|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0345413997
| 9780345413994
| 0345413997
| 4.02
| 27,112
| 1957
| Jun 17, 1997
|
really liked it
|
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!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 21, 2010
|
Feb 24, 2010
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1933929820
| 9781933929828
| 1933929820
| 3.49
| 727
| Apr 15, 2009
| Apr 15, 2009
|
liked it
|
In the introduction to this book, the author states that he truly admires William Shatner - he states that Shatner is a man who has made a career out
In the introduction to this book, the author states that he truly admires William Shatner - he states that Shatner is a man who has made a career out of caricaturing himself, remaking himself over and over again with no looking back, no shame and - as far as we know - no regrets. He finishes by kindly asking William Shatner not to sue him. I don't think he has too much to worry about, really. This book is a quick, fun read that, while not necessarily painting William Shatner in the best of lights, certainly pays homage to his long and varied career. The story goes as follows: William Shatner is on his way to the very first ShatnerCon, a convention celebrating his life and works. It is a convention mobbed with fans, devotees who are there to see their idol, whether he caught their hearts as T.J. Hooker, Captain Kirk, or the host of Rescue 911. In the new Cathode-La convention center, tribute can be paid in full to William Shatner, a man who has changed so many lives. But there are those who do not adore Shatner. They don't like him or even tolerate him. They are the Campbellians, known by the bloody stumps where their right hands used to be and each known only as Bruce. They hate William Shatner with a passion that borders on madness, and seeing him dead is not nearly enough for them - they want his entire body of work to never have existed. Their weapon is a Fiction Bomb, a metaphysical WMD that can erase stories from existence. No one remembers them, no one knows they ever existed. Should the Fiction Bomb succeed, William Shatner's entire body of work would cease to be. And so, in short order, would he. But what if a Fiction Bomb should go wrong? What if that interface between fiction and reality should be breached, spilling its contents into what we commonly call the Real World? In that case, dozens of William Shatners - every character the man had played - would emerge in our world, with only one thought on their minds: Destroy the real William Shatner! This book is a very quick read - only eighty-three pages - but it certainly packs in a lot of action, and as works of fan-fiction go, it isn't too bad. Because that is most assuredly what this book is - fanfic. Burk has a very basic concept here - get all of Shatner's characters out to kill him. Simple. Add lots of blood and gore and guts, because that's always fun, and you have some entertaining reading. This is the very best kind of fanfic, really - you know it's just a send-up, never intended to be a serious work of literature. Sit back and enjoy the ride. It suffers from some serious editing problems, though, and Mr. Burk would have done well to have hired a good proofreader. There are some very basic grammatical mistakes, dropped plurals and a few sentences that just don't make sense. To a regular reader, it might not be important, but to someone whose bread and butter is the proper use of English, it's kind of glaring. But then my expectations weren't all that high - I went into this expecting a rollicking adventure and that's what I got. Complaining about the grammar in a book like this is like complaining about the quality of the vegetables in your Big Mac. Still, there are some redeeming points to it, above and beyond the weirdness of the whole thing. The beginning of the book does a very good job at setting up a real dreamlike atmosphere – a building that covers a hundred city blocks and has a parking lot that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Upon reaching the convention center, Shatner finds out that he is already late, and is led through a maze of hallways that result in almost instant disorientation. He has to sign hundreds of photographs for hours on end, and ultimately faces off with his own doppelgangers. Burk has reached into the bag of common nightmares and put together a scenario that is both familiar and disarming, which propels you through the rest of the book. After all, if you're struggling to keep up with events, think about how Shatner must be feeling? And of course, one can't help but wonder if this is a commentary on the very nature of the actor/fan dynamic. Who is William Shatner, after all? Depending on who's looking at him, he could be Kirk or T.J. Hooker, Denny Crane or Buck Murdock, the guy who saw gremlins on his plane or the guy trying to sell you cheap airplane tickets. On top of that, Shatner has another character to maintain – Shatner as a public figure, the guy who goes to conventions and book signings and does guest spots on TV shows. Who is the real William Shatner? Who are any of us, really? In this age of online presences, there could are electronic doppelgangers of ourselves all over the internet. The person that your Twitter followers believe is you is not necessarily the same person that the people on your Mad Men slash fic forum know. You present a different face to your Facebook friends than the people you know in your World of Warcraft game, and like Shatner in this story, you ultimately have no control over the different renditions of you that other people see. The good news, of course, is that those different Yous are unlikely to rise up and try to kill you. Ultimately, this book has no over-arching message about the nature of identity in a world where different versions walk around without our knowledge or consent. I don't think that it was ever Burk's purpose to write a treatise on the modern concept of identity, but rather to write a quick, bloody thriller about William Shatner. So, it has no real lessons to teach us other than that if you see a deranged Captain Kirk approaching with a lightsaber (and how that got in there, I'll never know - a little artistic license for the sake of awesomeness) you run away. Very fast. -------------------------------------------------- "I'm a... professional. I can deal... with anything." - William Shatner, Shatnerquake -------------------------------------------------- ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jan 23, 2011
not set
|
May 24, 2009
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140345809
| 9780140345803
| 0140345809
| 3.83
| 5,171
| 1974
| Apr 01, 1991
|
it was amazing
|
Young adult fiction must be a really tough genre to wrap your head around, for a writer. You have a story that you want to tell, and you have to tell
Young adult fiction must be a really tough genre to wrap your head around, for a writer. You have a story that you want to tell, and you have to tell it in such a way that it is simple enough for your target audience to read, yet engaging enough to keep them reading. The themes have to be familiar enough for them to understand and relate to, yet unusual enough to be interesting for them. Go too far in the wrong direction and you have a failure. So how does a YA writer do it, balancing all those issues, while still writing a good book? Damned if I know. I've never managed to write a decent book for adults, much less young ones. Fortunately, there are plenty of talented writers who can write for young people, and one of those is William Sleator. A YA writer who specializes in science fiction, Sleator has written his fair share of strange, fantastic and sometimes disturbing books. Of all the ones I've read, this book is probably the one that creeped me out the most. The setup for this story is simple. Five sixteen year-old orphans - two boys, three girls - are put into a giant room, with no visible walls, ceiling or floor. The only structures in this room are stairs and landings. Nothing else except for a small machine with flashing lights and odd sounds that dispenses food. That's it. The five characters are very different and very interesting. First we have Peter, a scared boy, uncertain of his surroundings in the best of times, and utterly overwhelmed by being dropped into this bizarre place. He's afraid of everything and everybody, and finds solace only his the strange trances he drops into, in which he is with an old orphanage roommate, Jasper, feeling safe and protected. As an interesting aside, it wasn't until I was much older that I figured out Peter's sexuality. It wasn't that thinly veiled, either. I really don't handle subtlety well, I think.... Lola is not a showgirl. Sorry, had to put that in. Lola is a tough, street-smart girl who has no tolerance for stupidity or cruelty. She's had to learn a lot in her time, and doesn't look to others to decide what she should or should not do. Blossom is a fat little girl who is the first to figure out how to use the food dispenser (in a rage at it, she sticks out her tongue, and out pops a food pellet - but more on this later). She is cunning and devious, much sharper than people would give her credit for being. If anyone is truly dangerous in this crowd, it is her. Abagail is a mousy girl, pretty in her own way, but with very little in the way of self-confidence. She tends to latch on to other people and question her own thoughts and actions. She does have compassion, however, though not the means to make her compassion a reality. Finally, Oliver is the other boy of the group, and he is all that Peter is not. He is strong and confident and good-looking. For a while, Peter thinks that Oliver is his old friend, Jasper, and subsequently Peter is devoted to Oliver. A certain power stucture evolves when it is discovered that of all the people, only Oliver can bring Peter out of his trances. Oliver has power, and he is not afraid to use it. These five kids are trapped in this house of stairs. None of them know why they're there, they only know that they are. They soon discover that the food-dispensing machine will only give them food under certain conditions. In the beginning , they are forced to repeat a series of actions and movements, that evolve into a kind of dance, hoping to get food from the machine. From there it gets only worse. They soon discover that the dance isn't enough. The infighting that comes naturally becomes essential to their survival, for only when they are cruel or greedy will the machine start flashing its lights and entice them to dance. The question then becomes whether or not the kids will do as the machine wishes, and how long they can hold out against it. Or if they will. This book is disturbing to say the least. It levels some pretty harsh accusations about human nature, not just regarding the kids in the house of stairs, but also regarding the people who put them there. The kids are there for a reason, and not a good one. The whole setup (which is thoroughly, if somewhat clunkily, explained at the end) is about conditioning, and changing people's personality through stimuli and reinforcement to make them behave as desired. Because it demonstrates people, young people in particular, behaving in a manner that displays the truth of their nature, this book has often been compared to Lord of the Flies, and rightly so. In its way, it's even more disturbing than Lord of the Flies - at least the kids in that book had been left to their own devices, as terrible as they were. In this book, the horrors that these five teens go through are part of a deliberate state-sanctioned experiment in human conditioning - a kind of horrible, Pavlovian Breakfast Club. Such is the nature of that experiment that the two children who resisted the conditioning were actually regarded as failures. Upon reflection, the people pulling the strings are far more frightening and disturbing than these poor, manipulated children. If nothing else, the lesson to be learned from this story is simple - be a human being. There are some things that are too important to sacrifice for something as simple and petty as food and acceptance. We must never allow ourselves to be beasts. We have to be human. This has relevance today, when we are debating the ethics of torture - is it a necessary evil that we must tolerate if our society is to survive, or is it an offense against our humanity? If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that an evil act is somehow the right thing to do, then we have lost a very important part of ourselves. Of course, it's also about science, but the message here is less dire - we must not allow science to lose its humanity. In this book, a strange future with a monolithic state government, science is entirely utilitarian, with no moral qualms about putting minors through psychological torture. The good news is that, at least as of this writing, science errs on the side of ethics. Modern science certainly has its moral gray areas, but the majority of scientists out there would never consent to run an experiment such as this. I hope. The last line in the book is one of the more frightening ones in literature, right up there with the last line in 1984. It's a blunt reminder of everything that has happened in the book, and a pointed summation of everything that Sleator has been trying to say - that humans have a base nature, that we can be manipulated, and we will, given the right circumstances, allow others to shape who we are. His message to his readers - teenagers like the ones in this book - is to refuse to submit to such control. Good advice for them, and for us. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 24, 2009
|
Apr 25, 2009
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765352389
| 9780765352385
| 0765352389
| 4.01
| 788
| Apr 30, 1981
| Oct 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
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!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 21, 2009
|
Apr 21, 2009
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765348284
| 9780765348289
| 0765348284
| 3.98
| 22,686
| Oct 31, 2006
| Oct 30, 2007
|
really liked it
|
What do you get when you combine aliens, diplomacy, artificial intelligences, religion and sheep together? Well, for most people, the answer would be
What do you get when you combine aliens, diplomacy, artificial intelligences, religion and sheep together? Well, for most people, the answer would be a horrible mess. For John Scalzi, however, it's a fantastic read. Nothing too complex, no greater statements about the nature of humanity and the necessity of war that holds together the stories in his Old Man's War universe, just a good old-fashioned espionage romp. With sheep. Or at least a sheep. Kind of. The story begins with, as so many stories do, a murder. Not an intentional murder, really, but one that was born of shame and revenge, as so many murders are. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't rate much, except that the death of an alien trade ambassador is never a convenient thing. When said diplomat may just possibly have been killed by his human counterpart, that's even more difficult to deal with. Instead of a nice, tidy trade agreement cementing the relations between the United Nations of Earth and the Nidu, an alien race with an extraordinary sense of smell and hair-trigger tempers, we have what the State Department might just call "a challenge." The only thing that can heal this little rift between the two planets is a sheep. But not just any sheep - a special breed, created just for the Nidu called the Android's Dream. Without this sheep, the ruling family cannot hold on to power, and the Nidu will be plunged into a catastrophic civil war that will, in all likelihood, take Earth with it. In order to find the sheep, avert catastrophe and, most importantly, avoid calling shame down upon the government, State Department employee - and veteran of the Earth's greatest military failure - Harry Creek will have to use every skill at his disposal. And then some. It's a great read, this book. Telling any more about the plot would ruin it, so I'll just exhort you to pick up the book and get reading. In all honesty, you could probably finish it pretty quickly. But I can't just stop here, so let me tell you more about why I liked it as much as I did. What made it so good, what always makes good sci-fi good, is the reality of the world the author creates. It's great to come up with high-concept scientific ideas, or intricately-planned space battles, but for the reader to really immerse him-or-herself in the book, it has to have a world in which the reader can easily imagine her-or-himself existing. I thought of this during one scene early in the book. A character was riding the Washington, D.C. Metro and the narrator was describing the various aliens who were riding with him. There was an explanation of how various species had integrated themselves into the city, overcoming prejudice and discrimination, but what really got me was the description of a young woman reading the paper, the only other human in the car. Amidst all the different bodies, tongues, smells, and appearances, she didn't even notice. "If her great-great-grandmother were on the train," Scalzi writes, "she would have thought she was on commuter train heading toward the fifth circle of Hell. This woman didn't even look up. The human capacity for being jaded was a remarkable thing." It was at that point that I really accepted the reality of the book. It wasn't a perfect world, it wasn't one that had been ripped apart or perfected by alien contact. What had happened was what happens here any time cultures interact - after a brief period of unpleasantness, cultures start to mingle until it gets to a point where no one can remember when things were at all different. This book has all those little details that help sell the world, things that blend our world with theirs. Bored mall employees, amoral hit men, political jockeying, all of those things are familiar. Actual ghosts in machines, planet-cracking bombs, aliens that are almost entirely mouth and digestive systems, those are not. But they're believable, because Scalzi is one hell of a writer. I do have one little nit to pick, however. It's not a big nit, but a nit nonetheless. The book is an adventure, plain and simple. It's a plot-driven story that pulls you along from one event to the other with nary a chance to catch your breath, and I never complain about that. It has some great characters... who remain almost entirely static throughout the story. I can't say there's no character development in the book, because the big hairy guy who eats people does have a change of heart about it, but other than that.... Harry Creek begins the book as a reluctant hero who is hiding his super-hacker, ass-kicker light under a bushel, and he's happy to continue to be that at the close of the book. Robin Baker is a sassy, independent young woman who holds up under pressure - though not necessarily happy about it - throughout the book, and the Nidu ambassador Narf-win-Getag is untrustable the moment he walks on the page, and he remains so up through his sudden and inevitable betrayal near the end. Like I said, this isn't a huge complaint, because the book that Scalzi has written isn't a character book. It's an adventure, and adventure books usually don't require a whole lot of character development. That doesn't mean the characters aren't believable - they certainly are - and it doesn't mean they're not interesting - they absolutely are. They just don't grow. Fortunately I know from having read Old Man's War and its related books that Scalzi has no problem with character development, and so I can assume that keeping his characters reasonably static in this book was a deliberate choice. As a tangential comment on characters in the book, there was one character that drove me nuts. This character is not central to the story, and only appears a few times. What makes this person interesting are the following two things: first that the character is named Sam, and second that Sam's gender is never established. Maybe it's me and I missed something, but I have no idea if Sam was a man or a woman. I caught it mainly because Tad Williams used the same name to pull a similar trick in his Otherland series, but in that story he was hiding Sam's gender from another character, not the reader, so we eventually found out what was what. In this story, Sam's gender remains a mystery for no other reason than I figure it amused Scalzi. It has no bearing on the story, and it doesn't make the fate of Sam's lover any less tragic, but I found it fascinating. In any case, it's a great read and - as a bonus - very funny. The opening line alone lets you know that, no matter what you think you've read before, you haven't read anything quite like this. But I'm not telling you what that line is - I can't give away everything.... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 11, 2008
|
Sep 13, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765354063
| 9780765354068
| 0765354063
| 4.12
| 87,316
| Mar 2006
| May 01, 2007
|
it was amazing
|
Back in aught-Six I read Scalzi's breakout book Old Man's War and loved it. It had everything - high-end science fiction, philosophy, cool battle scen
Back in aught-Six I read Scalzi's breakout book Old Man's War and loved it. It had everything - high-end science fiction, philosophy, cool battle scenes and a protagonist whose sense of humor reminded me a lot of my friend Jon. The book's premise was very simple - why do we use young people to fight in wars? Because they have the bodies that work best for the task. If that were not an issue, then who would we want? Why, old people, of course. They have the life experience, the patience and the perspective to be better soldiers. In theory, of course. I don't think there's any sci-fi in the world that'd make Dick Cheney into a good soldier. So, it's The Future. Mankind has spread out among the stars, and the Colonial Union is the political organization that keeps them together. Any government needs a military, so the Colonial forces make sure they have the best recruits, all brought from Earth. With some pretty high-tech jiggery-pokery, the senior citizens from Earth's richer nations are made into lean, green fighting machines, capable of performing in ways that make the Marines of our day look like palsey victims. Their minds are transferred from their old, decrepit bodies and put into new ones, grown from their own DNA, but altered to make them better soldiers. It's all very exciting and cool, but at some point, I suppose Scalzi asked himself a question: what happens when someone signs up at age 65, but doesn't make it to age 75 when they're supposed to start their service? Well, we have all this DNA just sitting there, can't let it go to waste, can we? That brings us to the Ghost Brigades, the rather morbid nickname for the Colonial Union's Special Forces. Their bodies are grown from DNA whose previous owners have expired, and modded in more extreme ways than the regular defense force soldiers. Then, when the body is ready, they're woken up. An amazing piece of biotechnology called, rather whimsically, a BrainPal prepares their brains for consciousness, acting as a kind of bootstrap for the emergent personality. It tells them what they're supposed to know, so they don't have to go through the tedious process of learning it all. And, of course, much more. They Special Forces do what the regular Defense Forces can't, and act in ways that their more "ordinary" soldiers couldn't understand. In Old Man's War the Special Forces only came in at the end. In this book, as you might have guessed, they play a much more central role. Charles Boutin is a traitor to humanity. For reasons known only to him, he has sold out the Colonial Union to its enemies, a troika of alien species that would be more than willing to wipe us off the map. The Defense Forces would love to find him, of course, but he's hidden himself among the enemy. So they got the next best thing: a copy of his mind that Boutin had made while researching the BrainPal. In theory, it should work: put this mental backup copy into a "clean slate," a body that has no mind of its own. A Special Forces body. And so, Jared Dirac was born. Decanted. Whatever. It was hoped that when he opened his eyes, he would be Charles Boutin in a new body, and could promptly be interrogated. But it isn't that easy. All Jared Dirac is is a normal Special Forces soldier, a blank slate who is ready to do the job he was, literally, born to do: keep humanity safe. He's sent off to training, with the expectation that he would be just another Special Forces soldier. But he is, of course, much more than that, and the memories that begin to emerge could lead the Defense Forces to their goal, or to destruction.... It's a great book. Tons of fun, although the exposition is a bit heavy-handed in the beginning. There's a whole lot of reminding about what you learned in Old Man's War, and I didn't really need it. That's the thing about recap, though: if you avoid it altogether, you can confuse people who haven't picked up the previous book in a while. Slather it on and you bore the people who have good enough memories. It's a tiny thing, though, well balanced by the awesomeness and imagination of the book. I look forward to finding and reading the next book in the series, The Last Colony. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 04, 2008
|
Apr 07, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679767800
| 9780679767800
| 0679767800
| 4.06
| 52,333
| Jun 14, 1956
| Jul 02, 1996
|
liked it
|
In his introduction to the book, Neil Gaiman notes that most science fiction, while being about the future, is a product of the times in which it was
In his introduction to the book, Neil Gaiman notes that most science fiction, while being about the future, is a product of the times in which it was written. Therefore, most science fiction can be easily dated within the first two pages. Books from the 80s read like Neuromancer, with their despairing cyber-topiae, books from the 50s all sound like Arthur C. Clarke, and books from the 70s have entirely too much sexual subtext. The Stars My Destination was originally published in 1956, but damned if it feels that way. Probably because so much 50s sci-fi predicted the shiny-jumpsuit future where the biggest problem we face is robot Armageddon. This book, on the other hand, deals realistically with the problems of the future. One of which is the realistic implications of "jaunting," the will-driven teleportation that any normal person should be able to achieve, albeit to different magnitudes. The ability to move yourself up to 1,000 miles with a thought creates a terrible economic and social upheaval, reordering the way that humans have lived ever since we figured out how to fit wheel to axle. The other element that I liked was that of the corporate ruling class that runs throughout the book. While there is no explicitly shown "lower class," the overarching power of the corporate clans tacitly demands the existence of an impoverished working class, full of ignorant laborers who will just work for their day's pay. Such is Gully Foyle. He's presented to us in the beginning as a near-animal brute, thinking of only one thing - survival alone in deep space. As it turns out, he's very good at that, and eventually manages to signal a passing spaceship to pick him up. But, when the ship passes him by, his thoughts turn to a new white-hot focus: revenge. And with revenge in mind, it turns out, you can accomplish damn near anything. The path that Foyle takes is long and complicated, driving him from the highest of high society to the depths of the earth, and at each stage of his quest, he becomes more than he was. Gully Foyle goes from animal to man, and then on to something more.... I tore through this book in a couple of days, and enjoyed most of it very much. Most of it. The ending fell flat for me, though. For the majority of the book, Bester was trying to get us to cheer for this revenge-driven brute, this animal in human flesh who, no matter how well he learns to speak or dress, is still driven by his burning flame of vengeance. In the beginning, in fact, he reminded me a lot of Marv from Sin City - The Hard Goodbye. As we get to the end, though, it seems like Bester felt compelled to throw in some social commentary about the inherent goodness of the masses of humanity and our limitless potential or some other such nonsense. I didn't buy it. Foyle's switch from selfish individual to quasi-messianic superhero seemed really forced. I would have been happier if he'd just killed the people who needed killing and then went off to explore the universe. Other than that, it was a great book. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 29, 2006
|
Feb 08, 2008
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345477332
| 9780345477330
| 0345477332
| 3.89
| 9,855
| Nov 03, 2005
| Jun 27, 2006
|
liked it
|
REVISED: 4/19/12 When you think about Darth Vader, many things come to mind. Dark Lord of the Sith. Bane of the Jedi. Throat-Crusher Supreme. Emo? No. Of REVISED: 4/19/12 When you think about Darth Vader, many things come to mind. Dark Lord of the Sith. Bane of the Jedi. Throat-Crusher Supreme. Emo? No. Of all my complaints about the new trilogy – and there are many – the biggest one has to do with how Anakin Skywalker was handled. I grew up loving Darth Vader. He was a vicious bastard, but by gods he was awesome about it. He was a hard-ass who inspired terror wherever he went, and he was a man who overcame insurmountable evils to ultimately redeem himself. From the moment we see him emerge from the smoke in A New Hope, we know that this is a man to be feared and reckoned with. He never said, “Yippee,” and he most certainly was never a mopey little emoboi. I despised the choice to make Anakin a whiny little brat who was turned to the Dark Side. And please note the passive voice there – “was turned.” He was manipulated and pushed and pulled, and finally when Palpatine said, “Go murder children,” Anakin just said, “Okay,” and did it. I never got the feeling that Anakin was making his own choices in these movies, or doing terrible things because he truly thought they were the right thing to do. The title of Darth Vader fit very, very poorly on this wet noodle of a Sith-wannabe, and that, more than anything else, made me very angry about the new trilogy. So, in comes James Luceno to clean things up. Set about a month after the events in Episode 3, this book starts Vader’s transformation from mopey to malicious. Despite the best efforts of the Clone Army, some Jedi survived the initial massacre of Order 66. One of those, a Jedi named Roan Shyne, is trying to lead his dead comrade’s padawan to safety, wherever safety may be found. He’s questioning his purpose now, in a world where evil has emerged victorious, and where the Jedi are no more. Should he make a stand and die defending the Idea, or should he obey Yoda’s last orders and go to ground? Sadly, he’s a principle character in a Star Wars novel, so the Force takes the choice out of his hands. He finds himself drawn ever closer into the mystery of the Empire and the Emperor. And Vader. Who, I might add, is having issues of his own. The first three pages of his first POV scene are about how uncomfortable the Suit is (Luceno talked to the folks at LucasArts to find out what it was like), and how miserable he is being a nubby lump of burned flesh inside a mobile life-support system. He can’t see properly, can’t hear normally, can’t move like he used to – hell, he can barely walk steady, much less wield a lightsaber like he used to. Palpatine, being the good mentor that he is, knows exactly how to cure Vader’s blues: give him a project, something to keep his mind off things. Like hunting people down and killing them. Luceno handles the transition from brat to demon very delicately and very smoothly. By the time the book is over, Vader still isn’t the avatar of evil that he will one day become, but he’s certainly over the hump. In addition, the advantage of writing a prequel story is that you can boost the power of events that happen later on, giving them much more significance. When Vader finally kills Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi, for example, the moment is a little richer and more powerful for having seen what Palpatine put Vader through in his early days. In this book, we get a good look at the Master-Disciple relationship of the Sith, and the precarious balance that it requires. The Master works his hardest to break and subjugate his disciple in order to make him strong enough so that he will one day exceed his master. The problem is that, traditionally, the disciple usually kills the master at that point, finds a new disciple of his own, and the cycle begins anew. Palpatine is looking to avoid that, if at all possible, and Vader is just itching for a chance. The key is that power is an end unto itself, and the cycle of murder is just a part of that. But at the end of Jedi, Vader kills his master for the benefit of another, something that is antithetical to the core philosophy of the Sith. Vader gained no power by killing Palpatine, at least not in the sense that he understood “power” up to that point. Star Wars purists might stay away from the novels, and that’s certainly their right. I think this one is worth reading, though. It’s an excellent move away from the horrorshow that was the new trilogy, and does a very good job at helping us rediscover the Darth Vader that we all came to know and love. ------------------------------- “The old system is dead, senator. You would be wise to subscribe to the new one.” - Darth Vader ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 17, 2006
|
Feb 08, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140285539
| 9780140285536
| B002JJC5RG
| 4.01
| 109,913
| 1951
| Jul 1999
|
it was amazing
|
I have a long fondness for Apocalyptic novels. The Stand was one of my early favorites from junior high school, and I really enjoyed its cousin by Rob
I have a long fondness for Apocalyptic novels. The Stand was one of my early favorites from junior high school, and I really enjoyed its cousin by Robert McCammon, Swan Song. There's something about the End Of The World that just grabs me and won't let go. Maybe it's the thought that, should the world end, I would be one of the survivors. The rule of law would break down, all shackles of modern life would be loosed, and I would finally be free to choose my own destiny. Which, knowing me, would probably be very short and end up with me getting shot by some kind of Mad Max pirate tribe. I can say with some certainty, however, that in this book's scenario I would not be coming out on top. Because I love astronomy. Let me explain. The end of the world came in two parts, one of which was definitely of our own doing. It started with a comet. Or a meteor shower. Or something, but whatever it was, it lit up the sky. Green streaks of light brightened the night skies around the world, and everyone who could go and watch them did so. I'm a sucker for a natural light show, so I probably would have spent the night watching the skies and enjoying myself. And I would have woken up stone blind the next day. That in itself - the vast, vast majority of the human population on Earth being blind - would have been a pretty good apocalypse. Wyndham describes rashes of suicides, accidental deaths and, of course, murder in just the first few days. Without vision, the carefully crafted world we've made kind of falls apart. But it would have been survivable. Co-operation groups spring up pretty quickly, both voluntary and otherwise, where sighted people assist the blind in surviving. It would have been tough, yes, but not impossible. If not for the Triffids. While we don't know what caused the green comet, the Triffids were definitely our fault. Bioengineering gone haywire, the Triffids are ambulatory carnivorous plants with a poison sting that can kill a grown man from ten feet away. And while they're not intelligent, they are remarkably... aware. They follow sound, they learn and co-operate in hunting, and are very difficult to eradicate. But by themselves, they're manageable. Their stingers can be removed, even though they grow back eventually, and they make interesting garden plants. And they're immensely profitable - the oil derived from a Triffid outdoes every other kind of vegetable oil available. In normal times, the Triffids are under human control. Two problems, when put together, make for a truly terrifying end. And an exciting story. Wyndham has created a brave new world for us, with a wide variety of characters who all react to their new situation in different - and realistic - ways. From the girl who believes that the Americans will save her to the man who believes that polygamy is the way to a brighter future, everyone has an idea on how to survive. But first they have to deal with the Triffids.... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 13, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743498399
| 9780743498395
| 0743498399
| 4.04
| 1,133
| 2005
| Jan 01, 2005
|
really liked it
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 14, 2009
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812545249
| 9780812545241
| 0812545249
| 3.68
| 5,471
| Aug 2001
| Jun 17, 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's the 21st century, and nothing has really changed. Things are going pretty much as we expect - the rich are getting richer, the world is ticking a
It's the 21st century, and nothing has really changed. Things are going pretty much as we expect - the rich are getting richer, the world is ticking along, and people are busy not thinking about the future. Oh, plenty of people say they think about the future, but when they say that, they usually just mean their future. Not THE future. Scott Warden doesn't even think about his future. He's an expat beach bum living in Thailand, barely supporting his wife and his young daughter, and pretty well content to stay that way. Until, of course, he is invited to see the first of the Chronoliths. The Chronolith is a towering monument - ice-cold and ice-blue, it stabs hundreds of feet in the air and is made of no material that science can identify. At the base, there is an inscription, proclaiming a great military victory - 20 years in the future. An unknown warlord named Kuin will, in about two decades, run roughshod over the world, erecting these time-violating towers in his wake. And, through coincidence or causality, Scott gets pulled into the attempt to stop Kuin before he can even get started. It's a fun book, and I really like Wilson's style. He kind of sucks you in, and that's something I haven't gotten in a long while. what's more, he is an intelligent writer, in more ways than one. He not only manages to explain the theoretical underpinnings behind his plot - some pretty abstract theoretical physics - but he's also careful to show the psychological and social implications of the Chronoliths. How would people react to the sure and certain knowledge that, in twenty years' time, a supremely powerful warlord would start rampaging across the world? How would different social classes and age groups react, and what would be the political and economic results? Without getting bogged down in technicalities, Wilson does an excellent job at painting a future in decline. Not a dystopia by any means, just one of those periods where things aren't so good - where they could get much worse just as easily as they could get much better. I enjoyed him so much, I think I'll go right on to the other book of his that I have.... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 03, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 076534825X
| 9780765348258
| 076534825X
| 4.03
| 41,866
| Apr 2005
| Feb 07, 2006
|
really liked it
|
I was so impressed by his work on The Chronoliths that I went right ahead and jumped into this book without hesitation. Of course, I was not disappoin
I was so impressed by his work on The Chronoliths that I went right ahead and jumped into this book without hesitation. Of course, I was not disappointed. At least not too much, but I'll get to that later. It is the near future, as these stories so often are, and one night the stars go out. The night sky goes black, with none of the familiar lights that have guided us throughout human history. Within minutes, the entire network of satellites circling the globe plummet to Earth, leaving modern telecommunications in shambles. Many people, naturally, panic, fearing that the night would be endless, but no - the sun comes up in the morning. The bright, yellow, light-giving.... oddly uniform and uneventful sun. The Earth, as it turns out, has been enveloped in a kind of cocoon, what thinkers of the age would call The Spin. Inside the Spin, life goes on. There's no stars or moon, and the sun is artificial, but other than that, nothing much changes. High-tech balloons help solve the problem solved by the loss of communications satellites, and everyone goes about their lives. Outside the Spin, the universe is flying by. For every second that passes on Earth, 3.17 years passes outside the black shield. One minute means the passage of 190 years. One hour, 11,412 years. One day, 273,888 years. One year on Earth is 100,037,592 years to the universe at large. Which means that within the next generation, the sun will reach the end of its life, growing to a red giant that would turn the Earth into so much space dust, Spin or no Spin. The big question, then, is who - or what - did this, and why? From reading these two books, I have noticed a few things about Wilson's style. Further reading may disprove my theories, but we'll see. For one, he seems to enjoy dealing with the sociological side to sci-fi. In The Chronoliths, he imagined how the world would react to a tyrant whose coming was announced 20 years before he ever took power - militant cults, youth movements and generational discord, of course. In this book, he does the same - what would the world do if it only had about 50 years to live? The answer, according to Wilson, is splintering messianic fundamentalist religion and violent crime. For the public at large, it seems like there is indeed no hope for the planet, so they naturally turn to the Lord or hedonism - sometimes both at the same time. For our narrator, however, all is not lost. He is friends with one of the greatest minds of his generation, a man who might not be able to stop the Spin, but who could probably figure out what it's there for - if it doesn't kill him first. Which brings me to the second thing I've noticed about Wilson's work. So far, he's worked through a first-person narrator, who is admittedly "chronicling" the events of the previous few decades into a book for posterity. I have no real problem with that except that by the time the narrator is writing the book, he is more or less out of any real danger. This is less true for Tyler Dupree in this book than it was for Scott Warden in The Chronoliths, but as you get to the end of the book, you realize that the important part of the story really ended years before. So the actual end is kind of anticlimactic - the narrator may be in a tough spot before he gets to the last page, but you know that he's out of the real story already and is destined to survive. Otherwise how could he have written the book? Or maybe I shouldn't be reviewing at 12:30 in the morning.... Anyway, it was good. If I see any more of Wilson's work floating around, I'll most definitely pick it up. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 08, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553575384
| 9780553575385
| 0553575384
| 4.11
| 41,818
| Dec 01, 1997
| Dec 01, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 21, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553562738
| 9780553562736
| 0553562738
| 4.03
| 61,008
| Jun 05, 1992
| Jul 1992
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 16, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0886779774
| 9780886779771
| 0886779774
| 4.15
| 14,459
| Apr 10, 2001
| Apr 01, 2001
|
it was amazing
|
At last we have come to the end of our journey, when all will be explained and all will be resolved. As the book opens, the Other - the operating syste At last we have come to the end of our journey, when all will be explained and all will be resolved. As the book opens, the Other - the operating system for the Grail Brotherhood's mysterious plan for immortality - has been defeated, overcome and overpowered by the truly evil assassin Dread. With his mutant ability to manipulate electronics, Dread has taught the Other how to feel true pain, and now has nearly complete control over the Otherland network. With a nearly limitless number of worlds to choose from, Dread allows his sadistic madness to run wild. But no matter how many worlds he rapes and plunders, there are still those he truly wants to destroy - the Otherland explorers sent by the mysterious half-human Sellars. But those explorers themselves face greater dangers than Dread. Half of them have been thrust back into the twisted realms of Otherland, where the horrors and dangers that had been built into it have mutated into unrecognizable terrors. The other half... they ended up in the heart of the Other's secret dreams. There they must face the eventual death of the network and survive it, if they can. Offline, Sellars has brought all of his players into position. Lawyers, children and old women are his army, and together they will uncover the horrible and heartbreaking truth about the nature of the Other and the evil that has been done to it. I really love this series. As it moves towards its ending, which does involve a lot more explaining than most other books do, it's easy to get swept up in the sheer scale of the narrative. There's a lot to take in by the end of the series, a lot of loose ends to tie up, but it all wraps up rather nicely. More or less. There is a rather major revelation that comes near the end that just kind of... gets written off. I have a sneaking suspicion that Williams might have been able to stretch this series into a fifth book, but it probably would have suffered from Rowling Syndrome - a lot of unnecessary padding in between the important bits. The important thing is that, by the end of the book you really do feel invested in the world that Williams has created. You care about the characters, and you want everything to turn out all right for them. For the good ones, at least. For the bad ones, you want them to get their just desserts, to see them suffer as they have made others suffer. You even find yourself feeling for the Other, which we - and the protagonists - have always believed to be the main villain of the story. It is not, as we find out, and the scope of the villainy that has been done to it is truly astonishing. In his forward to the second book, Williams apologized to his readers about the cliffhanger ending to the first. This isn't really four books, he said - it's one giant book that had to, for various reason, be split into four. The main reason, of course, being that no one would print or buy a 3,500 page hardcover, even if the fine folks at DAW Books were willing to try it. He is right, though - it is one very long story, and thus you can extract a great many things from it, if you want to. There's no one thing that I can say this book is about. In one sense, it is an exploration of the future of the digital world and what it might mean to people. The virtual net of this story would be as alien to us as the internet would be to our grandparents. It has become the sea in which our characters swim, and their main way of interacting with the world. It is only when their ability to go offline is taken away from them that they truly begin to value the world and the identity they've left behind. What's more, it explores how we connect with each other - looking at both the relationships we build in virtual space and the ones we build in the real world, and finding complete validity in them both. There are issues of identity, best shown by Orlando, whose towering Thargor the Barbarian character hides a young teenager with a crippling illness that will kill him long before he's old enough to vote. His best friend has a slightly less unfortunate secret to share - that behind those big, muscular sim bodies, Sam Fredericks is actually a girl. The story explores issues of family - how Renie deals with her father, Long Joseph Sulaweyo, or how little Christabel Sorenson's family react when they find out that their young daughter has been drawn deep into Sellars' conspiracy. And the bonds between mother and child that can never truly be broken. And there are even issues of the very definition of the word "life." If your mind is perfectly copied into a computer, with all its memories and personality intact, is it still you? Are you still human? Are you even alive, in any real sense? The Grail Brotherhood certainly believed so, or they would never have started this project in the first place. But in a system as broad and complicated as the Otherland network, who knows what else might arise to test our definition? The story is about heroism and history, about love and hate, about the unshakable bonds of friendship and the tenuous reliance on people you despise. It's about the lengths to which fear will drive you and the extremes you will encounter when you test that fear. It's about science and faith and looking at the world in ways you never imagined. It's about good, it's about evil. It's about life, really, and what it is about life that makes us want more of it. Now I'm just waxing philosophical. To sum up: this is probably one of my favorite stories in my library. I highly recommend you pick it up, set some time aside, and enjoy it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 28, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1857239903
| 9781857239904
| B0068HXK4M
| 4.07
| 16,093
| Sep 30, 1999
| unknown
|
it was amazing
|
This is easily my favorite book in the series, short though the series may be. Otherland is a strange story, really - it's like a hybrid science fictio This is easily my favorite book in the series, short though the series may be. Otherland is a strange story, really - it's like a hybrid science fiction/fantasy tale in that you can easily forget which genre you're in. It's clearly science fiction, in that the whole thing is taking place in a massive computer simulation, but on the other hand, it owes a lot to fantasy - especially the world-crossing aspects of it. Our Otherland heroes have been trapped there for some time now, running through the system with very little understanding of where they are or where they're going. The whole thing is run by a cabal of the world's richest men and women in an attempt to foil Death itself, and was built as their eternal playground. Thus, there are countless worlds to choose from. There are places where you can re-live entire historical epochs, where you can fly in rivers of air or play in a cartoon kitchen. You can be a cowboy in the Old West or a Knight of the Round Table or anything that your mind can conceive - and your programmers can work out. The complexity of this system is such that it is indistinguishable from real life. It is multi-sensory, so you get the full experience of actually being there, with none of the obvious CGI cues that we've come to expect from the virtual world. What's more, the owners of the system have nearly godlike power within it. They plan to not only live forever, but have absolute power while doing so. Two of these simworlds - one original, one derivative - are the reasons why this is my favorite book of the series. The original simworld (not based on any well-known work or historical event) is the House. After being betrayed by the assassin Dread, who has been masquerading as one of their number, Renie, !Xabbu, Martine, Florimel, T4b and Emily are stuck in a kind of... unfinished world. It's a place where the programming hasn't really been settled, and where the unreality of the whole thing can be deadly. They manage to escape by following Dread to a new simulation - a great House that is, in itself, a world. It goes on as far as anyone knows, but is home to countless tribes and nations. Our heroes meet runaway lovers - a cutlery apprentice and a girl from the linen cabinets. They are aided by the Library monks, whose expertise encompasses everything from House history to the minute details of plasterwork. They are nearly killed by attic bandits and hunted by nomadic bands of steeplejacks. Aside from imbuing the House with a deep sense of history and complexity, Williams raises an important point that anyone who has ever played "The Sims" can recognize: what do you do when you start to empathize with a computer-generated being? During their time in the House, they meet people who seem to be genuinely good, perceptive, interesting people, qualities that we don't know how to confidently imbue in real humans, much less coded simulacra. The residents of the House have passions and dreams, they love and hate just as "real" people do. They can't be written of as "just code," because they don't act that way. They help and hinder our heroes just as people out in Real Life might. This brings up an interesting ethical problem: while they can't be sure what their ultimate goal will be, our heroes are pretty sure that the system will eventually have to be destroyed - as far as they know, it is the Otherland system that is keeping them trapped, and their loved ones in comas. Will doing this be, in essence, genocide? By shutting down the Otherland network to save the children in comas, and to save themselves, will they be condemning thousands - perhaps millions - of coded "people" to extinction? Are these "people" really people? After all, the Grail Brotherhood was planning to become immortal code themselves - would they be any less alive than their meat incarnations? While this is not a problem that we have to grapple with yet, it's one that may come up eventually. Tad Williams has done a very nice job in this series of predicting technological advancement, so he may have seen forward on this one, too. The other simworld that makes this my favorite book is a derivative one. This means that it is based on an extant work, much like the Alice in Wonderland world that Paul Jonas goes to, or the bizarre cartoon kitchen from which Orlando and Fredericks had to escape. This world is one of the oldest stories there is, and was the first simworld to be created when the construction of the Otherworld began. It is The Iliad. I've read the original poem a few times, and I'm impressed with it every time. It's a massive story, full of heroes and villains, bravery and treachery, and death. Lots and lots of death. It's an epic poem, and it deserves the title, as it pits nations, men, and gods against each other in what is ultimately a tragic and terrible ten year war. For Tad Williams to use this as the climax for a novel is nothing short of audacious, but he pulls it off wonderfully. Not only does he manage to keep hold of the terrible horror of war that Homer put throughout his poem, Williams integrates his characters into the story, putting them in the roles of key figures such as Achilles, Patroclus, Cassandra and Odysseus. They all want to get into Troy so they can find their way to the Black Mountain, but to do so they must go through the war that has served as the archetype for human conflict for the last few millennia. Their choices, freely made, reflect the choices of the characters they inhabit, which are themselves models for heroes of fiction throughout literary history. In one wonderful scene, Sam Fredericks, who is inhabiting the character of Patroclus, is wondering what to do about her sick friend, Orlando Gardiner, AKA Achilles. He cannot fight, but the Argives need him, and throughout their long friendship as online gamers, it was always Orlando who was the hero. Sam was the sidekick, the buddy, but when you made the movie poster, Orlando's character would always be in the middle of the shot. But much like another Sam in another story, Fredericks knows that heroism isn't just muscles and swords and snappy dialogue. It's about doing what has to be done, even if you don't want to do it. Nearly crippled by progeria, a debilitating childhood illness, Orlando has nonetheless continued to fight on in the Otherland. Now the hero cannot fight, and Sam realizes it's the sidekick who has to pick up the burden. Thus, Sam unknowingly fulfills the destiny of the character she is portraying, puts on the shining armor of Achilles, and goes out to inspire the Argives to fight so that she and her friends might live. The entire Troy sequence is amazing, and every time I read this book, I feel compelled to read The Iliad again. But the series doesn't end there, of course. Suffice it to say we hit a major climax by the end of this book. People are in danger, secrets are revealed, battles are fought... and one of our brave heroes makes the Ultimate Sacrifice. We are brought to the heart of the operating system, the Black Mountain which entombs the Other. The Grail Brotherhood sets their immortality sequence in motion, and the amoral killer Dread makes his bid for virtual godhood. Setting us up for the final book, we are left with our heroes in disarray - divided and lost, dropped into an entirely new environment that is beyond their understanding and forced to cooperate with their gravest enemies for their survival. You may look at this book and think, "Holy cow. 924 pages. There is no way I'm reading 924 pages." But you will, and it'll go a lot faster than you think. Williams has done a great job of making a multi-layered, fast-paced story that you can enjoy on many levels. You can revel in the action and the mystery, you can ponder deep philosophical problems, or you can comb through the great attention to detail and see how much work he must have done to get the Trojan War sequence right. Hats off to you, Tad Williams. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 22, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1857237641
| 9781857237641
| B002JJ4DRG
| 4.03
| 16,469
| 1998
| Jan 01, 2003
|
it was amazing
|
When last we left Our Heroes, they were caught in the Otherland - an immense virtual reality program built by people with more money than God - with n
When last we left Our Heroes, they were caught in the Otherland - an immense virtual reality program built by people with more money than God - with no idea where to go and no idea what to do. They were lost, confused and had no way out. Oh yes - back before Neo got his clock punched by Agent Smith, Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, Fredericks and all the other Otherland explorers discover that they are in more danger than they realize - if they die on the network, then they'll die in real life. And, almost right out of the gate, people start dying. Whether they're tiny biologists living among the ants or a lifetime gamer warring against the different factions of a twisted Oz, they die in unpleasant and, ultimately real ways. And it's up to our heroes to not only avoid death themselves, but also to figure out what the hell they're supposed to be doing in there. One of the things I like about this series is that Tad Williams openly admits to stealing - er, paying homage to the great writers of the past. At the end of book one, when all the main characters have been gathered together and are being told about the great dangers they will face, and how they are part of a plan to defeat the Grail Brotherhood and their Nefarious Scheme, most of the people there want nothing to do with it. It's up to Orlando Gardiner, our young barbarian warrior-slash-progeriac teenager to say, "Hey, this the the Council of Elrond! We have a mission here!" Unfortunately, while the Fellowship of the Ring gets a clear mission before leaving Rivendell, the Otherland explorers are scattered before they know what to do, and their main goal is to run for their lives. As this book progresses, they start to learn more about the vast Otherland network, what its nature is and why it was made. They also learn that it is unstable, and possibly a living thing in its own right. Almost immediately, the group gets split up. That is, as all ensemble writers know, the best way to really build a meaty story, and it works really well here. Unfortunately, while there are three groups, the strongest and most interesting characters get put into two of them. Orlando and Fredericks get sent off into a world more bizarre than any online gaming ever prepared them for; Renie and !Xabbu end up in a horribly twisted version of The Wizard of OZ, if Oz had invaded Kansas, taken over, and started a three-way fight between the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man. This leaves us with the third and largest group being somewhat less interesting than the others. Not completely, of course - we have a blind woman who can sense the information flow of the simulation, a teenage net-freak who only speaks in online slang, a campy death-clown named Sweet William, a Chinese grandmother and an abrasive German woman. They're not bad characters by any means, and each one is special in his or her own right. It's just that most of them were introduced later in the first book, and so we've had less time to get to know them. Putting a more familiar character in that group might have made them more interesting, or it might have overshadowed them. Who knows? One thing that the third group has, however, is a secret - one of them is not who he or she appears to be. One of them has been co-opted by the sociopathic assassin, Dread. The only one with the freedom to go on and offline at will, he has nearly godlike power at his fingertips. And he intends to use it. I can imagine that Tad Williams had a great deal of fun working out these novels, mainly because he created a concept that allowed for incredible freedom in world-building. After all, on a super-powerful VR platform, any conceivable simulation can be created. So whether it is the mythical land of Xanadu, a cartoon kitchen where the groceries come to life at night, a world where people fly like birds, or the legendary land of Ithaca, the settings in these books are only limited to what Williams can think up and work with. What's really interesting is that he seems to take great pleasure in reminding us that we are, in fact, reading a story - he goes so far as to have one character reflect on exactly what kind of character he is. People are reminding themselves that they're not in a story, even though they are, and at the same time recognizing that the entire structure of their virtual universe is patterned on the rules of fiction. It's a strange type of meta-fiction that rewards the careful reader. So, as the book comes to a close, we have some new threads to follow. The Otherland explorers begin to find their purpose and learn about their situation. We've met a strange type of character which exists in many worlds at once - the beautiful, birdlike woman who tries to help Paul Jonas and Orlando Gardiner find their way; the horrible Twins, whose only job is to pursue Paul Jonas wherever he may go. These people can be found around any corner, and the outcome of meeting them is always uncertain. Offline, real-world investigations into the mysterious comas that afflict children begin to bear fruit - a young lawyer named Catur Ramsey is trying to help the parents of Orlando and Fredericks find out what happened to their children, and the search leads him to a strange woman, Olga Pirofski, who may have a vital clue. Renie's father involves himself with some very dangerous people indeed. The police in Sydney find themselves working on a five year-old murder case that will eventually lead them to the malicious assassin/hacker Dread. A mysterious group called The Circle makes itself known to a select few, and reveals its mission - to oppose the Lords of the Otherland and their relentless pursuit of immortality. All through this, those Lords of the Otherland struggle amongst themselves to see who will ultimately control it. The tale becomes stranger with the telling, but I can guarantee - you'll be good and ready to jump right into book three.... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 11, 2010
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1857236041
| 9781857236040
| B0027OYXGO
| 3.93
| 27,959
| Dec 05, 1996
| Jan 01, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
Let me just start by saying this: the first time I finished this series, I immediately went back and started reading it again. I can't think of any ot
Let me just start by saying this: the first time I finished this series, I immediately went back and started reading it again. I can't think of any other series that I've done that with. This is one of Tad Williams' "economy-sized manuscripts," similar to his fantasy classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Similar in size and scope, anyway - four giant tomes chock full of all things awesome. It's a series of grand scope, amazing scale and great imagination, well worthy of your time. Seriously, top-shelf stuff here, people. It begins with the children in a near-future world. Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher in South Africa, has a brother in the hospital. He, like many other children around the world, has gone into an inexplicable coma, the causes of which defy medical science. The only clue she has is that the outbreaks of these comas coincide with the availability of access to the Net - a virtual reality internet that is what Second Life dreams of becoming. Here, depending on your equipment, you can live in a virtual world that is more vibrant and exciting than anything the real world can offer. And you can do it in full sense-surround 3D. Renie's brother, Stephen, engaged in the usual mischief that any kid with access to his own virtual universe might do, and finally got caught. Something shut him down, and Renie was determined to find out. With the assistance of her student, a Bushman named !Xabbu, Renie uncovers an amazing virtual world, something that puts the best virtual reality to shame. It is the Otherland, a playground for the obscenely wealthy. And it may hold the secret to what has afflicted her brother. That's the short version. There's a ton of other storylines going on in there as well. There's young Orlando Gardiner, who compensates for a crippling illness by being the baddest barbarian on the net. There's little Christabel Sorenson, upon whose earnest desire to help the funny-looking Mister Sellars the entire future of the Otherland rests. There's the aptly-named Dread, an assassin extraordinare whose strange "twist" gives him an edge in all things electronic. And, of course, there is Paul Jonas, a man trapped in an imaginary world, whose escape threatens the greatest dreams of the richest men the world has ever known. All of this, as the series title suggests, centers on the Otherland project, a virtual reality of monumental proportions. It's a world that is more real than the real world is, a world of digitally-created, but very deadly, dangers. The slightest misstep could spell disaster. And just FYI, Otherland predates The Matrix by three years and, kung-fu aside, is a much better story. The really fun part is re-discovering things in this series. There are some things I remember very clearly, but other little details that pop up and make me think, "Oh yeah, I forgot all about that." There's just so much stuff crammed into this series that even after two back-to-back readings, I still let details slip away. So, make a sandwich and find a comfortable place to sit. This'll take a while, but I guarantee - it'll be worth it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 12, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140285601
| 9780140285604
| 0140285601
| 4.15
| 410,964
| 1963
| 1999
|
really liked it
|
Nothing in this review is true. As much as I enjoy reading Vonnegut, one of the nagging little doubts I always have is that I'm missing something. That Nothing in this review is true. As much as I enjoy reading Vonnegut, one of the nagging little doubts I always have is that I'm missing something. That there's a hidden message in there that I'm not picking up on. Or, on the other hand, that I am picking up messages that just aren't there. Which is, perhaps, the point of the whole book. The world is full of lies. Good lies, bad lies and indifferent lies, but lies nonetheless, and we pick and choose the lies that make our lives happiest. The lie that we know more than other people, or that we are chosen by one deity or another. They're all lies, and the acknowledgment of that is.... depressing. So, rather than just write about that, Vonnegut wrapped it in a "religion" known as Bokononism - the indigenous and completely artificial "faith" of the island of San Lorenzo. And in order to tell us about Bokononism, we need a narrator - and a disaster. Which brings us to Ice-Nine. A variant of water ice which is the final creation of the father of the atom bomb - Dr. Felix Hoenikker - Ice-Nine is solid at temperatures up to 45.8°C (114.4°F). A single crystal of Ice-Nine can convert any liquid water it touches, which will in turn convert any other water in contact with that. If Ice-Nine were to come into contact with a natural body of water, the chain reaction would lead to the total freezing of the planet Earth. The narrator's journey to the end of the world is an interesting one, started by a search for the truth and ended with the death of humanity. As, perhaps, all searches for truth must. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 14, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575076372
| 9780575076372
| 0575076372
| 4.27
| 262,748
| May 26, 1989
| Dec 2005
|
liked it
|
I really, really, really hate books like this. Oh, it's not a bad book, don't get me wrong. It's just that nowhere on the book did it indicate that thi I really, really, really hate books like this. Oh, it's not a bad book, don't get me wrong. It's just that nowhere on the book did it indicate that this is the first Hyperion book. Which means that I got to the rather abrupt, Wizard of Oz ending and then nearly threw the book across the room in rage. So yeah, it's a good book. And now I have to go and hunt down the next one. Bastards. Anyway, Simmons has pulled out one of the oldest storytelling devices in English literature, and made it new again. It's the far, far future. Earth is long destroyed, but a planet-spanning Hegemony has taken its place, stringing worlds together in a vast, interstellar web. All but the enigmatic planet of Hyperion. It is on Hyperion that the mysterious and terrifying Shrike lives, the guardian of the Time Tombs. And it is here that the ultimate future of Humanity will be decided. If interstellar war, spies and general bad luck don't end it first. Seven people, citizens of the Hegemony, are chosen to go on the Shrike Pilgrimage, a journey to the Time Tombs in which they will attempt to open the Tombs and control... whatever it is that they can control. And they have to get there before the Ousters, another spacefaring "nation" of humans do. And so the pilgrims travel to Hyperion. As they do, they decide that it would be in all their best interests to know why it is that each one has been chosen to go, in case their shared backgrounds might give them a clue as to what they'll need to do next. And so it is that the Priest, the Soldier, the Poet, the Scholar, the Detective and the Politician tell their tales of loss, hope and rage. Each one of them has been touched by Hyperion, even before getting there. And each one has been used by the Hegemony to achieve some greater purpose, one in which their individual desires don't matter. To my mind, the individual stories are far more fascinating than the overall arc, which is pretty murky up until the end. Humanity is painted as a petty, vengeful, manipulative race, or at least the Hegemony is, and the characters hold the key to its downfall. If I read it all correctly, that is. Anyway, it looks like there are three more books I have to find. Dammit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 17, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.02
|
really liked it
|
Feb 21, 2010
|
Feb 24, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 3.49
|
liked it
|
Jan 23, 2011
not set
|
May 24, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 24, 2009
|
Apr 25, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 21, 2009
|
Apr 21, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 3.98
|
really liked it
|
Sep 11, 2008
|
Sep 13, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 04, 2008
|
Apr 07, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
liked it
|
Jan 29, 2006
|
Feb 08, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
liked it
|
Apr 17, 2006
|
Feb 08, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was amazing
|
May 13, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.04
|
really liked it
|
Jun 14, 2009
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
really liked it
|
Nov 03, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
really liked it
|
Nov 08, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 21, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 16, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 28, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.07
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 22, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 11, 2010
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 12, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
really liked it
|
Apr 14, 2008
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
liked it
|
Dec 17, 2006
|
Jan 31, 2008
|
Loading...
