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| 0316399620
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| 0316399620
| 4.03
| 90,979
| Apr 08, 2014
| Oct 21, 2014
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liked it
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The best analogy I can think of for my reading experience of the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it was like watching one of the Avenger movies
The best analogy I can think of for my reading experience of the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it was like watching one of the Avenger movies. Those movies are undeniably well-crafted. Creative. Entertaining. Yeah, definitely entertaining. And smooth. Smooth and beautiful. No ugliness. Watching em never makes you squirm in your seat, uncomfortable. Probably as a result of this, the me who walks out of the theater is no different than the me who walks in. Really. No different. I learn nothing. I’m not inspired. The movie doesn’t engage me on the intellectual or spiritual level. It entertains. Simple enough and no cause for condemnation. Likewise my 3 star rating of this book is not a condemnation. It was a smooth, pretty book, and I was entertained. But no more than that. The me who started this book is no different than the me who finished it. I gained no new knowledge. My understanding of humanity was not altered. The moral foundations on which I base my life were not challenged in any way. In short, this book possessed, for me, no revelatory power. You know what I’m talking about. When you put down a really great book and you can feel a sort of echo of death because, for you, that world is closing. It is over. You entered, you traversed it, and then you exited, changed. And now it’s gone and the old you – the one who entered – is gone with it. Yeah, I didn’t feel that at all. My first inkling that things would turn out this way was the book’s artificial structure: the classic hook prologue followed by pages of exposition. In other words, basically the same structure as Twilight. Now there’s nothing wrong with starting out with a hook. In fact, you damn well better show me that you’re not going to waste my time within the first 20 pages or I’ll be dropping you. But don’t pull a bait and switch. This book begins with a little girl telling Harry August: The world is ending. And it’s speeding up. Okay cool, I’m on board. Oh wait, it’ll be page 116 until we get back to that? And then a couple hundred more pages until we actually learn anything? That, my fellow book readers, is a bait and switch. Luckily, some of the intervening material is entertaining in its own right. Because Harry August is an Ouraboran (from ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail), whenever he dies, he’s simply born anew, with his old memories intact. Like Groundhog Day, except a whole life (and without any humor – this book is deadly serious, man). Following the hook prologue, we spend the first hundred pages exploring Harry’s first lives. The chapters tend to be short, but meaty, and it’s here that we first encounter what turns out to be an important theme throughout the book: torture. And this is where the book stumbled for me once again. It’s not much of a spoiler to share that Harry August ends up in an insane asylum. I mean, that’s obvious, if you think about it. It turns out to be a pretty formative episode in his life that then leads into another formative episode. Unfortunately, it’s garbage. Claire North’s depiction of a mental hospital is pure Hollywood. In fact, with only a few changes, you can see basically the same thing in Terminator 2. Incompetent, closed-minded doctor. Check. Abusive muscle-bound orderlies. Check. Forcing drugs on patients. Check. And the patients themselves? Yeah they’re off-the-wall crazy, more like Arkham Asylum inmates than what you’d actually find in the real world. Now of course this was the 1960s and as Harry August himself states: “Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work.” But the absolute reality of this depiction is unimportant. It rings false. It reeks of artificial drama. Unlike, say, with David Foster Wallace and the mental hospital scenes in Infinite Jest, it’s pretty obvious that the author has never been in a mental hospital. Had she, she would have known that the REAL killer in any situation of incarceration is boredom. Oh man, the boredom. If you’ve ever been incarcerated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not about how much there is or is not to do. It’s that, being locked up, your actions are officially circumscribed. The things you can do – and when you can do em – are a very small subset of choices indeed and that’s when the boredom strikes and begins to grind you down. No surprise then that people who have spent a lot of time in an asylum just don’t have the ENERGY they’re depicted as having in this book. Rather, if you visit a mental hospital (one way or another), the prevailing impression you’ll get is that the patients are broken. They’ve given up. They’re the dirty laundry of society, and they know it. And the staff and doctors? No question there’s some bad eggs out there, but most of them are decent people who have a tough job that grinds away at them too. They want to make things better, but they simply lack the tools. They simply lack the power. Everyone there: powerless. But did we get that in this book? No, we got the artificial Hollywood version, with a criminally incompetent doctor, a big and abusive orderly (aka Nurse Ratched), patients going bonkers, and la la la. Unfortunately, this set a pattern that would be continued throughout the book: the author didn’t know what she was talking about. There’s a rule in writing that you should “write what you know.” It’s not a very good rule, ripe for misinterpretation. For example, just because you’ve never been in a mental hospital doesn’t mean you can’t write about it. And what about speculative fiction? How can you ‘know’ about magic and aliens and spaceship battles? My most recent story is about tele-troopers who jump around the galaxy, judge civilizations, and then blow them up. Uhhhhh… do I know anything about that? Well no, but the story’s also about wanting something you know you can’t really have and about not belonging in the mainstreams of society, and I do know about THAT. I know my characters. And I know how science and culture interact in a general fashion, if not in the specific case of teleportation. The overarching problem with the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it’s an IDEAS book and a CHARACTER book, and the author understood neither the ideas nor the character. The story conceit – that of repeating lives – naturally suggests an exploration of time-travel and alternate dimensions. Fascinating topics. This book’s treatment of them failed to move beyond pop culture science. That the author doesn’t have a strong grasp of physics becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses. For example, the Quantum Mirror. A device that reveals ALL KNOWLEDGE OF ALL TIME, dun dun dun! And it works by… oh wait. This is completely ignored. I mean, the author doesn’t even ATTEMPT it. And you might protest, not unjustly, that that’s not the point. Well you’d be wrong. It is the point. The mechanics of the world – for example, how to *permanently* kill an Ouraboran – play a fundamental role in the plot. Harry August’s interpretation of the many dimensions is an essential component to the questions of morality he faces. There are whole chapters spent solely discussing the nature of reality. Strip away the repeating life conceit and the scientific interpretation of it and the plot loses its flavor and its bite. And there’s just no defense against the fact that Harry August, roughly a thousand years old as he narrates, doesn’t sound anything at all like a thousand year old man. Where’s his voice? His vast experiences serve as the WHAT of the story, but HOW he describes them is truly lacking. He’s trained as a doctor, but doesn’t sound like one. He’s fought as a soldier but struggles to understand the motivations of a mercenary. He’s supposedly a great physicist but shows no real interest in the nitty-gritty details, unlike, well, every great scientist ever. Really, he sounds like a precocious teenager who still thinks apathy is cool. Which, given that Claire North is primarily a YA author, doesn’t really come as all that much of a surprise. Now I’ve given this book a thorough thrashing, enough that you might think I hated it. I didn’t. Or that I think Claire North is a bad author. I don’t. Rather, I think she bit off more than she could chew. She wrote about a topic she didn’t really understand, using settings and situations she didn’t grasp, and with a narrator she couldn’t pull off. But a terrible book? By no means. As I said in the very beginning, it was entertaining, beautiful, and smooth. It’s just… I’ve read much better. I’ve read good time travel stories. I read one recently in the July 2015 issue of Asimov’s SF, called Pollen From a Future Harvest by Derek Kunsken. It was amazing and tightly plotted. This one was not. We’ve all read stories with fascinating characters. Harry August should have been, but wasn’t. Basically, I thought this book was aimed at the literary equivalent of Avengers watchers, and I don’t mean anything negative by that. I certainly don’t mean “stupid” people. Enjoying a summer blockbuster or the latest Dan Brown best-seller doesn’t make you “stupid.” It just means you have a certain taste. Power to you if you like the way the way this book combines a smooth mainstream style with an interesting premise. But I have a different taste. I don’t require my stories to be real, but I like them to feel true and this one, because of my background, doesn’t. I like stories that explore the ugliness of humanity. I like ideas I’ve never thought of, explored deeply and sharply. I like characters whose voices sound fresh and new and desperate. I like plotting that anticipates and subverts my expectations. And because I like these things, the First 15 Lives of Harry August failed to satisfy. ...more |
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Aug 24, 2015
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| 4.02
| 55,459
| 1986
| Mar 07, 2006
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liked it
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With each review I write, I become increasingly daunted by a sense of infinite possibility. I have an entire book, this Count Zero, to write about – w
With each review I write, I become increasingly daunted by a sense of infinite possibility. I have an entire book, this Count Zero, to write about – what in the world should I focus on? The question in turn gives rise to an equally haunting sense of relativism. Is this book good? Sure. Is this book bad? Sure. With few exceptions, a good book is not infallibly so nor a bad book insurmountably so. Rather, the goodness or badness is a choice I, the reader, must make. Yet when I make that choice – to be positive or to be negative – and then write my review, my chosen perspective will percolate backwards in time and memory and retroactively alter the focus of my thoughts on the book. Simply put, deciding it is good will MAKE it good while deciding it is bad will MAKE it bad. To quote Bruce Lee: when you pour water into a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. What’s a reader to do with the vast sea of literature that lies between the unquestionably stupendous and the indisputably horrendous? Become the bottle or the cup? I’m not sure what’s caused this, but I can guess. My mental library only increases. I only add books and never take away. Only the hordes of death and disease threaten my library! And I thus far remain stalwart against these inevitable foemen. As such, the styles and ideas have begun to blend into each other, so that each story invokes a dull version of déjà vu. To the youthful, newness and goodness correlate. But I am not so youthful anymore and I must adjust… Furthermore, my engagement with my mental library has taken on a different tone because I’ve gotten my own hands dirty with the book biz. Unsurprisingly, the once bright realm of words is less golden and more gilded. You would not, for example, believe some of the responses I’ve gotten from editors, who give feedback that’s borderline nonsense. Somehow I expected more than tired eyes. As a result, books don’t seem so SACRED, anymore. Less a diamond sculpture and more like a statue of ice. Mutable. Melting, dulling – and so easy to kick over. Books and the stories within them no longer seem like great FORCES of nature, which transport me – often without my noticing it – into fantastical realms, feeding my subconscious direct like some sort of IV drip filled with idea, scenery, and character. Rather, they’ve become personalized transportation. The author is not a tornado but a cab driver. Certainly I am transported from realm to realm, but I do so aware of the transportation. Books now represent individual works by individual persons. Flawed and imperfect. Simultaneously in my life, I’ve learned that love is also not a great FORCE of nature. It’s a great CHOICE of humankind. It no longer surprises me, for example, to learn that a wife can continue to love her abusive husband for years and years. It no longer surprises me to watch a parent love his insane, spoiled child when doing so, to the degree it is done, only harms that child’s future. I am no longer filled with a hot rage over such things, but sorrowful compassion. No more do I believe this apparent foolishness of love suggests an ANIMAL love. Maybe it does. I am not so sure. I happen to now think that these flawed loves persist not because they are instinctual and pathetic but because the lover made the CHOICE to love and therefore became defined by it. Thus defined, they could no longer give up the love without their identity becoming destroyed. Such thoughts give rise to more doubts and more questions. Is it better to control your love or be controlled by it? Or is there any difference between the two? Well. Somehow I have managed to write many paragraphs in a book review without saying a word about the book. You may even wonder what any of this has to do with it. I hope not but allow me to be more direct: I likewise struggle with the decision to consider my reading of Count Zero a win or a lose. It contains elements I love: noir! voodoo! the rising specter of corpotocracy! cyberpunk! I’ll have you know I kickstarted the latest Shadowrun game by Harebrained Games, so you can imagine ‘street samurai’ and ‘cyberdecks’ are right up my alley. And AI. Man, I love AI. I love how AI will free humanity of such a burden on our shoulders. Count Zero has lots and lots of AI, including AI who think they’re voodoo gods. So, yeah, I dream of the friend who will sit with me and argue about the future of robots. Barring the real existence of such a friend, however, this and other books will suffice. And the style, sharp and purposefully obscure, with the near death of major characters happening off the screen and told in retrospect, and jargon and terminology thrown around like ninja stars: difficult but interesting. AND YET… despite the plot’s scope being superficially large and magnificent, the actual sense of scope felt anything but. One of the three PoVs, for example, was an art dealer named Marly whose connection with the story could best be described as ‘accidental.’ Another of the PoVs, a for-hire corporate samurai named Turner, possessed no personal stake in any of the proceedings. And the book seemed to take for granted that I would automatically dislike the mega-rich CEO fella who is at the heart of the plot’s machinations, when I felt no such thing at all. His ultimate fate seemed perfunctory, abrupt, and anti-climactic. Indeed, the threads which bound the three PoVs together never tightened in unity in the same compelling way that, say, the threads in Game of Thrones do. Rather, their connection was accidental at best. In fact, that’s the best word I can use to describe my overall sense of interface with this book: accidental. My enjoyment of the book felt accidental, like I just so happened to be in the right mood, with the right amount of time, to engage with it. The plot and everything that happens feels like one big accident. And yet I cannot argue that this makes the book less good. Less compelling, yes. But I am rather leery of the notion that compelling can or should be equated with good. So then we return, do I become the bottle or the cup? Do I say this book is good or it is bad? Do I recommend it? At times like these, I find myself returning to a quote that has in many ways defined me, both as a person and as a writer, from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. He wrote, Do I contradict myself? Knowing as I now do what it takes to write a book, that it represents in a very real sense, a sliver of an author’s life, as potent as a horcrux, I find myself unwilling to take very seriously the stars I could give or not give. Even more, it feels insulting and dehumanizing. Here is a human: a complex spiral of DNA, one among many permutations it could have been, with memories and actions both good and bad, of high quality and low. Who will judge this pitiful creature and call it angel or demon? Here, then, is Count Zero: a complex weave of words, one among many permutations it could have been, some good and some bad. You can find either in it and which side of the coin you choose to focus on depends on you. Me, I’ll just appreciate a good noir cyberpunk tale, admit its faults, and move on to the next book like a sort of readerly ninja practicing his forms. A cop out, for sure, but then I do believe that was my point. ...more |
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Jul 28, 2015
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| 0345421450
| 9780345421456
| 0345421450
| 4.09
| 12,372
| Aug 1998
| Jun 1999
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really liked it
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In short, Heroes Die is as macho a book can be without also being completely terrible. In long, well, it's a lot more than that. In fact, I initially d In short, Heroes Die is as macho a book can be without also being completely terrible. In long, well, it's a lot more than that. In fact, I initially disliked it, but the inherent complexity of the major plot idea grew on me until it reached its peak at about the last 50 or 60 pages. It then ended in a climax that was vaguely bewildering. But anyway, the plot goes something like this: the main character, Hari Michaelson, lives in a futuristic caste-based society. His caste is right of 'Professional' or more specifically, 'Entertainer.' See, Hari is an Actor, though that's not actor in the sense we know it. Rather, Hari is teleported to another dimension, to the Overworld, a sort of Fantasy-version of Earth, with magic and swordsman and gods and all that jazz. There he takes on the role of brutal & legendary assassin Caine. His sensations - indeed his very thoughts - are sent back via a 'thoughtmitter.' This allows the wealthy to Adventure right alongside Caine, seeing through his eyes, feeling through his skin, even listening to his very thoughts. And that's the interesting dynamic. That's what kept me intrigued. The conflict is dual-layered throughout the story. On one hand, Caine must deal with a night-ominpotent tyrant in Overworld. On the other hand, Hari must navigate the treacherous waters of the caste system, particularly the psychopathic Administrator who runs the Studio which employs him. Bad enough to live in a stratified society where you're treated as a second class citizen, where speaking any sort of liberal philosophy will get you a rather unpleasant date with the Social Police. But Hari also has to edit his very thoughts! That, to me, was the real core of the story, much more so than the sword-and-sorcery. I only wish it had played a larger role in the plot. Perhaps in the second book. As a small aside, this book is super macho. It's violent, though not gratuitously. I mean the guy IS an assassin. But more than that, the female characters are, well, not that great. In fact, the romance arc that is meant to serve as the protagonist's primary motivation is actually a bit creepy. Especially it's ending. At least, I find it creepy when women positively respond to obsession. Like: "I didn't love you but then I learned JUST HOW MUCH YOU CARED. And now I do!" What's weird about that, to me, is that you rarely see the flip-side. You don't really see a man distance himself from a woman but then when he learns just how much she cares, he's like, "OH MAN! Now I want you!" Usually he just thinks of her as clingy and stalkerish. I dunno. I blame it on Twilight. But then I blame everything on Twilight: someone cut me off on the road. Twilight. I dropped my favorite glass and it broke. Twilight. *shakes head* Freakin twilight. ...more |
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Jun 30, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0804139024
| 9780804139021
| 0804139024
| 4.42
| 1,156,423
| Sep 27, 2011
| Feb 11, 2014
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liked it
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It could have been more. The plot basically consists of: "Oh God I'm going to die." "No wait, I know what to do." Cut to other points of view for fifty It could have been more. The plot basically consists of: "Oh God I'm going to die." "No wait, I know what to do." Cut to other points of view for fifty pages. Then, "Oh no I messed up. I'm going to die." "No wait, I calmed down and I figured out what to do." This cycle repeats roughly 5 or 6 times and then the book ends. Now, don't get me wrong - it was pretty amusing to read about the protagonist saving the day with science! Science is awesome! I love science. It was great to put myself in that situation and think: Would I have survived?! (hint: no). The author and I would probably be best bros. He likes studying astrodynamics in his spare time? Cool, I like studying quantum chromodynamics. It's just... I expected more than an engineering puzzle when I picked up this book and read the first couple of chapters. I expected an evocation of place. I wanted to know what it would REALLY *feel* like to be isolated and trapped on Mars, to stare at those endless rust plains, to have the weight of an entire planet on your mind. I wanted an authenticity not just of science but of humanity. Unfortunately, while the protagonist Mark Watney's optimism and juvenile sense of humor make him easy to root for, they completely gloss over the loneliness, boredom, and trauma he would have had to overcome to actually bother getting out of his bunk in the morning. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the protagonist was without any real humanizing flaw. I am reminded of Richard Mattheson's I Am Legend. The protagonist there faces a similar conundrum as Mark Watney (only human being around) and must utilize a similar sort of experimentation and scientific know-how to figure stuff out. Yet in I Am Legend, we also see the result of the protag's isolation. He drinks. He rages. He destroys perfectly good research simply out of frustration and anger and a sense of hopelessness. You get a little pissed at him but you understand where he's coming from. And when he encounters another living being, he becomes OBSESSED. He makes bad decisions simply from a desire to not be alone. Which is a pretty good summary of what it means to be human. Not so with Mark Watney. Every mistake he makes is a simple one, like forgetting to put the milk back into the fridge and it spoils. An every day mistake. All the tension of this man v. nature story amounts to no more than brain farts in a hostile environment. Mark Watney never jeopardizes his survival as a result of hopelessness or loneliness or anything like that. All of that is fixed by 70s TV shows and disco and that's that. If only that's how the world worked. And when he finally re-establishes contact with people, does he FREAK OUT!? Nah. He texts a boobies emoticon. What it really comes down to is that, for purposes of pacing & suspense, Andy Weir chose to put in alternative PoVs from Mark Watney's fellow astronauts and other people back on Earth. This allowed the author to, for example, foreshadow a dust storm that may cause trouble for the protag. This was a mistake. It ruined any sense of isolation and claustrophobia. It prevented any evocation of place. With all that said, I am giving The Martian 3 stars. It's not the book's fault I had different expectations. Am I going to watch Transformers and complain that it wasn't philosophical enough? Rather The Martian delivers on its story about unified scientific endeavor in the face of overwhelming odds - a fundamentally reassuring message. More importantly, I am TOTALLY on board the hype for this book. The science is more right than it's wrong. And it makes science seem COOL and EXCITING. Which I'm all for because I totally hope to see a Mars colony in my lifetime. I'll be real pissed if I die before it happens. Real pissed. Also I want jetpacks. Actually I want to ride a t-rex to work. Imagine stopping next to some bro's Hummer on your t-rex. But, ah, I concede that is unlikely to happen. ...more |
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Jun 20, 2015
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| B004RD854O
| 3.85
| 2,262
| Feb 21, 2012
| Feb 21, 2012
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really liked it
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I wanted to like this book more than I did. Though the overlying prose is clean and efficient, if not as beautiful or sharp as I would’ve liked, the u
I wanted to like this book more than I did. Though the overlying prose is clean and efficient, if not as beautiful or sharp as I would’ve liked, the underlying imagination is a death-trap rollercoaster, a series of imaginative heights not fully connected with the rails of plot and theme. Case in point: Professor Tyburn, a man of mechanism and wit, the opening act for the vaudeville troop around which this book is centered. He is a puppeteer, yet his puppets need no strings to operate. Rather, they are strangely autonomous and yearn to be freer still. As the book progresses, the Professor grows more and more haggard and complains that the puppets grow harder to control… What follows is an excellently horrific AND human story. Yet its connection to the overarching story is tenuous at best. It serves to push the protagonist somewhere it needs him to be, but otherwise lacks a sense of continuity with the surrounding elements, as if it were a puzzle piece forced by some gargantuan child into a place it does not quite fit. The problem, I eventually came to realize, was a lack of foreshadowing, or rather a failure to emphasize the foreshadowed elements. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that Professor Tyburn looks at something he shouldn’t look at it and it begins to infect him and turn him dark. That is the explanation given after the climax of his story anyway, yet it feels tacked on. That he looked at something he shouldn’t have is, from what I can tell, NEVER MENTIONED again. Furthermore, even the very first time we see him, his puppets already appear difficult to control. It’s a shame because so many of the elements in this book, when taken on their own, are wonderful. The meeting of the personified four winds, for example, was wonderfully imaginative. Too bad it had to be weakened by an unearned, tacked-on romance at the end. The depressed, treacherous, and ugly elves are absolutely essential to the plot (and wonderfully subversive!), yet they are pre-referenced in only the vaguest of terms. Other elements are likewise patchwork too. The lead protagonist, a pianist named George who believes his father is the troop’s leader Silenus, is by far the most boring character in the book. Which is OK. A sort of ‘every-man’ perspective on decidedly supernatural proceedings is a classic technique. Unfortunately, the plot ramps up to an INSANE level at the end. Within a couple chapters, George’s stakes go from, ‘So hey we’re travelling around and I really want to be part of the act rather than just a stagehand’ to ‘I AM GOD’ – no, really. But the plot isn’t really ABOUT George. Not *really.* It’s about Silenus – who is entirely absent from the grand finale! And on and on and on, but I think I’ve gotten across what I want to get across with my review. It’s like you’re standing on top of a mountain and the view is beautiful. It’s amazing. You want to make a wish and jump off and sail away, like that crazy girl in Crouching Tiger. You don’t, of course, because you’re not crazy. Instead you trek down the side of the mountain and end up in some HORRIBLE LAVA JUNGLE SWAMP FILLED WITH GIANT MOSQUITOS. Die! you yell and proceed to beat them with a pool noodle. A Siamese-twin panther you slay with a blunderbuss. And suddenly you find yourself atop another mountain peak with a beautiful view. How did you get there?! Why did you not see it from that other mountain peak you were at?! You begin to suspect that you are not, in fact, in reality at all. Rather you are dreaming. And thinking that, the stitch and weave of the dream becomes visible to you. You now realize you are in a manufactured world and, knowing that, the view is not as beautiful as you had once thought it could be. Still, while it lasted, it sure was nice. *Edit note: A year after reading this, I raised my rating from 3 to 4 stars. In the blurry lens of memory, the book's patchwork elements are smoothed out, leaving only some sharp, unique, and wonderful images. ...more |
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Apr 29, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 0340837942
| 9780340837948
| 0340837942
| 4.15
| 132,553
| Jun 02, 1966
| Mar 14, 2005
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it was ok
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress begins, promisingly enough, with a conversation between the sentient computer Mike and the mechanic Mannie, our protagoni
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress begins, promisingly enough, with a conversation between the sentient computer Mike and the mechanic Mannie, our protagonist, about the subjective and paradoxical nature of humor. It then segues into a revolution whereby the Moon, a penal colony used primarily as a farm to grow wheat to feed Earth's beleaguered masses, attempts to become an independent state. The revolution is planned and executed primarily by Mike, essentially an omniscient God, and everything which can go right goes right and everything which might go wrong does not. It seems then that The Moon is, in fact, a rather Lenient Mistress. …and naïve, sexist, and outdated. But let’s start with the first one. New Title: The Moon is a Lenient Mistress. A clothesline with a pair of whitey-tighties has more dramatic tension than this book. Though there is, ostensibly, a macro-conflict in the form of Luna’s revolution, it doesn’t come across as such because everything always works out. Even when the plan appears to stumble, it actually turns out NOPE, it was all part of the plan. Computer Mike has no limitations and knows all. It's no surprise, and no spoiler either, to tell you the revolution succeeds. Manuel is clearly narrating in retrospect, a fact referenced multiple times throughout the book, which is itself largely told in summary, rather than depicted scene-by-scene. What about micro-conflict? Ha! You may not have known this – I certainly didn’t – but revolutionaries are all extremely polite and well-behaved. The three main characters always agree or, if disagreeing slightly, happily defer to Professor (a blatant analogue of Heinlein himself). Any character who strongly disagrees just sort of vanishes. Any character who isn’t on the good side is portrayed as a bumbling, blithering idiot. Course maybe Heinlein is just that good at mapping out a revolution. Maybe he’s a master of human nature. Maybe, should I ever plan a revolution, perhaps against our future McWalmart Overlords, I should exhume Heinlein’s body and use my necromantic powers to raise him as a zombie adviser. Except... New Title: The Moon is a Naïve Mistress. I’ll get to the dated technology in a moment, which has some excuse, but is there any excuse for an inaccurate depiction of human nature? To some degree, the lack of conflict makes sense because this is Old Sci-fi and in Old Sci-fi, drama and character often play a subordinate role to ideas and science. Much of the joy (and there is some) comes from reading this book as a Revolution For Dummies. But the joy is hampered by this book’s inauthentic depiction of the turbulence of revolution and of humanity and society in general. Case in point: The very premise is absurd. Luna is a penal colony, filled almost exclusively with convicts (in the future, capital punishment is considered ‘inhumane’). Simultaneously, Loonies (those who live on the moon) are portrayed as being exceptionally polite. Simultaneously, a good HALF of those who arrive on Luna end up dead either through carelessness or murder. Simultaneously, there are no laws. Zero. Simultaneously with all this, Luna is depicted as a stable, healthy semi-utopia. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (wait for it) ...hhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (wait for it) ...hhhhhh no. Next up, I am a Nigerian prince who has $10,000,000 to give you. I just need your bank account information. We all know that in the absence of societal structure, the strong rule the weak. In fact, we have places without laws in the world, Somalia being one of them. Don’t think anyone would call it utopian. In addition to his wildly naïve depiction of a libertarian society, Heinlein’s grasp of gender dynamics leaves much to be desired. On Luna, the ratio of female to males is wildly skewed, a 1:2 ratio at time of story but even worse in the years before. The result, according to Heinlein, is the empowerment of women. Because that’s definitely what's happening in India. Oh wait. No, the opposite occurred. Duh. Ironically, because Heinlein obviously attempted to do otherwise, the book’s depiction of women is nothing less than creepy thereby granting TITLE NUMBER THREE. Cue drumroll…: New Title: The Moon is a Sexist Mistress. Heinlein’s depiction of women is bad. He tries and if this were kindergarten, that’d earn him some points. But we’re in the big leagues of literature, aren’t we?! So it’s just creepy and sexist: Practically every woman of note mentioned is described as beautiful. No ugly women allowed, apparently. When beautiful woman #1, Wyoming Knott, was introduced, I thought to myself, “Oh man. Dollars to donuts, main character sleeps with her.” For a bit, I thought I'd be owing myself some donuts but then in a surprise twist... she gets married into Mannie’s line marriage! You know that rule in theater about how if a gun is mentioned or introduced in act one of a play, it will go off by act three? I propose a similar rule for beautiful women. If a "beautiful" woman is mentioned in the beginning of the book then she will be slept with by the end. That or she’ll be an evil murderess. Sorry beautiful women out there. That’s your fate in life, apparently. I mean, despite narrator telling us that Loonie women are empowered and in charge of society, the book consistently depicts them in subordinate or domestic roles. Wyoming Knott is one of three main revolutionaries, right? The book suggests she's essential. Which is because she does… wait… what does she do? OH THAT’S RIGHT. NOTHING. She flirts, she spurs the men on. All other women are likewise depicted in this bizarre cheerleading role, or as mothers. Every woman (or girl!) of note eventually gets married, like it's the penultimate fate. Well what can ya say? It's a universal truth, right Jane Austen? This book is super hardcore about placing women on a pedestal. Heinlein, who obviously doesn’t get human nature and even less woman nature, seems to believe that this is a GOOD depiction of women. Like omg they’re so amazing and dynamic and look at this SPUNKY female, free with her kisses and sexuality and can take and dish out insults with the best of em. Please, God of Literature, spare me from such inadvertently Lovecraftian horrors. The spunky female stereotype of an “empowered woman” is so eerie. It’s outdated, at the least, and you know what else is? The technology! New Title: The Moon is an Outdated Mistress. This book is lauded for its supposedly accurate depiction of engineering and technology. Huh? What? You mean, like how one of the main characters uses a phone with like a hundred meter cord in order to talk to the computer? Don’t even give me that context of the past nonsense. We had radios back then. Is it really that hard to extrapolate that we’d have personal radios (i.e. cellphones) in the future? Or how about when the main character uses PUNCHCARDS to program a super computer? Hahahahaha. Or here’s a good one: nuclear-warhead interceptor missiles cost “thousands” of dollars. Do I buy a used car or hydrogen bomb? Choices, choices. That is the very definition of sci-fi failure. It’s a sci-fi writer’s job (particularly one writing in this hard sci-fi mode) to infer future ideologies and technologies. It’d be the equivalent of my writing a story set a hundred years in the future and having people still drive around in cars with internal combustion engines. Barring Mad Max style post-apocalypse, that is NOT going to happen. Or talking about a hamburger costing $5 a century from now. (In fact, for your information, at average rates of inflation, a $5 hamburger will cost $96 in a hundred years. Jeez.) In summary, is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Nope. The Moon is a Lenient, Naïve, Sexist, and Outdated Mistress. This book doesn’t grant insight into humanity, it doesn’t depict a realistic future, it doesn’t even entertain. And it's creepy. At any given point while I was reading this, I could have put it down for good and been content. Basically, The Moon is a Boring Mistress. No one wants a boring mistress – and that’s the truth. ...more |
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| 4.02
| 30,859
| Mar 17, 2005
| Sep 27, 2005
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The third in Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series and my least favorite. Somewhat paradoxically, however, I also found it the most complex. This book The third in Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series and my least favorite. Somewhat paradoxically, however, I also found it the most complex. This book is extremely bleak, and in a manner that's not readily apparent. While the protagonist Takeshi Kovacs is your typical angry, jaded, world-weary ex-soldier in both Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, his personality is livened by a sense of humor. This liveliness is almost entirely absent here in Woken Furies, which is the only book set on Kovacs' homeworld of Harlan's World (which is heavily flavored by Japanese culture). Rather, in this last Kovacs novel (Morgan has said he will not write no more and I believe he should stick with that), Kovacs comes across as just plain tired. You get the sense that life has thoroughly kicked his ass. Throughout the book, you really get the sense that Kovacs is just going through the motions. He gets involved in various causes and such, but his heart's really not into it. To be clear, this isn't accidental. It's not a spoiler to say that Kovacs' primary antagonist in this story is a younger version of himself. That this younger version is more interesting, more motivated, and all around zestier is explicitly stated. All of this is, however, another way of saying that the book's protagonist & narrator is rather humdrum, which makes Woken Furies rather less fun to read than the first two novels. This issue is compounded by a plot that can feel, at times, rather roundabout and artificial. In summary, Woken Furies was a realistic conclusion to Kovacs' story. Shame though that it had to be such a downer (the epilogue's hopeful note notwithstanding). ...more |
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| 3.93
| 37,218
| Mar 20, 2003
| Mar 02, 2004
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An entertaining, fun read - though not as good as the first in the series, Altered Carbon. While AC was a postcyberpunk detective fiction murder myster An entertaining, fun read - though not as good as the first in the series, Altered Carbon. While AC was a postcyberpunk detective fiction murder mystery, this one's a rather more straight-forward treasure hunt. It did capture some of that fabulous joy of finding and interacting with an advanced alien species (which, for me at least, never gets old). There was the cool technology of course. But the overall plot and person-to-person interactions just weren't as good. Still a recommend, though, if you liked Altered Carbon. ...more |
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| 0765319233
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| 4.23
| 25,750
| 1986
| Nov 13, 2007
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really liked it
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An excellent military history fantasy. The style is bare. Minimal scene setting, particularly in the first book. Minimal world-building. You don't rea
An excellent military history fantasy. The style is bare. Minimal scene setting, particularly in the first book. Minimal world-building. You don't really even get much of a sense of how big The Black Company is, at least until later. Yet such a bare style coincided with the plot. For most of these three books, The Black Company is working for the "evil" side. The battles are not glamorous and are not written in glamorous style. They're written with the cynicism and world weariness you would expect from war veterans. ...more |
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| 4.05
| 7,892
| 1987
| Nov 15, 1997
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it was amazing
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| 4.34
| 13,355
| Oct 15, 1994
| Oct 15, 1994
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it was amazing
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| 20,487
| Oct 15, 1994
| Oct 15, 1994
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it was amazing
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The book’s cover offers a blurb from Neil Gaiman: "The best SF novel of the last century." Yeah, okay Neil, I thought to myself. I bet you say that to The book’s cover offers a blurb from Neil Gaiman: "The best SF novel of the last century." Yeah, okay Neil, I thought to myself. I bet you say that to all the pretty books. Then I read the book. And he was right. At least, right if you define "best" as "none better" rather than "better than all." Book of the New Sun belongs in a class of its own. If there's anything to compare it with, I haven't read it. With this quartet, Gene Wolfe did for speculative literature what Raymond Chandler did to detective fiction back in the 50s: He raised it above its humble genre trappings. Chandler opened my eyes to a new type of writing. Prior to cracking open the pages of The Long Goodbye, I perceived literature as a dichotomy: entertaining genre “trash” and high-falutin’ Literary tomes. The former focuses on the ‘what’ while the latter focuses on the ‘how’ but both possess merit. Chandler's fiction blurs that line. His plots are as entertaining as they come, yet much of a reader's delight arises from the sharp style and tremendous wit with which he wrote. So it is with The Book of the New Sun, though Wolfe’s style could not be more different than Chandler’s. While Chandler’s Marlowe narrates with sharp, forceful prose, Wolfe’s Severian - an apprentice torturer - narrates this old earth science fantasy blend with meandering complexity and guile, unreliable even in his claim that he’s a liar. Does he lie? Yes – but not in the manner you might think. He lies not by shape, but by weight, giving you the facts plainly enough but hiding their import. Such subversion exists throughout the quartet. It is entirely readable as a straight-forward hero’s journey of the Campbellian variety. It’s an adventure in the same way Chandler’s novels are mysteries. They entertain at the surface level. But they are also so much more than that. In Chandler’s case, his novels are a how-to manual for dealing with a world (that is, our world) so reliant on manipulation that we take for granted the deception we encounter, and might even feel lost without our daily dosage of bullshit advertising, politicking, journalism, and TV drama. In the Book of the New Sun, the adventure masks an allusive labyrinthe, a riddle of time and meaning, that must be traversed by careful reading. Which, if we’re being honest, is problematic these days. Most people are not careful readers and don’t want to be. That is their prerogative, though as a writer myself, I find it frustrating. The defining trait of modern entertainment is its ease of consumption. Book of the New Sun is not easily consumed. With long, tortured sentences, complex diction, discursive asides, and more than a few instances of elision, even a superficial reading requires work. To attain any sort of depth requires even more. But this work does not go unrewarded. The complexity doesn't exist for the sake of complexity, but rather to ambush the reader with a delightfully refreshing subversion and to present a complete picture of a character's mind and life. I even found the book rewarding on a sentence-by-sentence level. It is peppered throughout with insight and interesting prose. In short, Book of the New Sun is very much like a trek through a hilly country. More difficult than taking a car to be sure, but not all that challenging, and I never knew what new beauty I'd find over the next hill. To be shorter still, I loved this book. I absolutely loved it. It changed me the way a good love affair changes you. It taught me to expect more from my literature. ...more |
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One of the theoretical fates of the universe is something called heat death. In heat death, the universe will have reached a state of maximum entropy,
One of the theoretical fates of the universe is something called heat death. In heat death, the universe will have reached a state of maximum entropy, which means that all of the universe's heat will have distributed itself equally. Without a temperature gradient, there can exist no free energy. Without free energy, no chemical or physical interaction can occur. In short, nothing can happen, ever. That we call this 'heat death' is suggestive of human psychology. Why not call this state tranquility? Or nirvana? This fate is, after all, an eternal peace, free of conflict, forever. This suggests a rather insidious conclusion: we equate peace with death. We don't like death and therefore we don't like peace. I'd qualify this by saying we like the IDEA of peace, certainly, but not the reality. Peace makes us fat and bored. I am convinced that a desire to escape boredom - and the associated feeling of 'life must SURELY be greater than this' - lies at the root of all great tragedy, and all great triumph. It is the latter I wish to focus on because this line of reasoning is what convinced me to write this review. The author James Hider offered me a free copy of Cronix in exchange for maybe a review. I told him I was happy to accept this offer because - as an aspiring author myself - I empathized with his endeavor. Also, free book! Yet as I neared the end of Cronix, I knew that while I had enjoyed my read, I could not in good faith write a glowing review. I considered simply declining to write anything at all. I mean shoot, I don't want to be a debbie downer. But I started thinking about this heat death thing. If difference of temperature leads to the ignition of stars and the formation of planets and the creation of life, then what does diversity do for human beings? Great things I happen to believe. Diversity should be encouraged, not swept under the rug. Thus I state that not all stories can appeal to all readers and Cronix, alas, did not appeal to me. This is not to suggest it is poorly written or boring. Far from it! I finished it in about a week of pleasurable reading. Cronix is an ambitious undertaking. It is full of big ideas, touching upon everything from immortality to divinity to the nature of the soul, all of which are explored in clear, unaffected prose. Cronix is a book easy to get into but nevertheless invites deep thought. Alas, it fails to reward such contemplation. Neither the plot itself nor the ideas that fuel the plot stand up to close inspection. So much so that I'd go so far as to suggest that this isn't really science fiction at all - but fantasy. The technology at the heart of Cronix isn't science but magic, and I don't mean in the Arthur C. Clarke sense. The primary conceit of Cronix is that, in the future, we figure out how to upload our consciousness into a digital form. What follows is a mass Exodus, wherein the vast majority of humanity gets 'chipped' and then commits spectacular (if not quite believable) suicide, thereby uploading itself into orbiting supercomputers. Safely encoded, these Eternals are free to explore virtual paradise after virtual paradise. So far so good. The problem is that in Cronix, the more minds that upload themselves the faster the supercomputers run. This isn't just a minor detail - it is an absolutely essential motivating factor for one of Cronix's major characters. Unfortunately, it makes no sense. It is equivalent to suggesting that a computer would run faster because you put more stuff in its hard-drive. We all know the opposite is true. Furthermore, the notion that people must die to be uploaded makes no sense. It's not even true in the book's universe, as digital 'back-ups' of people are constantly being made. Yet peppered throughout are stories of tragedies in which people committed suicide, expecting to be resurrected in virtual paradise, only to fail because the up-link was destroyed or tampered with. It's like, gee, maybe it would have been smarter to upload yourself first and then die. But of course that's not as spectacular an image as people throwing themselves from the roof of skyscrapers. There was a clear friction between the book's world-building and the realistic adoption of new technology. I often felt the author was willing to ignore human nature in order to present shocking images and ideas. Or, more egregiously, for the sake of plot convenience. With my suspension of disbelief crumbling, I spent some time contemplating the plot as a whole. I quickly realized it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I cannot explain without spoiling the entire plot, so take heed of this spoiler tag, as I mean it: (view spoiler)[ The protagonist, a non-chipped fellow named Oriente, begins his journey after meeting a talking wolf. He ends up in a crumbling, largely empty London, where it's quickly revealed that some shadowy force (that turns out to be a sort of adolescent deity formed from millions of combined consciousnesses) is pulling the strings. What does this budding deity want of Oriente? It wants him to be 'chipped.' Except he's already chipped. Which (and unless I'm blind) apparently occurs off-page. It's like one moment they're talking about how's calling himself stupid for not getting chipped, then the next moment he's hearing voices and his chip is being blamed for it. Nevertheless, there's a whole escapade involving Oriente's consciousness being decanted into a flock of geese so he can fly to Central America, where he is promptly escorted back into civilization so that he can be... chipped? Except he's already chipped? Alright... Well, anyway, he gets 'decarnated' and thus brought into the virtual reality heaven, whereupon he promptly returns BACK to earth to serve as the deity's prophet. (hide spoiler)] Well! That's a bit like having a car full of petrol and then driving a thousand miles away to a gas station because you know your tank will be empty after driving a thousand miles. Rather circular, no? Now certainly explanations can be put forth to explain all of this. But plots, like jokes, aren't so good if they have to be explained. Rather, such plot convenience reveals the strings attached to the puppets. No longer does the story seem real. And not seeming real, it begins to lose much of its vigor. It is the difference between seeing a truck speeding toward a CHILD versus that same truck speeding toward a CHILD-LIKE DOLL. One might well inspire you to risk your life. The other would be of almost no interest. Thus, I give Cronix 2.5 stars. Is it competently written and entertaining? Yes it is. Is its ambition admirable? That too, yes. Did it succeed in its ambitions? For this reader, no. I like my science believable and my plots, wibbly wobbly though they might be, to ultimately feel inevitable. Yet I am only one voice among many. For more punctilious readers or those especially experienced with science-fiction, I cannot recommend Cronix. Yet for those who are looking simply for a good time, Cronix is easy to recommend. ...more |
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| 4.04
| 108,427
| Feb 28, 2002
| Feb 28, 2006
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it was amazing
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Altered Carbon, which amazingly enough is Richard Morgan's debut novel, is the best sci-fi noir mix I've ever read. I don't mean to suggest the others
Altered Carbon, which amazingly enough is Richard Morgan's debut novel, is the best sci-fi noir mix I've ever read. I don't mean to suggest the others were bad, but this one possessed a delightful vitality the others couldn't match. It positively hummed with energy and ideas. Granted, the ideas - people's personalities largely exist as data which can then be downloaded into other bodies in a process known as 'sleeving' - are hardly the most original. But if we're going to be honest, do you know how bloody hard it is to come up with a truly original concept? Try it. Try coming up with a BRAND NEW sci-fi idea that stays within the realms of both possibility and applicability. It ain't easy. But then, if we're going to be even MORE frank, it's no different with people. One person is much the same as any other. Small variances sure, and occasionally you get a truly stand-out individual, but realistically? In a given region, people are much the same and even across the world, people are much the same. Does that mean these people are unoriginal and derivative? No! Because people have a fundamental vitality to em. Our strivings and yearnings never grow old. And if they do grow old, then the problem be with the eye and not that which the eye beholds. That's what reading Altered Carbon felt like: getting to know someone new, with all of their own idiosyncratic aspirations and mannerisms. It was a fine friendship, while it lasted. That is, Altered Carbon is a lively, enjoyable read and you'd be hard-pressed to find better hard-boiled sci-fi. ...more |
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| 0886773687
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| 4.11
| 19,784
| Dec 1984
| Dec 04, 1984
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really liked it
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This was a fabulously pure novel. Laser focus. The first fourth is about a soldier (about which we know next to nothing aside from his name: Felix) wh
This was a fabulously pure novel. Laser focus. The first fourth is about a soldier (about which we know next to nothing aside from his name: Felix) who gets into a power-suit and drops onto a hostile planet inhabited by 8 foot tall, impressively strong giant insects with the incongruous moniker of "ants." That is it. I mean, we see plenty of characters and we get some hints of the dude's backstory, but these sections don't mess around. They're action and the madness of war, pure and simple. I was hooked. I knew that the author wasn't going to pussyfoot around. If that were all the story had to offer, I'd say well done chap, slap it with four stars and end the review here. However, Act 2 - which is much more, let us say, human - gives us a fresh perspective on Felix. This act follows the exploits of a famous pirate, Jack, starting with his prison escape and then onto a complicated heist on a colony planet. At first, I was like huh? How is this related? But the two plot-lines eventually collide in satisfying fashion. I wouldn't claim that the story or ideas are particularly fabulous, or that the prose is particularly lyrical, but then it didn't need or want to be. That is, in fact, it's charm. This is just an utterly entertaining, solid sci-fi yarn that satisfied me complete. The author knew what he wanted to write and he wrote it. For that I give Armor my highest award: Top-shelf. Only the best. ...more |
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| 0441783589
| 4.01
| 231,860
| Dec 1959
| May 1987
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really liked it
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Basically this is a book about the main character becoming a marine. And then a marine officer. Except it's in the future so the marines (aka Mobile I
Basically this is a book about the main character becoming a marine. And then a marine officer. Except it's in the future so the marines (aka Mobile Infantry) wear powered exo-skeleton suits that can fire nukes and jump thirty feet and instead of fighting other humans, they fight 'skinnies' and bugs. The fighting/action sequences are minimal. The vast, vast majority of this book is about Johnny Rico's training, daily military life, and the philosophical rationale behind a government in which only those who serve are allowed to vote. This annoyed some people. It didn't annoy me. ...more |
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| 4.06
| 52,333
| Jun 14, 1956
| Jul 02, 1996
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really liked it
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The Count of Monte Cristo... in space! That alone should recommend it but there are some distinct differences such that I would be remiss in their omi
The Count of Monte Cristo... in space! That alone should recommend it but there are some distinct differences such that I would be remiss in their omission. The Stars My Destination follows a simple soul with the well-chosen moniker of Gulliver Folly. He's a mechanic on a space-ship, and we learn early on that he's considered a 'dead end' of a human being, with a critical lack of motivation. Yet whereas Edmond Dantes is a simple happy soul, Gulliver is anything but. In an early scene he rapes his jaunting (read: teleporting) instructor. At every point in the story, until the end, he places his vengeance before all else, often abandoning his comrades. While we're supposed to empathize with Edmond Dantes, like him even, that we may assuage our guilt for supporting his drive for vengeance, no such excuse is given for Gulliver Folly. He's a brute and we each of us must at least be partially brute for understanding his appetite for vengeance. While the revenge in the Count is a slow 800-900 page simmer, the revenge story here is a hot boil. Despite being a 1950s sci-fi novel, The Stars My Destination is thoroughly modern. The plot flows at break-neck speed, with minimal distraction or delving into philosophical depths. Alfred Bester chose to focus on the What, instead of the Why (though that is not to suggest that the story is confusing. It isn't. The excellent world-building is probably the single best part of this story). So there's your simple summary of plot. I admit that I have little interest in writing reviews in order to help other people decide if they want to read the book or not. No, I am thoroughly selfish here, maybe even a bit like Gulliver Folly in his quest for vengeance, though I quest for reflection. That is, I am not particularly interested in the what. I want to know why. In this case, I want to examine the nature of motivation and particularly why revenge stories fascinate us. I wrote in my The Count of Monte Cristo review: We suffer daily and usually our suffering has very little meaning. By inheriting a vast fortune and a deep education, Edmond gets the chance to transform himself and to give meaning to his suffering. That still sounds pretty valid to me. But I think there's something more to it as well. There's a purity of intention in revenge stories that we respect. In TCMC, Edmond Dantes dedicates his entire existence to this one task, this one goal. Gulliver Folly does the same. In fact, this purity of intentions reminds me of the Daleks, from Dr. Who. Most Whovians I know really like the Daleks. More so than most other creatures. Why? Because they have such purity of intention. They're innocent, childlike in their desire to Exterminate! I found that the more the writers of Dr. Who tried to humanize the Daleks, the less interested I became. There's so much 'grey area', so many alternative perspectives, so much political correctness that muddies the waters of EVERYTHING we do that when we come across someone (an adult especially) who views the world with a crystal black-and-white purity, we respect it. Even when we know it's wrong, I think we feel a little bit jealous. We wish we had something we believed in SO MUCH that we could dedicate our whole being to it, our whole fiber, and the consequences be damned. In a recent movie I watched, Calvary, the protagonist, a priest is speaking to one of his flock who wants to join the army. He says: I've always felt there's something inherently psychopathic about joining the army in peace time, as far as I'm concerned people join the army to find out what its like to kill someone. I hardly think that's an inclination that should be encouraged in modern society, do you? This struck me as stunningly valid. There is something inherently psychopathic about joining the army to 'serve your country' when there are so many other peaceful ways you can do so. But as I think about it now, I see there is another element as well. War is one of those few times that we can be excused for dropping all pretensions of humanity. We can drop that filter of morality that exists in front of our minds. The very definition of psychopathic? Perhaps. But I think it's just that those who join the army see it as a way to prove their mettle, to have a chance to dedicate themselves fully 100% to a given task, to a given ideal. Because let's be straight: most everything we do in life can be completed by a particularly smart monkey. I'm convinced that I could program a robot (or that a robot could be programmed, rather) to do my job. Driving a car? Robot could do it. Cooking? Robot. So the feeling we get, a feeling that I believe pervades modern society, is that we're all operating at like 10% capacity. I think that's why the (completely false) notion that we only use like 10% of our brains fascinates so many of us. It's just not that challenging to live, for most of us. We're like a person in a sensory deprivation tank, hallucinating because his brain requires stimulation. Our brains require problem solving tasks and in order to get it, we have to invent drama, invent issues. There's a quote here at the end of The Stars My Destination that sums it up pretty well: You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you......more |
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| 159780133X
| 9781597801331
| 159780133X
| 4.04
| 8,601
| Feb 2008
| Feb 01, 2008
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really liked it
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This is a collection of some ten stories of varied quality (mostly high but 'softer' was terrible and should have been left out). My two personal favo This is a collection of some ten stories of varied quality (mostly high but 'softer' was terrible and should have been left out). My two personal favorites were The Pop Squad, set in a world in which people are immortal (via a youth treatment known as rejoo) and therefore population must be strictly controlled. The narrator/protagonist is a member of the pop squad, a sort of police officer, whose job it is to enforce population control, i.e. kill children. My second favorite was The Pasho about a priest who returns to his war-like sand people after becoming educated by the more peaceful (and therefore ill prepared to fight war) lake people. What is most interesting to me, personally, is that this collection is universally described as grim. At least all the first ten reviews here on Goodreads used the word bleak. Which I found particularly alarming because I did not consider them any more bleak than the world we live in now. In Pocketful of Dharma, we get the perspective of a street beggar/thief who gets caught up in something of a religious/corporate struggle involving the Dalai Lama. Well that's certainly no different than our world today. In The Fluted Girl, we encounter a world in which people undergo often radical surgeries in order to make uniquely gifted stars (the title gives this one away). While the Fluted Girl herself is undoubtedly abused, I actually remain untroubled by the notion of radical body alteration. I'm not a fan of radical piercing - but only because they're usually done in a way that look terrible. Same for tattoos (don't get me started on how cliche so many tattoos are). But it's the execution I disagree with, not the idea. Frankly speaking, I am super gung-ho about genetic manipulation. We can now sequence the human genome for like a thousand bucks. The future of biotech looks bright indeed! In The People of Sand and Slag, we find three super human soldiers who live on an earth that is more or less devoid of any significant life aside from humanity. They come across a dog and find its fragility confusing. In the past couple of years, I've developed a new perspective on pets. I can still remember when I signed my lease, the staff asked if I had a pet. I said "No" and she replied, "Well there's still time." Like it was a baby or something. "You're not too old yet!" It should come as no surprise, then, that every single person in my apartment building (aside from me) has a dog. Well, a lot of these dogs NEVER STOP BARKING. Enough to drive anyone bonkers. I feel sorry for the dogs. I just think there's something wrong about forcing this noble beast designed to roam through the fields and forests of the world into a tiny box for most of its life except for the occasional walk. Such pet-lovers are often the same people who will lament Seaworld's terrible treatment of its whales and then not bat an eye over the fact that they're doing the exact same thing to their dog. And for what? In order to have a mentally regressed creature that doesn't know any better than to love them unconditionally. I find it, well, if I'm frank, I find it sickening. I also find it confusing that few people seem to agree with me. Actually no I don't. People will always support those beliefs which cast their actions in a good light. But anyway, are these stories bleak? Sure. But, if you're able to separate yourself from the context of the present, you'll see that, well, no, many of the practices portrayed herein aren't more bleak than the stuff we have today. Rather, I found many of these stories to be uplifting. The downtrodden refuse to be defined by their poverty or characters choose to fight against the status quo. ...more |
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| 0812536363
| 9780812536362
| 0812536363
| 3.77
| 18,421
| 2006
| Apr 03, 2007
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A Review Wherein I Postulate The End of Humanity: ...but first the boring stuff: Ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas :] Writing, characterization, plot, A Review Wherein I Postulate The End of Humanity: ...but first the boring stuff: Ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas :] Writing, characterization, plot, and dialogue :[ Basically, the plot focus is all wrong. It's incredibly domestic. If plots were pokemon, this one would involve a Magikarp and a Gyrados... and focus on the Magikarp. [image] I mean dang, look at that BAMF. Basically, Robert Gu, an old poet with Alzheimer's, has his youth and mind restored by medical science. Unfortunately, his poetical genius is lost somewhere in the restoration and his attempts to get it back embroil him a larger plot involving Mind Control and international intelligence. Alas, this more interesting plot tends to play second fiddle to the family drama Robert experiences with his son, daughter-in-law and, in particular, his granddaughter. It's never compelling. As a traditional story - i.e. a character arc - the story isn't well developed. Robert starts off as a very mean character and suddenly just sorta becomes... not mean. It all takes a backseat to the IDEAS. So you know what? Failings explained. 3 / 5 stars given. Justice done. Let's move on to the FUN STUFF. The IDEAS: Rainbows End represents our current society accelerated 20-30 years into the future, and I'd wager a crisp tenner against a dozen homemade donuts that it's more accurate than not. For example, Vinge predicts that electronics will be woven into clothes and contact lenses. The most techno-savvy (i.e. primarily youngins) control these 'Epiphany' computers via gesture while older people must resort to the more primitive keyboard. Well, I actually once worked in an e-textile lab and while our explorations were simplistic (one of the grad students designed a pair of pants that analyzed your leg movements to guess what type of dance you were doing), e-textiles are a natural evolution of mobile computing. Combine this with various virtual reality initiatives (Facebook's Oculus Rift, Steam's HTC Vive, Sony's Playstation VR being the three frontrunners) and the likes of google glass, and it's looking like the ubiquity of mobile electronics will continue unabated, not just in terms of adoption and usage but invasiveness, too. Augmented reality overlays anyone? I'll be pleased as plum pie when physical stop signs are replaced by windshield AR. But what does this all mean? Well, a major theme of Rainbows End is how such technology must invariably lead to the death of privacy. And aren't we there already? Only the nuttiest of people believe there's anything close to privacy these days. Edward Snowden heyyyy? Sony, Target, Kickstarter getting hacked? Ashley Madison? Panama Papers? Those annoying Amazon ads that you might well be looking at right now, showing you the last product you looked at on their website? Or how about when the Ukrainian gov't used cell-phone triangulation to text warnings to people who were within a certain radius of a demonstration/riot? I like to put myself in the mindset of people there. Pocket vibrates. Fella's thinking, "Oh man, I bet it's that cute girl I've been wanting to talk to!" Hahahaha NOPE. It's a text from her BIG BROTHER. Rainbows End also explores what I call "the acceleration of change." When I jog, I sometimes listen to a podcast called Radical History. In the episode on the dropping of the atomic bomb, the historian talked about how the rapid introduction of aircraft prevented military leaders from understanding how to properly use them. When it came to men-on-horses and infantry, military tactics were well understood and war could be conducted in a relatively sane method. But all of a sudden, you had this new technology. Clearly it was powerful - a real game-changer. But how did you utilize that power in the most effective and humane manner? At first, the idea was tactical bombing. You'd target the actual soldiers. But the precision wasn't there. So a few strategists came up with a brilliant new idea: strategic bombing! You could utterly destroy a major enemy city. The death and destruction would be SO GREAT that the civilians would lose all will to fight and would (somehow?) force their government to surrender. The idea was we'd have some dense, horrible destruction right at the beginning to spare us all from a much longer war. It sorta made sense. Obviously this didn't happen. But at the time who was to know? The same such conundrum is now true with regards to modern technology. Cellphones, the internet, genetic manipulation, drones/robots, etc. We're making use of these, sure, but are we doing it the right away? Is technology outpacing our ability to guide its usage? I'd guesstimate that the amount society changed from 2000 to 2015 is probably about the same it changed from 1970 to 2000. And that in turn was the same amount of change from, say, 1775 to 1850. Consider, for example, that the same weapons used in the American revolutionary war (1776) were essentially the same used in the American civil war (1865). One hundred years and many soldiers were still using front-loaded muskets! Can you even IMAGINE the weapons that will be used in a hundred years? Meanwhile, the Romans wielded the steel gladius from 4th century BC to 3rd century AD. A POINTED METAL STICK. FOR SIX HUNDRED YEARS. HOLY CRAP. So that's what I call the "acceleration of change." It's kinda like how the universe continues to expand at an ever increasing rate. Well, as I wrote, I believe society and values are now changing so fast that governments and even individual people are unable to adapt. More than at any other time in our history, there exists a gap between our technological power and our grasp of how to properly use it. For example, let's talk about education and how we test competence. Most modern tests - the bar examination, the FE exam, an AP Calculus exam - involve a student working in isolation with nothing but a calculator, a pencil, and his brain. Does this make sense anymore? When a WEALTH of information and input from other analysts is now readily and easily available? It's rare - and perhaps entirely impossible - to find a job which does not benefit from access to other experts. I mean, hell, I recently dismantled, repaired, and then reassembled my CAR ENGINE purely by instruction via internet. So it would make sense to structure tests in such a way that online resources can be used. What we really ought to be testing is not just FACTS-IN-BRAIN (which are important!) but also a student's ability to research, elicit expert response, and synthesize online information. But could you imagine the response if I proposed allowing students to use their laptops during a test? I know of teachers who STILL do not allow their students to cite online resources. I still hear teachers genuinely state that Wikipedia is not a real source "because it can be edited." What is MOST amusing about that is how those teachers don't grasp how idiotic that statement is. As if a book written and researched by a single author is superior to a crowd-sourced document composed by a hundred scholars. So there's this huge bias against networked intelligence because society has changed so fast. What was considered CHEATING only ten years ago is now basic reality, in the workplace, in social interaction, and so on. And that's due to the Acceleration of Change. Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End, takes an optimistic perspective on this, but his essays are more bleak. He believes in something called a Technology Singularity: eventually we're going to create an AI that's smarter than we are. That AI, in turn, will create an AI smarter than itself. Repeat ad infinitum until ultra-intelligent AIs render humanity obsolete. *shrug* Not exactly a new idea. But I like to think the Acceleration of Change can explain why it's necessary. And all that discussion is, ultimately, my review. If contemplating the big ideas of the world is your schtick, then Rainbows End can serve as a wonderful springboard. But if you're simply out for a good yarn - and there's no shame in that - Rainbow's End doesn't quite cut it. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2014
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| 1857231589
| 9781857231588
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| 4.12
| 170,253
| Jun 1973
| 2000
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really liked it
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Rather iconic Arthur C. Clarke, only a little less so than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically it's about a giant alien spaceship that shows up in our sol Rather iconic Arthur C. Clarke, only a little less so than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically it's about a giant alien spaceship that shows up in our solar system and the team that explores it. It was rather refreshing to have, for once, a crew that was competent. Unlike, say, Prometheus where every single crew member was horribly incompetent. Artificial conflict is eugh. Eye-rolling. None of that here. As I said, it's refreshing to have a book where random melodrama wasn't the vehicle of suspense. Just good ol' fashioned mystery and exploration and wonder. Also, apparently the other books in the trilogy aren't very good. So I think I'll stop with this one! ...more |
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Jul 28, 2015
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Jun 30, 2015
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Jun 20, 2015
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Apr 29, 2015
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Apr 06, 2015
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Mar 18, 2015
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Mar 18, 2015
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Jan 18, 2015
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it was amazing
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Jan 18, 2015
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it was amazing
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Jan 18, 2015
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it was amazing
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Jan 17, 2015
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Dec 19, 2014
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Oct 19, 2014
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Sep 24, 2014
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Aug 26, 2014
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Aug 24, 2014
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Mar 24, 2014
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Dec 28, 2013
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