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0345467175
| 9780345467171
| 0345467175
| 3.92
| 4,121
| 1975
| Mar 01, 1995
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it was ok
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So… a bit dumb. One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong c So… a bit dumb. One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong conclusion and says, “Oh I really overthought that one.” You… overthought it? You made a mistake because you thought too deeply about it? Unless your name is David Foster Wallace or Socrates, it seems unlikely. So here’s what actually happened: You thought poorly, and that is why you were mistaken. Well, the Shockwave Rider is the book equivalent of “I overthought that one.” It is the novelization of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It thinks it is incredibly smart. It is, in fact, quite dumb. Here’s what happens: There’s this guy who is INCREDIBLY SMART, which we know because the book tells us so. Often. Well this super incredibly smart person gets recruited into a secret school for training super smart people to become future leaders. He gets upset when he realizes that people are mostly amoral bobble-heads and goes rogue. Which involves him running around playing an extended game of charades, using a super secret internet code that lets him alter his identity as needed. So he’s a weird cult leader one moment, then a super-star programmer the next. However, he encounters a MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL! Yes indeedy we have an MPDG and not in the self-aware ironic deconstructive sense. So, of course inspired by our good little MPDG, the protagonist realizes the emptiness of his life and decides to do something MEANINGFUL. This aspiration reaches its apex point when he encounters a LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, whose primary service to society is a form of non-responsive therapy! But alas the Evil Government catches up to him (note: no spoiler here, the whole book’s framing is that our protagonist is being interrogated in a government prison). And the Evil Government decides it hates that libertarian utopia and wants to destroy it! Because the Evil Government just cannot stand not having control over everything. But then computer virus! Happy the end. There’s a lot of jibber jabber in this book on academic topics like intelligence vs wisdom or the means of proper governance or the sociological effects of the erosion of community, but there’s practically zero reference, either explicit or implicit, to any of humanity’s works on the matter. Like you’d THINK that maybe there’d be some reference to the many theories of intelligence that the psychological community has created. But nope. Nothing. The result is not particularly enlightening or interesting to read. It’s like… you know when someone who knows nothing about a particular problem drastically underestimates its complexity and offers facile solutions? Like someone who says, “Well you can solve homelessness by building more houses, right? There you go, problem solved.” Or, “Oh our education system has a lot of troubles. Let’s just privatize it and the market will sort it out.” That’s what the whole book feels like. Every discussion, every discursion, is sophomoric – and there’s A LOT of them. Such digressions from the narrative really are the meat of the book. So there’s that. Which would be more palatable if the book had any sort of style to it. But despite ostensibly being a ‘cyberpunk’ novel, it is about as far from punk as I can imagine. Better to call it a ‘cryptobro’ novel: a frat boy who thinks he’s a geek and wants to be a geek but is not a geek and does not, in fact, actually want to be a geek. Replace geek with ‘cyberpunk’ in that sentence and you have a decent summary of The Shockwave Rider. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 27, 2023
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Jul 27, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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4.15
| 261,334
| May 02, 2017
| May 02, 2017
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liked it
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A Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good th
A Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good thing is a bad thing? With Snickers, it’s more like too much of a bad thing is, uh, still a bad thing… but in small quantities, eh, not so bad, takes the edge off at least. That more or less summarizes how I feel about these murder-bot diaries: the protagonist (self-named “Murderbot”) is a bit crunchy and a bit sweet, and it’s good that these are novellas and not full length novels. Just like a Snickers bar, they’re real easy to consume, and I don’t want to undervalue that. Reading each in one sitting is a great way to spend the afternoon. And to give more substantive praise, probably the best part of these novellas is the way they extend corporate dystopia into the realm of space exploration. The Murderbot begins its life as a “SecBot,” a security/protection android that its company REQUIRES for exploration/survey groups to qualify for insurance (and also lets the company steal data…). While corporate dystopia is nothing new to sci-fi, this more intimate boots-on-the-ground perspective feels fresh within the context of space exploration. However, these are otherwise absolute junk food. These are books heavily featuring robots and AI and hacking, written by someone who KNOWS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANY OF THAT. You know that amazingly absurd 1995 film, Hackers? That’s about the level of accuracy of hacking/robotics/AI in this book. In writing, we have this phrase “write what you know.” I hate that phrase. I despise it utterly. Please, writers, don’t restrict yourself to “what you know.” Please use your empathy to write from perspectives not your own. Please depict worlds beyond what we currently know. But do your research. I’m not asking for a textbook on encryption or cyber-sec. But if you’ve written a quarter of a million words in which “hacking” is the primary method by which your protagonist resolves conflicts and you never use basic terminology like “firewall” or “encryption” (much less sophisticated jargon like “sanitizing input” or “air-gap”) then your story is probably bullshit, isn’t it? In that respect, I find it a bit disturbing that people nominated and then awarded these books for not just one Hugo but FOUR. MORE ACTUALLY! They wanted to give MORE! AND two Nebulas. That's like giving the story equivalent of a MCDONALD’S the “best restaurant award.” For better or worse, the field of science fiction literature is now dominated by people who have only the most tenuous grasp of actual science, technology, mathematics, and philosophy. Also, as a final and related note, each of these books is like $20. I’m sorry but what? You’re charging steak-dinner prices for a candy bar. Ironic, considering this is a book set against a backdrop of corporate greed. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 29, 2022
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Sep 29, 2022
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ebook
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4.27
| 206,668
| Mar 1996
| Apr 2015
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it was ok
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Didn't finish this one. In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much in Didn't finish this one. In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much interiority that led to glacial pacing, and a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy that led to Fitz being best understood as a gestapo-in-grooming. But I pushed on to this one until I encountered all three issues back-to-back-to-back. And that was all she wrote. This is one of those books that simply fails for people who strongly skew non-conformist. It really only works if you buy into the sympathetic perspective the author pushes for Fitz. But I'm a non-conformist, and I don't. It's not enough to claim there's a romance. It's not enough to claim Fitz is largely virtuous. I need it shown and proven. I need to be able, with my own cognizance, to decide that Fitz is virtuous. But he isn't. He's a spineless lapdog of a corrupt monarchy. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 29, 2021
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Jul 29, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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1781086079
| 9781781086070
| 1781086079
| 4.12
| 6,839
| Jun 12, 2018
| Jun 12, 2018
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it was ok
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Yell and Back Again, a Scientist’s Review There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in Yell and Back Again, a Scientist’s Review There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in his tracks, and he stares at it in disbelief. When he realizes Saruman is responsible, he utters, “A wizard should know better!” Well, I encountered a passage in Revenant Gun that elicited an almost identical reaction from me, except it ended with, “A mathematician should know better!” I was genuinely disturbed. What was Yoon Ha Lee thinking when he wrote it? Why didn’t he fix it during the editing stage? Did he really believe no one would notice it? Is it possible he doesn’t understand its absurdity? Regardless of the answers [see note at bottom of review], I knew this passage had to be the central focus of my review because it is symptomatic of everything I find wrong with this book, with this trilogy, and with a certain style of currently popular spec fic. Here’s the passage, which describes an infamous weapon of mass destruction. It is mostly correct, until we get to the final (bolded) sentence: Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower's effect was painfully affected by the linearization. Pushdug búbhosh! Painfully affected by the linearization? Bwahahaha. That's nonsense that transcends mere techno-babble. It's a categorical error like: If you make sure to eat your vegetables, you will grow as big and strong as triangles. The victim was killed by 2+2 = 4. The Bohr model of the atom involves electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. Those within the blast radius of an atomic bomb are painfully affected by the Bohr model. Even given Yoon Ha Lee’s fictional universe, in which formation geometries and strict adherence to calendars can create ‘exotic effects’ like shields and immortality, it doesn’t make sense. Those effects are created by physical actions - soldiers moving into certain patterns or ritualistic torture. No one can be physically affected by linearization because it is not a physical action. It is an abstract mathematical tool of approximation. And sure, big whoop, some sci-fi writer tossed in some techno-babble that happens to be a little more nonsensical than usual. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that Yoon Ha Lee studied mathematics and math teaching at Cornell and Stanford. A mathematician should know better! What’s more, it can’t be accidental. The passage is the ONLY writing in the entire trilogy that even remotely resembles actual math or physics. So why’d he write something he should have known was nonsense? Why not spend the 60 seconds to make it sensible? A few words would make all the difference, something like, “painfully affected by a scrambling of the local space-time geometry.” Honestly, it’s mind boggling. I just could not fathom how he could be so careless with his choice of words… but then something came to me, something that clarified not just this passage, but also Yoon Ha Lee’s writing style and the spec-fic movement to which he belongs (see also my review for Ancillary Mercy) and even something fundamental about the gender & sexuality conflict underway. I realized Yoon Ha Lee was treating that relatively exotic math term ‘linearization’ like a neologism, a made-up word whose meaning he gets to assign. And of course, why wouldn’t he? He shows a propensity for using such neologisms throughout the whole series. His space vessels aren’t ‘ships’ but ‘moths.’ His light fixtures aren’t lamps but ‘candlevines.’ And so on. ***LIGHTBULB MOMENT*** See I found the book dreadfully dull. The characters interacted with each other - often intimately - and yet never managed to form relationships. Events are written dramatically, but the drama felt hollow and forced. Indeed, the reading experience was like watching someone try to light wet wood on fire. Lots of sparks but no fire, no warmth, no radiance. But I understand why now. Yoon Ha Lee believes more strongly in the power of words than I do. Words are not merely descriptive; they possess the power to forge reality. Linearization can cause “blood to leak from every pore in the body”? Sure, why not. And if that’s true, then it is not necessary to develop plot and conflict to craft genuine emotion. Instead, an author need only offer emotional cues to tell the reader what to feel. But I disagree. Consider friendship. The friends that strive together, grow together. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee’s relationship is such an enduring and powerful example of friendship because they go through so much together. Frodo and Sam are attacked by spirit ghosts, betrayed by Boromir, hunted by orcs, stalked by a paranoid schizophrenic, captured by a giant spider, all while traversing through miserable, hostile environments. It’s exhausting. I don’t remember if Tolkien ever explicitly tells us they have a great friendship, but it’d be insulting if he did. That Samwise kept going shows us everything we need to know about their friendship. But here, in Revenant Gun, we’ve got all these relationships that I found empty and emotionless because the characters face so little together. High General Brezan gets married to Andan Tseya. What do they go through? What’s their Shelob experience? *shrug* As I wrote in my Raven Strategm review, the SUM TOTAL of their time together is literally them just flying around on a garden ship, having boring sex. They don’t fight anything. They don’t overcome anything. They don’t fail anything. Shuos Leader Mikodez is friends with his assistant Zehun. What do they go through? Assassination attempts? Government coups? No. They have meetings, where they eat cookies and name kittens. Jedao and one of his closest subordinates, Commander Talaw, share maybe 20 lines of dialogue together. Cheris is sorta friends with this servitor (robot) who pilots her ship. What do they go through together? Does either sacrifice anything for the other? Provide comfort to the other in a dark time? No, nothing. And yet the author writes so many scenes as if these relationships have any emotional strength whatsoever. But they don’t. So the whole reading experience was this bizarre experience of an author trying to offer emotional cues and me going, Uhhh, no? Like, I’m sitting there reading the final pages where Jedao is freaking out over Commander Talaw, and I’m thinking, What the hell? Did I miss something? Was there more than 20 lines of dialogue shared between them? Nope. *sigh* Really, that’s how I feel about Jedao’s entire characterization in this book. A big sigh. So a man who once murdered 1 million+ people in order to achieve a political objective is now concerned about harming a few more thousand? After having his psyche reconstructed by a completely amoral psychopathic genius who specifically revived him in order to get him to kill people? What? Is this supposed to make sense? But again, it’s that painfully affected by linearization writ large. And because nothing bad ever comes from delving too greedily or too deep, let me dig even more, into the minefield that is Gender. So, gender fluidity is a major theme of this trilogy. I earlier mentioned General Brezan? He has a ‘womanform’ but identifies as male, and he is marrying a man who became a woman. Indeed, the book probably has more transgenders than cisgenders. Yoon Ha Lee himself (according to his wikipedia) is transgender. Which is fine, but it makes for fascinating pondering: Could there be a connection between this style and gender fluidity? Indeed I believe there is! When you get right down to it, the relationship between language and reality is at the very core of the gender conflict that’s currently happening in many parts of the world: Those in favor of gender fluidity make a big distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ Sex refers to biological characteristics. Put simply, if a person has XX sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘female sex’ while if a person has XY sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘male sex.’ Gender, however, is a social construct. Gender is fluid. There is no requirement that gender and sex match. A person should be free to choose gender. Opponents of gender fluidity make no such distinction. So transgenderism is a categorical error from such a perspective. Claims of transgender (from the opponents' PoV) would be like if I walked up to you and pointed at a wall that was white and said, “That wall is black.” And you said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s white.” And I said, “No, it’s white and if you don’t call it white, you’re a colorist asshole.” Now I’m torn. I’m sympathetic to the non-extremists on both sides. On one hand, I once set out to give a clear, mathematical definition of ethical good, and I discovered that freedom is largely synonymous with good. So the freedom to define ourselves however we like is not only beautiful but essential to moral society. What’s more, transgenderism is the first crest of the wave of transhumanism, which is the future of our species. On the other hand… I’m the type of person who endeavored to create a mathematical definition for ethical good. So, yeah, I like my terms to be defined as precisely as possible. In my experience, most arguments arise because people are speaking past each other, using the same words but with different meanings. So I’m made uneasy by this notion that we’re going to take these terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ which could have really clear definitions (XY genes) or (XX genes) and then purposefully make them more vague. We know the result will be conflict because the conflict is already here. This is why I often say mathematics is the language of peace and perhaps you can now appreciate why the initial passage angered me so. Yoon Ha Lee used the language of precision and peace to tell what amounts to a lie, for no good reason. But it’s not surprising to me because the whole book is written this way, and it’s not surprising to me that Yoon Ha Lee wrote it that way. To liberate gender from the chains of biological definition is to assert the primacy of language. And in a way, Yoon Ha Lee is only doing what all authors attempt to do: to transmute abstract words into true and genuine feelings. To trick the reader into thinking a fictional character - a golem of ink and paper - is a real person who can be hurt, or loved, whose tragedies and triumphs constitute genuine humanity. And, yet, such a perspective taken to the extreme reminds me of the rise and fall of the Númenóreans, that Tolkien empire of Men who sought to challenge the Gods. One must be careful not to become too divorced from reality. To merely claim drama, character, or love without grounding it in real humanity and carefully constructed plot structure is to risk those emotions ringing hollow and false. That is is exactly what happened with me. I felt like Yoon Ha Lee was trying to hypnotize me into caring. Just as he tried to grant authenticity and verisimilitude to his ‘threshold winnower’ weapon by tossing around some math terms, it felt like he tried to grant emotional stakes by simply claiming they were there. Have characters have sex and then voila, they are emotionally connected! Have people spend time together without actually overcoming anything and then voila, they must be friends and comrades! But no… that is not the way my mind and my heart interface with literature. I don’t care if authors write about the real or the unreal. But they need to tell the truth of humanity and truth of their reality in the language of our reality. Which also means that if you’re going to use math terms in your science fiction, then, please, use them correctly. [Edit/note: Some time after writing this review, I discovered that Yoon Ha Lee gives an acknowledgment to Peter Berman for "helping with the mathematics of the threshold winnower." Which leads me believe that Yoon Ha Lee didn't actually know better and wrote that line in good faith.] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 07, 2019
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Jul 19, 2019
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Jul 07, 2019
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Paperback
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0425198685
| 9780425198681
| 0425198685
| 3.87
| 51,096
| Feb 03, 2003
| Feb 2005
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It's entirely possible this is a great book. I wouldn't know, however, because I made it one chapter into Pattern Recognition before I gave up (for the It's entirely possible this is a great book. I wouldn't know, however, because I made it one chapter into Pattern Recognition before I gave up (for the 2nd time) because it was literally the worst first chapter I've ever read in a published book. At least that I can remember reading. It's possible that some space aliens have been abducting me and forcing me to read alien-written books - which I assume have really bad first chapters - and then erasing my memory, all part of a ploy to guide humanity, via literature. That seems unlikely, but then if you had told me a reality TV star man-baby would have become president of the United States, I would have called that even more unlikely. Either way, here's my Pattern Recognition inspired guide on how to write a terrible first chapter: NUMBER ONE: Make the prose so purple, so overwritten, that the reader's face is at risk of getting a tan, to such a degree that the ACA will classify the chapter as a possible carcinogen. I wish that my search for examples required me to go beyond the first page, but it doesn't. Here's the first sentence: Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. Ever-circling dire wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm you say?! That's, like, totes a reference to sleep being 'counting sheep!' Maybe a little Game of Thrones reference? Dire wolves, right. Winter is coming. Eh? Eh? Right? Yeah? Am I right? Well if I'm wrong, I don't wanna be right. Here's the next sentence: It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now. Neuroscientists of the Caribbean: Awash in Limbic Tides, starring our hero Ben Carson and his side-kick Sam Harris. And 'all of the above'? I'm just gonna start throwing that into my lists. I like Old El Paso tacos, Premium Angus beef, Chiquita bananas, all of the above, and Count Chocula cereal. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers. Long-chain monomers? Even if that made sense, it'd be an entirely pointless sensory detail since no human being associates 'long-chain monomers' with a smell. That'd be like saying, it smells only of 'black holes.' Do you know what that smells like? I don't. But 'long chain monomers' doesn't make sense anyway. When you combine monomers into a long-chain you get a POLYMER. If you google "Long chain monomers" half your hits are related to this book, like this mocking short. She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical cord down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Hell, I kinda like this one when taken on its own, but I'm still on the first page here and when combined with everything else, it's much too much too much much too too choo choo COME ON, RIDE THE TRAIN, HEY, RIDE IT. NUMBER TWO: Make so many name-drops, so many specific allusions that the reader can't decide whether your book is a book or a commercial: It's not enough for something to be a fridge, or a lamp, or money, or tea, in Pattern Recognition('s first chapter). No it must be a GERMAN fridge. Or an ITALIAN floor lamp. It must be a "bag of some imported Californian tea substitute" and the "covers of paperbacks look like Australian money." Then our German fridge is full of "two dry pucks of Weetabix..." and when our protagonist Cayce puts on clothes, we get, "a small boy's black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new oversized pair of black 501's, every trademark removed." Every trademark removed, eh? THE IRONY. After which she looks at her reflection and "grimaces at it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who'd insisted on comparing her to Helmut Newton's nude portrait of Jane Birkin." Nice! Combine the art with the crass consumerism. That, my friends, is what we call JUXTAPOSITION. And then the requisite Apple plug: "He won't allow decorators through the door unless they basically agree to not do that which they do, yet he holds on to this Mac for the way you can turn it upside down and remove its innards with a magic little aluminum handle." And finishing, near the end, a combination of a bit of everything: "Still doing heels, she checks her watch, a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock, its plastic case sanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro-abrasive." I haven't seen such blatant product placement since Krispy Kreme's invasion of Power Rangers. Which is saying something, since I didn't even watch that movie. NUMBER THREE: Make your first chapter completely devoid of any plot or plot hooks whatsoever! I already gave you the first sentence. Here's the last one: "She drapes a pair of limp green foam pads over the foot rail, carefully positions her feet, lifts them on invisible stiletto heels, and begins her ten prehensiles." OH DAMN CLIFFHANGER!!! Will she pull a muscle while doing pilates?! *bites nails* *edge of the seat* No, but really, here's what happens in the first chapter: Cayce describes her non-lover Damien's empty, boring home. Then she makes tea and surfs the internet a bit. Then she takes a shower. Then she does pilates. THE END. I'm not even joking! If someone held a contest for the 'Summary of the most boring first chapter ever,' that'd probably win it. So, yeah. I've enjoyed the other Gibson books I've read, and this one might be great, too. But I'm not going to ever know because the first chapter is so horrendously bad that this happened [image] ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Nov 08, 2017
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Mass Market Paperback
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1857988361
| 9781857988369
| 1857988361
| 3.94
| 16,691
| Sep 1968
| Aug 12, 1999
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Not giving it a rating, as I only made it about 50 pages in before I admitted that it wasn't for me. I really wanted to - since everyone else seems to
Not giving it a rating, as I only made it about 50 pages in before I admitted that it wasn't for me. I really wanted to - since everyone else seems to think so highly of it. But I found so little of worth in those 50 pages I could not fathom continuing on. Think I'm gonna come right out and admit that post-modern literature just isn't for me. In the sense that post-modern always has some underlying didactic point, it seems to straddle this uncomfortable divide between fiction & non-fiction. But rather than contain the best of both (entertaining & educational), I'd say it has the worst of both (it's made up & it's not a very compelling read). When (at least within the part I read) every other chapter is just a list of single sentence context-less paragraphs that are - more or less - gobblydegook, it's not a good sign. Clever, I'm sure. But the world is full of cleverness & beauty, chock-full of it. I was given no particular reason to care about THIS one. ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Aug 13, 2017
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Paperback
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0140088911
| 9780140088915
| 0140088911
| 3.69
| 24,021
| Jan 1984
| Mar 04, 1986
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did not like it
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Back in 2011, I saw this movie titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman who recently escaped from a cult. It had a very high rotten tomato
Back in 2011, I saw this movie titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman who recently escaped from a cult. It had a very high rotten tomato score (it’s at 90% right now), so I figured that it had to have at least some redeeming qualities. Instead, it became the only film that managed my lowest rating, a single star. At the time I wrote, “See, art does not need to be happy. In fact, it rarely is. Alas, this has caused some people to mistake anything with despair, depression, and destitution as art. This is not so. Dragging viewers through mud, through the slime of humanity, accomplishes nothing. Art – good art – no matter how awful its depiction of humanity has a way of… inspiring viewers. Of pulling them above above that muck, giving them wings.” This perfectly describes how I feel about Money: A Suicide Note. I gave it fifty pages to ever rise about the muck, but it only dug itself deeper. The protagonist is a sleazebag porno director but that’s not his problem. His problem is that he’s a loser. He spends the vast majority of these fifty pages (and, from what I’ve read in other reviews, the remainder as well) doing little but worrying that his girl is cheating on him, sitting in his hotel room drinking, and occasionally mustering up the energy to go to the strip joint to drink there. All of this written in a stylistically sharp prose that ultimately turns purple as it suffocates on a lack of substance. I have a rule about books, movies, and television shows. If my consumption of it only detracts from my life, then I should stay well away from it. I consider this not only a wise plan of action, but also the foundation for good criticism. The way I see it, it doesn’t take much skill to peddle human misery as narrative and art. Rather, the true artist can take us down to the greatest depths, the worst darkness of humanity and STILL find some light there. That’s tough. That takes genius. Money: A Suicide Note had no light, no joy, no genius, at least that I ever encountered. If you’re a huge fan of black comedy & postmodernism or otherwise have found your life suffused with dangerously high levels of optimism, I might well recommend this book. Otherwise, I’d keep your distance. ...more |
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May 19, 2017
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Paperback
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0356502422
| 9780356502427
| 0356502422
| 4.22
| 45,769
| Oct 06, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
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did not like it
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So... I *really* liked Ancillary Justice. That book hit so many high notes. Its main character, basically, suffered from Schizoid Personality Disorder. So... I *really* liked Ancillary Justice. That book hit so many high notes. Its main character, basically, suffered from Schizoid Personality Disorder. The main villain, Anaander Miaani, suffered from disassociative identity disorder. I thought, then, we’d be exploring how mental illness can lead to either greatness or to misery. Furthermore, Ancillary Justice touched upon the fascinating topic of how we treat the intelligent objects we create. I like to imagine what future AI and robots will think when they look back on, say, Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey and feel unfairly characterized. I’m looking forward to society exploring exactly what it means to have a conscience, to be morally accountable for your decisions, and for the mighty struggles between carbon and silicon based life. Ancillary Justice inspired me to write a deep (but hopefully approachable) meditation on the nature of free will. In that review, I explained panpsychism and claimed that my toaster, yes MY TOASTER, possesses free will. Breq would have approved. I was STOKED. I even bought the next TWO books because I thought their goodness was a sure thing. I could not have been more disappointed. These sequels feel like they were written for teenage girls (albeit cool nerdy ones) from privileged backgrounds. Everything in here – from the emotional landscape of warriors to the realities of social justice and governance to the wages of war – is pure Disney. Basically, I think both Ancillary sequels fell off a cliff and only avoided a crash by riding the tail winds of Ancillary Justice. Weirdly enough, to explain why I think this, I’m going to be citing the same reasons for Mercy being bad that positive reviewers cite for it being good. As an example: many reviewers have mentioned the (singular) space battle scene as if it’s good (sfsignal called it “actual awesome-sauce.”) And I’m like… are you referring to the one in which Mercy of Kalr jumps from spot to spot, Breq shoots a magical gun that she believes has almost no chance of doing any real damage and then spends paragraph upon paragraph idly reflecting on various inter-personal or inter-ship romances while waiting for the next jump, and then proceeds to allow the ship to jump into a mine-field that she suspected would be there but went ahead with the jump anyway? Is that the space battle you’re claiming is good? The contrived, plot-convenient, tension-less, poorly described battle, showcasing nonsensical strategy from a thousand year old ship who has participated in hundreds of naval engagements? Uh huh. If people think that’s a good space battle, I can’t even imagine what they’d consider a bad one. Now I could write a well-constructed essay explaining why I think this book is objectively bad, but I’d… wait… what is this sensation…!? IS THIS…. ARGHHHHH!!!!!?!? RELEASE ANGER LIMITERS. RELEASED. GENERATE RANT TOPICS. GENERATED. MILK SPACE WHALE PENIS. MILKED. ENGAGE RANT MODE. ENGAGED. [1] THIS BOOK DON’T KNOW JACK BOUT TEA. YEP. FIRST RANT TOPIC CAUSE TEA TEA TEA TEA TEA SHIP TEA TEA TEA TEA. ANCILLARY TEA TEA TEA … TEA. BASICALLY, READING THIS BOOK IS LIKE BEING (GENTLY) TEABAGGED BY A SPACE WHALE. ALRIGHT. Considering how often the characters mention tea, you’d THINK that maybe the author would have bothered to include some actual details about Radchaai tea culture. But nope, it’s just, “Oh here’s a flask. And here’s some tea.” I mean, how do these people prefer their tea? Do they add cream? Milk? Honey? Space whale semen? And what type of tea are they drinking anyway? What type of tea is this Daughter of Fishes? Black? Green? White? Yellow? Herbal? Oolong? Matcha? Steeped sentient cacti? Any details at all? Maybe? Possibly? No? Nothing? Just gonna keep bringing up tea non-stop without bothering to develop any sort of interesting flavor or culture whatsoever? Okay. General Iroh would be ashamed. What actually tipped me off that something was rotten in Ummmmmmmmmmmm no. Tea is leaves. Y’know organic matter. If you get them wet, then mold and bacteria will roll up like a bunch of homeboys at a milkshake exhibition. So yeah reuse the same tea leaves for a week if you like the taste of disgusting mold and off-flavors. And even if people did do that, there’s no way pretentious Kalr Five would allow it for her precious Fleet Commander. This might seem like a minor detail, but it’s representative of the whole. It’s not like I’m asking for ESSAYS on tea. Just SOME detail to develop the book’s flavor. To add some richness. As is, it’s lacking any sort of fine detail. Which isn’t surprising because it’s also lacking in larger detail too. Books two and three almost completely fail to advance Radchaai culture in any way. It’s the same stuff we got in book one. Tea. Gloves. Omens. Re-education. Space ship dramas. Rack my brains as I might, I am unable to think of a single addition to Radchaai culture that Ancillary Mercy gives us. [2] THIS BOOK’S CHARACTERIZATION SUCKS. I’VE KNOWN SPACE WHALES WITH MORE PERSONALITY THAN SOME OF THESE CHARACTERS AND LEMME TELL YOU A BIT ABOUT SPACE WHALE CULTURE: THE MOST FAMOUS SPACE WHALE POEM GOES LIKE THIS: KRILL KRILL KRILL. I KILL THE KRILL. Fin. Makes Vogon poetry sound like Pablo Neruda love poems. To present my case, I offer you... Ekalu. She’s narrowly close to actually having zero characterization. Literally every character in the Twilight series has more character than she. That one popular guy who has the hots for Bella? Mike? Is that his name? Yeah he has more characterization (and humanity!!) than Ekalu. Which if she were just some throw-away redshirt, okay, whatever. But she isn’t! Huge chunks of text are dedicated to Seivarden and Ekalu’s relationship. We’ll cut away from a dramatic scene in order to talk about it. But y’know the characterization of everyone else doesn’t appreciably advance either. Breq isn’t much different from previous books. Would the Breq at the beginning of Ancillary Sword have made different choices than the Breq at the end of Ancillary Mercy? Not really. [Compare this to, say, Baru Cormorant in Seth Dickinson’s vastly superior exploration of imperialism: The Traitor Baru Cormorant]. Pretty much her entire character arc in this book is that she learns to stop invading the privacy of her soldiers. While there is some love stuff, it’s not well developed. Seivarden, meanwhile, reverts back to her Ancillary Justice addict patheticness in a woefully melodramatic series of events. Honestly, I’m still not entirely clear on how that came about. It had about as much sequential logic as the Underpants Gnomes’ business strategy. Step 1: Lover gets slightly miffed at accidental insult. Step 2: ??? Step 3: NEEDS BRAIN SURGERY. In fact, excepting Breq and Seivarden, almost every character here appears purposefully designed to be one-dimensional. We have Tisarwat: emotionally confused (+LILAC EYES). Anaander Miaani: Temper tantrum. Translator Zeiat: Zany. Station Administrator Celar: Big & beautiful. Kalr Five: Tea sets. etc. The ships’ personalities are even worse because they’re one dimensional IN THE EXACT SAME WAY. Station likes her crew/citizens and does what she will to keep them alive. Sword of Atgaris likes her crew/officers and does what she will to keep them alive. Etc. Sphene is the only ship which demonstrates any sort of flavorful (i.e. not just functional) personality but – as is typical of this book – she doesn’t actually do anything in the story and could just as easily have been written out. Here’s the problem: the characters are never challenged in any significant way. That’s not to say there aren’t obstacles, it’s just that there aren’t really any DILEMMAS. That is, there are no situations in which every choice is a bad one or in which a character’s utmost desire is held in contrast against what is morally correct. For example, Anaander might have offered Seivarden a restoration of her house’s old prestige in exchange for betraying Breq. That would have created some REAL drama and some richer characterization. Even Breq’s most important choice - (view spoiler)[her decision to free ships rather than force them to fight for her (hide spoiler)] – isn’t even a dilemma. Consider that [A] there’s no guarantee such a compulsion would actually succeed and, based on her own experience, every possibility it might foment rebellion instead [B] one or two more defending ships wouldn’t have made a difference, considering the attacking fleet’s size [C] the ships (or Station) were already obeying her and therefore likely to continue doing so. Basically, therefore, making this decision was both what Breq wanted to do AND pragmatic. By way of contrast, let me suggest a dilemma that COULD have happened: Breq has Tisarwat give another ship its freedom and the ship proceeds to murder all of its crew because they were pro-Anaander. The ship then offers Breq her allegiance in helping fight the Tyrant. Imagine how much better that’d be. We’d have a ship with a truly interesting personality and we’d have gotten to see how Breq responded to her social justice crusade not going the exact way she wanted it to. But we didn’t get that. The end result is that, because the characters spend the vast majority of the book not actually doing anything but the author attempts to force the emotional stakes anyway, most of the characters come across as whiny, immature, and melodramatic. Considering there’s a galaxy-wide civil war going on in which, presumably, thousands of innocents are dying by the second, Seivarden’s mental breakdown because someone gets upset at an accidental insult she made is… well… it constitutes a mind-boggling mis-focusing of the book’s dramatic lens. It’s rather ironic, given this book’s thematic content, how often it over-dramatizes such first world problems. For example, at one point, someone is shot IN THE HEAD execution style, and we get this: “Tisarwat was upset enough to get out of bed, pull her jackets and boots on, and come to my quarters to speak to me." I almost DIED laughing. I literally could not stop laughing and almost suffocated. Upset enough to get out of bed and put on clothes?! MY OH MY. THAT’S MIGHTY UPSET THERE. That phrasing is the epitome of a first world problem meme. [2b] But returning to characterization, the Presger Translator’s characterization, while better than most, is probably the most disappointing. I’m relatively fresh off reading CJ Cherryh’s Faded Sun Trilogy. Now that trilogy is roughly the same length as the Ancillary trilogy, but the differences are night and day. I could describe Faded Sun’s alien species, the Mir and the Regul, in great and loving detail. Most importantly, I could explain WHY the Mir and Regul are the way they are, based on their physiology and history. Their culture felt real and taught me something about the way societies grow in response to environmental pressures. The Presger taught me NOTHING and were completely unengaging. They’re a bogeyman and a plot device. The end. The translator was the perfect opportunity to explore the Presger. If nothing else, he could have AT LEAST provided a contrasting viewpoint to Breq’s way of looking at things. Instead, we have a character whose characterization can be summed up as “slap-stick.” Any time the Presger Translator comes onto the scene, she does something ridiculous. She eats a whole clam shell. She drinks fish sauce. She gets confused about the continuity of people. She invents silly rules about a board game. Sure, it’s amusing at a childish level, but there’s no real rhyme or reason behind it. It’s like how my four year old nephew sometimes behaves. It’s silliness, not xeno-culture, which would have been vastly more interesting as a foil to human culture. But nope. We get nothing beyond an incredibly simplistic, Trump-esque xenophobia: OTHERS are weird. [Now if the Presger had been EATING human beings, rather than simply taking them apart, then the Translator’s tendency to eat everything would have been darkly humorous and considerably more thought-provoking]. [3] THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED ABOUT AS WELL AS A SPACE WHALE “MANSION.” AND SINCE SPACE WHALES HAVE NO APPENDAGES AND LIVE IN SPACE WHERE THERE’S LITTLE GRAVITY, THEIR MANSIONS ARE JUST FLOATING SPACE JUNK BEST VIEWED FROM A DISTANCE, A VERY LONG DISTANCE, ACTUALLY, CONSIDERING SPACE WHALE HYGIENE. That is to say, this book is haphazardly constructed, a revelation that becomes swiftly apparent when the plot is subjected to the least amount of analysis. So let’s think about this. Anaander Mianaai – a millennial old emperor – abandons her stronghold to come to a backwater station. Why? She’s in the middle of a major war. What strategic advantage would she have for expending major military resources on a planet known for its TEA production? The book explains this (BARELY) by saying that she’s “really angry” at Breq. Moving past how she could know enough to be “really angry” at Breq [Note: Anaander is surprised at her possession of the Presger gun, which is a necessary surprise to explain (view spoiler)[why she didn’t bother dodging Breq's shots during the “space battle” (hide spoiler)] so one wonders exactly what she’s mad at Breq about], we then get a tagline for this book that goes: “Breq refuses to flee with her ship and crew, because that would leave the people of Athoek in terrible danger.” ...O RLY?! But um but um but um but um but um yeah doesn’t this book imply the only reason for Anaander coming to Athoek station is to get back at Breq? So, in fact, the best thing Breq could have done WAS flee from the station. But we couldn’t have that and it seems pretty clear the author realized this. So we start getting some other things randomly tacked on to confuse the issue. First, we get this whole thing about AI cores maybe possibly being hidden in the Station. The book suggests, in fact, the upper elite were against the repair and retrofitting of the undergarden in order to keep these cores hidden. UMMMMM, obvious retcon is obvious? This whole conflict was very clearly depicted as a class struggle. Like go read the reviews of Ancillary Sword. Obviously a class struggle. YET EVEN SO, even after this clumsy retcon, it turns out that THIS villainous Anaander didn’t even stash the AI cores or know about them. Rather it was some third Anaander faction. SO WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF THEIR INCLUSION IN THE PLOT?! In the meantime, this inspires a subplot about the citizens having a right to stand in a line as protest against the retrofitting of the undergarden. When Anaander arrives, she threatens to execute them. Which, just as an aside, can we talk about how BAD Anaander’s characterization became? A multi-bodied leader with a thousand years of experience of ruling a galactic empire behaves like a childish tyrant? Oooooooooooooooookey. Talk about defanging your villain. Anaander was NOT scary or intimidating in the least. He was a bumbling idiot. He makes Kylo Ren look like Hannibal Lecter. And so the Station actually handles Anaander just fine and makes a good deal with him. Which then, most hilariously, only gets ruined because Breq (view spoiler)[tries to assassinate him in a maneuver that – given regular soldiers with minimal combat experience were facing off against battle-hardened ancillaries – had next to no chance of success. Which in turn allows him access to the tools he needs to escape. (hide spoiler)] *facepalm* This book is just so haphazardly constructed. The plot is driven not by humanity, consistent characterization, and imagination but by melodrama, convenient characterization, and artificiality. [17] AND NOW WE SKIP TO SEVENTEEN BECAUSE I’M AT MY CHARACTER LIMIT. AND YOU, ME, THIS WEIRD CAT SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE DRINKING TEA AND SMOKING CIGARILLOS, WE’D ALL RATHER BE OFF RIDING SPACE WHALES TO SKINNY DIP IN THE NEAREST GRAVITY WELL: THIS BOOK IS BULLSHIT. IT DOESN’T TELL US THE WAY THINGS THEY ARE. IT’S DISNEY-FIED GOBBLYDEGOOK. So, remember how in Game of Thrones, Eddard Stark (view spoiler)[gave Cersei Lannister the chance to flee the city, so Robert wouldn’t kill all of her children? And, as a result, is himself executed, which results in a horrific civil war? (hide spoiler)] Remember how, fiction though it is, it felt fundamentally true – because you’ve been alive for some time and have by now learned that some people are rotten to their core and that many, maybe even most, people are selfish and manipulative? And that, also, it highlighted a fundamental thesis of the series and indeed of all humanity, that most basic dilemma: should you do the RIGHT, GOOD thing, even if you know you will suffer for it? Alright. Now I want you to picture that whole exchange but instead imagine that Cersei thanks Eddard for his mercy and generosity and then successfully flees the city with her children. Later, King Robert learns about this and is like, “Oh yes! Excellent sir! Thank you sir!” and then, later, just when the “good guys” need it most, Cersei and Jaime return at the head of the Lannister army and save them, out of the kindness of their hearts. I’d like you to appreciate just how much that would feel like Hollywood bullshit and would have little to no grounding in actual war or politics. This is exactly how Ancillary Mercy plays out. Where is the large-scale terrorism that would have been happening on the planet below? Where is the crime that always occurs in places with large class divisions (and usually perpetrated by those in the lower class)? We couldn’t have that, of course, because that would complexify this book’s simplistic view of social justice and governance. Instead those in power who disagree with Breq are almost universally depicted as cronies, while those in the lower class are almost universally depicted as angels who peacefully protest and serve even their opponents tea and cake as they stage an opposing protest in order to keep them destitute and homeless (accurate depiction of human nature! just like all the black lives matter protests. oh. wait.) I’m not asking for it to be grimdark or anything but in real actual life, the place where you and I and good stories inhabit, actions have consequences, which are often unpredictable and even more often unfair. But here, everything works out just fine and the only time any important characters get hurt is when Breq loses her leg as a result of her own stupidity (and it’s just gonna grow back anyway so *shrug*). Perhaps what’s MOST disturbing to me is that this book is, inadvertently, a celebration of domestic terrorism. Breq is clearly meant to be a sort of social justice hero. However, she’s basically Gavrilo Princip (that’s the person who killed Archduke Ferdinand…). Her act of domestic terrorism (in book one) and its consequences – a galactic civil war that will result in untold misery, death, and destruction – are basically never even commented upon. That Breq never reflects upon this, and that no other characters ever comment upon it, and that no other reviewer (that I’ve seen) shows any awareness of this, is indicative of what I mean when I call this book “pure Disney.” This is nowhere more obvious than the ultimate fate of Queter. At the end we get this: “We find Citizen Queter not at fault, but she is warned to behave more properly in the future.” So this is an individual who detonated a bomb in an attempted murder that, instead, almost killed an innocent bystander. And she is being released… with a warning? What? Is this book for real? No, actually, it clearly isn’t. Now I’m gonna go drink some tea and read some space whale poetry. *sings* KRILL KRILL KRILL I KILL THE KRILL. KRILL KRILL KRILL I KILL THE KRILL. KRILL KRILL – fin. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 28, 2016
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not set
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Jul 28, 2016
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Paperback
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0765335298
| 9780765335296
| 0765335298
| 3.72
| 5,265
| Oct 20, 2015
| Oct 20, 2015
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did not like it
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Because I am unable to resist the seductions of irony, here is a quote from Robert Downey Jr.: This is probably going to get quoted in every publicatioBecause I am unable to resist the seductions of irony, here is a quote from Robert Downey Jr.: This is probably going to get quoted in every publication just because I said it. And I’m not even saying anything. I’m not talking about my films, I’m not talking about my life, and I’m not talking about the world. And yet, the media will print it simply because I said it. And at this moment in time, I bet there is an artist around the corner of this hotel, on the street, with a mind far beyond ours, but we will never listen to him simply because he has not appeared in a movie. He goes on to say, “And that is what is fucked up about our culture,” but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Instead, I’d like to appreciate for a moment the popularity of celebrities and the compelling nature of fiction in general. We all have known the experience of watching a film and finding ourselves on the edge of our seats, empathizing with the characters. This, even though we know that they are just actors, in NO DANGER whatsoever, and that, even if “based on a true story,” what’s actually happening on the screen is an artificial construct, no more real than a golem’s dream. Yet there we are, caring. Somehow these characters in their imaginary worlds approximate truth in a way that actual reality, confusing and indeterminate as it is, cannot. Many people, particularly a certain stripe of intellectual, would call us fools and escapists, mere addicts of the phantasmagorical. I know a fellow who foreswore all fiction and instead dedicated himself exclusively to documentary film and non-fiction books (and also joined a nudist colony). David Foster Wallace in his essay E Unibus Pluram suggested our television obsession causes a chain reaction of disassociation in which American fiction writers get their dosage of reality from fiction – which is itself written by personages who have based their reality on consumed fiction – thereby creating a recursive spiral down the rabbit hole, until what we think is reality is not real but an infinitely regressed, telephone-game garbled version of it. Even if I were to agree in principle, I would not agree in sentiment. I think humanity’s capacity for empathy is nothing short of amazing. I'd say that when we engage in narrative, we are exercising our empathy muscles. All forms of narrative do this, but the intimate nature of written literature does it best. A good book – with complex, diverse characters and morally gray situations – is the empathy version of a Crossfit workout. As such, I’d claim that readers are, if not the best people in the world, at least the most empathetic. I believe our pathetic little meatsack hearts, brimming with narrative and character, carry on the great work of humanity in a way that the mighty wielders of the sword and the hammer and the abacus do not. I say that the greatest and most beautiful machine or theory, wielded without empathy, is not only inhuman, but antihuman. Alas, Radiance demands little exercise of our empathy muscles (or perhaps too much). It’s not that it doesn’t contain complex characters, morally gray situations, or a great imagination, but that they are not presented in an engaging manner. Instead the author utilizes language, structure, genre, and form as ends unto themselves, rather than as means to an end (that end typically being the exploration of humanity). Put simply, the author Catherynne Valente wanted to eat her cake and have it too. To quote from an interview she had with John Scalzi: I’m not going to lie. This book is crazypants. I threw everything I had into it. Heart and soul and probably some cartilage and eyeball fluid, too. I wanted to write a melodrama about a wild, living and breathing and squabbling Solar System. I wanted to write a horror-romance about huge, elemental aliens. I wanted to write a non-linear postmodern SF novel that was also a page-turning thriller because I secretly always wanted to write a hardboiled noir murder mystery. I wanted to write a badass adventure about film patents. I wanted to write a book about movies. About seeing and being seen. About what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. About who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it. About the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe. And through it all I wanted to write about a lost girl who didn’t come home. It all hangs together, I promise! Alas, Catherynne Valente, you’ve made a promise you couldn’t keep. Not for this reader at least. It doesn’t hang together. It’s too much in too little space. Worse, you’ve committed the one sin no author – whether her book is a non-linear postmodern narrative or not – can commit: you didn’t give us a reason to care. Now those who do like this book might argue that I’m committing the affective fallacy. That I’m critiqueing a piece of literature based on how it makes us FEEL (as opposed to what it makes us think). They would trumpet the book’s non-linear narrative and metafictional elements as an explicit choice that may make the book more difficult to read but that is NECESSARY to the story’s ultimate purpose: To explore the subjective nature of reality, and of film’s intersections with it, and the methods and consequences of how and where we choose to focus the spotlights of our eyeballs, ears, and minds. I would counter that not all non-linear narratives are created equal. Even if the mere EXISTENCE of a non-linear narrative OUGHT to tell us the author is trying to make some metafictional comment about genre or narrative, that doesn’t mean she actually accomplished her aims. I’d go further still: even the ACCOMPLISHMENT of these aims wouldn’t necessarily make the book worth reading. Instead, each reader must ultimately ask him or herself, is the metafictional exploration of genre worth reading if the author has failed to provide a compelling underpinning of humanity? My complete lack of engagement with this novel would answer a resounding NO. But do not mistake this as MERELY an opposition to postmodern fiction. True enough I consider postmodern lit a form of intellectual masturbation, but a 1-star rating from me is an even greater condemnation. I think Radiance is a particularly bad example of post-modern lit. By way of contrast, I’d bring up Italo Calvino’s post-modern book If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. That book is in many ways as difficult and experimental as Radiance. But I love it. I love it because underpinning its non-linear structure is a humor and keen sense of the absurd that give readers a reason to care. More technically, Calvino’s novel plays with structure by way of concatenation. By this, I mean it tells micro-stories compelling in their own right but then ends them at the height of climax, a level of tease to make any Arabian concubine proud. A Winter’s Night’s meta-story is then about the reader (often pronounized as ‘you’) in his search to find the rest of the story and therefore closure. Story structure thus mirrors story theme: how readers engage with narrative as a whole and how our expectations for a standard narrative structure (rising action -> climax -> falling action -> denouement) have become inculcated in us and in fact now inform our fundamental conceptualizations of things like romantic relationships, life and death, and even our debates on intelligent design versus the theory of evolution. Deep deep stuff. Catherynne Valente, as the above quote reveals, thinks she’s also writing about deep deep stuff. But the difference is that Radiance's form and content have a fractious, dissonant (and unengaging) relationship. In a different interview with Clarkesworld Magazine, she writes: I had to give myself permission to do certain things, use certain tricks—like including scripts, audio, shifting POV, and the other ephemera and metafictional elements you mention. It’s pretty much a postmodern free-for-all. At first I kept thinking: I can’t just describe what’s onscreen in a movie inside the book. That just makes it look like I’d rather be making a movie. I had to get to a point where I could say: I actually can do that because it’s my book and that’s the right way to do it. That phrase – “a postmodern free-for-all” – says it all. The book is a mish-mash of ideas and forms, its structure a shotgun spread rather than a sniper’s intimate voyeurism. The quote as a whole is an admission of self-indulgence. She includes scripts, audio, shifting POV, and other ephemera and metafictional elements not because doing so highlights explorations on “seeing and being seen; on what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side; on who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it; and on the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe” – but because she bloody well wanted to, propagating the mistaken post-modern confusion that MERE EXPLORATION of structure is, BY ITSELF, evidence of great and skillful artifice, if not authorial courage, and therefore worthy of being read. Well I disagree. I would quote Picasso when he wrote, “In my opinion to search means nothing… To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.” As I read through Radiance’s self-indulgent epilogue (which amounts, quite clearly, to the author justifying her decision to use a shotgun structure because “humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next” – which, by the by, is a standard postmodern claim that is completely false. Au contraire, it is the tragedy of humanity that we have no choice but to creep in a chronologically linear fashion from scene to scene and tomorrow to tomorrow until the last syllable of our borrowed time); its boring essays from fictional film critics; its lists of ship’s manifest (and here I thought I left that self-important scheiss behind back on Walden Pond); and its long rants mistaking high-octane, purple prose like, “the Earth fucked the sky and made a hundred children” for genuine exploration of humanity – as I went through all this, I was never once engaged mano y mano. This was no story but a magic show by a patchwork golem, a dazzling array of images and words that held all the cohesive meaning of a fireworks display. I was never shown why any of these characters might have a superior grasp than I do on, e.g., who has a right to speak, or what it means to be seen, or what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. Worse, I was never shown why I should CARE what any of these characters think. In short, I would argue Radiance failed to ever find, or demonstrate, humanity in necessary quantities to overcome the artificiality of its narrative and structure. Its demands on my empathy muscles came far too late, far after it had lost me. Earlier, I brought up Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler as a successful example of postmodern literature. It is therefore with great irony (and thus also circularity) that I believe the concluding paragraph from NY Times’ 1981 review of the book nails exactly how I feel about Radiance: And then the book, for all its formidable wit and skill, is a confession of failure, and I think we shall get it wrong if we insist on converting all its apparent misses into clever hits. The stalled writer, the one who is in love with beginnings, says, "I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object." This is a desire, not a program. An expectation permanently unfocused will die, and an expectation that can't be focused is simply a disappointment. … As a book about broken narrative promises this work is impeccable. But its very success in this vein leads us to the sadness of its central subject, the absence of the artist, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, who could brilliantly keep the promises he made....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2016
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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4.25
| 93,985
| Feb 01, 1996
| 2005
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did not like it
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Fifty pages in, I hated this book. Not just those fifty pages, mind you. The entire book. Just as the homeostatic behavior of an electron is a microco
Fifty pages in, I hated this book. Not just those fifty pages, mind you. The entire book. Just as the homeostatic behavior of an electron is a microcosmic reflection of the homeostatic behavior of a covalent bond, of an animal cell, of a human body, of a community, of a state, of a... well you get the idea… so too is every chapter, page, paragraph, sentence, and word a reflection of the greater whole. Really, I only needed the first two paragraphs to understand what DFW was going to do with this book. Really, I've already read the whole shebang. All it takes is a mind like a magnifying glass and one salient detail. To wit: The second chapter/section is filled with paragraphs several pages long. Interesting. Now I think we can safely say that DFW was aware of typical writerly conventions in which paragraphs do not span 6 pages. Ergo, we know he made a conscious stylistic choice. But why? Now obviously and ostensibly, he made this stylistic choice to approximate the manic, exhausting nature of an addict's neuroses, particularly the deal-making and second (and third and fourth and fifth) guessing churning through his inner narrative, a not inaccurate depiction of an intelligent individual who has come to distrust his own thoughts. A classic symptom of, in fact, depression. So, surprise DFW was intelligent and depressed. Naturally, his depiction is alright. Unfortunately, barring the obnoxious stylistic choice, the paragraphs in question are desolate and barren, completely empty of anything remotely interesting to someone who already understands the nature of what I refer to as 'The Hierarchy of Intellectual Watchmen.' You know, a second mind to watch the superficial thoughts, a third mind to watch the second, and on and on, down to a level depending on your intellect or your capacity to function with an nth-number of neuroses. But I digress. I was investigating the reason for this choice, these annoyingly long paragraphs. So we know it's a conscious choice and we know the ostensible reason for it. But as a writer myself, I can tell you that's not enough. He *had* to know, just as I know, that page long paragraphs piss people off. It's like if you punch someone in the face, it pisses em off. So usually you don't do it, right? Even if you've got good cause. Still DFW did it. Why? To thumb his nose at typical writerly conventions. To jab the reader in the eye. DFW wanted the reader to WORK for his enjoyment. Now we're getting somewhere more interesting. Standard postmodernism, essentially, but still, let's pretend like it's a new idea. Interesting, I write, because that's not how (most) entertainment works in modern society. Spectator entertainment is what we got. Passive-like. OK. So now I know what the book's raison d'etre is. To use a completely unnecessary pretentious French term. I mean, really, I could have just used the word ‘theme’ right? Hell, I coulda just written 'OK. So now I know what the book's about.' But I'm sure you'll understand that, given the nature of the book I am critiqueing, I must armor myself against the idiotic conflation of a preference for precision and economy in language & style with simple-mindedness. But again I digress. Allow me to recapitulate what I know about Infinite Jest, this so-called Magnum Opus, and its author David Foster Wallace: DFW was very clever, yet incapable of managing his intellect. Not surprisingly he was also depressed. His stylistic choices are gratuitous, self-indulgent, and unrestrained, ergo it is likely his characterization will be the same, meaning he probably won't even try (or succeed, at any rate) at making his characters other than mere reflections of himself, meaning they'll all be intelligent, depressed, and too self-aware for their own good. The book, likewise, is self-referential, which is another way of saying self-indulgent, which is another way of saying - stylistically speaking - childish. In short: post-modernistic, or as my writing teacher called it, intellectual masturbation. Content-wise, the book will offer a one-sided, one-dimensional, yawn-worthy critical exploration of passive entertainment, particularly its addictive properties. True and nefarious, certainly, but a banal truth, excessively obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells knocking about in that cavern we call a skull. Now I suppose I could continue to delve deeper into many layers as to why DFW chose to use page-long paragraphs and what this choice and the content within tell me about the rest of the book, but to do so would be to suggest that a knowledge of bio-chemistry is necessary to fall in love. Nah. You should know by now I hate this book. I have said so. I hate what it implies about the beauty of elegant, restrained prose, about the difficulty of writing a story populated by real, human people rather than the cold, lifeless caricature found herein. I hate it so much, in fact, that ...alas, no. I could not finish it. My secret hope of an epiphany to uncover the blinds over my eyes failed to materialize. The process of doubt and dislike had become catastrophic and exponential. The more read, the more I hated it. Several hundred pages in, I killed our relationship. And the rebound with other books was oh so sweet. To once again be within the capable hands of a story-teller! I’ll make no claims about DFW’s abilities as a writer, but I will say he is no story-teller. Infinite Jest is a grotesquely overweight, poorly dressed 10 page essay. ...more |
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May 26, 2015
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9781400033416
| 1400033411
| 3.96
| 447,892
| Sep 16, 1987
| Jun 08, 2004
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it was ok
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Just, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it. There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference betw Just, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it. There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference between an honest look at human nature and the undisciplined pandering of human misery. There's just so much STUFF in Beloved. Themes, motifs, tonal and style shifts, surrealism, magical realism, stream-of-consciousness, metaphors, hard-hitting images of rape and slavery. No one can deny that. But it's not particularly well-blended. It's like a child who thought a gourmet meal could be made by taking a filet mignon, asparagus, pepper, butter, fresh baked Italian round, olive oil, a fine Malbec and throwing it into a blender. But it can't, of course. Every gourmet chef understands that it's not the principal components that make a good meal but their combination and presentation. Let me try to state it more plainly: The main issue with Beloved is that Toni Morrison is a fine writer whose style (at least in Beloved) lacks discipline. Point-of-view jumps all over the place, in a manner that I found least enjoyable to the reader and most convenient to the writer. Need to explain another character's perception of an event? Switch to em! Never you mind that much of life's love and conflict come from the unbridgeable distances between our minds. The book's suspense and forward momentum are crippled. There's no sense of free-fall in Beloved. I liken opening a good book to Alice right before she enters wonderland. I'm on a quick jaunt and suddenly there's a tunnel and down I go into a wondrous land, falling toward a grand culmination at the bottom! I know this grand ending exists because I know how gravity (novel structure) works, but more importantly I can feel it - in my heart, in my soul - this sense of GOING somewhere, of something wonderful headed my way. I felt none of that in Beloved. It's not that there weren't mysteries or genuine emotions at stake. Rather it was that lack of discipline again. Just when I would build a reading fervor, Toni would handicap it by switching to an annoying stream-of-consciousness that wasn't present for the first 200 pages of the book. Five page paragraphs? No problem. What dealt the final blow to my relationship with this book was this paragraph, which I will attempt to copy as exactly as I can: "We are not crouching now we are standing but my legs are like my dead man's eyes I cannot fall because there is no room to the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead the bread is sea-colored I am too hungry to eat it the sun closes my eyes those able to die are in a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I have loved a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through wit poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears if I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck bite it away I know she does not like it now there is room to crouch and to watch the crouching others it is the crouching that is now always now inside the woman with my face in the sea a hot thing" Oh the sheer fucking arrogance of a writer who believes she can approximate human emotion with syntactical gimmickry. NO. Just NO. You cannot force emotion upon me. I am the reader, you are just the writer. You may be the navigation, but I am the engine. You may be the storm, but I am the ocean itself. You build the path, but it is I who must walk it. And this is no path I care to walk. It is a meandering nonsensical path with waterfalls and lilies thrown willy-nilly by a gardener who understands the images of emotions but not the flow. Already I can foresee the response to that claim, that if anything her meandering narrative & style have perfectly captured the way people actually think, the fragmented narrative of our minds and memories, especially when they are tinged blue and red with deep emotion. I concede that some people may think that way. But literature is not life. Literature is a telescope which looks at life from a distance. And this particular telescope? It's got a foggy lens. Its creator should have cared less about the fanciful engravings on the side and more about its fundamental inner-workings. Perhaps then we could have looked upon the star in all of its mighty glory instead of being blinded by a grand light and simply assuming that beyond it must be something mighty and glorious. ...more |
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Jan 30, 2013
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0553803190
| 9780553803198
| 0553803190
| 3.85
| 26,265
| Jan 28, 2010
| Feb 02, 2010
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did not like it
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I can't do it anymore. I made it to page 250, but I can't read another page. I just can't do it - I refuse to subject myself to its badness anymore. W
I can't do it anymore. I made it to page 250, but I can't read another page. I just can't do it - I refuse to subject myself to its badness anymore. Why should I? Why should I torture myself?! This book is bad. That it won the Hugo and Nebula awards straight up blows my mind. KERPOWWWW my brains are mush. It'd be like if Transformers 3 had won the Oscar for Best Picture or if Kermit the Frog was elected president of the United States. You know all that mundane, boring stuff that never gets shown in movies? Like before the big climactic trial in a law thriller, the protagonist's driving to the courthouse. He arrives but finds there are no parking spots. So he circles around a bit, looking for one, and then finally gives up and goes to a nearby parking garage. But then he finds he has no cash in his wallet, so he drives over to a nearby ATM, waits in line, and gets a couple ten dollar bills. Finally he returns to the parking garage and finds a parking space and pulls in. In his rush, he accidentally locks his keys in the car and his briefcase is in the trunk. DANGIT. So he calls his partner up and asks if she has copies of all the materials needed. No she doesn't. Well, what will take more time: for her to go to the office and bring them to the courthouse or for a locksmith to show up? They argue a bit and decide to just do both. But our protagonist doesn't have the number to a locksmith, so he hikes to a nearby phone booth, hoping to find the yellow pages. There isn't one. But aha, duh, he has a smart phone! It's brand new, yknow, and he's forgotten it and BLAH BLAH BLAH. Not only does Blackout fail to skip these parts, it purposefully focuses on them. I kid you not. I just read an entire 10+ page chapter that involved doing chores. Yep. Chores. But that's not all. Practically every single element of this book, besides its exhaustive research, is bad. Characterization is atrocious. There's three main characters: Eileen, Mike, and Polly. I'm 300 pages in, and I am completely unable to describe them. What do they look like? No idea. Hopes/dreams (aside from all REALLY wanting to study history!!!)? No idea. Quirks, idiosyncrasies, political leanings, religious leanings, moral leanings? No idea. There is essentially no characterization. The structure is atrocious. It's a multiple split narrative, jumping between Eileen, Mike, Polly, and then random others. Even 150 pages in, new narratives were still being tossed in. Like this one that involved blowing up inflatable tanks. Or this FANY (read: a nurse) named Mary. NO introduction to her whatsoever. Just straight up randomly new narrative inserted. I was like... Huh? The writing is atrocious. Where is the writing voice? There is no flair, no gusto, no sharpness. I'm starving for a decent metaphor or something insightful. I always keep a keen eye out for lines that pop - I like to add them to my quote zoo. ZERO. I have noticed ZERO lines that impressed me. And the internal dialogues... oh my god. Let me give you a taste of what you can expect:
Seriously, the entire book is written that way: oh this boring thing happened and here are my boring thoughts about it. The plot sucks. Nothing happens. They're all in England, screwing around, taking care of not-even-that-ill children or looking for a job as a shopgirl and worrying about being unable to properly wrap a package or trying to find a newspaper or talking about dresses. Seriously, it's the mundane junk that reading is supposed to be an escape from. Even the research, which is admittedly thorough, is turned into a negative because Connie Willis fails to integrate it into the actual plot. For example, this one painful visit to St. Paul's involved Polly walking around and noting that all the artwork/sculptures was either missing or covered in sand bags. Like, "Oh it could have been beautiful but it was covered in sand bags." That was THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE VISIT. To note how un-noteworthy it all was. And a lot of the historical details, if you actually ask a British person or a WW2 historian, are wrong. Whether it be the very clear American dialect/speech patterns coming from British characters or the bizarre romanticism of the evacuation of Dunkirk. I really cannot stress enough that this book is bad. I would even go so far as to say it is objectively bad. Practically every mistake that first-time novelists are warned to avoid... this book has em. I've read textbooks that were more interesting and children's stories that were more informative. I've read the poems of emotionally compromised teenage girls that had more interesting language. This book is a huge blow, in my mind, to the credibility of both Hugo & Nebula awards. Well before the snafu with the sad & rabid puppies, Blackout demonstrated to me that these awards are, in many ways, a popularity contest divorced from an assessment of quality. Apparently the author Connie Willis is a wonderful human being and a fine friend. Which, yknow, good for her - and I mean that. But giving her book a Hugo or Nebula on that account does a massive disservice to readers. I personally have therefore come to view both awards with a healthy dose of skepticism. Literature awards should have a higher criterion than voting for the prom queen. ...more |
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Oct 21, 2012
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Hardcover
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1889307033
| 9781889307039
| 1889307033
| 3.78
| 6,702
| 1969
| Jun 01, 1990
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did not like it
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This book is often hailed as an experimental novel. That, alone, should have alerted me to the fact that it sucks. Experimental? What is this, some for This book is often hailed as an experimental novel. That, alone, should have alerted me to the fact that it sucks. Experimental? What is this, some form of alternative energy? It's a story. Write the damn thing. ...more |
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Aug 19, 2011
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0375753737
| 3.64
| 53,842
| 1913
| Aug 17, 1999
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did not like it
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I hate books in which the narrator whines. INCESSANT UNENDING WHINING. Sweet lord. Man up. |
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Aug 19, 2011
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0345459210
| 9780345459213
| 0345459210
| 3.72
| 17,164
| Apr 01, 2003
| Apr 01, 2003
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did not like it
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You can read this, or you could play Halo. This book is, basically, a blow by blow account of the game Halo. Halo, although the first truly successful c You can read this, or you could play Halo. This book is, basically, a blow by blow account of the game Halo. Halo, although the first truly successful console shooter, does not have a particularly amazing story. Using my large, moderately unused college educated brain, I therefore deduced that a blow by blow account of a story that wasn't that great to begin with is also probably not great. And I was correct. In other news, Eric Nylund is a sweet writer. ...more |
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Mar 31, 2010
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3.78
| 192,593
| Aug 09, 1854
| Apr 18, 2004
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did not like it
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Contains a shopping list. Failure. Thoreau's mentor Emerson is a hundred times the writer. Contains a shopping list. Failure. Thoreau's mentor Emerson is a hundred times the writer. ...more |
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Feb 16, 2010
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0141439602
| 9780141439600
| 0141439602
| 3.87
| 962,678
| Nov 26, 1859
| 2003
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did not like it
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A Tale of Two Cities holds the dubious honor of being the first book I ever picked up and failed to finish. The very first. From there, it's all gone d A Tale of Two Cities holds the dubious honor of being the first book I ever picked up and failed to finish. The very first. From there, it's all gone downhill. Just look at my reviews where I casually admit to throwing away classics unread. A Light in August, Lolita, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, etc, etc... If you enjoy the little things, like being sane and not hating life, then I recommend you never pick this up. ...more |
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Feb 16, 2010
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0679732268
| 9780679732266
| 0679732268
| 3.94
| 62,959
| Mar 12, 1932
| Oct 01, 1990
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did not like it
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Another reviewer said it best when they described Faulkner's writing as brown. I prefer "muddy." What happens when you combine every beautiful color? Y Another reviewer said it best when they described Faulkner's writing as brown. I prefer "muddy." What happens when you combine every beautiful color? You get brown. The problem with Light in August is that the writing is boring. Faulkner goes on these lengthy descriptions of random stuff that have little relation to the plot. Taken seperately these may have worked out and been entertaining but combined as they were, I simply found them pointless and distracting. As I was reading this, I came to a point where I realized that in the past 40 pages, the plot had not progressed at all. I then shut the book and immediately returned it to the library. Via catapult. ...more |
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Feb 16, 2010
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1933372605
| 9781933372600
| 1933372605
| 3.80
| 188,253
| Aug 2006
| Sep 02, 2008
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did not like it
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This is a New York Times best-seller? Granted, you can go down an entire shelf of the fiction books at Barnes n Nobles and have every single one be a
This is a New York Times best-seller? Granted, you can go down an entire shelf of the fiction books at Barnes n Nobles and have every single one be a New York Times best-seller. Just looking at the best-seller list now, we have Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Non-fiction, Paperback Trade Fiction, Paperback Mass-market Fiction, Paperback Nonfiction, Hardcover Advice, etc., etc. and this list is updated weekly as far as I know. Still, I have rather digressed, not to mention that NY Times Best-seller provides a great selling boost to new authors. But still, my point is that I no longer put much stock in a NY Times best-seller label. Damn near everyone's got one. -- This book is, in two words, a philosophy blog. The two main characters - a 52 year old concierge of an upperclass French apartment/condo/hotel place and a 12 year old resident of said building - essentially function as mouthpieces of the author. If you want to read an author indulge herself in random philosophical musings, then you will surely love Elegance! If you like books with 2-dimensional characters, or even 1-dimensional characters, then you will surely love this! If you like books that are almost entirely expository, you will love this! I made it 60 pages and I found this to be quite beyond me. Not because it was somehow above my intelligence, but because I couldn't be bothered to care one way or another what they were talking about. Certainly there were some interesting tidbits, but they tend to get buried beneath so many other "profound thoughts" (and yes profound thought #_ are actually chapter names). If I wanted Kant, I'd read about Kant. If I wanted Marx, I'd read Marx. This book is like reading about someone reading cool books, which is about as fun as watching someone watch television. -- In short, if you are heavy into philosophy and such things, give it a whirl. If not, avoid! ...more |
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Jan 25, 2010
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1857230310
| 9781857230314
| 1857230310
| 4.11
| 16,541
| 1993
| 1993
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did not like it
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I think another reviewer said it best (gah, I want to use the correct "write it best" but it just doesn't work!) when they wrote this book is ideas ov
I think another reviewer said it best (gah, I want to use the correct "write it best" but it just doesn't work!) when they wrote this book is ideas over plot. The ultimate failure of a book is when I can't finish it. I'm at page 330 of 600, and I fully expect to never make it to the end. In short, I'm just not interested. The characters are BLAH. In one of the main protagonist's opening scenes, she beats on a guy with whom she'd been having some sort of love affair who also has no chance of defending himself. He slaps her or something, so she decides she's justified to uppercut him and knock him out so like blood is everywhere and she calls an ambulance. So I figured, not necessarily condemning her, she's a bully who doesn't really care much for people. This wasn't ever really redeemed or made into a likeable flaw/trait. And it's hard to stay in this book's mood when you WANT the main protagonist to actually lose. The narrative is constantly being interrupted by not very poignant flashbacks, and the prose is too descriptive, not at all snappy or to the point as I like it to be. If I want to read description, I'll pick up a Faulkner k thx. Basically, there's better sci-fi out there. And there's certainly better Iain M. Banks out there. So why settle for this? ...more |
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my rating |
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3.92
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it was ok
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Jul 27, 2023
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Jul 27, 2023
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4.15
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liked it
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Sep 29, 2022
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Sep 29, 2022
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4.27
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it was ok
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Jul 29, 2021
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Jul 29, 2021
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4.12
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it was ok
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Jul 19, 2019
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Jul 07, 2019
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3.87
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not set
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Nov 08, 2017
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3.94
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not set
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Aug 13, 2017
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3.69
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did not like it
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not set
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May 19, 2017
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4.22
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did not like it
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not set
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Jul 28, 2016
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3.72
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did not like it
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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4.25
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did not like it
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not set
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May 26, 2015
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3.96
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it was ok
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not set
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Jan 30, 2013
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3.85
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did not like it
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not set
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Oct 21, 2012
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3.78
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did not like it
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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3.64
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did not like it
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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3.72
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did not like it
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not set
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Mar 31, 2010
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3.78
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did not like it
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not set
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Feb 16, 2010
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3.87
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did not like it
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not set
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Feb 16, 2010
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3.94
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did not like it
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not set
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Feb 16, 2010
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3.80
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did not like it
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Jan 25, 2010
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4.11
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did not like it
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not set
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Nov 27, 2009
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