"It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe Updated review after a re-read in November 2019.
---
“Change is freedom, change is life."
"It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed."
"There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”
This novel will for ever be one of my favorite books: when graceful, intelligent prose and brave, nuanced ideas collide into one great story that intertwines the personal and the political, you get a treasure like “The Dispossessed”. This book jumped at the top of my favorites list mere seconds after I finished the last line.
Shevek was born and raised on the anarchist colony of Anarres, and while he has always embraced the principles on which his society was founded, as his work in physics becomes more complicated, challenging and promising, he begins to see cracks in the utopic system his ancestors created. A visit to the twin (but capitalist) planet Urras brings into sharp relief the differences between the two worlds, but also brings to light more commonalities than Shevek had expected. He soon finds himself caught in a high stake political game that would seek to make him the figurehead of a new revolution – or let him take the fall for its failure, depending on who has the upper hand.
LeGuin built her story carefully, and the two narratives, one set on Urras and one on Annarres, feed each other and collide at the perfect moment to bring the story together flawlessly. Brilliant narrative structure aside, this book is simply stuffed with beautiful and thought-provoking passages I had to stop and re-read a few times.
It would be a gross over-simplification to say that this is a sci-fi book about communism. Yes, it is that, but it is so much more. It is a nuanced, idealistic, heartbreaking, gentle and extremely intelligent novel. The subtitle “Ambiguous Utopia” is perfect: a book like that challenges the reader without ever trying to preach to them, letting them make their own minds up about the fictional anarcho-communist planet of Annares and its relation to its capitalist home world of Urras.
Shevek is one of the most beautifully rendered characters I’ve encountered. Stuck between both worlds, he struggles with the philosophies he lived his whole life by, the advantages of the new world he is discovering and his longing for what he left behind. He is flawed and lost, but also incredibly wise and brave, with a strong sense of compassion and integrity. I just loved him. And unexpectedly, I found his relationship with his partner Takver to be deeply romantic.
Le Guin definitely preached to the choir in terms of politics with me, I admit it. But I admired the fearlessness with which she chose to point out that whatever system of wealth distribution you live in, people will try to exploit each other, people will bully and ostracize those who don’t fit quite right with their herd, people will feel jealously and hatred. People on Annares share the wealth and the work, but they are still humans, with all the good and negative connotations that entails. This is why her utopia is ambiguous: human nature remains no matter what system you place it in and while you can dream of giving people a better life by giving them a system or code to get rid of inequalities, you can never remove the wild card of “people and how they will behave” from the equation.
I believe this book to be a classic, and I believe it completely transcends the science-fiction label. It is nothing less than a great work of art in my eyes and I recommend it to everyone.
"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere."...more
Updated review after a second reading in November 2018.
--
"I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system."
Ms. Valente wrote the kind of bookUpdated review after a second reading in November 2018.
--
"I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system."
Ms. Valente wrote the kind of book I wish I could write, and for that I am both in awe of her, and kinda pissed off. Seriously, the woman took some of my all-time favorite things, chucked them in a blender and then wrote this book.
A documentary film maker goes missing while she is shooting her final project, about a mysteriously deserted colonial settlement on Venus. Her story is pieced together through movies, depositions, hard-boiled detective style remembrances and her own “video diary” entries. It sounds choppy and yes, you must pay attention to the dates of the various entries to not get confused, but Catherynne Valente knows just how to weave all these elements together to form a beautiful, completely original story.
The world Valente crafted for “Radiance” is an alternate Earth where the Golden Age of Hollywood has remained one of silent black and white movies because of patent wars, where humanity has explored the solar system and colonized all its planets, where the “milk” of mysterious Venusian creatures known as callow whales is what enables humans to experience space travel safely, and where making documentary movies is considered “genre” because everyone is so obsessed with lurid fantasy that it's now the mainstream. Of course, that can be too rich for some readers’ blood, and I can’t really blame them. But I am an absolute glutton for this deco-punk phantasmagoria.
I enjoyed this novel immensely, and while it is not perfect, it has a fairy tale/sci-fi/what-the-hell-is-going-on vibe to it that just blew me away. I kept thinking of the Georges Meliès movies, the exaggerated movements and expressions, the surreal plot lines and beautiful cardboard sets… I loved the non-linear, patchwork flow of the book and the alternate history where inter-planetary travel is just as H.G. Wells might have imagined it.
The narrative is a postmodern mosaic (I seem to be reading a lot of those lately…) and its a colorful, glittery literary puzzle, and it is also a love letter to silent films, to a certain dramatic aesthetic that went out of fashion but for which Valente clearly still pines.
It is dizzying, occasionally frustrating; but I also found it dazzling and exuberant. This is not really an escapist read, it’s a book that you need to chew on a bit. I’ve come to find that those are the books I usually end up enjoying the most, the challenging ones, the ones that require patience and brains.
I enjoyed (and probably understood) this novel even more the second time around! If you are a fan of Valente, or are looking for a book that’s unlike anything you’ve read before, this might just be what you are looking for!...more
I had read “The Island of Doctor Moreau” years ago, and while I remember the broad strokes of the story, I was fuzzy on the details, as this classic oI had read “The Island of Doctor Moreau” years ago, and while I remember the broad strokes of the story, I was fuzzy on the details, as this classic of horror/sci-fi is more of a novella than a novel, I figured it could make a quick book to read during a busy weekend.
A man named Prendick is the sole survivor of a shipwreck, but the boat that rescues him is an odd one: it carries a strange collection of wild animals, in the care of man named Montgomery, who heavily hints at a disgraced past in London. Prendick finds himself stranded with Montgomery and his odd menagerie on a small island, inhabited only by the strange Doctor Moreau, and even stranger creatures that aren’t quite human, but not quite animals either. Prendick soon realizes those creatures are the grotesque results of Moreau’s experiments, and that they struggle not to give in to their most animalistic instincts.
I had completely forgotten how violent and bloody this book is, especially considering it was published in 1896. Anyone who has a hard time reading about violence towards animals should steer clear of this one! While those details made Prendick’s story unpleasant, I found myself frustrated with the book for other reasons.
We never really understand the sinister Doctor’s ultimate goal with his strange vivisection experiments. Is creating those bizarre creatures an end in and of itself, or did he seek to accomplish a bigger end game? We also never really know what the event that caused Montgomery’s downfall actually is, as Victorian quaintness forces Wells to simply hint coyly at events and deed too terrible to speak – yet where is that quaintness when it comes to describing Prendick’s disgust at the sight of the Beast Folk?
I do not plan of doing a deep analysis of the book and the context in which it was written, but it does reek of white colonialist elitism, and of course the violence against animals is atrocious to read. While these elements did not age well, the fundamental idea of the thin line between human and animal remains something we ponder to this day. No to mention the unethical scientific experiments and discovery at the cost of untold suffering… There is a lot to unearth with a book like this one, and in some ways, it is Wells’ nod to “Frankenstein” – as it is a story of scientific curiosity gone terribly wrong.
My biggest issue with this book is actually that it felt rushed: I wanted to know more about Moreau, his past and his terrible work, more about Prendick and the how’s and why’s of him ending up there, more about the Beast Folk and how they came to be organized in that lose social structure they created. An extra hundred pages would have improved this book greatly.
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” –“A book is a loaded gun.” – Ray Bradbury
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” – John Waters
This is going to be a review/rant and there might be spoilers.
One day, I was at the hair salon getting my mop splattered in bright pink hair dye. I can’t wear headphones with all that colored goop on my head, so obviously, I always bring a book and try to ignore the (usually) loud and (often) inane conversations I overhear as I wait for the color to set. Alas, hair salons are rarely temples of highbrow philosophy. I think I was reading an Atwood novel on that particular evening, when I overheard one of the hairdressers talking to her client. She was saying something like: “I can’t see the point of reading. I mean, if I have some free time, I don’t want to have to think, you know?”. As luck would have it, my hairdresser chose that moment to offer me a gin and tonic. I asked for a double, and homicide was averted (we often fault alcohol for the bad behavior it can result in; I say give it more credit for all the times it helped some people avoid beating an idiot to a pulp with a hairdryer).
I don’t know that other hairdresser well enough to pass judgment, but those words made me tense up and clench my hands into fists. To me, her words meant: “Why think when you can be satisfied by entertainment? Why think when (unreliable) media give you pre-chewed (potentially erroneous) information on important topics? Why think when someone else might do it for you?” I bet she’d have been fine in Bradbury’s imaginary near-future America. Content. Or too stupefied with vacuous entertainment to bother thinking about it…
I am not the first person to read this book and to look around only to find that we are living more and more in Bradbury’s nightmare, glued to screens at all times, neglectful of true human relationships, disconnected from our minds and our imagination. He was afraid of the media being controlled by the government, of people caring more about being entertained than about being informed, of humans being so disconnected from each other - even from those closest to them - that seeing someone suffer before their eyes made them feel nothing.
Guy Montag is a fireman, but not the kind we know. Books having long been banned by the government, owning them is now a criminal act, and Guy’s squad’s job is to set fire to the possessions of those who are found owning books. He meets a teenage girl named Clarisse, who seems strange to Guy at first: she doesn’t care to watch the parlor wall, the enormous television screen most people are hopelessly addicted to, preferring to be outside, thinking and talking about things that he had never thought about himself. A few days after meeting Clarisse, Guy is called upon to burn down an old woman’s house: rather than live to see her books being burnt, she sets herself on fire and dies as her home is being ransacked. In the confusion and chaos, Guy steals a book from that woman’s collection. And it turns out its not the first book he smuggled back home...
I originally read this book about ten years ago, and I had forgotten the way Bradbury perfectly illustrates the quiet desperation of Guy and Mildred’s dull life, notably through the casual attitude of the paramedics who rescue suicide attempts ten times a day. Clarisse does have a bit of the manic pixie dream girl thing going on, which is grating, but also charming because she represents a liveliness that is tragically absent from Guy’s hollow life. I had also forgotten how intriguing the ambiguous Captain Beatty is: a clearly very well-read man who has been indoctrinated by the powers that be... but has he? Would he have hunted Guy or was he trying to liberate him in a way he himself could never be? The final metaphor about how we come to embody the books we read and love is simply perfect.
If you are reading this, it’s safe to assume you love reading as much as I do. I’ve been told by someone that I fetishize books, and while they meant it as something weird, I have long embraced that fetish. Reading is definitely about the words; but I’d be lying if I told you I took no pleasure in the act of touching the pages, smelling the inimitable perfume of ink and binding glue, running my fingers along the spines of the books on my shelves and admiring those shelves the way I would a lovely painting or artwork. They are objects of infinite beauty, filled with knowledge, memories, wonder, unknown worlds and ideas to explore and beautiful language to swirl around in one’s mind, like good wine in a glass. No image horrifies me quite as much as the thought of burning books.
I have the 60th anniversary edition, with a brilliant introduction by Neil Gaiman, and plenty of essays at the end about the context in which the book was written and the many reasons it is still a relevant and significant work; all this additional material is quite worth the time to explore, especially Bradbury's own essay about why he wrote science-fiction and the coda to "Fahrenheit 451".
A lyrical and chilling book. No, it’s probably not Bradbury’s best book (though it remains my favorite for sentimental reasons). No, paper doesn’t actually burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, the characters are underdeveloped. Yes, it is occasionally didactic, the pacing is sometimes rushed and Bradbury wasn’t super good at predicting some aspects of the future (sci-fi is a thought experiment, not meteorology). But it is an important reminder that we are still lucky to have the freedom to read and to think – and that it can be taken away if we don’t use that freedom. It makes me proud to be that weird girl, sitting in a corner of the break room with her book. A must-read, in the same league as “1984” and “Brave New World”.
Reading “Fahrenheit 451”, I was reminded of a very strange play by Amélie Nothomb titled “Human Rites” (“Les Combustibles” in the original French - which makes a lot more sense), where she takes a similar idea and spins it on its head: set in a cold country under siege (Eastern Europe is implied), a small cast of characters have burned everything they own to keep warm, and eventually, the only combustibles they have left are their books. In such a situation, which book would you refrain from burning, and possibly sacrifice your comfort and life for? The play is far from perfect (probably one of her weakest works, honestly), but it is an interesting exercise of thought, as it can be interpreted to be about many things: the importance of culture and literature, certainly, but also their price – on many levels. In the play, the more books are burnt, the more animalistic and inhuman the characters get. As the symbols of their culture and civilization vanishes in the flames, so does civilized behavior......more
Imagine a future where we have actually run out of oil and fossil fuel, where genetically modified Updated review, after a re-read in November 2018.
--
Imagine a future where we have actually run out of oil and fossil fuel, where genetically modified food has gotten completely out of control, where people have figured out a way to make genetic weapons that ruined other countries’ harvests, and foodborne plagues have screwed up every level of the food chain and killed millions. Calories are now the most sought-after currency: clean calories, that is. Anderson Lake, the sort-of main character of “The Windup Girl”, works for a calorie company named AgriGen. He is located in Thailand, one of the few places where there is still profit to be made from the import of resources, and a shaky alliance between varying branches of government controls trade and environmental preservation and maintains a precarious peace. In this Bangkok on the brink of civil unrest, he will meet Emiko, the titular windup girl. She is an artificially created creature, almost human, engineered to be the toy of a wealthy Japanese man. And like most toys, she ended up thrown away, and now she is a very popular entertainment for decadent men who frequent the club she works at. Anderson’s rampant ambition and attraction to Emiko are some of the many factors that will set in motion a series of events of destructive consequences. Their story is interwoven with that of Jaidee, a city official trying to do the right thing, and that of Hock Seng, a Chinese refugee working for Lake who is struggling to make his life safe again.
The multiple points of view that show this strange new world under very different lights, the tension built by the civil unrest that boils over as a reaction to the corrupt government agency calling the shots, the paranoia of being a target leading characters to do things they would never have done under normal circumstances: all those things make the book very affecting, even if character development is not very sophisticated. No one trusts anyone in this dog-eat-dog world, and bribes are what seems to keep everything running, so everyone is constantly walking on eggshells, creating a tense and urgent atmosphere up until the very last page.
But there is no denying that this is a bleak book. The world it is set in is dirty, cruel and dangerous – and yet so meticulously imagined that it feels 100% real. The classic sci-fi questions addressed by Bacigalupi (how far can science go before it turns against us, nature vs. nurture, what is evolution, etc.) are nothing new, but the context in which he forces us to think about them is key: it is a terrifyingly close and believable future. The slow and unavoidable breakdown of the world as we know it due to lack of natural resources always taken for granted. This idea of a slow and creeping apocalypse is in many much more unnerving than that of a quick and brutal one: I don’t think anyone worries about the atomic bomb blowing us all to smithereens anymore, but we watch sea-levels rise around our feet and freak out. In many ways, it reminded me of the masterful “The Sheep Look Up” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which also tackled the idea of ecological apocalypse and its consequences – albeit in a very different setting.
The character of Emiko is fascinating because she is a strange form of AI - or post-human creature, really - who feels, wants and thinks, but her engineering also limits her. She was not naturally born, her suffering is not taken seriously by most and some people even consider her to be demonic, because she is technically stronger than humans, and is only kept relatively inoffensive by some genetic programming that makes her subservient. What if those barriers were removed? What if she was given the chance to evolve freely? Post-human evolution or transhumanism is a fascinating and unsettling topic. Gibbons, the geneticist encountered in the second half of the book talks about windups as an upgrade on human beings since they are impervious to the diseases that have killed so many, are often stronger and better suited to live in this new world that has been so devastated by plagues and crop failures. While some people consider them an abomination, he sees only that one needs to adapt in order to survive, and that the windups are simply better adapted than good old-fashioned humans.
Did this biopunk fiction make too many people uncomfortable? Is that why it is so scandalously unknown (I know it won a bunch of awards, but for some reason, none of my friends had heard of it, and it took me ages to find a bookstore that had it in stock)? I found it to be so darkly fascinating, beautifully written and yet completely fucking depressing. The slow apocalypse, not triggered by one world-changing event, but by a series of seemingly small disasters one after the other… if you read any report written in the last decade by a climatologist, you can’t deny that this is what we are experiencing right now, in our lifetime. Not all genetically modified food is bad: sometimes it helps grow stronger crops in hard-to-cultivate areas. But when it’s used unwisely or greedily, it can have a lot of terrible repercussions. I am definitely a science person, but I do think that we need a solid moral compass with which to evaluate how far we go in pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge. Things backfire, good science in malicious hands becomes a weapon and then we all pay the price.
This is a really unique and amazing book that I recommend to all sci-fi fans, and fans of great writing in general. I will be re-reading many times....more
In typical Vonnegut fashion, this novel is zany, unpredictable, funny, thought-provoking and very, very hard to summarize. As much 3 and a half stars.
In typical Vonnegut fashion, this novel is zany, unpredictable, funny, thought-provoking and very, very hard to summarize. As much as I enjoy his books, reviewing them is always a challenge, because where the hell am I even supposed to begin? With the story of the man and his dog, who are spread across time and space; the story of the rich and depraved Malachi and his feeble attempts to control his fate? The non-linear way this strange story is told makes me think of a Mobius strip: I’m not sure where it really begins.
Describing the story too much would be giving away the good parts, so I won’t try to go further, but I will tell you that I love Vonnegut’s slightly infantile humor, his humanist views and his disdain of corporations and organized religions. I love the old sci-fi books that are in fact deep philosophical works, and this one is right down that alley. It didn’t hit me as hard as “Breakfast of Champions” did, and it wasn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as I had anticipated (hence the rating), but in the grand scheme of Vonnegut’s work, this is an interesting and entertaining book about free will, the institutions that control our destiny without our awareness and how utterly insignificant we are when you think of how big the universe actually is....more
“Cat’s Cradle” was my first Vonnegut, and I will fully admit that I… read… it… wrong. I had no idea who Vonnegut was at the time, what his style was a“Cat’s Cradle” was my first Vonnegut, and I will fully admit that I… read… it… wrong. I had no idea who Vonnegut was at the time, what his style was about, that this was supposed to be satirical: so it just seemed fucking weird and disjointed and it left me scratching my head and wondering what the big deal was with Vonnegut. Luckily, I persisted, read some of his other work and figured it out. It seemed to me like it was time to revisit this classic, with a better understanding of what I was getting myself into.
This time around, I did find it funny, but funny in that very specific Vonnegut way, which makes me laugh and want to smack my head against a wall simultaneously. Maybe it’s the context in which I am reading it this time: I couldn’t help but wonder what good old Kurt would say if he could see the complete fucking mess that’s been made out of the pandemic, the climate crisis or even Facebook. We don’t have little chips of Ice 9 hanging around, but we are still self-destructing pretty efficiently…
A man who goes by the name of Jonah wants to write a book about the day the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, and seeks the perspective of the children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker – one of the scientists who created the bomb. His research will lead him to a small island in the Caribbean, where he will meet the very off Hoenikker children, but also other (typically Vonnegut-esque) quirky characters, an openly false religion (let that sink in) and a bio-weapon even more dangerous than the atomic bomb.
This is not my favorite Vonnegut, even after this second read, but it is one of his great books. I am always amazed by how fresh they feel, even of they were written more than 50 years ago: the world changes much more slowly than we like to think! Humanity’s ability to destroy itself out of pettiness and/or incompetence is nothing new, it just feels more and more like current events....more
Loading...
