A solid book that won both the Hugo and Nebula and was one of the first books to bring up the theory of multiple dimensions with any sort of scientifiA solid book that won both the Hugo and Nebula and was one of the first books to bring up the theory of multiple dimensions with any sort of scientific plausibility. Isaac Asimov knew the science, and he does not shy away from it here. This is hard sci-fi....more
And boy did that feel good. While I approached The Stand (as I do every book) with exuberance, each successive night my joy grew lRetired on page 245.
And boy did that feel good. While I approached The Stand (as I do every book) with exuberance, each successive night my joy grew less, until I was slogging through it. Finally I admitted to myself this was one relationship that simply wasn't going to work out.
But as with any other break-up, I am left asking Why? Why did it turn out this way? Is it my fault? Or is it the book's fault?
As for whose fault, who knows? But after much pondering, I did finally reach an overarching conclusion for why The Stand felt like such a dull, plodding exercise: this book is so predictable.
To begin with, the characters: The Rock Star acts like The Rock Star, sleeping with women, blowing money. The Country Boy is a good ol' feller, one of those strong, silent cowboy types. When we encounter one of a pair of killers, I was at first really excited. I thought that the group of survivors was going to have some bad elements, some unstable and potentially treacherous additions. But no. Instead the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' are separated into two different camps. It's not that I didn't like the characters, exactly; rather, they bored me.
One of Kurt Vonnegut's rules of creative writing is that "Every character should want something, even if it is a glass of water." I sometimes jokingly explain that's why Buddhist monks don't make good characters: they have mastered desire. The characters of The Stand are not Buddhist monks but none of them wants anything beyond simple survival. Which is not a driving force. Survival is what I term a 'negative' force. Survival is not the embracing of life. Rather, it is the fleeing of death. Love, on the other hand, is a 'positive' force. People drive toward love.
The issue, at least by page 250, is that all the major characters have failed to demonstrate any sort of positive force. Realistic, perhaps; compelling, no. I suspect this is because they have only interacted with minor, disposable characters: No character relationship survives the apocalypse.
This, in stark contrast to, say, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" where the protag has a strong relationship with his son and who very much desires something: the survival not of himself, but of his son. (And that's why The Road, despite its very very spare prose, is vastly more compelling than The Stand).
This lack of relationship-building could be forgivable if other elements of the book were brilliant. They are not. The 'killer' virus Captain Trips is as boring as can be: simply a souped up version of the flu. The 'horror' of the book is, so far, nothing beyond a large number of corpses everywhere. The prose itself is workmanlike at best - it felt, to me, mostly like a vehicle to get characters from point A to point B.
All said: there is much better post-apocalyptic fiction out there....more
*Raymond Chandler's noir mystery The Long Goodbye *William Gibson's Neuromancer *Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness *Fitzgerald's Curious CaseIngredients:
*Raymond Chandler's noir mystery The Long Goodbye *William Gibson's Neuromancer *Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness *Fitzgerald's Curious Case of Benjamin Button *Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers *Joe Haldeman's The Forever War *Some 19th century poetical affectation
Blend.
Spice with hard sci-fi jargon like 'farcaster' and 'time-debt', and a healthy dose of literary allusion.
Wrap in the structure of The Canterbury Tales.
Bake for 500 pages.
What do you have? Hyperion!
As every other reviewer has mentioned, Hyperion is structured like The Canterbury Tales. Six novellas within the larger narrative, each giving a different perspective on the universe, the ruling council of the Hegemony, the 'Web' of worlds, and the murderous God-like Shrike that dwells on the planet of Hyperion.
In the old days, authors were obsessed with 'voice' and it was believed that a well-read individual should be able to identify the author of a text, just by the style. For example, I might be able to pick up anything by Hemingway and, without knowing he was the author, nevertheless be able to recognize, 'Ah, Yes! This is Hemingway!' These days authors are less obsessed with creating a single monolithic voice and instead demonstrating their flexibility. Dan Simmons does just that in Hyperion: each of these stories is told in a different style.
While some are better than others, I don't know that anyone can deny that the feat itself - this skilled writing of different styles - is anything less than impressive.
My only real complaint is that the pacing suffers. Novellas are structured different than novels. It's not just a mere matter of length, or of word count. That'd be like saying a train is simply an oversized car, but of course it's not. The considerations and engineering are totally different.
Hyperion tries to be both car and train, and it suffers for it. Each story ends at the climax, and though each pilgrim's climax will be resolved when they reach their final destination, we don't get to see that until the very end (and by 'very end' I mean the next book: Hyperion & Fall of Hyperion are very clearly a single tome, simply split down the middle). So basically, we read the novella, reach the climax point... and then STOP! Full break! Time to do the next novella. It's exhausting.
It's like if you were to go to a fancy restaurant and be served a six course meal. As each course comes out, the waiter describes it in delectable detail: so-and-so exotic fish was personally raised in a diamond-encrusted glass tank by mute monks who have dedicated their lives to pisciculture. Once ready to be eaten, the fish was flown from that tank to the restaurant at Mach 3 by fighter jets to guarantee freshness. The chef, meanwhile, has been trained by culinary ninjas and cooks blind-folded so that his sense of smell is at its peak. Finally, after this long introduction, your waiter places the meal before you and you're like OH BOY I CAN'T WAIT TO EAT THIS. You spear a morsel of the fish with your fork but... just as it reaches your lips... The waiter says NO! And brings the next course out and begins his next spiel. And you're like okay, good things come to those who wait, but by the end, you're exhausted and you just want something good to eat.
Which isn't to say that the stories are unsatisfying. Each story is, to some degree, fully contained and has its own miniature climax and resolution. But the reading of Hyperion is not like the reading of most other novels - it's not like riding out a storm, adrenaline and crash and thunder til the sun finally comes out. Rather, it's gentler, waves flowing in, and then flowing out. I took each story separately: reading one and then putting it down, and returning a few days later to get the next. It is in this way that Hyperion should be read....more
Not quite as aimless as the previous tome A Feast For Crows, but still suffers from Stuck-Plot-Syndrome. I've noticed this happens rather often for epNot quite as aimless as the previous tome A Feast For Crows, but still suffers from Stuck-Plot-Syndrome. I've noticed this happens rather often for epic fantasy series. I think authors get to this point where they're as bound by the rules (and characterizations) of the world they've created as you and I might be bound by the laws of physics or of time or of society.
Let me explain: when you're first writing a book, all the characters have a mutable characterization; if you need to alter them slightly to make the plot flow more smoothly, you can do so. If you need to alter the rules of the world to better fit the plot, you can do so. But after you've written 3 or 4 books with those characters and those worlds, you can no longer make such adjustments. Which isn't to say that it's impossible to both maintain consistency AND have a good plot. Rather it becomes increasingly difficult to do so - and successful authors tend to obsess less about such things than as-yet unpublished authors might.
You can see that happening here with A Dance With Dragons. Several characters' chapters become little more than boring travelogues. La la la, today we saw a giant turtle. It was pretty. La la la. Very few characters manage to accomplish anything at all.
Yet it's still an enjoyable read. There's something terribly rich and awesome about George RR Martin's world. It feels so lived-in, so real. And of course the commentary on the costs of war, and the politics of war, are as astute and sickening (but of course you can't turn away) as ever.
I think I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much had I not read the entire thing while enduring the terrible pain of two ear infections. That might not make sense, but I felt like, with my pain, I was really getting the full 'effect' of what it'd be like to live in such a sordid, grimy world as the one that Martin has depicted....more
Though many (that is, most) other reviewers found the first book in this series, Old Man's War, to be superior, I have to disagree.
The Ghost Brigades Though many (that is, most) other reviewers found the first book in this series, Old Man's War, to be superior, I have to disagree.
The Ghost Brigades essentially contains everything that book one contained: interesting (science) ideas, solid plotting, functional but snappy writing. But with some of the more immature nonsense removed. I also found it to be more complex.
There's always a temptation, I think, to make alien creatures just plain evil. Have them eat babies and enjoy the flesh of humans and yadda yadda. The temptation makes sense because it makes for easy writing, easy villains. But reading about such villains only allows a mindless sort of enjoyment. That's largely how Old Man's War played out.
In The Ghost Brigades, things were a little more interesting. The primarily villain was not even an alien species, but a rogue human scientist! And the aliens themselves were somewhat humanized (an ironic statement, I know).
All of which made this one superior to Old Man's Brigade. Which is why I will continue, with equal parts excitement and reluctance, on with this series. Scalzi's got a talent; it would be churlish of anyone to deny it. I just hope he chooses to mature it, rather than fall back on some of the more childish elements in his earlier works....more
The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God's Eye, which is considered by many to be the finest first contact sci-fi written.
Unfortunately, theThe Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God's Eye, which is considered by many to be the finest first contact sci-fi written.
Unfortunately, the Gripping Hand lacks much of that first contact mystery / thrill that the Mote possessed. In lieu of that, we do have some admittedly neato space battles and economic / political maneuvering. But as fun as all that is, The Gripping Hand is strangely... soap opera. And I don't mean that in a good way. I mean that in the sense of melodramatic posturing and overwrought character interaction. Niven & Pournelle are clearly more comfortable describing the dance of starships than they are the dance of people. The ever-shifting relationships of the human characters felt weird.
I think if you read, and like, The Mote, then this guy is worth reading, just to wrap it up. But outside of that... well......more
Whenever I review science fiction books, I always feel like I have to justify the genre as a whole. Never you mind that many of our blockbuster films Whenever I review science fiction books, I always feel like I have to justify the genre as a whole. Never you mind that many of our blockbuster films are science fiction or that 'science fiction' has inspired the engineers & scientists who created the very technology that you are using to read this post.
Never you mind that. Science fiction books are GENRE books, and therefore never as worthy as a Great and Wondrous Book of Literature. You'll find them but rarely in English classrooms.
To which I say: Bollocks.
I'm a teacher. (Young) readers of science fiction are pretty rare. Sometimes they're even closet readers. But grant me ten minutes of conversation, and I can always tell who is a reader of books and who is not. Readers of sci-fi have ideas for how things might be. Not just for their own lives - which is part and parcel of being human - but for society in general. That is, readers of sci-fi have vision. As Ray Bradbury said: science fiction is the fiction of ideas.
So, yes, The Mote in God's Eye has spaceships and forcefields and alien creatures and all that delightfully fun stuff, but it's not about all that. That may be its modus operandi, but it is not its raison d'etre. Instead, Mote tells the story of mankind's first interaction with an alien species who, by the principles of evolution, are similar to us, but also different.
Which I think is cool. Alien cultures inevitably serve as foils for humanity. In other genres, characters might act as foils to the protagonist. In sci-fi, we have foils to the entirety of humanity! (Take that, Charles Dickens!) When alien cultures are peaceful, it is to demonstrate that humanity is bloodthirsty and violent. When alien cultures are vicious, it is to show how, despite our violent nature, we still have a great capacity for creation.
So The Mote in God's Eye is about that. It's about first contact. It's told from multiple perspectives (including the aliens) to develop a full understanding of the alien culture.
Which I personally find to be an interesting puzzle. That is, I kept wondering: how accurate is this book? I mean, yes it's ALL false, but how accurate does it feel? For example, let me ask you a question: why do (most) women not have (much) facial hair? You take it for granted, but if you were an author creating an alien species, you would have to ponder the complex pathways of psychology, evolution, and biology to figure it out. Should you do so erroneously, then you have created an unbelievable fiction and done a disservice to your readers.
Ultimately, I believe they've done a fine job of it. I enjoyed my time, had some good thoughts, and there's not much more you can ask for than that....more
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It won the 1961 Hugo for Best Novel, which might suggest its goodness, but if you're like me, yA Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It won the 1961 Hugo for Best Novel, which might suggest its goodness, but if you're like me, you don't put much stock in the Hugo or Nebula. After all, Connie Willis' Blackout/All Clear won both in 2011, and that remains one of the worst books I've ever read (see review).
A Canticle for Leibowitz is, however, quite good. The phrase "post apocalypse" evokes images of leather-clad warriors and mutant cannibals and warlords and glassy deserts and deadly battles over gas or food or an oasis. Leibowitz has all of that but it exist only on the periphery. Instead, it focuses on the Order of Leibowitz, a monastery founded with the goal of the preservation of knowledge following the mass destruction after WWIII (the 'Deluge of Flame'.)
It's split into three sections, each 600 years apart, and covers many miles of thematic terrain: science vs. religion; the cyclical nature of history; man's repeated folly and the inevitability of self-destruction; and so on. That might make it sound a very heavy novel, but it's not bleak at all. It's funny for one thing. For another, the monks themselves, from abbots to the guest Poet to the humble Brother Francis and his Illuminated Circuit Diagram, are all relatable characters. Flawed but attempting to do their best. By the end, you begin to get a very lived-in, homey sense of the monastery, and you will know it quite well.
This humanity, despite the bleakness of overall plot, gives rise to an interesting conclusion: we all know that we will die. Maybe it will be tomorrow and quash our current dreams or maybe it will be forty years hence after we have accomplished all we have set out to do. Either way, we must end. Yet still, day by day, we carry on. Can society not do the same?
If society is doomed to destruction - which I believe is the inevitable result of the creation of nuclear weapons - does that mean we should all give up? No, of course not. The inevitability of war & terrorism no more renders civilization pointless than the inevitability of death renders a single individual's life pointless....more
Stranger in a Strange Land is the purest science fiction book I've ever read. It may not have laser beams or rocket ships but it does have aliens and Stranger in a Strange Land is the purest science fiction book I've ever read. It may not have laser beams or rocket ships but it does have aliens and alien culture. That is, Stranger in a Strange Land strives for what great science-fiction should always strive for: taking the reader on a journey of perspective. From the comfortable outlook of our daily mundanity to one far-removed. Sure, this is ostensibly the goal for all fiction: here learn what it's like to be a lumberjack from Bolivia with a penchant for poetry or a post-Victorian mademoiselle searching for a husband. But these are human people, not so far removed in time and place as we might think. Science fiction attempts an even larger gap, in which the distance-gap is measured not in miles but in light-years and the time-gap measured not in centuries but in eons. And in the case of Stranger in a Strange Land, the protagonist is human only in genetics:
Valentine Michael Smith was raised in Mars amongst the Martians. He knows nothing of humanity. He does not understand love or laughter or religion. He has to learn everything from scratch, and we get to learn it right along beside him.
If you can get past the rampant sexism (e.g. the line: 'Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault' said by a female character) and the homophobia and other cultural artifacts of the 1960s, there is a great wealth of thought to be found in this book. It's a very pure approach to understanding humanity and what makes humanity tick. You'll find thoughts on the male<>female duality that fuels much of our culture, some biting satire on media and government and religion, even an attempt to shake the 'traditional' pillars of society like monogamy and marriage and the pursuit of wealth as the American dream. I personally didn't buy some of this, especially the libertarian/hippy approach to life, but that's OK. As the author himself said, the book is an "an invitation to think--not to believe." And in that it was successful.
--
The above is my review but for those inclined, I wanted to add a little extra, especially what I mean by 'pure.' What I found really enjoyable about this book is that the protag Mike approaches everything with a clean, free, unbiased mind. Which made it really easy to gather and formulate my own thoughts on the topics which are discussed/approached in the book.
At least at first. Unfortunately, this purist approach was, I felt, eventually corrupted. I give Heinlein top marks for sustaining it as long he did (longer than any other book I've read), but as soon as more sexual elements are introduced, his own tendencies as a male and a human begin to show.
The turning point, for me, is when Mike finally 'groks' (an all-encompassing word that can best be translated to mean 'ingest' or to fully understand) laughter and people. He claims that laughter exists only in response to pain; his regular ol' human companion Jill is unable to come up with any examples in which this didn't happen. REALLY? Laughter is often cruel and in response to pain, but it is far more than that. Laughter derives from irony, a play between what happens and what is expected. I laugh all the time, on a daily basis, about things that are not painful. The other day one of my fifth grade students asked me what blood type was. It was such a strange question that I laughed. Was my laughter in order to cover up pain? No.
Unfortunately, it is this 'grokking' of laughter that then leads Michael to 'grok' humans.
Which I believe is impossible.
Of late, I have been pondering how the larger, 'macro' behavior of humans and other objects in general can be tied back to behavior on the quantum level. In quantum mechanics, there's a well known principle called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which at its lowest level means we can either know the velocity of an electron or its position but not both (that's because in order to 'discover' the electron, we would need to hit it with energy of some type, which would alter its velocity. We extrapolate this to mean that the act of observation will always alter the behavior of that which is observed). Upon pondering why the mis-'grokking' bothered me so, I realized:
Historians, poets, writers, politicians, philosophers, and even the old granny who runs the local grocer all attempt to define humanity in some way. Just what is it that makes a person human? A soul? A genetic code? Hatred? Violence? Hope? Love? Yet if you take the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle* and carry it on up to the macro-level, it's easy to see that humanity is undefinable. Because what it means to be human is not a static thing. Every day our technology changes, our society changes, our economy changes. You can look at the past and say, 'Ah this is what it meant to be human then.' Or maybe even look at the present and say, 'Ah this is what it meant to be human today.'
But humans are not creatures merely of the past, or of the present. We are creatures of the future, which is one of the many reasons why we are the ultra-apex predator on the planet. At any given day, you might live in the past, or the present, or the future. No philosopher or poet or cab driver can know all of these things at once and without knowing them all at once, the 'definition' of humanity will remain elusive.
*I'm well aware this is pseudo-science and invoking a scientific principle doesn't make my point any more valid; I merely brought it up to provide a nice framework with which to 'grok' my meaning....more
Old Man's War was a fairly enjoyable read, which is amusing because of how much it betrays its basic premise:
The title, Old Man's War, comes from the Old Man's War was a fairly enjoyable read, which is amusing because of how much it betrays its basic premise:
The title, Old Man's War, comes from the fact that, sometime far in the future, the Colonial Soldiers who defend humanity out amongst the stars have a minimum recruitment age of 75! The notion being that veterans of life have a whole mess of skills and wisdom they can bring to the table. Just gotta give em young bodies again (and there's some cool science on how that's done).
The problem, however, is that no one comes across as the least bit wise. In fact, this book's voice feels very immature. Not surprising, I suspect, given that the first chapter of another Scalzi book - Android's Dream - is a very long fart joke.
You ought to appreciate the boyish enthusiasm that might suggest, which after all is more or less as intrinsic to sci-fi as rain is to noir, but it makes me wonder if author and premise were somewhat at odds with each other.
There's also some amateurish stuff in here - like a massive front-loading of exposition that most agents/editors will turn down lickety split.
Buuut I said, it was an enjoyable read, with only a few speed bumps to slow you down. Good enough, anyway, that I might pick up books 2 and 3 in the series.
*Note: I did pick up the next books and found that I enjoyed them even more than Old Man's War. Much of the complaints of immaturity I leveled against Old Man's War are absent from The Ghost Brigades & The Last Colony....more
The book was written in tandem with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, which I think is rather unique and interesting.
As for the book itself, it wasThe book was written in tandem with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, which I think is rather unique and interesting.
As for the book itself, it was enjoyable, more enjoyable than the film in my opinion, though I wish I had watched the movie before reading the book. Ambiguity is the movie's lifeblood and the book tends to clear all that up.
Of particular interest is how much time Arthur C. Clarke devoted to explaining the mundane realities of space travel, such as the zero g bathroom or the delicate bone structure & atrophied muscles of those who have grown up in a low-gravity environment. Like all good sci-fi, 2001 A Space Odyssey is more about ideas than it is about space battles, though there's enough malice and conflict in here to make it an enjoyable read.
But if you don't like sci-fi, I would probably avoid....more
The Kraken Wakes, despite its really cool cover, has nothing to do with giant squids. Seriously, I picked that up and read all the way to the end, jusThe Kraken Wakes, despite its really cool cover, has nothing to do with giant squids. Seriously, I picked that up and read all the way to the end, just WAITING for the appearance of the giant squid promised on the cover. There was no giant squid.
Who does that? Who promises giant squids and then reneges on that deal? It's like handing a plastic ice cream cone to a child. He'll be like, OH YEAH ICE CREAM. Until he tries to bite it and discovers that, nope, it's just plastic.
BUT ANYWAY.
This book was OK. Without any spoilage, it's a bit in the vein of War of the Worlds, in the sense that mysterious aliens invade and humans suck it up at fighting back. In this case, the aliens exist in the DEEP SEA! Down in those trenches.
My real problem is that the portrayal of humanity's response was so unrealistic. The entirety of the world was vastly incompetent. Which, OK, if this was a matter of forging peace, I could accept that. But this was WAR we're talking about. Anyone who ever suggests that humanity is bad at WAR... frankly doesn't know what they're talking about. There's a reason we're the apex predator on planet earth and it's not because we invented the iPhone. It's because we love killing shit and we love creating tools that help us kill shit.
The lion's share of suspense in The Kraken Wakes only exists because all of humanity is incompetent at war. We'll fight off some bizarre invasion of sea tanks and then be like, "Oh okay. We defended the attack. We'll just hang out for five years now, waiting for the next attack, doing absolutely nothing."
Every single story in this collection is superior to those of the first book and each reminds me, in some way, of the shorts of Poe or Lovecraft or evEvery single story in this collection is superior to those of the first book and each reminds me, in some way, of the shorts of Poe or Lovecraft or even the sort of X-Files-esque monster-a-week mindset that characterizes most non-drama/comedy television.
While those stories contained in book #1 (Swords and Deviltry) are rather standard fantasy fare, these are much more original and interesting. The heroes fight against various evil dwellings, including a living tower; they encounter their own sunken island, very much in the vein of Lovecraft's Cthulu; they fight various incarnations of Death himself and other evil gods and goddesses. They seek after a great many jewels though, of course, rarely succeed in acquiring them. Just as noir crime thrillers have taught me to never trust a beautiful women, so too did these stories teach me to never trust a beautiful jewel! Always strings attached, you know.
The stories really do come across more as idea explorations than fantasy pulp, and they're the better for it.
With that said, fantasy short stories feel very dissatisfying to me, in much the same way as I recently explained how comic books feels very dissatisfying. It never actually feels like Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser are getting anywhere. Like they're running in place, y'know? A whole lot of fighting and sharing of witty thoughts to no end. That's the nature of short stories, sure, yet one of the things I most enjoy about the 'Epic' mode of fantasy writing (as opposed to Leiber's sword and sorcery) is the world building and the sense of the journey. Fantasy short stories, at least these, are the broken-record version of a journey. Each one begins with a quick, brief intro of Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser and then they're off, in a quick and entertaining little jaunt that nevertheless doesn't provide any character change at all.
So they are well-written, yes, and deserve their four star. But I don't know that I would ever recommend them, and I don't know that I'll be picking up any more of Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser....more
These books are considered by many to be the fathers of "sword and sorcery" so I was rather excited to pick them up.
I'm less excited now. While there These books are considered by many to be the fathers of "sword and sorcery" so I was rather excited to pick them up.
I'm less excited now. While there wasn't anything glaringly wrong or bad about them, they were thoroughly ho hum. Origin stories for Fafhrd the Barbarian and the Gray Mouser. Nothing about them really stood out. Not the language, not the characters, not the setting, not the suspense, not the thrills. It was even a little strange that the Gray Mouser's origin story casts him as a wizard... but he never ever uses magic?
All told, my response was: "Hrm alright."
With that said, supposedly these are some of the weakest stories in the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, and, having read the first story of book #2, I'd have to agree. It was much better. So this might be one of those things that, if you really like sword & sorcery shenanigans, you just have to get through in order to make it to the better stuff....more
I wonder what it is about dream sequences in stories that makes them so dissatisfying. There is the obvious sense of feeling cheated; the reader/vieweI wonder what it is about dream sequences in stories that makes them so dissatisfying. There is the obvious sense of feeling cheated; the reader/viewer builds up a relationship with a character. If it turns out that relationship was built on false premises, on nonsense, we feel conned, mocked even. Our trust in the author was broken.
Yet at the same time, what does it matter? The story within a book or a film is more or less just a higher level dream sequence, isn't it?
The Three Stigmata is full of PKD hallmarks. Sentient appliances. Precogs. And the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, hallucination and sense. Yet while the other PKDs I've read managed to maintain a life-line back to reality, The Three Stigmata sets us adrift.
The major gist of the Three Stigmata is this: the Earth is a harsh place to live. In his own act of precognition, PKD foresaw the global warming epidemic that we would face. It's so hot that you can't go outside without a proper suit. As such, the UN (implied to be the only government left standing) has begun drafting citizens to become colonists on other planets, notably Mars.
Mars sucks. Nothing grows. Telepathic jackals feed on colonists. In order to combat this dreariness, colonists use a dollhouse and a drug called Can-D (get it?) to transport themselves into the better life of Perky Pat, the doll of the dollhouse. If that sounds a little trippy, it is. But it's not all that much of a stretch. Don't we do the same thing with television today? Live vicariously through others?
But then Palmer Eldritch arrives with an alternative to Can-D, a drug he's calling Chew-Z, and that's when the reader is shortly set adrift.
There comes a point, about mid-way, that we can no longer be sure what is, or is not, reality. You read on, thinking it to be clarified, but it never is, not quite. What is real, what is fiction? We don't know.
That was PKD's point and it was aptly done.
Yet when I open a book, I am not seeking an open-ended experience. What I like most about books is that they end. No matter what horrible things might happen to our protagonists, we know that it will be over for us. Even the happiness we might feel when trapped within the pages will eventually go away. It's not like life. It doesn't keep going on and on. Our happinesses don't grow wearied and atrophied. We don't have to replace them with new ones. A book is a self-contained unit, a story with a clear beginning and a clear end. It always begins on page 1 and always ends on page X.
So I take issue with the blurring of reality in Three Stigmata. It was not satisfying to me. I don't need a book to tell me how subjective consciousness and reality is. Every single day of my life tells me that.
It was a good book, for all of that, but I'd take PKD's Ubik over Three Stigmata any day o' the week....more
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. WI 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:
I would if I could, Eileen thought, but while she'd been intent on taking care of her evacuees, Samuels had boarded up all the doors except the one in the kitchen, moved his chair in front of that, and nailed shut the windows in every room but the ballroom, which was always full of children. And she only had ten more days. If no one else came down with the measles.
But if they did, surely Oxford would attempt to pull her out. She was surprised they hadn't already. Now that most of the children had recovered and Binnie was out of danger, Una and Mrs. Bascombe could easily handle the situation but there was no sign of the retrieval team and no message from them.
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
Nobody writes like PKD. Perhaps because so very few people can, on one hand, be absolutely crazy (and he was), yet on the other hand possess the sheerNobody writes like PKD. Perhaps because so very few people can, on one hand, be absolutely crazy (and he was), yet on the other hand possess the sheer willpower to wrestle those visions under control and then frame them in paper and ink in a way that other, non-crazy people, can understand.
That's what I dig about PKD (and Ubik in particular) so much: the normalcy of its abnormality. Ubik is full of otherworldly sci-fi elements: telepaths, precogs - people who can see the future, and other mind powers. There are those who fight against them - the members of the Society - such as main character Joe Chip's employer, Runciter. There are funeral parlors which keep dead relatives in a state of half-life in which they can still communicate. It's all wild and crazy but it's written in a way that makes it seem completely normal. That's because I think, for PKD, it was normal. That was how he viewed the world: through this strange lens in which the future could be foretold, in which people's minds COULD be read.
There is, of course, an awesome story here too. There's some twists, there's some existential drama: how do we know which is reality and which is dream, told in a non-cliche manner. There's some great futuristic atmosphere, such as the coin-operated appliances (the door requires five cents or it refuses to open).
Honestly, I don't know what else to say. Most people are familiar with PkD's movie-books, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or the short story Minority Report, but Ubik is, far and away, my favorite of his. Must read, if you are a fan of what Ray Bradbury called "the fiction of ideas."...more
Attempting to describe a great book is a bit like attempting to describe the beauty of a sunrise: It was red and stuff was glowing orange and yellow. Attempting to describe a great book is a bit like attempting to describe the beauty of a sunrise: It was red and stuff was glowing orange and yellow. It just doesn't translate. Which is an interesting thing to my mind because OF COURSE a sunset doesn't translate. It's photons and light beams and refraction and fire and energy, no mere words. But shouldn't a book? It IS mere words.
But it's not. It's the fatigue you feel at the end of a work day when you recline in your favorite chair and open the book to the furthest dog-ear. Or the noise of skateboarder grinding on a nearby rail in your favorite park and your annoyance at the distraction. It's the slow imperceptible slanting of light through window blinds as you read the day away. It is the memories that the book invokes. It is the new ideas that the book inspires.
This is not true of all books. Some books are mere words. There are characters and conflicts and the occasional witty metaphor and it all resolves and the person who finishes reading this book is the same person who started it.
The Farthest Shore is not such a book. It tells the superificial story about Sparrowhawk - now Archmage of Roke - and a young prince, Arren, as they travel about earthsea in an attempt to figure out why magic is going extinct. This story has everything you could hope for in a fantasy. There's dragons. Huts made of dragon bone. There's an exotic peoples, the People of the Open Sea, who live on giant rafts. There's a land of death into which our heroes must travel. There's thieves and scoundrels and slavers and a corrupt powerful mage.
But none of those are why I give this book five stars. They had to be there to earn the five stars, yes, but they are like the wrapping paper on a present. The presentation matters, it does, but the core fulfills. And the core of The Farthest Shore is strong. Told from Arren's point of view, this is a bildungsroman (that's a fancy word for coming-of-age). It talks about a life of being vs. a life of doing whether suggesting that either is the better. It confronts evil vs good and speaks of it in fresh language, not as yin and yang, nor as black and white. Arren says: "I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent; they kill because they must.”
Ged responds: “That is why nothing else can resist us. Only one thing in the world can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it."
It confronts, too, the strangeness of immortality, the inherent despair of believing or needing an afterlife. Such a belief is not forced upon you: this is not a pedantic tale. But it is there, if you care to see it. The great evil of this book is the result of people thirsting after eternal life. But as Ged says: "How can one appreciate life without death?" Indeed, implicit in the idea of a heavenly afterlife, is the notion that this life, our life here on earth, needs something more to be complete. But I do not think that is so. I believe when I live, I am living, and when I die that I shall be dead, and that is good enough for me.
It is this complexity - combined the grandness of adventure - that leads me to suggest that this one of my very favorite books. Read it?...more
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