes me much more excited to delve into the final volume of the trilogy, and of course from that point on to throw myself into the New Weird books he's now much better known for. 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 |
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1
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not set
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0060929871
| 9780060929879
| 0060929871
| 3.99
| 1,901,802
| 1932
| Sep 01, 1998
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liked it
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[Score: 5 stars as a comedy, 1 star as a drama, averaged out to 3 stars for Goodreads. Read on for the explanation.] Believe it or not, I managed to ge [Score: 5 stars as a comedy, 1 star as a drama, averaged out to 3 stars for Goodreads. Read on for the explanation.] Believe it or not, I managed to get to the age of 49 not only without ever reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but even without learning any spoilers about the plot or story, so I was excited this week to be able to throw myself into it without knowing the least little thing about it, other than that many people consider it the spiritual brother of George Orwell's 1984. And so that's why it came as such a confusing surprise when I did start reading it, and my immediate first thought was, "Wow, this is...kinda terrible. A society that worships Henry Ford like a god? Whose members vomit in disgust at the very idea of marriage and romantic love? Where infants are taught to hate intellectualism by giving them books of nursery rhymes, then hitting them with an electric cattle prod whenever they try to read it? This is a joke, right? Huxley must have meant this as a joke, right? No person in their right mind could read this crap and seriously consider it a dramatically brilliant predictor of the future, right? RIGHT?" And that's when I finally read the Wikipedia pages for both Huxley and this book, and learned the fascinating truth -- that Huxley in fact deliberately did mean for Brave New World to be a joke, and the fact that the academic eggheads he was precisely making fun of now treat this as a serious drama is the biggest joke of all. Turns out that Huxley's first four books before Brave New World were all comedic satires along the lines of George Bernard Shaw, making vicious fun of such subjects as flapper fashion (Crome Yellow), the Jazz Age artistic community (Antic Hay), and the then-trendy post-war fascination for the Renaissance era (Those Barren Leaves), while also being a contributor of witty think-pieces to Vogue and Vanity Fair in these same years. Huxley fully meant for Brave New World to be his fifth comedic satire of this series, to be read in the same tongue-in-cheek spirit as the first four, essentially a wicked parody of such utopian academic intellectuals of the time as HG Wells, mostly known by us now for proto-science-fiction like The War of the Worlds, but hugely famous in his own time for a series of books whose central premises were, "Gee whiz, the future's going to be so great, and I can't wait to live there!" Huxley thought it would be hilarious to write his own "Gee whiz, the future's going to be great" book, but to upend the genre by making all the future developments things that audiences in the 1920s would react to with disgust and horror -- a society deliriously happy now that they've gotten rid of romantic love and natural childbirth, where messy and unfair democracy has been replaced with a algorithm-controlled caste system, where people are conditioned from birth through genetic manipulation and Pavlovian reinforcement to be unquestionably happy with whatever role in life the big computer of the central government has assigned to them. And to add to the ridiculousness, after reading a found copy of Henry Ford's autobiography during a long and boring sea voyage from Europe to America that previous summer, and finding it so ludicrously self-important as to turn into an inadvertent comedy, Huxley decided to set his backwards-utopian society in a far-future time when Ford has been elevated to the next Jesus or Muhammad, within a world that now treats capitalism and automation as literal religions. As far as I can tell, the only reason Brave New World started getting treated seriously in the first place is that, by complete coincidence, several of the things Huxley wrote here as a joke were things that the Nazis in Germany started trying to actually do with complete earnestness just a few years later, especially when it came to Huxley's fanciful ideas about eugenics being the "hope of the future;" then after World War Two was over, when neo-liberal academic intellectuals were desperate to find things to explain to their mouth-breathing inferiors (i.e. the general public) why fascism was so wrong, they latched on to Huxley's former comedy and transformed it into "The Prescient Classic That Brilliantly Foretold The Coming Of Fascism," which was then intellectually linked with the deliberately serious and profoundly better 1984 so that one couldn't think of one without thinking of the other. (For comparison, note that it was these same exact post-war neo-liberal academic intellectuals who latched onto The Diary of Anne Frank to essentially paint the entire Jewish race as pious, sexless do-gooders who have never done a single wrong thing their entire lives, the exact emasculating characterization that Philip Roth was railing against in his countercultural classics like Portnoy's Complaint; and that both of these books' grossly unfair generalizations were further cemented by literally decades of lazy high-school teachers assigning them as required reading while towing the official party line about "what they meant.") That's a real shame, because Brave New World is actually subversively brilliant as long as you read it as a comedy, one that has nothing but contempt for intellectuals who think the future's going to be great simply because it's the future, financially backed by amoral business tycoons who think just because they're rich, that somehow automatically makes them qualified to be sociologists too. When seen like this, the book has a lot to still say even about such contemporary figures as Malcolm Gladwell and his deep-pocketed buddy Bill Gates; but when viewed through the filter of it supposedly being a straightforward drama, like decades of academics have brainwashed us into thinking, Brave New World is awful, a hacky and unsubtle slog that makes any intelligent reader go, "How could anyone ever take this crap seriously?" The secret is that Huxley never meant you to, which is the real key to enjoying this deliberately over-the-top satire. ...more |
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not set
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Feb 05, 2019
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Feb 05, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0345345150
| 9780345345158
| 0345345150
| 3.85
| 3,535
| Oct 1979
| Mar 1994
|
really liked it
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I'll take any excuse I can to read another book by sci-fi "New Age" author Roger Zelazny, who had a long career but is mostly known for his head-tripp
I'll take any excuse I can to read another book by sci-fi "New Age" author Roger Zelazny, who had a long career but is mostly known for his head-tripping cross-genre exercises of the 1970s; so while recently researching Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and learning that Zelazny once wrote a novel in which this poetry book was combined with an AI computer to become a self-sentient creature, I decided "what the hell" and checked that book out of the library at the same time, 1979's Roadmarks. The book's been almost entirely forgotten at this point, and for good reason -- clocking in at only 180 pages and entirely taking place in just one location, it's fair to call this one of Zelazny's minor works, and people new to him should gravitate instead towards his major classics like Lord of Light or the "Amber" series. But still, this was a fun little read, a gently comedic time-traveling actioner that will remind many of Tim Powers, entirely set along a highway that stretches from the beginning of human existence to the end, and with various drivers from differing parts of history who have found their way there through various obscure metaphysical means. (The sentient books, including not only Leaves of Grass but Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, are inventions from the future that have themselves found their way onto the "Road," essentially personal assistants but with the snippy, wisecracking personalities of KITT from Knightrider.) Our particular story, then, follows one such full-time driver of the Road, an arms dealer who purchases weapons from the future and delivers them to armies from the past, who learns that a former business partner has taken out a futuristic hit contract on him, and must learn why and how to get out of it alive. Zelazny has a lot of fun here with world-building, presenting a Road that's equally populated by horse-drawn wagons and sonic-booming bullet cars, and presenting a theory of time traveling in which the most important moments in history have fully paved exit ramps complete with fast-food joints and motels, but that through the manipulation of Roadsters always have the danger of turning into obscure moments in history, whose off-ramps become weed-covered dirt tracks that barely anyone even remembers are still there. It isn't exactly an easy book to track down (Amazon isn't even currently selling a Kindle version), but a pretty fun little read if you ever happen to come across it at a used bookstore or yard sale. I recommend doing so if you ever have the chance, but don't beat yourself up trying to get your hands on a copy. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Feb 2019
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Feb 01, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0720612683
| 9780720612684
| 0720612683
| 3.67
| 9,407
| 1967
| Jul 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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The Paris Review website recently started a fascinating new regular feature call "Feminize Your Canon," in which they look back at various female writ
The Paris Review website recently started a fascinating new regular feature call "Feminize Your Canon," in which they look back at various female writers in the past who by all rights should've been as famous as their male counterparts from those years, but for one reason or another (spoiler: mostly sexism) simply didn't get the kind of attention they deserved. It's a great series for people like me, who wish to be sensitive to our contemporary age's newfound focus on non-white, non-male artists, but who don't want to entirely give up the important things we can learn by looking back at the "classic" artists of previous ages. That's how Anna Kavan came to my attention, which I'm glad she did, because she turns out to be one of the most interesting people of Mid-Century Modernism you've never heard of. Like Diane Arbus in the photography world, Kavan started out as an author of traditional domestic dramas in the 1930s (back when she was writing under her married name of Helen Ferguson), the kind of safe, soap-operaish tales that women were "supposed" to write in those years; but a mental breakdown in 1938, followed by a stint in a Swiss psychiatric institution and the introduction of heroin into her life (a drug that would remain a daily habit for the next 25 years), created an artistic chrysalis around her during World War Two; and what emerged afterwards was a suddenly platinum-blonde, radically experimental, sexually explicit writer along the lines of Anais Nin, who legally changed her name to the protagonist of her former domestic dramas, and was now spending her time re-approaching her older works but now rewriting them in evermore surrealistic and proto-feminist terms. This reached its apogee in the last book of her career, the 1967 "science-fiction" novel Ice, the one and only book while she was alive to achieve mainstream commercial success. I put "science-fiction" in quotes here, as those familiar with the book already know, because it's actually sci-fi in a nebulous, unusual way that fitted it exactly into the New Wave going on in that industry at the time, when you look at people like Ursula K. Le Guin, JG Ballard and Roger Zelazny. Set in a world where an unknown man-made calamity has set off a global freezing chain reaction, starting at the poles and slowly creeping in both directions towards the equator, our story follows an unnamed male military veteran who is outrunning the catastrophe through random globe-hopping, all the while desperately tracking down, catching up with, then losing again the object of his obsessive focus, a brittle-thin platinum blonde who exists as a perpetual prisoner of the various men around her in her life, as we watch graphic examples of man's inhumanity towards its fellow man in various developing nations that have broken down into lawless anarchy in the face of the coming genocidal disaster. If this sounds like a story with strange random connections to Kavan's life, that's because it is -- based on the abusive relationship she had with her first husband, when the two were traipsing across the planet in an attempt to avoid the active fighting of World War Two, the story gets mixed with Kavan's drug habit and her forays into psychoanalysis to produce this trippy, dark, yet thoroughly speculative tale, a story that wouldn't be out of place whatsoever if paired with Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness from just two years later. In a perfect world, this would've gained as much attention from the sci-fi community as Le Guin's did, and Kavan would've had a long and distinguished second career within the world of smart, metaphorical genre writing; so it's a shame to all of us that just a few months after the publication of Ice, Kavan died of heart failure exacerbated by decades of heroin abuse. I've gotten interested now in reading all of Kavan's post-breakdown work, but have learned that nearly all of it is out of print, that Amazon doesn't carry even cheap Kindle ebook copies, and that even the Chicago Public Library (which is usually a great destination for old obscure titles like these) doesn't have a copy of most of these books. That makes Kavan a perfect candidate for a new pickup by a smart small press out there, and a major rediscovering of her talent, along the lines of Nelson Algren in the 1990s when Seven Stories Press admirably reprinted all of his old out-of-print books for the first time in decades. In the meantime, however, at least this most famous book of hers is still easy to find, a devastating portrait of submission and abuse while set in a bizarrely post-apocalyptic world with danger around every corner. It comes strongly recommended to one and all, but especially to those interested in forgotten feminist pioneers and the history of science-fiction's New Wave years. ...more |
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not set
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Jan 23, 2019
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Jan 23, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0399180117
| 9780399180118
| 0399180117
| 3.63
| 32,106
| May 01, 2018
| May 01, 2018
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did not like it
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[This review reveals no spoilers about book 3 of this trilogy, but also assumes that you've already read books 1 and 2 and are familiar with the plot
[This review reveals no spoilers about book 3 of this trilogy, but also assumes that you've already read books 1 and 2 and are familiar with the plot surprises those contain.] Usually when I read the three books of a sci-fi trilogy directly in a row, I write one long review for the entire trilogy and just triple-post it at Goodreads; but the quality turned out to be so profoundly different between the individual novels of Sylvain Neuvel's "Themis Files" trilogy, I feel compelled in this case to write separate reviews for each of them. Regulars will know that I loved the first book of the trilogy, Sleeping Giants, and that I found the second book, Waking Gods, more problematic but still worth taking on. The third and final book, though, Only Human, unfortunately just falls flat on its face, a manuscript that from start to finish feels like Neuvel had completely lost interest in writing more chapters of this saga, but was contractually obligated to deliver a third volume when he first signed a deal for the second one (which very likely could've been exactly what happened). Among this book's many literary crimes: --After propelling us through the first two books by an alien race that seemed entirely inscrutable, the main charm of those first two volumes, the third book spends half its page count on said alien world, where we discover that the aliens have all the thrills and charisma of a bunch of autocrats in cheap suits sitting around a boardroom at the EU Parliament headquarters in Brussels. BLLLEEEEUUUUGGGHHHH. This is the biggest problem of all with this book, that after all my fanciful theories while reading the first two books over who the aliens might turn out to be, the reality inside Neuvel's mind turned out to be a thousand percent more boring. --By killing off the mysterious "Smoking Man"-esque leader of our heroes at the end of book 2, Neuvel also eliminated the justification for why the novels have been written in an epistolary style (that is, because we're supposed to be reading the Smoking Man's reports on the events long after they happened); so to continue the epistolary style in book 3 makes the whole gimmick feel forced and fake, and calls way more attention to itself than it did in the first two books, especially with the evermore strained nature of the "written transcripts" as Neuvel transitions into more and more in-the-moment action scenes. --After very cleverly making the antagonist of the first two volumes an autistic scientist, organically using her natural personality to make her actions "evil" simply because she lacks the capacity to normally empathize with other humans (one of the smartest things Neuvel does in the first book, and one of the big reasons I was such a huge fan), by book 3 he's turned her into a cackling, mustache-twirling supervillain, not just profoundly disappointing but an active insult towards the mentally challenged. --And worst of all, after literally killing off 100 million people at the end of book 2, Neuvel simply had nowhere to go here as far as raising the stakes, and so he unwisely did the opposite, turning the entire story into one not about the aliens themselves but about an alt-right US President who uses the remaining robot to stage a militaristic overthrow of the rest of the world's governments, and to round up people of color and put them in concentration camps. This makes the whole thing feel like a cheap criticism of Donald Trump, when one of the most interesting things about the first two books is that Neuvel avoids making trendy and obvious "politician of the moment" statements. And by using the aliens as a fake deus-ex-machima to bring about a peaceful resolution (a statement that will make more sense once you read the book), Neuvel wallows in the precise thing I said during my review of book 1 was one of its greatest aspects, that he avoided the perennial cliche of hacky sci-fi novelists to end their novels with, "BEEP BEEP YOUR ALIEN OVERLORDS COMMAND YOU TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER AND LIVE IN PEACEFUL HARMONY BEEP BEEP." Audiences have been rolling their eyes at this trope ever since The Day The Earth Stood Still almost 70 years ago, and believe me when I say that it hasn't gotten any fresher in the years since. A book that not only squanders every bit of goodwill Neuvel built up with the first two volumes, but actively does the exact opposite in many cases of the smart decisions that made the first two so great, Only Human is exactly the kind of book I was originally expecting from Sleeping Gods, when I first heard that the book had been rejected by 50 publishers and had only become famous because of an Amazon populist upswell of a self-published version. I was originally pleased that the first book turned out to not be the hacky, obvious, barely readable disaster you would expect from those circumstances, but part 3 turns out to be exactly that. Avoid at all costs. ...more |
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Jan 21, 2019
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Jan 21, 2019
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Oct 14, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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| 4.19
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it was amazing
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Sep 14, 2019
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Sep 14, 2019
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| 3.96
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Sep 04, 2019
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Sep 04, 2019
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| 3.55
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it was amazing
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Aug 22, 2019
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Aug 22, 2019
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| 4.17
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did not like it
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Aug 10, 2019
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Aug 10, 2019
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Jul 2019
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Jul 01, 2019
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| 3.58
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it was ok
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Jun 15, 2019
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Jun 15, 2019
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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May 16, 2019
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May 16, 2019
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| 3.80
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it was amazing
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May 13, 2019
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May 13, 2019
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| 4.31
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May 03, 2019
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May 03, 2019
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| 3.18
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it was amazing
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Feb 26, 2019
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Feb 26, 2019
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| 4.34
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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| 4.30
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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| 4.30
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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| 4.02
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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| 3.48
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it was amazing
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 25, 2019
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| 3.99
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liked it
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Feb 05, 2019
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Feb 05, 2019
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|||||
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Feb 2019
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Feb 01, 2019
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|||||
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| 3.67
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it was amazing
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Jan 23, 2019
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Jan 23, 2019
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| 3.63
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did not like it
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Jan 21, 2019
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Jan 21, 2019
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