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| 0765316994
| 9780765316998
| 0765316994
| 3.86
| 109,930
| Jun 05, 2012
| Jun 05, 2012
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really liked it
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The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, on the meaning of life, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Frederich Nietzche said, "If w
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, on the meaning of life, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Frederich Nietzche said, "If we possess a why of life, we can put up with almost any how." And Stephen King wrote, "Life sucks, then you die." It'll take a far better philosopher than I to really look at this book from an existentialist viewpoint, but I strongly suspect that it would be a lot of fun to do. After all, one of the major questions that philosophy - and existentialism in particular - tries to address is that of why we are here. What is our purpose in life? What, in the end, does it all mean? For us out here, that's a question we can't really know the answer to, and thus a whole branch of philosophy exists to tell us that it doesn't really matter. That maybe we don't have a purpose imposed upon us from outside, but that's okay. We can create our own. We can contribute our own verses to the powerful play of life, as Whitman would have it, and in the end we are responsible for our own lives. But what if we weren't? What if there was a being that orchestrated our lives, willing them into - and more importantly out of - existence? What would you do with the realization that your life is not entirely your own? And even worse, the realization that the person in control of it doesn't really care all that much about you? That is the problem faced by Ensign Andrew Dahl of the Universal Union flagship Intrepid. It is the 25th century, and things couldn't be better. He has a chance to see new world and new civilizations, to boldly go... Well, you know the rest. Dahl is at the frontier of science and exploration, and is determined to make the most of it. If he survives. Alone among the ships of the UU, the Intrepid loses crew at an alarming rate. Dahl soon discovers a fact that has been known for years by those crew members who are bright enough to spot the pattern: people who go on away missions with the command staff will, almost inevitably, die. Toxic gasses, killer machines, Borgovian land worms - these are just a tiny sampling of dangers that have done in ensigns and miscellaneous crew for years, and no one seems to know why. All they can do is make sure they're not in the room when the Captain comes in, looking for someone who pop down to a planet's surface to find out why that mining colony hasn't reported in recently. Dahl, of course, just can't let himself and his friends die, so he begins digging into the true nature of their lives on the starship Intrepid. What he discovers is a truth almost too mad to be believed: their lives are not their own. A greater power is directing events on the Intrepid, dictating who lives and who dies, and that greater power doesn't seem to be very good at what it does. So Dahl and his friends have to bet everything on the power of the Narrative, meet their makers and try to find a way to secure their freedom. Or, failing that, a way to see to it that their lives have more meaning than they had before. As always with John Scalzi, I recommend picking this up. It's a very fast read - I finished it in under a day - and it has the tight combination of humor, thoughtfulness, and genuine emotion that I have come to expect from his work. From a premise that is incredibly simple - “The crew of a starship realize they’re doomed if they go on away missions and try to change their fate” - he's built up a multi-layered exploration into the meaning of life and death. The universe he's given to us is one where people are denied the ability to give meaning to their own lives, and have to rely one an unseen force to do it for them. The fight, then, is to acquire that ability to decide. To gain agency, as it were. They want to be able to control their own existence so badly that they risk their existence entirely. The corollary, then, is very simple: what are you doing with your life? We, the readers, have that agency. We can make decisions for our own lives and our own purposes. If we succeed or fail, we can do so knowing that we made those successes or failures possible. [1] In a sense, we don't know how good we have it, something that is brought up in the second of three codas to the main novel. We can choose. We can create meaning in our lives without hoping that some higher power will do it for us. So why don't we? For a book that presents itself as a quick, fun read, there are certainly layers upon layers of meaning in it that could be a lot of fun to explore. The only complaint, really, is that it wasn't long enough. And I don't mean that he skipped essential scenes, or that he should have opted for a Tolkien/Jordan/Martin-esque style of describing every goddamn thing that showed up on the page, but there were points where I just wanted him to slow down a bit and let us appreciate the moments for what they were. There's a scene in chapter 21, for example, that should be really emotional and meaningful, but it's almost entirely dialogue. Good dialogue, yes, but I wanted to linger over it a bit, and that's true for a lot of scenes in the book. Scalzi writes wonderful banter, and makes his characters sound real, but I want to see things as well as hear them. Also, to be honest, I expected the last page to just be a picture of Scalzi at his computer, turning to the camera and winking. It would have been hilariously meta, but I guess he's not as gimmicky as that. Buy the book and enjoy it. If you're a fan of Star Trek - which was, given the title, a huge inspiration for the story - you'll no doubt appreciate it more than most. Even if you haven't watched every episode of the original series, though, the Red Shirt character is one that has permeated all levels of fiction, and has died many times in order to advance the plots that you love so well. He even has one poor guy who's not only a Red Shirt, but nearly at the end of his tour and about to get married. There was no way he'd survive. Take some time out for these poor, expendable bastards and give them a chance to shine. ---- "The [Borgovian Land Worms] were in a frenzy. Somebody was now likely to die. It was likely to be ensign Davis." - from Redshirts by John Scalzi ---- [1] There are plenty of external, uncontrollable factors, of course, which can all be lumped together under the term "luck," but you know what I mean. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 20, 2012
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Jun 20, 2012
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Jun 22, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 1560258691
| 9781560258698
| 1560258691
| 3.95
| 558
| Oct 24, 2006
| Oct 04, 2006
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really liked it
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There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been ext
There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been extinct for millions of years, to kill Hitler - always a favorite. You could go to the Library of Alexandria and save the works of great scientists and philosophers that have been lost to history. You could document the Crucifixion or watch the fall of Rome first-hand. You could see Jimi or Elvis or Janice or Kurt in their heyday, watch the original performances of Shakespeare's plays, or talk engineering with DaVinci. With a time machine, the whole of history is open to you, and your options are just about limitless. All Ron Mallett wanted to do with his time machine was see his dad. This book is not just about how one man went about figuring out how to travel through time. That in itself would be interesting, since time travel has been a dream of mankind ever since we figured out that time was a thing. There's a lot of complicated science that goes into not just manipulating time, but figuring out that it can be manipulated, and it takes half a lifetime to master. A lot of popular science books focus on the science, unsurprisingly, and talk about how certain things were discovered and what can be done with them in the future. That's all well and good, but this book adds an extra element that's often missing from other popular science texts. It talks about why. When Ron Mallett was ten years old, his father died of a heart attack brought about by a combination of smoking, poor dietary choices, and a genetic inclination towards heart problems. Overnight, the man that young Ron loved and idolized was gone, leaving him directionless at an age when having a father can be so very important. With the loss of a beloved parent, it's entirely possible that Ron could have seen his life crippled from that day onward. It might have been, if not for H.G. Wells and his famous book, The Time Machine. After he read this book, the notion that time could be navigated became the center of his life. His first attempt at a time machine - built of pipes and wires in his basement - was unsuccessful, of course. But he was undeterred, and realized that if he was going to make this dream come true, he would have to buckle down and start learning some science. Just the idea that he might one day build a machine to travel through time was enough to give him direction and purpose, and it set him on a course that would go on to define his life. The book is a memoir of his own travels through the world of physics and relativity, moving from one point to another as new ideas and discoveries signposted his route towards a theory of time travel. Initially guided by Einstein, Mallett went from being a young academic to programming computers for the Air Force, to becoming a full-fledged academic at the University of Connecticut. He makes sure that the reader can not only follow all the steps that he took, but that we can also see why he took them. What chance encounters and lucky finds pushed him forward, or what unfortunate incidents slowed him down. He reminds us all throughout the book of why he has chosen to do science, and never lets us forget this motivation. At the same time, he is sure to tell us about two rather significant obstacles to his progress. The first, of course, was that he felt he couldn't be honest about why he was studying what he was studying - relativity, black holes, lasers, that kind of thing. For fear that he would be labeled a crackpot and denied the opportunities he would need, he revealed his ambition to build a time machine only to those he felt he could absolutely trust. As far as anyone else was concerned, of course, he was just another theoretical physicist trying to figure out how the universe worked. The other challenge he faced was that he was African-American in a field that was very, very white at the time. He had to deal with racism in both its overt and covert forms, and work even harder to prove himself to those who couldn't - or wouldn't - see past his skin color. He doesn't dwell on it in this book, since that's not what this book is about. But I'm sure if he wanted to write about what it was like trying to break into physics academia as an African-American in the 60s and 70s, he probably could. What's most important, though, is that he continually reminds us of why he's doing what he's doing. He talks about his father, and the memories he had of him. He keeps his non-academic life in view, letting us in on his personal triumphs and failures, his struggles with depression and his joys at advancing towards his goal. The end result is a book that is not only about science, but about a person. The emotional thread that runs through this book is strong, and even if you can't quite follow the science, you can still follow the passion that Ron Mallett has for this project. The book, while fascinating, is technically unfinished. He has yet to build his time machine, and there's no proof that the ideas he's come forward will actually work, even if the math says they should. As the book finishes, he has a plan, and he lays out the way he thinks his machine should work, but we'll have to wait to see how that works out. Whether he succeeds or fails, though, he has built up a lifetime of research that has expanded our understanding of space and time in such a way that Einstein - and Ron Mallett's father - would no doubt be proud of. ------------------ "Time stopped for me in the middle of the night on May 22, 1955." - Ron Mallett, "Time Traveler" ------------------ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 23, 2012
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Jun 04, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0345413997
| 9780345413994
| 0345413997
| 4.02
| 27,113
| 1957
| Jun 17, 1997
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really liked it
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Oh, 1950s science fiction - is there nothing you can't do? One of the downsides to our modern information age is that we have so much information avail Oh, 1950s science fiction - is there nothing you can't do? One of the downsides to our modern information age is that we have so much information available to us. If I see a reference on a blog or in a book that I don't know, it's a quick hop over to Google or Wikipedia to find out what it is, and if it's really interesting I can find myself learning about something I never knew before. And so, if I want to know more about cold sleep, robotics or time travel, there's a whole host of ways that I can not only learn about it, but learn why it's just so hard to do. I mean, think about robotics - we've been looking forward to the perfect household robot for decades now. One that can cook and clean and do all those tiresome chores that we would rather not spend our time doing. The problem is that those tiresome chores are actually marvelously complex tasks, involving not only precise physical movements, but some very complicated judgment calls. Every time we figure out how to get a robot to do one of those things, we then have a hundred other things that need to be done to get it even close to human-like competence. I know this because the internet knows this. But back in 1957, this stuff was all new and fresh and unknown, so if Robert Heinlein wanted his main character to cobble together the perfect household robot with some off-the-shelf parts and a little bit of magic tech (the Thorsen Memory Tubes), then why not? Assuming we had the technology, what couldn't we build? Thus is the set-up for The Door into Summer, an adventure in engineering, patent law, and economics, with a little bit of time travel thrown into spice it up. Our hero, Daniel Boone Davis, is an engineer of the purest sort - he got into engineering to solve problems, and that's what he does. He doesn't want to be just one guy working on one cog for a huge corporation; he wants to make things himself that he knows will benefit everyone. He's a real Populist Engineer, too - his creations are made with replaceable parts, specifically so that the owner can quickly deal with any mechanical problems themselves, rather than have to wait for a repair shop to do the work. The parts are all off-the-shelf, too, which not only makes the machines easier to produce, but makes the production cost lower. In other words, he's making machines that will benefit as many people as possible, and the first one is the somewhat misogynistically-named Hired Girl. This machine (which is a very close approximation of the Roomba, by the way) becomes an instant success, and the company that Dan forms to take care of it is looking to become fantastically wealthy. Unfortunately for Dan, his business partners - Miles and Belle - are far more interested in becoming filthy rich than helping mankind. So when it looks like Dan's newest creation, an all-purpose household robot named Flexible Frank, is going to be a wild success, they manage to freeze him out of the company. Literally. They steal his inventions out from under him and force him to take the Long Sleep - to be frozen cryogenically for thirty years. He wakes up in the year 2000, without money, without a job or prospects, and without his beloved cat, Pete. A word about the cat angle to this story - if you're a cat person, like me, then the relationship between Dan and Pete will really resonate with you. Its clear that Heinlein himself was a cat person, as he shows a wonderful understanding of the human-cat relationship, including the absolute uncertainty as to which one is in charge at any given time. While the cat is not absolutely necessary to the plot, it's a nice addition to the story. If you're not a cat person, well... you should be. Anyway, in the wild future of 2000, Dan discovers that something very strange was going on around the time he got frozen, and the more he uncovers, the more it looks like there can be only one explanation - time travel! This is really classic science fiction at its best. The narrator is a brilliant man who never meets a problem he cannot solve, at least not eventually. He's a certified genius, and were it not for his blind spot for pretty women and his trust in his business partner, he would have had a fantastic life as an inventor. But his love of making stuff gets in the way of how the real world works, and sets him up for a series of thefts and betrayals. But you never really worry about him, because he is a man with no uncertainties. He doesn't wallow in self-loathing and moral dismay when he encounters a problem like being thirty years in the future with no means of supporting himself. No! When he sees a problem, his first thought is, "How do I solve this?" In other words, he's an engineer. It's a remarkably optimistic book, too. While the future of 2000 isn't perfect, it's still a whole lot better than 1970. And while 1970 certainly isn't perfect, it's a whole lot better than 1957. The book rests on that wonderful mid-century assumption that while human innovation can't solve every problem (and indeed often succeeds in creating more problems), it is, in the long run, a force for good. For the modern reader this may seem terribly naive, but I found it refreshing. So while the story is really pretty predictable, it's a fun ride. Even the time travel element isn't quite as risky as Heinlein tries to make it out to be, since the reason Dan opts for time travel is that he's found evidence that he's already done it. Therefore no matter how dangerous it might be, he knows for a fact that he'll be successful. He doesn't mention this, or even seem to notice it, but the sharp-eyed reader should pick it up pretty quickly. While most of the driving force of the book is what I would normally consider pretty boring - patent law and engineering - there is one element to it that is distinctly Heinlein: the universality of love. Dan is done in by his belief that he loves Belle, who turns out to be a gold-digger of the lowest order. But in the end, Dan knows who he truly loves. The only problem is that she's an eleven year-old girl. Whether in the publication year of 1957, the year Dan starts in, 1970, or the far-flung future of 2000, a grown man marrying a pre-teen is something that is generally frowned upon. They're able to settle this problem with a little time travel/cryogenic jiggery-pokery, but when you stop to think about it, the situation can be somewhat... unconventional. If you stop to really think about their relationship, there's some strange moral ambiguity going on there. Fortunately, the characters don't really care and the book ends without going into the ramifications of what they've done. The book isn't about moral complexity, though. It's about solving problems and finding happiness, no matter what you have to do to get it. It's about overcoming adversity, betrayal and even time itself to get the life that you know you deserve. It's about finding that door into summer, when all the other doors lead you only into the winter. While we may not be able to solve our problems quite as neatly as Dan Davis did, we can still follow his example. Except, perhaps, with the romancing eleven year-olds. That's still not cool. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 21, 2010
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Feb 24, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0765352389
| 9780765352385
| 0765352389
| 4.01
| 788
| Apr 30, 1981
| Oct 01, 2005
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it was amazing
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It's always dangerous to revisit a book that you loved when you were a kid. Everyone knows that. Some books are really just geared towards a certain a
It's always dangerous to revisit a book that you loved when you were a kid. Everyone knows that. Some books are really just geared towards a certain age, a certain time in your life where that book can step in and say, "Here - someone knows what you're thinking about." And those books are amazing. You read them and your life changes. Maybe only in small ways, maybe in ways you don't even realize until later, but it does. Then you come back to it ten or twenty years later and think, "I remember this book. I loved this book. I think I'll read it again." So you do, and it's a disappointment. Not because the book isn't as good as you thought it was but rather because you aren't the person you were when you first read it. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just life. When I ordered this off Amazon, I did so with a certain amount of trepidation. This book occupies a very special place in my heart. I read it over and over again when I was a kid. It instilled a love of time travel that I keep to this day. I even adopted the name Tycho as a pseudonym for various parts of my own mind all the way through high school and beyond. I knew that re-reading it would put that entire past at risk of becoming foolish or stupid or childish, and I wasn't sure my ever-vulnerable pride wanted to take that. Fortunately, I discovered that the book was as good as I recalled it being. Shorter than I remember, of course, but still quite good. The story is deceptively simple - Tycho Tithonus, the youngest of four siblings - the other three being very talented and thoroughly unpleasant - finds a small, silver, egg-like object while digging up a new vegetable garden. As innocuous as is seems, that object is about to change everything. It is, in fact, a time machine. It's not very difficult - it has a series of dials on one end, which you turn to set the time you want to go to. Press the other end and it's done. And Tycho does what anyone would do when presented with such an amazing device: go back and re-work an unpleasant event in his past. And if by doing so he could maybe teach his nasty siblings to appreciate him more, well, so be it. Of course, the ramifications of this act don't become clear until it's much too late. But the past doesn't really hold that much allure for young Tycho. It's over and done with, and was never very pleasant to begin with. So he decides to go to the future, to see what has become of himself and his family. A quick twenty-year jump to April 23,2001 shows him what's in store for himself. A desperate, unhappy, bitter man, fronting for a lunar entertainment industry and reduced to begging sponsors for money. Disappointed and upset, Tycho comes back. Later, he visits the future again - same day - only to find it has changed completely. He's no longer a sad, shapeless man but a tough, ruthless one, a man who uses his ability to travel through time to make money and ruin his family. Terrified, Tycho returns to his own time. But his curiosity can't be stopped. He needs to see a future where everything works out right. Unfortunately, every time he goes there it's worse and worse. His future self becomes a monster and a murderer, a willing agent to bring beings of higher power onto this planet. This is one of the things I've always liked about Sleator - his mind turns around corners. Everyone and his uncle can write about a time traveler going to the past and changing the present, but who writes about someone changing the future by messing about in the present? Not many, I'll tell you that. Each time Tycho comes back from the future, the knowledge he has gained causes him to say something or do something that alters the course of his future in a new and terrible way. And seeing how much worse it gets just forces him to make even more terrible decisions, until you have the final, terrible paradox of an old Tycho trying to chase down and kill his younger self over the course of millennia. Which does bring up the problem of paradox, unavoidable in any time travel book, known in fiction as "massive, gaping plot holes." For example - if Tycho time-travels twenty years into the future to see his older self, there shouldn't be any older self there for him to meet. It's impossible - as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Tycho vanished on April 23, 1981 and re-appeared twenty years later. Everyone else lived through that time, but he simply side-stepped it. Instead of finding a letter from his older self to his mother in their future house, he should have found perhaps a black-framed picture of 11 year-old Tycho with a note to the effect that they should have loved him more. The only way I can think of to resolve this problem is to assume that Tycho was absolutely and incontrovertibly determined to return to his own time after each future visit, thus ensuring that he would eventually live out those twenty years. Fortunately, Sleator handles these paradoxes in a very simple and straightforward manner. During one of Tycho's experimental first trips into the future, he meets his teenage self, who shows him how the dials work on the egg: "But," Tycho said. "But if you're me... I mean, if we're the same person, how can we both be here at the same time?"There you go. That bit there is the author saying, "Yes, I know there are paradoxes involved, but that's not the point of the book." That pretty much sweeps aside all those little picky details, like older Tycho trying to kill his younger self, or the fact that, by the end of the book, the entire story didn't, technically, happen. "Shut up and concentrate." He handles the alterations resulting from time travel very neatly as well. Rather than beat us over the head with "Things have CHANGED!" he just inserts a simple descriptive line in there. If you're reading carefully, you'll notice that Ludwig's hair has gone from proto-emo long to a nice crew cut. Even Tycho doesn't notice, which is interesting. When presented with the results of a change in time, he has a moment of jamais vu - the feeling of something familiar as totally new - and then the story moves on. The effects multiply and resonate, and even Tycho isn't aware of how much he's changed. Going back to the plot hole problem for a moment, there is the small issue of the egg's origin and purpose. We know it was planted on Earth by aliens, something like 150 million years ago. It seems they did so with the intention that it one day be found and used in order to prepare the way for their arrival and dominance of Earth - this is what can be gleaned by the ravings of older Tycho. But why would an alien race which has time travel sorted out need such a roundabout way of conquering the world? Why drop it into some Jurassic mud and leave it at the whims of plate tectonics? Why not just show up at Tycho's house one day and drop it on his bedside table? This is never adequately explained in the book, probably because it's not what the book's about. But it nagged me when I was a kid, and it still does now. All plot holes and paradoxes aside, it's a really good book, and if you have a kid, I recommend it. It's the kind of story that you really can pick apart and look from many angles. In one sense, it's a story about destiny. Tycho and his siblings are all named after extraordinary famous people - Ludwig Beethoven,Tamara Karsavina, Leonardo DaVinci, and Tycho Brahe - in the hopes that they would grow up to emulate them. Tycho's siblings fall into line very easily, adopting the roles that they'd been given from birth. Tycho doesn't - he's interested in a little bit of everything, and isn't entire sure what he wants to do with his life. I knew that feeling when I was eleven years old. Hell, I know that feeling now. And of course it's about the futility of letting your future control your life. The future isn't fixed. It's an organic, growing thing that you can't begin to control, and the tiniest change in the present could become a radical change in the future. Sure, it's good to have goals and plans, but to try and wield unbending control over who you're going to be is foolish at best. And that brings me to the nagging question that occurred to me right around chapter 9, the first time Tycho sees his adult self and is terribly disappointed in him. Reading this again as an adult, I found myself wondering that if eleven year-old me suddenly appeared, what would he think? Would he be impressed at the path my life had taken? Would he be disappointed by my physical appearance? Would he be surprised at the relationship I have with my siblings? Would be be shocked that I have a boyfriend? What would his judgment be on his future? Following right on the heels of that, of course, was the more important question of, "Who cares what eleven year-old me thinks of my life?" Not to disparage the eleven year-olds out there, but you don't know nearly as much as you think you do, and becoming a teenager isn't going to confer any more wisdom. Tycho doesn't know the twenty years of history and context that led to him becoming a miserable bastard. Perhaps if he had learned a little, he might have made better decisions when he returned to his own time. And if eleven year-old me gave me any lip about what I'd become, I'd send him back to his own time with a whole host of new neuroses to deal with. Anyway, my point is this: The Green Futures of Tycho is a damn fine book. It's a good time travel adventure, and it's a good allegory for the existential angst we all go through when we consider the future. While such feelings might be new and raw to a child of Tycho's age, and old and familiar to us adults, it's still something that we need to deal with. And perhaps that best way to do it is to simply appreciate what we have now. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 21, 2009
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Apr 21, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0743498399
| 9780743498395
| 0743498399
| 4.04
| 1,133
| 2005
| Jan 01, 2005
|
really liked it
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Why yes, I own both the comic and the novelization. Is there something wrong with that? Actually, here's a Little Known Fact about me: when I was in, m Why yes, I own both the comic and the novelization. Is there something wrong with that? Actually, here's a Little Known Fact about me: when I was in, maybe, junior high school I tried to novelize Crisis. I sat down with the comics and went through them, panel-by-panel, trying to put them into a narrative form. I tried to fill in things like expressions, reactions, to bridge the gap between the kind of story you can tell in a comic and the kind you tell in a novel. To my memory, it was pretty good, though it's no doubt lost to the ages by now. If I ever run across it, I'll either marvel at my innocent youth or cringe at my fumbling attempt to do the unnecessary. I am not the only one who gave that some thought, it seems. To his credit, though, since Marv Wolfman was the guy who wrote the comics, I think he has far more right to put it into novel form than I ever did. But whereas mine was a straight page-by-page translation of the comic to text, Wolfman decided to tell the story from a very different angle. He decided to let is see the Crisis on Infinite Earths through the eyes of Barry Allen, The Flash. As I said in my review of the comic series, Barry Allen was (more or less) the beginning of the Multiverse in DC Comics, so it was fitting that he be the one to narrate the end in this book. After all, he didn't get all that much page time in the comics - a few ghostly visitations, some taunting and then he was dead. Yes, his death saved billions of people, but still - for someone as important as he was, you would have thought he'd have gotten a few more pages. The thing about The Flash, though, is that he's hard to pin down. Literally. Even on an ordinary day, we're talking about a man who can race laser beams - and win. He can alter his subjective view of time to the point where a hummingbird in flight becomes a still life. He can run fast enough to travel through time, and vibrate the very molecules of his body to a point where he can not only ghost through solid matter but pass between the dimensional barriers that separate the multiple Earths. How any villain ever got the best of this man is beyond me. If the writers had ever taken his powers seriously, The Flash never would have had a challenge. So who better to narrate our alternate view of the Crisis than he? The fact that he's dead by the time the book begins doesn't really make much of a difference. There's too much for The Flash to do, and suddenly the fastest man alive doesn't have enough time. I don't really need to re-iterate what the Crisis was about, why it happened and who the main players were. None of that has changed in this version of the story - we just have a different point of view. And from this point of view, we learn many interesting things that the comic held back from us. The relationship between The Monitor and his young ward, Lyla, for example - he knew even before he found her that she would kill him. In fact that she would have to kill him, if any of the Earths were to survive the coming apocalypse. We get a much better look at the Psycho-Pirate, the mad puppet of the Anti-Monitor whose ability to manipulate emotions becomes key to the control of worlds. And we get first-person views from so many other heroes and villains that took part in the Crisis - getting a much deeper look at the work. Most of all, of course, we get to see Barry Allen. What drives him, even in this semi-dead state, to continue to play an active part in this Crisis? Incorporeal and largely unable to interact with - let alone avert - the catastrophe, The Flash remains a witness until the time comes that he is able to (with a little time-travel cheating) free himself from his bonds and go to a death that he knows he cannot avoid, and which he also knows is not the end. Honestly, how he survives beyond death the way he does isn't very clear in this book. It has something to do with the Speed Force, a kind of semi-sentient energy field that grants speedsters their powers and provides them with a heaven when they die. His jaunts through time and space seem to be at the control of a higher power, but exactly who and what that power is we are never quite sure of. As with any transition from one medium to another, there are changes. The villainous takeover of three Earths is gone, for example, as is the involvement of Superboy-Prime, and much of what occurs after the Anti-Monitor's ultimate defeat is completely different (and is therefore, if you've been keeping up with the DC Universe over the past three years or so, decidedly non-canon). But Supergirl's death is expanded upon, and we get to see the decisions that bring her to her doom. We know that, like Barry Allen, she did what needed to be done, knowing that it would be her end. Getting a quick look inside her head before she took on the Anti-Monitor makes her death just that much more poignant. But also as with any transition from one medium to another, it is very hard to compare the new rendition to the original. While this novelized version of Crisis is a quick and enjoyable read, it doesn't have nearly the scope and depth and visual punch that the comic did. Because comics are such a visual medium - a story told in mixed media - you're going to lose something when you take one of those media away. While I enjoy reading this (and it's a lot easier to carry around than the Rosetta-stone-sized Absolute Edition of the comic), it's never going to take the place of the original. Wolfman is an excellent writer of comics, but he's not a novelist. If you are a fan of Crisis and you just want another look at the old story, pick this up. If you've never read Crisis before, get your hands on the comics and let this one come to you later. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 14, 2009
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Jan 31, 2008
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Paperback
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| 0553575384
| 9780553575385
| 0553575384
| 4.11
| 41,818
| Dec 01, 1997
| Dec 01, 1998
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it was amazing
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Yes, it's a Connie Willis Time Travel Double Feature! And in this book, we are introduced to the lighter side of time travel - something that was sore
Yes, it's a Connie Willis Time Travel Double Feature! And in this book, we are introduced to the lighter side of time travel - something that was sorely lacking in The Doomsday Book. I mean, it's not that the Black Death didn't have its lighter side, it's just the overall it's not so much fun. This book is a follow-up to The Doomsday Book. Not a sequel, really, but it's in the same world, and some of the main characters make appearances in this one. But whereas The Doomsday Book was all about how your image of a far-away place never really matches the reality of it, this book is more about how what you think you know about what's going on isn't actually what's going on. To explain: Ned Henry is an historian, working for the implacable Lady Schrapnell who is determined, against all possible odds, to rebuild Coventry Cathedral exactly the way it was when it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. The reason for this goes back to the water-damaged diary of her many-times-great grandmother, who visited the Cathedral in her youth and whose life was changed forever. The credit for this change was given to her sight of an atrocious example of the worst in Victorian art - the Bishop's Bird Stump. Schrapnell has enlisted every historian at Oxford to help get the new cathedral exactly as it was, regardless of their own personal safety and in complete defiance of everything that is known about time travel and its effects on the human body. And so Ned, who is suffering from severe time lag, is sent to recuperate in the Victorian Era, 1888. He has one simple job to do - return an object that was brought through from the past, something that should not have been possible to do. Once he accomplishes that relatively simple task, he has two weeks to enjoy an idyllic life of leisure among the upper crust of English society. Of course, it's never that simple. Which is kind of the point of the book. History is a chaotic and complex thing, one where the ultimate cause of an event can be hard to pin down, and even harder to change. There is no such thing as a non-significant object when it comes to history, and everything is important. Cats and seances and penwipers, fish, maps, croquet, candles and jumble sales - everything affects everything else, and the results of those interactions are sometimes very difficult for us to see. In the course of trying to correct one apparent incongruity, Ned and Verity (another historian, whose beauty pretty much snares Ned from the get-go) discover that they are part of a greater pattern to solve a far greater problem. It's a great book, and a wonderful read. Very funny, too... Pick it up. ...more |
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not set
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Feb 21, 2008
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Jan 31, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0553562738
| 9780553562736
| 0553562738
| 4.03
| 61,008
| Jun 05, 1992
| Jul 1992
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it was amazing
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I honestly can't count the number of times I've read this book. I think this is the fifth time. Or maybe the sixth, I don't know. It doesn't really ma
I honestly can't count the number of times I've read this book. I think this is the fifth time. Or maybe the sixth, I don't know. It doesn't really matter, because it's just as enjoyable, touching and heartbreaking as it was the first time I read it, and that's a hell of an accomplishment. It is the middle of the 21st century and time travel has finally been worked out. A reliable there-and-back-again way to go into the past and come back to the present. Unfortunately, there are limitations. The computer that makes time travel happen, through means I'm not sure even Ms. Willis understands, will not allow for a paradox. This means if you try to go to the past with anachronistic technology, or carrying a disease that could wreak havoc on the population, the interface simply won't open. If you try to place a traveler somewhere where their appearance could cause a paradox, the machine will put them in another place or time - a factor called "slippage" which can put you anywhere from five minutes and a few feet off your mark to years and miles. The machine won't allow you to get anywhere near events of importance. Secondly, the machine won't allow you to take anything through the net. So if you travel to, say, Napoleon's palace and try to rob him blind, the interface won't open until you've got rid of all your booty. Those two factors alone made the time machine economically useless. If you can't profit off it - or change it - what good must it be? A lot of good, as it turns out, if you're an historian. While the machine may not allow you to get anywhere near Hitler, it will allow you to see what life was like in the ghetto in the 30s. The whole of history suddenly became open to real discovery, and places like Oxford were at the forefront of the research. One student, a young lady named Kivrin, has a dream to see the Middle Ages. Despite all the warnings that it was full of filth, disease, superstition, danger and death, she still wants to see it more than anything in the world. The sheer force of her will finds her in the machine, ready to go to the year 1320 to see firsthand what life was like for the average English citizen. She has prepared herself as best she could, but nothing could possibly prepare her for the time and place she ends up in.... And in the present, a new plague has spread around Oxford. It's a new type of flu that seems to have come from nowhere, and it's started to kill. Kivrin's teachers and friends have to race the disease, time and sheer bloody-minded bureaucracy to try and find her and bring her back safely. What is remarkable about the book is the detail. Willis has obviously done a lot of research into not only Medieval Oxford but modern Oxford as well. Since one of the themes of the book is that we don't know nearly as much about the past as we think we do, Willis has gone to great lengths to make sure that we - through the eyes of Kivrin - never know what to expect because our expectations are all totally wrong. And as is so often true about history, the more we know about it, the more interesting it becomes. The Oxford of the future, by contrast, isn't all that futuristic. It looks a lot like the modern world, probably because it's only a couple of decades removed from us. Sure, there have been advances in technology, but the lives of the people aren't much different from ours. Interesting note: the book was published in 1992, well before the age of cell phones, instant messaging and the internet. Because of this, one of the greatest hindrances to getting anything done in this far-future Oxford is that no one can get anyone on the phone. It's a videophone, yes, but most of the characters spend time waiting for phone calls to come through or trying to place calls to people who aren't near a terminal. It's a bit strange, from my modern perspective, to see a world that has pretty much conquered disease and mastered time yet never figured out a means of personal communication better than a land-line. That's just a small thing, though, and as long as you accept that particular bit of alternate-future, you'll be okay. It's a fantastic book, one which I recommend without reservation. The characters are deep and interesting, and the writing really puts you in their world. Seriously. Go get it. ...more |
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not set
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Feb 16, 2008
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Jan 31, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0552148997
| 9780552148993
| 0552148997
| 4.50
| 112,579
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2003
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really liked it
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Pratchett books are like potato chips - can't read just one. The Discworld books are broadly arranged into four groups. The Death books look at what it Pratchett books are like potato chips - can't read just one. The Discworld books are broadly arranged into four groups. The Death books look at what it means to be a human being, the Wizard books are about how we deal with the universe at large, the Witches books are about how the individual fits into the rest of society, and the Watch books are about how we deal with being part of a system. Having been a poli-sci major, I tend to enjoy the latter group the most. The main character of the Watch books is Sam Vimes, once a captain of the night watch, now a Duke and the Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. He's got a wonderful wife who's expecting their first son. He has everything to lose, and, thanks to a bolt of lightning on the roof of the Unseen University library, he nearly loses it all. He's sent back in time 30 years to when the Night Watch was an ineffective organization, the city's leader was a paranoid madman, and the citizenry was ready for revolution. Into all of this comes Sam Vimes, who has to take the role of the sergeant who played a pivotal role in the unrest, John Keel. And part of John Keel's job is to be to make sure the young lance-constable Sam Vimes grows up to be a good copper. Under normal circumstances, this would be hard enough, but with the city about ready to explode and the government run by corruption, this is an even harder job. I always enjoy reading the Sam Vimes stories, mostly because, of all the main characters that Pratchett uses, he's the one that has the most growth. He goes from being a drunken captain in Guards! Guards! to a Leading Member of Society and ambassador in Thud!. In this book, he's fighting for a great many things at once - his wife and child, his city, his fellow officers and, literally, himself. He also has some of the best scenes - at one point, he barges into the headquarters of the city's Secret Police and finds the torture chambers. After blackjacking the torturer, he runs into the adjacent room, grabs the little man he finds there, and roars, "And what does daddy do at work all day, mister?" What with all the recent arguments about the U.S. torturing terrorist subjects, about whether it's warranted or not, or even actually happens, I think that phrase should be hung up in every office at Gitmo and should be memorized by every intelligence officer in the CIA. Politics is always important, and occasionally funny. With Terry Pratchett, they're both. ...more |
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not set
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Mar 03, 2007
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Jan 31, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0330301624
| 9780330301626
| 0330301624
| 3.97
| 142,269
| May 15, 1987
| Jun 24, 1988
|
really liked it
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I want an electric monk. As Douglas Admas tells us in this book, every civilization creates mechanical devices designed to save us from our labor. We h I want an electric monk. As Douglas Admas tells us in this book, every civilization creates mechanical devices designed to save us from our labor. We have diswashers to wash our tedious dishes for us, VCRs to watch those tedious television programs so we don't have to, and finally the Electric Monk to believe on those things we can't be bothere to believe in. Is that cool, or what? As strange as it sounds, the Electric Monk is actually integral to the plot. But this plot is complex enough to deserve it. The main character, more or less, is Richard MacDuff, an up-and-coming young computer programmer who has several unique problems. The first problem is that of his couch - it's stuck in the stairwell and, by all logic as affirmed by the best computer modeling systems, should never have gotten where it was in the first place. The second problem is that he's wanted for the murder of his bosss. He didn't do it, of course, but that kind of thing doesn't really impress the police. And, of course, there's the problem with the woman he loves, Susan, who just so happens to be the sister of the boss whom Richard is accused of murdering. Add into all that the titular Dirk Gently, if that is his real name. Dirk is a man who, since college, has unswayingly, constantly denied having any kind of psychic powers whatsoever - which caused him some problems during his university days when he managed to correctly predict, down the the comma, the contents of a major exam. Now older and weirder, Dirk runs his Holistic Detective Agency. His work rests on one simple principle: the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things. Based on a common misunderstanding of quantum theory, Dirk believes that all things are fundamentally connected to all other things, no matter how tenuous those connections might appear to the unaided eye. So during the course of, say, looking for a lost cat, it is entirely possible that he may have to go down to the beach in Bermuda. Because, fundamentally, all things are connected. And billable. Then there's the matter of a time machine hidden in Cambridge and the temptation that can arise from having one. With what amounts to a TARDIS, one could go to any point in time and space. You could visit ancient lands, pet extinct animals or, if necessary, fix something that had gone terribly, terribly wrong. It's tricky, but it can be done. And if you're the ghost of an alien whose simple mistake – putting his trust in an Electric Monk, for example – consigned it to billions of years of insubstantial solitude, a time machine might be very tempting indeed. There's really no good way to summarize this book. As Douglas Adams is fond of doing, there seem to be several plotlines and events which, at first, seem to ha ve no relation to each other. But as you read, you find out that the Electric Monk isn't as funny as we thought he was, that putting a salt shaker into a piece of pottery can cause more problems than you think, and that you should always be afraid of people with nothing to lose. As Dirk claims, all things in this book are fundamentally interconnected, even if it's not obvious at the moment. Yes, even the couch. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 03, 2009
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Jan 31, 2008
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Paperback
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