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| 823
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| Jan 2003
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #25. It occurred to me the other day that it’s been almost a year since I last read one of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Relaunch” novel
2024 reads, #25. It occurred to me the other day that it’s been almost a year since I last read one of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Relaunch” novels (see this page for the full list of books I’ve already reviewed), so I threw the latest in the series on my Kindle and just finished it up today. To remind you, this is a series of around a hundred novels that were published between 2000 and 2020 which, unlike is usual with non-canon franchise novels, actually follows its own persistent storyline that is basically supposed to start the day after the final episode of the TV show, which allows the books to make major decisions that then have repercussions in later books, introduce new characters who keep showing up over and over, growing and changing like the characters from the original television iteration, and basically provide all the serialized goodness that made us DS9 fans such admirers of the original show to begin with. When last we left this Relaunch series, Ben Sisko’s son Jake had stolen a shuttlecraft and plunged himself into the wormhole, in an attempt to track down his messiah-like father, who famously ended the TV series by saving humanity and then getting sucked into the wormhole by the “Prophets,” a mysterious alien race who live outside of normal 3D time and space, and who the nearby citizens of Bajor worship like gods; and page one of this latest book opens with Jake getting spit out the other side of the wormhole by said Prophets without achieving his goal, his spaceship now non-functioning and with it looking pretty clear that he’s going to die. Lucky for him, then, that a ragtag group of salvagers in the Gamma Quadrant just happen to come across his craft right when he’s about to run out of oxygen, and end up taking him in and recruiting him as the newest member of their team. This was an extremely clever thing for author SD Perry (an admired Star Trek novelization veteran) to do, because it gives us an excuse to step away from the usual characters and plot developments of this series altogether, to instead spend an enjoyable 300 pages with this entirely new group of people and other sentient creatures, as they traipse across their area of space in pursuit of a Glowy McGuffin that basically serves as an excuse for character development and a lot of casual hanging out. That’s essentially a bit of a breath of fresh air for this series, which like the TV show usually hews closely to an ever-expanding mythos which requires more and more background knowledge with each new title in order to adequately follow, which as fans of serialized franchises can tell you can be both a blessing and a curse sometimes, especially those times when all you want to do is go through a fun little adventure without having to keep track of 50 different characters and the latest developments with all of them. That said, this book does provide a pretty major new development to the main mythos, as Jake and company stumble across a character who literally hasn’t been seen since season 1 of the original TV series and had never shown up in the novels before now; I’ll let the details remain a surprise, but she essentially plays a major role in bringing an end to the “avatar” prediction that’s been a running theme since the very start of these Relaunch books (but for more, see the literal book Avatar that kicked off this entire series, again written by Perry). I found this enjoyable, because as fans of heavily serialized fiction know, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as having a major new development introduced and then have it just linger on and on in the background while everyone slowly forgets about it, so it looks like from what we’re seeing at the end of this book that the ancient prophecy about Ben Sisko’s child becoming a fabled “chosen one” is finally going to be resolved in the next several books (or at least we’ll see). Meanwhile, though, Perry does her usual excellent world-building here, giving us such fun new Gamma Quadrant species as an artificially intelligent creature who lives inside the circuit boards of spaceships, five rocks that can join together into a creature through a hive-mind network (and that happens to be psychic when it does), and what can best be described as a sentient puppy, which is exactly as adorable as that description makes it sound. That said, also as usual, Perry’s prose is just a bit too tedious for me to give a full five stars; in particular I found myself really frustrated with Jake’s endless journal entries in this novel, which seem to serve no other purpose than to recap developments we had just read only a chapter or two previous. All in all, though, I found this to be a really satisfying read, just like all the rest of the Relaunch novels I’ve now gotten through, and I’m looking forward to tackling the next soon, the Klingon-focused The Left Hand of Destiny. I’ll be reading that right away, so to avoid the long delay that happened last time, so I hope you’ll have a chance to join me again soon for that. ...more |
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| 0553448129
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| 3.69
| 278,581
| Nov 14, 2017
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2024 reads, #14. DID NOT FINISH. I tolerated Andy Weir's debut novel back when it first came out, 2011's The Martian (my review), but I can't say that
2024 reads, #14. DID NOT FINISH. I tolerated Andy Weir's debut novel back when it first came out, 2011's The Martian (my review), but I can't say that I actually liked it; and that's because, as a so-called "hard science-fiction" author, Weir is both incapable of creating complex characters or believable dialogue, and has no interest in doing so, believing as he does that a novel doesn't need pesky things like interesting characters or believable dialogue if you have math equations! That would've usually led to me never reading another Weir novel ever again, but when a copy of his follow-up, 2017's Artemis, showed up in my neighborhood's Little Free Library the other week, I was just too tempted and second-guessed myself, picking it up and trying to read it this weekend. Note to self: Stop second-guessing yourself, Jason! Unfortunately this was exactly as terrible as I suspected it was going to be, mostly because Weir finally does try to create compelling characters and realistic dialogue in this book, getting things so cartoonishly wrong that the novel ends up reading like a high-school creative writing assignment from a dimwitted 14-year-old, and accidentally setting back race relations an entire generation by his embarrassing "I'm actually secretly a straight white male" depiction of a woman of color as the book's main character. (How can you tell that a woman of color character has been written by a straight white male? Well, if in the first 25 pages, she gives her personal carrier a man's name because it's "big and strong," literally says [using these exact words], "What's wrong with hookers?" and describes the chiseled-jaw Aryan acting as the Moon's sheriff "Hitler's wet dream" and then immediately confesses she has an enormous crush on him...it's a pretty good freaking bet.) A classic case of failing upwards, Weir's novels are just getting worse and worse, yet are securing bigger and bigger Hollywood deals (his newest novel just got acquired by Ryan Gosling), so take that as the dire warning to any actual intelligent readers that I mean it as.
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| 4.43
| 118
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| Nov 08, 2022
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2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is fine in that way that would get it three stars in any other circumstances, but four stars as a romance novel since that's all anyone's ever hoping from Kindle Unlimited books, that they aren't actively terrible. It's a science-fiction novel, the fourth in an entire series, with a substantial amount of backstory; although unfortunately, despite author Kaylee Pike giving this away as a standalone book, she didn't bother to actually explain any of the backstory here in volume number four, which means that you're kind of taking guesses at what's going on here besides the very general information common to all of these kinds of books, "Sassy human woman develops fascination for red-skinned hunky alien with gigantic horse cock" (because space aliens in romance novels always have cocks the size of a horse). I suppose that's all you really need to know here, although it would've been nice if Pike hadn't assumed that her readers had already read the first three books in the series, because the universe she's created here seems pretty interesting, and I would've liked to have known more about what the relationship exactly is between these aliens and the occasional human characters we see. Oh well, I guess!
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| 4.30
| 89
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| Aug 21, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
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| 9798702166483
| 4.26
| 54
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| Feb 25, 2021
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it was amazing
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I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out
I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. Merged review: I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. ...more |
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| B07MSB15LZ
| 3.48
| 18,080
| Aug 20, 2019
| Sep 05, 2019
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2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the
2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the Nazis actually winning World War Two; and that got me thinking again about Robert Harris' 1992 Fatherland, one of the best of them all, a murder mystery set in an alternative Mid-Century-Modernist 1960s where a bunch of skinny-tie Nazis in sharp Kennedy suits are preparing to dually celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the war and Hitler's 75th birthday. And that was a reminder that I read that book years and years before becoming a full-time reviewer (literally picked up for a quarter at a random yard sale 25 years ago), and that I've never looked further into the career of this surprisingly interesting journalist and historian turned thriller author. Out of the 15 books he's now published since then, the one I mostly wanted to read was 2019's The Second Sleep, because that's one of the only ones besides Fatherland that scratches my alt-history speculative itch; namely, it's set about a thousand years after a civilization-destroying apocalypse, in which there's been such a long period where humanity's official policy was "never speak of the Science Years" (plus a complete lack of any historical records from our times, because of all of it originally being digital) that humanity has completely reverted back to a society identical to the beginning of the Medieval period, where they believe that this is how society has always been, with humans living in thatched huts and cowering before an angry and judgmental God before He eventually became vengeful and apparently destroyed this mysterious "Cloud" where all the world's information used to be stored. Unfortunately, though, just like my recent read of Daphne du Maurier's 1972 Rule Britannia (my review), Harris doesn't seem to have been able to come up with an actual compelling story to set within this fascinating universe, attempting to skate by on 300 pages of just concept alone; and let me tell you, once the novelty wears off on a "future humans think it's still the Medieval Age" concept, it simply becomes a historical fiction book, as if it was actually set in the Medieval Age, which is not the book I was wanting to read when I first picked this up. And while Harris tries to save the book the same way he made Fatherland so interesting, wrapping the plot around a mystery that's obvious to us modern readers but constitutes a shocking discovery to its characters (namely, when a '60s murder investigation accidentally reveals the Holocaust from twenty years previous, which had been quietly swept under the rug by the Germans after actually winning the war), here the reveal doesn't nearly spark the imagination, as our filth-covered neo-serfs very, very, very slowly come to realize, "OH MY GOD, HUMANS USED TO OWN COMPUTERS, WHATEVER THOSE ARE!!!!!!!!!!1!!" To be clear, neither of these reveals are supposed to be shocking to the readers themselves (and in neither case are spoilers either, which is why I don't mind divulging the information); but why it works in the case of Fatherland is because it's fascinating to picture a world in which the Nazis manage to completely hide the concentration camps from the public, leaving us a group of people who are certainly hard-right warmongers, but who in history's eyes aren't any worse than Spain's Francisco Franco (who held power for 36 years) or Russia's Joseph Stalin (who ruled for 29 years). If the Nazis hadn't bothered trying to eliminate the Jewish people, would they now not be thought of as The Greatest Monsters In The Entirety Of Human History? That's an interesting question to contemplate! What isn't an interesting question to contemplate, though, is, "What would happen if, a thousand years in the future, a group of people who have entirely lost the history of the 18th through 21st centuries suddenly rediscover it, but without the means, training or intelligence to duplicate any of it?" That's instead simply a gimmick, which like a jump scare in a horror movie is good for only a few seconds of legitimate entertainment before the audience goes, "Okay, what else you got?"; and that's why this book is so flat and disappointing, despite it being just as good in quality as Fatherland from 27 years earlier. That would normally get the book two and a half stars from me, being rounded up to three here at the "no half stars" Goodreads, so take that under advisement when deciding whether or not to pick the book up yourself. ...more |
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| 1857984986
| 9781857984989
| 1857984986
| 3.93
| 15,854
| 1961
| Dec 1998
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a
2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a favorite among heavily reading insiders in the know, the kind of books difficult to find in mall stores but that the coolest people at the annual Coniconicon were always seeming to rave about. And now, forty years later, I've finally read my first Stainless Steel Rat novel myself, LOL; and I have to confess that I now deeply regret waiting so long to do so, because at least this first book in the series turned out to be quite amazing, not just for the story itself but because it's turned out to have held up way better than most of the other '50s sci-fi being published by his peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. It's essentially a heist story about an intergalactic con man named James "Slippery Jim" Bolivar diGriz, who lives in a Star Trek-like post-scarcity universe where crime has been virtually eliminated; he himself commits crimes simply for fun, and as a subversive act of rebellion against a tediously clean and optimistic universe, just to prove that he has free will and doesn't have to buy into the Starfleet-like goody-two-shoes attitude about the so-called "dignity of all humankind" and all their other garbage-people nonsense if he doesn't want to. As he explains, back before the invention of skyscrapers (keep in mind that this was written in 1957), rats pretty much ran things in the crumbling old wooden and brick buildings companies used to try to run their businesses out of; but if you want to be a rat in an age of all stainless steel buildings, you have to become a stainless steel rat yourself, a poetic way of explaining the book series' main pleasure, of how diGriz takes the exact futuristic implements of this brave new galaxy and uses them against the happy, shiny people who were under the impression that this tech would turn the entire human race into one big hand-holding family of man, where there would finally be no more war and no more crime and everyone will live in complete tech-enhanced harmony. So in this, you can very much see this as a precursor to and informer of the cyberpunk movement that would begin around 25 years later, in that Harrison's main point in this book is that all the utopian ideals of the Mid-Century Modernist era in which he was living at the time were essentially one big smokescreen, and that all the new inventions and gadgets that were being introduced to a stunned, grateful populace every month in these years are actually double-edged swords, easily able to be used for evil no matter what the perpetual Hugo-winning tech utopians like Asimov and Heinlein had to say about the subject. That's one of the two main reasons this reads so much better 70-odd years later than his peers, because Harrison had the attitude about it all that we here in the 21st century much more commonly have too, that the human race is still shit and always will be, no matter how many doodads we invent, so we might as well sit back, have a drink, enjoy ourselves, and not worry too much about the repercussions. And then the other reason this has aged so much better than books by people like Asimov and Heinlein -- and I admit, the aspect of this I found most refreshing and surprising of all -- is that Harrison had a truly progressive attitude about female characters even back then, not only making a woman the main wily villain of this particular book who always seems one step ahead of diGriz's futile attempts to track her down, but then making her a highly complex, often contradictory, always competent and sometimes kind of insane person, such an astoundingly noticeable change from my recent attempts to re-read Asimov and Heinlein in the modern 2020s, and realizing that pretty much every woman in every story by those two in the '50s (when you see any female characters in them at all) is a secretary or a housewife or some other kind of damsel in distress, and that their one and only character trait tends to be a description of how much most men will want to or not want to have sex with them, more often than not based exclusively on their boob size. It's a shame that we need to celebrate the embrace of female complexity so much in 1950s science-fiction when coming across it, because of it having been so rare in genre fiction at the time to be almost non-existent; but that's unfortunately the world we actually live in, which means that if you're someone who's been interested in exploring the origins of this genre but can't stand the insulting ways everyone but straight white males are treated in most of them, these books are absolutely some of the ones from that period that you can safely read without having to worry about being inadvertently offended every few pages. Ultimately what diGriz discovers over the course of this book is that the skills and attitude that make him such an adept criminal are the same exact skills and attitude that would make him an excellent police investigator of other such criminals, eventually getting recruited into basically a sci-fi version of the dirty-tricks wing of the CIA (again, keep in mind the year this was written); so in this, you can see this book on top of everything else as being a precursor and inspiration for Star Trek's dirty-tricks wing of Starfleet, the infamous Section 31, although in this case with the Section 31 agent being the hero of the story instead of the villain. That tells you everything you need to know to understand whether or not you're going to like this book yourself, that the cynical, world-weary, wisecracking con artist with the contemptuously low regard for the human race is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for; and I'm assuming for now that it's this recruitment into Harrison's version of the Mid-Century Modernist-era CIA that ends up providing the framing device for the eleven other books in the series, written slowly over the remainder of the 20th century. (The second-to-last book of the series was published in 1999, with one final victory-lap novel in 2010 right before Harrison's death.) I'll be reading the rest of them in the coming years with great relish; and if you're a fan of my other book reviews and the way I approach literature in general, you'll surely want to jump into this series without delay yourself. ...more |
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| B00ECE9OD4
| 4.03
| 90,091
| Apr 08, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the b
2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the book on my list in the first place; and that's always an exciting moment for me as a heavy reader, because it means I can go into the book with completely innocent eyes, knowing not even the tiniest thing about it other than that at some point in the past, there was something about it that made me want to read it. That turned out to be especially good in this case, because this is a science-fiction novel light on action but heavy on ideas, so going into it with no pre-knowledge of the plot was delightful in the same way that going into a Christopher Nolan movie with this little pre-knowledge is. And indeed, at a certain point I actually had to look up the date this novel was published (2014, it turns out), so that I could make sure it actually came before Nolan's 2020 movie Tenet; for while the storylines themselves are vastly different, they're both fundamentally based around the idea of a time-travel cold war, and very specifically the idea of an apocalyptic event happening at some unidentified point in the future, and those future madmen sending people back to the past to ensure that the apocalyptic weapon actually gets invented. As you can guess, our narrator is the Harry August of the book's title, a lower-class rural Brit who is born in the 1920s, lives an unremarkable life, and dies in the 1990s; it's only when he turns five in his next life and all his memories come flooding back does he realize that he's now living his entire 70-year life all over again, seemingly as a re-do completely from scratch. Author Catherine Webb (writing here under the penname "Claire North") smartly has August go through the exact kinds of emotional cycles you would expect someone living the same long life over and over to go through: in his second life, August quickly comes to believe he's insane, and kills himself as a teenager; in his third life, realizing that he's not insane, he instead turns to a life of science to see if he can discover the answer behind his reincarnation mystery; when that fails, he then spends his fourth life devoted to understanding all the world's religions, just to wake up in his fifth life realizing that that didn't provide any answers either. Eventually he discovers (through very clever, byzantine plotting and writing, the kind that will deeply appeal to fans of books like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) that there's actually a whole group of humans who suffer from the same problem as him, and that over the thousands upon thousands of Earth timelines that have occurred over and over they've managed to create a secret organization of sorts called the Cronos Club, where they do things like help "rescue" newly refreshed "ouroborans" (as they call themselves) when they become old enough to remember all their previous memories but are still too young to do something like hold a job or get away from their biological parents. (In one of the dozen extremely clever limits Webb puts on her fantastical conceit here, in order to keep the stakes high, ouroborans only have their previous memories resurface in the year between being five and six years old; so if they happen to get killed before they're five, they wake up in the next life with no previous memories at all, basically wiping them back into amnesiacs.) It's here where Webb really earns her book's bona fides as a truly captivating and extremely unique sci-fi thriller, for because of the way these reincarnations work, you can effectively influence what will happen in the far past even though none of these people are technically time-traveling. Imagine our hero, for example, who dies in each existence of cancer in the 1990s; then in his next life, when he regains his memories of the '90s way back in 1925, he can seek out another ouroboran who's currently in their seventies themselves (i.e. was born back in 1850s) and tell them, "Here's everything that happens in the 1990s," information that they themselves can now take back with them in their own reincarnation. Then at that point, they themselves can seek out an elderly ouroboran (i.e. born in the 1780s) when they're a six-year-old in the 1850s, and tell them, "Oh, by the way, here's everything that happens way in the future in the 1990s." This is both a head-spinning concept and easy to understand, and Webb gets a lot of mileage out of it, in one example explaining that through this process, the Cronos Club has determined that the oldest of their kind seem to have first started showing up in ancient Babylon around the year 3000 BC, and that it seems to be roughly one out of every half-billion people who are born with the trait. (She also employs lots of funny Harry Potter-style sly humor when it comes to this subject, such as the stone obelisk the Babylonian ouroborans leave in the desert for future Cronos Club members to find, but how in some of these existences, this backwards grapevine convinces the Babylonians to sometimes leave dirty in-jokes for club members in the 20th century.) Of course, with me mentioning Tenet, fans of that movie will easily see what the main conflict is here in this book, written six years before it -- namely, the ouroborans all know that at some point in the far future, the human race will genocide itself using an apocalyptic weapon, but with each new existence this apocalyptic event is getting closer and closer to our own times, with it first being around the year 2400, then in the next existence it suddenly jumping to 2350, then in the next existence after that it jumping again to the year 2300. I'll let the answers to who is doing this and why remain a surprise (although it's not difficult to guess, once you're introduced to the book's entire cast of characters); but the important part here is that, like Tenet, the book's main pleasure in the second half becomes that of the extremely clever and well-plotted temporal cold war Webb creates, in which one side is constantly attempting to send information about future technology back to the past, and the other side is constantly trying to stop them, but without any of them able to just explode into open warfare because then all the normal humans (or as they're called in this book, the "linears") will declare all of them monsters and wipe out the entire Cronos Club for good (which indeed actually happens in some of the 15 existences we watch here of our titular hero). It's all just extremely, extremely well done, and this is for sure going to be going on my list of Top 10 Reads of 2023 at the end of the year; and so how additionally astonishing to learn afterwards, when finally reading up on Webb and her oeuvre, that the entire reason I did end up putting her on my to-read list in the first place is that she managed the flabbergasting feat of getting her first book published by a mainstream press and it becoming a bestseller when she was only 14 years old. (Of course, it helps that her dad is a veteran in the publishing industry who basically sent her manuscript to an agent buddy of his, but still.) Only 37 as of the writing of this review, she already has an amazingly prolific 23 published books under her belt, and her sci-fi titles under her Claire North name have either won or been finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Award. (She also writes adult fantasy novels under the nom de plume "Kate Griffin," and Young Adult novels under her real name.) In fact, it was during this post-read research that I remembered that it was actually another book of hers entirely that first got me interested in her, the more recent 2021 Notes from a Burning Age, so I'm sure I'll be getting to that one soon as well, since I ended up enjoying this one so incredibly much. I'll be sharing my review of that a little later this winter; but for now, sci-fi fans should for sure not walk but run to your local library to pick up a copy of this, both a trippy and an accessible genre novel of high ideas that will scratch the itch of a whole variety of different kinds of readers. ...more |
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| 0099086700
| 9780099086703
| B001E52GWA
| 3.76
| 1,796
| 1956
| 1967
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2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 24, 2023
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Jul 24, 2023
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1585676020
| 9781585676026
| 1585676020
| 3.93
| 6,513
| 1970
| Jan 04, 2005
|
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 24, 2023
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Jul 24, 2023
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0743410246
| 9780743410243
| 0743410246
| 3.96
| 757
| Nov 2002
| Nov 2002
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743445643
| 9780743445641
| 0743445643
| 3.91
| 819
| Oct 2002
| Oct 2002
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743445627
| 9780743445627
| 0743445627
| 3.80
| 826
| Sep 2002
| Sep 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0871404028
| 9780871404022
| 0871404028
| 3.61
| 33,738
| Nov 1975
| Apr 16, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #24. So, seven books now into the 18 I'll eventually be reading for the JG Ballard portion of my Great Completist Challenge, we've now reached what is far and away the most famous book of his career, a moment where his burgeoning experimental obsessions sort of perfectly crossed paths with the general public zeitgeist in a way it never had before nor ever would again over the course of his long 45-year professional career as an actively publishing author. It's tempting to say that it's when Ballard first found his "mature" voice, but that's not really true -- the measured and plain tone he uses to such great effect in this novel was there as well in his four-book "Catastrophe" series from the 1960s that started my completist look of him, back when he was starting out and could only find book contracts in the world of traditional Silver-Age straightforward science-fiction, just that it's easy to forget that when the last few books from the early '70s that preceded High-Rise had been written in a much more experimental stream-of-consciousness tone, like everyone else's had as well in the middle of the Countercultural Age in the early '70s when they had been written. As someone, though, who's now read all six of the novels before this, I can now state with some authority that this is at least where everything about Ballard that we consider "Ballardian" came together for the first time -- the better prose style of his earlier Mid-Century Modernist work (High-Rise is not confusingly written at all, but rather in the style of Ballard's peer Kurt Vonnegut seems to be deliberately simply written almost to make a comment on or perhaps even deliberately be playful about the dense, dark, almost transgressive conceptual ideas being conveyed), still with an incredibly bleak outlook on life, but now in the '70s with him able to go in a startling new direction with the source of his horror, not from a destroyed planet but rather from the detritus of specifically late-20th-century society, whether that's cars in Crash, the highways they drive down in Concrete Island, or in this book the skyscrapers where all those drivers live. Like literally all his other six novels before this one as well, it's primarily the story of a James Kirk-type chiseled-jaw white male Mid-Century Modernist-style hero, now finding himself completely over his head as the world collapses around him, although this time not a literal collapsing world like his '60s sci-fi titles, but one specific collapsing "skyscraper community." It's very, very important to remember that this was still a fairly new and startling idea in the real world, a single skyscraper that would also have its own grocery store, gym, swimming pool, preschool, and all the other amenities that could theoretically allow you to simply live your entire life there for months at a time without ever leaving. Weird little experiments in places like London in the '50s after the World War, they caught on a little more in the '60s when the Brutalist style of architecture started becoming popular, so that by the '70s they had become the hip faddish trendy thing that people were starting to talk about a lot, with their cold concrete facades and European Expressionist-style odd angles all over the place. This idea of your building as a fortress against the chaos of the sidewalk-level riff-raff was especially a hot topic in inner cities in the industrialized world in those years, as places like New York and Paris started falling apart in their inner cores to sometimes almost become lawless wastelands of random violence. It's no surprise, I think, that by complete coincidence (and it can be pretty easily demonstrated that they truly didn't know of each other's projects), Canadian horror film director David Cronenberg made the early movie Shivers (see my review at Letterboxd) at the exact same time Ballard was writing High-Rise, and both are about the idea that at one of these skyscraper communities one random year, everyone there actually goes insane and all try to kill each other. With this being the years of the Manson Family and Watergate, the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof, conspiracy thrillers in every theater and every bookstore, it makes sense that these creepily futuristic hundred-floor megalorotic monstrosities might come off as centers of existential menace to many people who looked at the world critically and artistically, and I think can largely explain why this book took off with the general public in a way that the one just previous, Concrete Island with its similar concept and similar writing style, just didn't. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's simply got such a killer, killer freaking premise; that in the face of a venue built specifically to let a thousand strangers live in a tiny space without a hint of conflict, using cutting-edge sociological/architectural theories and a series of pricy, high-end amenities, perhaps it might just backfire and do nothing but intensify the class-consciousness and resentment that courses through the blood of the average Briton, and convince people to violently fight for no other reason than to just prove who is right, determine who will survive, like two Karens who both spy the last Elf On A Shelf at Walmart on Black Friday and the next thing you know one has murdered the other, and is being led off in a confused daze with her hands cuffed behind her back and her face sprayed with blood. High-Rise is that, writ large, with all the details cranked up to 11, by which I quote yet another one of Ballard's weirdo contemporaries, Anthony Burgess, who was always talking about "the ol' sex and violence." That's what you get with Ballard Unleashed, which the '70s afforded him to do finally for the first time in what was now over a decade and a half as a full-time professional author; all the darkness and weirdness of his '60s sci-fi (which could get awfully dark and weird, a surprise for me when I first read them, as long-time readers of this series know), but with a '70s hippie death cult's worth of sex and violence, only this time set in a startlingly unique world of tasteful hallways with potted ferns and fully automated washers and dryers. And of course, also just like all six of the other books he'd published up to now, one of the Kirk stand-in's friends turns out to be someone who has learned to just embrace all the dark insanity and choose to dance off to the apocalypse with the rest of the sinning, decaying human race, here that being the mysterious architect behind the complex, one Anthony Royal, who lives up in an equally mysterious supposed entire house that's been plunked on top of the roof of the building. He sort of conceptually serves the same purpose as Dr. Robert Vaughn from Ballard's second-most popular book of his career, 1973's Crash, not in literal plot terms but that he's a character who fully understands and chooses to embrace the dark goddess of chaos known by many as Discordia, this understanding that everything's fucked so we might as well go along for the ride. This has so far been a defining thing for every single book of Ballard's career, at least one character in each who simply acknowledges that in a world gone insane, the most sane thing you can do is be crazy too, and I'm going to be interested to see whether Ballard will continue to keep this streak up in the eleven more books we have ahead. I gotta admit, that's kind of what took me so long to finally get to this, because I knew the actual storyline so well, I knew that it was going to turn out to be at least a bit of a disappointment to read a book that was going to be so similar to it. For those of us who are compelled to be completists, this is what pushes us to be them, because we tire of the popular and well-known, and want to delve into weirder and smaller corners to get a deep sense of what exactly made that artist tick. So in that spirit, next here with Ballard we tackle what is chronologically next but perhaps one of the most obscure titles by now of his career, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, which from its Wikipedia description sounds like it's going to be more experimental again in the style of The Atrocity Exhibition, inspired by 1700s weirdo William Blake and about a man who survives a plane crash and apparently gains superpowers, or perhaps is crazy and neither he as the narrator nor you as the reader know that. Sounds interesting if nothing else, which makes it worth taking on for a completist like myself, so I look forward to speaking with you again about that one very soon. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High-Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 0999664743
| B07DNPSF1V
| 4.00
| 619
| Apr 25, 2014
| Sep 06, 2018
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #13. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #13. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is my latest read from a group of 30 romance novels I downloaded to my Kindle for free last month from one of those promotional websites, featuring a handful of titles in each of around a dozen romance subgenres, such as Western romances, Regency romances, space alien group sex romances, small-town Christian romances, etc. This particular subgenre is known as "dystopian sci-fi romance," and the best compliment I can give it is that it actually works very well as simply a dystopian sci-fi tale, full stop, and in fact I wouldn't have even thought of the romantic relationship we see in this book being big enough to call it the book's main genre if I hadn't in fact found the book at a romance promotional website. I mean that as a big compliment to popular veteran author Jamie A. Waters (who, unlike many of the Kindle Unlimited authors I read, actually has 16 books out at this point and thousands of public reviews), that she could take a book like this to a sci-fi convention and still have lots of fans, even if none of those people in particular would consider themselves romance fans; and needless to say, this also is a strong sign that Waters handles her central romance with a lot more surprise and finesse than a lot of these contemporary "book a month" authors, who are downloading online guides to how to structure a romance novel's plot and then are sticking to that structure unquestioningly. That's perhaps the biggest joy here for genre fans, that the central romance here between a plucky young woman who scavenges cyberpunk-style among the ruins of a long-over civil war on her planet, and her would-be boss who is one of the few "outside travelers" from a nearby enclosed community of upper-classers who have mostly sealed themselves off from the riff-raff outside their gates, is full of surprises and unexpected beats, along with a realistic triangle complication when she too finally visits the "Omni Towers" of this series' title and finds herself equally falling (that is, with a lot of trepidation) for a haughty young junior member of that insular society's ruling class, the generalities of which you can picture falling safely into YA "Hunger Games" or "Divergent"-style territory. It's the action-oriented plot itself, though, that provides most of the thrills here, a well-done melodrama with a deep mythos and lots of great world-building. It's one of the rare romance novels I've read now that I would actually recommend to non-romance fans, and I look forward now to checking out the other five books in this long-running series. ...more |
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| 0062328247
| 9780062328243
| 0062328247
| 3.70
| 11,080
| May 05, 2016
| Jun 21, 2016
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #12. I read this on the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, in that his own dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller was partly in
2023 reads, #12. I read this on the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, in that his own dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller was partly inspired by this one, plus of course I'm just a sucker for dystopian day-after-tomorrow thrillers to begin with. Shriver is a lit-fiction veteran with 18 novels now in her oeuvre, most of which are obscure MFA titles with only tiny audiences; the reason her name may sound familiar is because of the one and only big hit so far of her career, 2003's school-shooter psychological character drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, the winner of that year's prestigious Orange Prize and then adapted into a Hollywood movie with Tilda Swinton that itself was a multiple award winner. Here Shriver is taking on a much bigger subject, which is showing exactly how a prosperous industrialized nation like the US could in fact devolve in the space of a mere decade into a lawless third-world country with no infrastructure to speak of. Shriver has mentioned in interviews that she wanted this to be the most realistic look possible at how such a thing could happen (as one of her characters astutely says in the book, science-fiction is never really about predicting the future, but rather commenting on the present); and so that makes this novel both queasily thrilling and nerve-wrackingly terrifying, in that every single plot development is based on a real thing that has actually happened in real-world America in the last couple of decades, only cranked up one or two notches and with no last-minute reprieve or savior that has (so far) allowed all of us in the 21st century to wipe our brow and give a huge sigh of relief every time one of these issues has reared its ugly head out in real life. For example, the event that starts this crisis is China giving the US a "margin call," suddenly demanding that we pay back the trillions of dollars that the country has loaned us over the years, feeling empowered after recently becoming the official biggest economy (and largest military) in the world; then when it becomes clear that the US neither has the money to pay off its national debt nor even particularly cares about doing so, the rest of the world suddenly devalues the US dollar as its main international form of currency and refuses to accept it as payment for anything, leading to a currency crash and hyperinflation situation much like Germany in the 1920s, where a loaf of bread at Whole Foods costs $20 on a Monday, then suddenly $50 on Tuesday, then up to $100 on Wednesday. Meanwhile, under a far-left administration that happens to include the first-ever Latinx President in American history, the White House is still so obsessed with social-justice issues that they essentially ignore the economy altogether (a very telling moment is when Congress debates whether or not to change all federal government forms to Spanish, since Latinx people now technically make up over 50% of the American population, at the same time that most of America's police go on strike because their government-issued paychecks keep bouncing); and meanwhile, all the upper-middle-classers keep talking about how things are bound to get better if the unwashed, uneducated, mouth-breathing masses will just remain calm, while all the poor people are positively giddy over the destruction of these upper-middle-classers' wealth, most of them not realizing that it will only be a matter of a few more months before all that vanished money will result in basically a collapse into violent anarchy for everyone, a slow-motion "gentle apocalypse" that Shriver deliciously doles out in infinitely clever, infinitely nauseating detail. (And don't worry if you're confused -- another clever detail here is Shriver including a 16-year-old autistic son in our title family who basically acts like a walking Wikipedia, explaining to readers the actual real issues being discussed in this fictional novel, and why taking these issues for granted like we do [for example, why going off the gold standard is actually the worst thing the US has ever done in its entire history] will inexorably lead to the society-collapsing disaster our Mandibles live through over these 400-odd pages.) Needless to say, I luuurved this book, although in a wrist-slashingly depressing way that makes me never want to read it or even think about it again, which of course officially makes me one of those millions of middle-classers with their head in the sand that has helped cause all these problems in the first place. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, as a cautionary tale about all the bad things that can happen under such seemingly innocuous attitudes like, "A prosperous country like America can ring up as much debt as it possibly wants to with no repercussions whatsoever." A tough but great read like this will show you in graphic, infuriating detail exactly what can happen under that kind of attitude, so please understand in advance that you're in for a pretty harrowing tale here indeed. ...more |
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Jan 31, 2023
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Jan 31, 2023
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| B08BCGC2BS
| 3.70
| 1,336
| Jun 16, 2020
| Jun 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #8. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #8. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is one of a handful now of books I've read in what's called the "fated mate" subgenre; that's when a paranormal creature such as a werewolf or space alien is not only attracted to our story's female lead character (or FLC), but is literally compelled biologically by something in their paranormal makeup to mate with her no matter what they rationally think of the situation, usually explained away with some vague term like "werewolf DNA" or "alien blood." In the case of the "Twilight" books that first made this trope famous (called "imprinting" in those novels), this uncontrollable compulsion to mate falls more on the emotional and romantic side of things, so that werewolves suddenly find themselves with the irresistible urge to buy their girlfriend a teddy bear or wash her hair in the bathtub; but in Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, this compulsion is much more darkly sexual in nature, a story concerning the first human woman to ever visit a planet full of male-exclusive eight-foot-tall blue-skinned devil-looking space aliens, whose compulsion to breed is so strong that even after getting one whiff of her scent from hundreds of feet away, our male lead character (MLC) immediately has a groaning flood of an orgasm that splashes right on the ground in front of him without him ever touching his penis, which should give you a good idea of what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about one of these characters being "biologically compelled to breed." (Don't worry, though -- at one point he does wash her hair in a local pond, now still making it 100% of every romance or women's erotica novel I've ever read that has featured a scene of the MLC washing the FLC's hair in a body of water in one way or another. You ladies and your obsession with having your hair washed by your boyfriend, I swear, I just don't get it.) Essentially this genre provides a cleaned-up, woman-friendly means of engaging in the very dark but surprisingly common fantasy many women have about being gangbang raped, which in fact is so common that there's at least three different subgenres within romance devoted to the subject, not just these "fated mate" stories but also "reverse harem" ones (in which the FLC is more aggressive about the subject and actually loves having all these hunky dumb men at her beck and call), as well as "why choose" stories (in which each of the men actually act like a traditional romantic partner, essentially letting the FLC have three or four or five monogamous boyfriends all at once [well, the men are all monogamous, anyway], with all the guys being remarkably cool about the fact that she has four other boyfriends, justified in a way usually baked right into the book's gimmicky subject). And I have to admit, it's an extremely clever way to tell such a story, because the female readers get to both have their cake and eat it too; for if you wrote a book about just some normal human male who suffered from uncontrollable sexual urges, and who felt compelled to sometimes grab the nearest female, hold her down, then breed with her to completion, that guy would just be some gross rapist Harvey Weinstein creep, and take it from me, ain't no woman out there in existence looking for a romance novel in which Harvey Weinstein is the MLC. By making it a special part of a paranormal character's fictional biology, though, this allows the character himself to still be the kind of boyfriend women fantasize about -- thoughtful, tender, respectful, caring -- who just happens to get overwhelmed by by the "whateverian" in his bloodstream that once every blood moon compels him to insert his horse-sized dick (they're always horse-sized dicks) into his "designated seed receptacle" (the FLC, often in some kind of collar-focused light bondage gear by now) until the deed has been finished, as the puny human mewls and squirms under his rock-hard body, both loving and protesting every moment of it. Then, back to washing her hair in the bathtub! Let's be clear, a big part of what makes Their Human Vessel so enjoyable is that it's simply a great science-fiction novel to begin with, full stop, no matter what other genre might be attached to it, with Bequin clearly having the kind of mastery over SF's tropes that comes with undoubtedly being a con-going fan herself; the universe-building here is solid, expansive, believable and clever, the dialogue Peak TV-level (or, you know, Joss Whedon-level at least), the characters complex and easy to root for. But sister, then add the bright blue horse cocks and the space alien gangbangs, and I luuuuuuuurved it, because this is exactly the kind of dark, outre, go-for-it prurience I myself like in erotic stories, as someone now in his 50s and who has been exploring sexuality in a complex and nuanced way for over 30 years now. What makes this book great is that Bequin simply doesn't hold back here, like so many women's erotica authors do when push finally comes to shove at their manuscript's most graphic moments; here, our FLC is pinned down and fucked before she can even get out a question about what's happening, much less a protest, over and over and over by multiple characters in multiple situations throughout the entire book, in an unending fashion without breaks needed since the unique DNA of the horse-dicked aliens make them ready to go again mere seconds after their previous orgasm, because of course it does, of course. And, in perhaps the most clever detail of all, part of Bequin's mythos here is that small amounts of the aliens' sperm can literally reverse aging and kill cancer in humans (the big secret behind this planet, that a British East India-type private company has enslaved the entire alien population and hooked them up to dick-milking machines, to sell the sperm as a medical pill back on Earth), but large amounts of sperm will literally start turning a human into one of the aliens themselves; so every time our short-haired, small-breasted, nerdy, reader stand-in-feeling FLC takes another massive load from the three remaining non-enslaved space aliens left on the planet, in the unending aggressive gangbangs they perpetrate on her over and over in their Na'vi-looking glowing-plant-filled underground pond cavern oases, the more those loads start changing her body to be more ready to endlessly take on these massive gangbangs over and over, as her bluish skin toughens and her sex drive goes up and she understands how it can be to deeply love three men at the same time with no guilt or shame. Or, er, three eight-foot-tall blue space aliens with horse cocks, I mean. I gotta plainly say, I loved this book, women's erotica done really right, which perfectly treads that invisible line between silly and legitimately hot. I can see that this author also has a whole series in the subgenre known as "omegaverse," which I have a strong interest in exploring (the very first romance manuscript I was ever offered as a freelancer, in fact, was an omegaverse story, which sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole a full six months ago or so, which has made me curious about the genre ever since). So I may actually take that one on next, and if it's good then go straight to the group of other omegaverse novels I recently downloaded to my Kindle, when going to a promotional website recently and downloading 30 titles all at once, split up among such subgenres as Regency, contemporary, Christian, beach, cyberpunk, "knotted" (but whew, more on that another day), cozy mystery, urban fantasy, Irish small town, mafia, and...that's it. No, wait, and Tolkien "high fantasy." That's it -- that covers the 30 romance and women's erotica titles currently on my Kindle. Like, five of those are omegaverse novels, so I may or may not hop straight to those after reading Bequin's Wounded Omega, we'll see. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who needs something rather intense to really "enjoy yourself" as a reader (I think you know what I mean), this'll be just your ticket, a story that needs some disbelief suspended but that by doing so can really suck you in as a good old-fashioned very dirty story. ...With, you know, blue-skinned horse dicks, buyer beware. ...more |
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| B0B5BDNL98
| 4.12
| 331
| unknown
| Jun 27, 2022
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through t
2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my fourth book of the run (see also Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and the first to cover the well-known romance trope known as "fated mates," which is when some sort of magical or other paranormal contrivance brings our two romantic leads together in a way so that no free will or rational choice is involved, but rather that the paranormal contrivance is literally forcing the two to be the kinds of soulmates the universe is demanding of them no matter what the individuals themselves think of it. Probably the most well-known example is the phenomenon of "imprinting" among werewolves in the "Twilight" books (or at least this is what Google is telling me -- I've never read the books myself), which as far as I can tell is a kind of play on animals going into heat, but in the case of werewolves involves not only an irresistible compulsion to have sex with the woman in question but also to mate with her for life, to protect her and take care of her and wash her hair in the bathtub and all the other sometimes eyerolling kinds of details that are found in romance novels. And we've got a similar thing going on here in Mate Exposed, except this time the werewolves are actually eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens, and the "imprinting" is just one aspect of a whole formal mating ritual they have back on their home planet, which our female hero, grade school teacher Victoria, learns all about when one of them saves her from a gang-rape among the tattered survivors of an apocalyptic event on Earth that is rapidly turning its victims into a planet full of flesh-eating zombies, a side effect of an interstellar war going on between our hunky Ajnarans and one of their alien rivals. That's a whole lot to cram into a small romance novella being used as a free magnet for getting people to sign up for a newsletter, and a big part of the problem here is that author Pearl Tate is simply not up to the task, not giving any of these elements enough time and space to be developed on their own, leaving us with lots of tantalizing ideas that we can only examine briefly in the rearview mirror as we rush our way to the next plot point. Plus, I don't know if this is specifically because I'm a guy or if this is a universal problem, but I simply had a hard time connecting together the elements I expect from a romance novel with the strange, outre tale being told here about hulking monstrous space aliens and what feels to me like a thinly veiled message about how great sex slavery is, and how a lot of our problems in our modern world would easily be solved if we simply got rid of the idea of women having free will, and instead let the big strong men just fight it out over who's going to own any particular "seed receptacle" among the women-folk. This might be a gender bias of mine, in that I simply can't understand the nearly universal appeal I've found so far in the romance genre of men "owning" women and women getting just unbelievably turned on by such ownership (an aspect that's shown up now in every single romance novel I've ever read, no matter what its genre or tropes), and the inherent unsolvable contradiction this creates with our modern notion of female equality and empowerment. (Jesus, no wonder dating in your twenties is so fucking difficult.) Or, you know, it might be simply because this particular book isn't very good, which I half-suspect is the case since all the other fundamentals of storytelling are only being accomplished in a mediocre fashion here too. Whatever the case, more research is warranted, so I'll be exploring this "fated mate" subgenre more within romance in the coming months, to see if I can get a better handle on the subject and why it's apparently addictive like catnip to the women who happen to like this subgenre. For now, though, I recommend skipping this particular title, and holding out for a better fated mate than an eight-foot-tall blue-skinned alien who would gladly give it all up to wash his human girlfriend's hair in the bathtub. ...more |
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| 9187222671
| 9789187222672
| 4.43
| 5,894
| Dec 01, 2017
| Dec 01, 2017
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #22. Earlier this year I checked out two library books by Swedish illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions
2022 reads, #22. Earlier this year I checked out two library books by Swedish illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions of "future trash" have been popular viral hits at the various social networks for an entire decade now, and whose debut book Tales from the Loop (my review) blew me away once I learned that, far from being a futuristic story, his paintings were meant to illustrate an abandoned Cold War Scandinavian research facility that never was, and that the story itself is actually a tender childhood memoir by an adult in the 21st century looking back at his 1990s youth spent among the decaying robots and half-collapsed maglev ships. Now, months later, I've finally gotten around to reading the other book of his the Chicago Public Library owns, and it blew me away all over again, and once again because the story accompanying the paintings was completely unexpected and much better than it has any right to be. This time a more straightforward thriller, it tells the tale of an apocalyptic event that happened soon before the events of our own book, nebulous in nature but having something to do with virtual reality goggles, an Apple-like all-consuming tech giant, and the systematic environmental collapse of America's west coast (whose landmarks Stålenhag cleverly renames just to make things even more surreal; so in the world of The Electric State, for example, the state of California is actually known as "Pacifica"); and we are basically following a teenage girl and her robot companion as she attempts to navigate the dangerous back roads of a now fully anarchic Southern Pacifica (think Los Angeles) to hopefully find a refuge she's heard rumors of near the north end of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Like Tales from the Loop, the written story here is just as important and just as impressive as the overwhelmingly beautiful paintings that accompany them; and in fact the one and only complaint I have (and it's not really much of a complaint at that) is that it's difficult to read an entire novella's worth of text when holding a giant oversized 11 x 17 book like the format this hardcover was first published as. Other than that, this was just as profound and moving a storytelling experience as his other book was, and I have to admit that Stålenhag is one of the only 21st-century artists I've come across whose original work I would love to collect (and that I bet is nearly impossible to do so, because he's become so hugely popular among the online crowd over the last decade). Do yourself a big favor and pick up any of his books when you have a chance, this one recommended just as much as any of the others. ...more |
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| 0553565079
| 9780553565072
| 0553565079
| 4.16
| 57,044
| Apr 1993
| Feb 01, 1994
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did not like it
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2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So here as we reach not the last of the '80s and '90s "bridging" novels that Asimov wrote at the end of his life to bring together his famous '50s trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," but indeed the very last book Asimov himself wrote from start to finish before dying in 1993, I thought it'd be worth taking a little time and really asking ourselves if these bridging novels were even worth the effort, given that they've turned out even just 40 years later to be such lackluster reading experiences (and spoiler alert, that was indeed the same case here, such a disappointing read that it almost is not even worth recapping). To understand why Asimov did this, you have to understand the similarly titled "Future History" series by his friend and peer Robert Heinlein, who wrote an entire series of short stories and novels primarily in the '60s and '70s that were all set along a single persistent 300-year storyline, just that he wrote the actual stories out of chronological order; they've lost a lot of name recognition over the decades in a way that Asimov's "Foundation" books never have, but it's important to remember that in 1966, when the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention decided to name an honorary Hugo Award after "Greatest Sci-Fi Series of All Time," Heinlein's Future History came in second, beaten only by Asimov's own Foundation series. If you look at these three unrelated '50s series of Asimov while squinting and sort of half-frowning, you can sort of squeeze them together into one unified storyline, spanning not Heinlein's 300 years of the future but instead an entire 22,000, to an eventual populated Milky Way galaxy containing thousands of inhabited planets, where Earth has become the stuff of myth and legend, and where the main crisis is that the all-encompassing empire that has run the entire galaxy for the last ten thousand years is on its last gasp, and the only person who knows is an eccentric history professor who comes up with an intellectually clever way to help humanity prevent its own destruction despite itself. But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books. That's where these eight books from the '80s and '90s came from, a desire to write all the twisty, exposition-heavy roads that lead from one trilogy to the next, and then attempts no less at taking the very last book and somehow trying to tie it back to the first book set 22,000 years previous. That's ballsy, to be sure, and it officially brings Asimov's timeline to an inarguable "megaseries" status, a great thing to leave behind for all of us in the future to think of as a single, monumental work from this genre pioneer and once massively popular author. It's impressive to be able to say "Asimov's Future History," and he deserves credit for devoting the last decade of his life and the last of his physical health to accomplishing this busy feat. But, as my almost exclusively disappointed reactions to the books have made clear, they've all been profound letdowns as actual reading experiences, franchise-propping scaffolding that exists for almost no other reason than to pass along story beats, and that really feel like the work of a worn-out old man who had nothing left of interest to say. That by itself is tragic enough, but another bad thing these bridging novels deliver, that wouldn't have existed at all without these books existing, is Asimov's increasingly adamant refusal as an old man to ever look back at his old behavior or writing, or to ever think that an apology or at least a rethinking was in order. In fact, Asimov expressly used these last novels of his career to defiantly still engage in the exact behavior that his increasingly younger critics excoriated in his books, such as the subsumed racism of '50s-style "PG-rated" slurs like "boy," and the out-and-out sexism and sexual objectifiction of every female character. He didn't need to do that -- even if he wasn't going to be progressive enough to acknowledge his critics and change those references, he could've easily just stayed neutral on the subject -- so to purposely put them in is a legitimate "fuck you" from Asimov at the end of his life to the people who eventually became the "woke crowd," and who would eat him alive if he happened to be alive and in his nineties and still trying to publish now, like poor old creepy Woody Allen. So where do we place these books? As the excuse that brings you and I together in this megareview of his megaseries? As a real mistake that left a bitter aftertaste to Asimov's career right when he should've been getting lionized? Good for several more awards and another several million into the Asimov estate checking account before the check-writer finally croaked? All of the above? For me, I like to think about how complex and interesting someone like Asimov's career was that we should still be caring about the arguments 30 years later; flawed to be sure, and sometimes very deliberately and not just a "sign of his times," but also impressive and prodigious, and that laid such important groundwork in the legitimizing of science-fiction that he simply cannot be ignored. Hell, there was a brand-new adaptation of "Foundation" on Apple+ just this last spring; I mean, a shitty and unwatchable adaptation, make no mistake, but there's something amazing to be said that people are still willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on his stories. So if the bridging novels are what's needed to tie together the historical importance and lasting power of these three original '50s trilogies, then I suppose that's not necessarily the worst thing, especially since after you read them all for the first time, you never have to reapproach the bridging tales ever again for as long as you live. And that finally brings us to the reason I started this megareview in the first place -- because Asimov's original '50s "Foundation" trilogy was the first adult science-fiction I ever read, some of the first adult fiction that I had ever read at all, tied in closely to my nostalgic memories of being in my grandparents' house in the '70s and '80s and peering through my dad and uncle's old '40 through '60s sci-fi collection on the musty back shelves of the guest bedroom. I started reviewing the first Robot novel two and a half years ago precisely because I wanted to get to the point that I'm at right this moment, entering the original "Foundation" trilogy I loved so much as a teen and seeing how it now not only stacks up against the rest of the "Future History" megaseries, but also how it stacks up against time. We'll be talking a lot more about that in the next review, for 1951's Foundation which started them all, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again next month for that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Apr 04, 2022
not set
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Apr 04, 2022
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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May 02, 2024
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May 02, 2024
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| 3.69
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Feb 18, 2024
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Feb 18, 2024
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| 4.43
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really liked it
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Jan 29, 2024
not set
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Jan 29, 2024
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
not set
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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Mar 09, 2021
not set
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Jan 07, 2024
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| 3.48
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liked it
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Nov 11, 2023
not set
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 3.93
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it was amazing
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Oct 22, 2023
not set
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Oct 22, 2023
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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Sep 16, 2023
not set
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Sep 16, 2023
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| 3.76
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Jul 24, 2023
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Jul 24, 2023
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| 3.93
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Jul 24, 2023
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Jul 24, 2023
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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Jul 06, 2023
not set
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Jul 06, 2023
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Jul 06, 2023
not set
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Jul 06, 2023
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Jul 06, 2023
not set
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Jul 06, 2023
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| 3.61
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it was amazing
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Mar 26, 2023
not set
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Feb 10, 2023
not set
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Feb 10, 2023
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| 3.70
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it was amazing
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Jan 31, 2023
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Jan 31, 2023
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| 3.70
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it was amazing
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023
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| 4.12
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it was ok
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Jan 2023
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Jan 01, 2023
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| 4.43
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it was amazing
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May 10, 2022
not set
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May 10, 2022
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| 4.16
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did not like it
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Apr 04, 2022
not set
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Apr 04, 2022
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