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166802568X
| 9781668025680
| 166802568X
| 3.86
| 16,191
| Nov 07, 2023
| Nov 07, 2023
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really liked it
| The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.-------------------------------------- Love is the mind killer.So what would you do if your super-secret software gave you the alert? End times are afoot. Time to scoot! If you are like most of us, you might seek our your nearest and dearest to see the world out together. But what if you are one of the richest people on the planet? Well, in that case, you would have prepared a plan, an escape, a plane, supplies, a bunker somewhere safe. Buh-bye, and off they go. The they in this case includes three billionaires, the heads of humongous tech companies, some years in the not-too-distant future, Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater. They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interviewWhat if you were the number one assistant to one of these folks, or the less-than-thrilled wife of another, or the ousted former CEO and founder of a third one, maybe the gifted child of one? You might have been spending your time trying to see what you could do to mitigate the vast harm these mega-corporations have done to the planet. These are Martha Einkorn, Lenk’s #2, Selah Nommik, Zimri’s Black British wife, Alex Dabrowski, founder and former CEO of the company now headed by Ellen, and Badger, Ellen’s son. “Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interviewBTW, Atwood mentored Alderman. What if you were attending a conference in Singapore, having recently met one of group B above for an interview, and gotten entangled in an unexpected way, but now find yourself in the vast mall in which the conference is being held, being chased and shot at by some psycho, probably a religious nut? Lai Zhen is a 33yo refugee from Hong Kong, an archaeologist and well-known survivalist influencer. She had met someone she thinks may be The One, but her immediate survival is taking up all available mental space. Thankfully, she has help, but will it be enough? [image] Naomi Alderman - image from The Guardian The action-adventure-sci-fi shell encasing The Future is a dystopian near-future that takes an if-this-goes-on perspective re the road we are currently traveling toward planetary devastation, global warming, the increasing greedification of the world economy, and concentration of wealth, at the expense of sustainability and human decency. But Alderman has done so much more with it. The Future has a brain and a heart, to go along with the coursing hormones, and some serious mysteries as well. Did I mention there is a romance in here also? Good luck shelving this thing. You probably will not have much luck putting it down once you start reading. Well, take that advisedly. I did find that it took a while to settle in, as there is a fair bit to get through with introducing all the characters, but once you get going, day-um, you will want to keep on. While offering a look at survival post everything, Alderman tosses in some fun high tech and BP-raising sequences. And she gives readers’ brains a workout, providing considerable fodder for book club discussions. To bolster the thematic elements, Aldermen provides plenty of connections to classic tales, biblical and other, that offer excellent starting points for lively discussions. Martha was raised in an apocalypse-concerned cult, led by her father. As an adult she gets involved in on-line exchanges about questions like what might be learned from the experience of a biblical apocalypse survivor, Lot. Alderman was raised as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah in the original, so knows her material well. (God was about to firebomb Sodom when Lot’s kindness to a couple of god’s emissaries earned him and his family a get-out-of-hell-free pass.) In addition, she finds relevance in Ayn Rand, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and more. She brings in a discussion of the enclosure act in the UK, how the stealing of public land by the wealthy has a mirror in the theft of public space of different sorts in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the biggest issue at work here is trust. In fact, Alderman had intended to title the book Trust. But when Herman Diaz’s novel, Trust, won a Pulitzer Prize, she had to find an alternative. Can Zhen trust her new love interest. Can she trust the AI that is supposedly helping her? Can she trust any of the oligarchs? Can she trust people she has known for years on line, but never met in person? This is a core concept, not just on a personal, but on a societal level. Civilizations are built on trust. It is an issue that touches everyone. The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interviewConsider a concern that is immediate in early 2024. Can American allies, whose alliances have kept the world out of World War III since the end of World War II, trust the US intelligence services with their secrets, when our next president might give, trade, or sell it to our enemies? Can you trust that the person you are communicating with on-line is being honest with you. (As someone who has met people through Match.com, I am particularly aware of that one.) If you are stuck on a survival island, can you trust that the other people there will not do you in, in order to improve their chances of gaining power once things begin to return to some semblance of global livability? In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interviewZhen’s is our primary POV through this, although we spend a lot of time with Martha. She is an appealing lead, a person of good intentions, and reasonably pure heart. She is wicked smart, able, and adaptive. It is easy to root for her to make it through. But, noting the second quote at the top of this review, if Love is the mind killer, might it impair her clarity of thought, her maintenance of necessary defenses? Of might it impair that of the person she is love with? The concern with dark forces is a bit boilerplate. Two of the oligarchs are cardboard villains; another has some edges. But it is the conceptual bits that give The Future its heft. Oh, and one more thing. Woven throughout the 432 pages of this book is minor crime, Grand Theft Planet. It should come as no surprise that an author who has had great success with her previous novels, and who has spent some years writing video games, would produce a fast-paced, engaging read, replete with dangers, anxieties, fun toys, and wonderful, substantive philosophical sparks. I cannot predict the future any better than 2016 presidential pollsters, but my personal AI suggests that should The Future will find its way to you, you will be glad it did. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.Review posted - 3/8/24 Publication date – 11/7/23 I received an ARE of The Future from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and the password to my super-secret software. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, GR, and Twitter pages Profile - from Simon & Schuster Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.Interviews -----Professional Book Nerds - Dystopian Futures with Naomi Alderman - video, well, mostly audio, with no real video – 41:59 -----Toronto Public Library - Naomi Alderman | The Future | Nov 13, 2023 with Vass Bednar - 45:05 - there is a nice bit in here on tech as neither bad nor good, but a tool which can be used for good or evil. -----Literary Hub - Naomi Alderman on Creating a Fictional Tech Dystopia by Jane Ciabattari -----Shondaland - Naomi Alderman Is Still Finding Hope in Humankind by Rachel Simon -----AP- Naomi Alderman novel ‘The Future’ scheduled for next fall by Hillel Italic -----Electric Literature - Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology by Jacqueline Alnes -----Independent - How We Met: Naomi Alderman & Margaret Atwood - by Adam Jacques – Atwood mentored Alderman in 2012 – a fun read Item of Interest from the author -----BBC Sounds - audio excerpt - 1.0 – The End of Days – 15:47 Items of Interest -----Tristia by Ovid – Zhen reads this prior to a trip to Canada -----The Admiralty Islands -----inert submunition dispenser - a kind of cluster bomb -----Wiki on the enclosure act ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 05, 2024
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Mar 06, 2024
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Hardcover
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1593767374
| 9781593767372
| 1593767374
| 2.64
| 1,090
| Feb 21, 2023
| Feb 21, 2023
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it was ok
| …plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions …plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions, even lingering, emotional responses of anyone who stuck around long enough to let their imagination build on the pre-existing foundation of an original experience – from what made a user crush to what made them cry out in pain, and reject the virtual experience altogether. It was a deep well. More than what made people tick, they were beginning to understand what those text amounted to. The way person would call might act. Even why.-------------------------------------- …she had a weirdness about her that bordered on hostility.A maven of the imagined, but largely a stranger to the real world, Miles works in virtual reality (VR). He stands in here for the tech companies that accept intellectual product from their users (you know who you are), while claiming the financial benefits for themselves, and then blaming users when things go wrong. (Not that users are never at fault) It is pretty clear that Miles is indifferent to any moral issues regarding blame-shifting. Neither does he lose a lot of sleep when he screws his partner, Lily, out of her fair share of recognition. He is also a pretty bright guy who comes up with three great ideas over the course of the book. [image] Colin Winnette - image from The LA Review of Books When the users of his company’s primary game platform fail to generate enough content of interest to other users, and thus ramp up on-line time, the company adds “Original Experiences” into the mix, pre-packaged prompts for the dreamverse the users may be unable to create on their own. Called Ghost Lover, Miles’s brainstorm OE brings into play a former lover. The company does boffo business with this until some people find ways to do dodgy things in the virtual world, and it becomes a potential crisis when the company tries to pare that back. So, time for Miles to come up with something else, which he does. But one must constantly feed the beast, so Miles comes up, eventually, with an ultimate, immersive experience, joining software and hardware. (no, not the holodeck) It is called The Egg. So, what happens when people share their most intimate memories, experiences, and reactions with a software company? What if your dreams could be made (VR) reality? What if your experiences were accessible by others? Complications ensue. While hardly one of the suits who rule tech companies, Miles is one of the people who define the tech experience for vast portions of the planet. Really? This guy? Maybe that is the point. Maybe the people who create our experiences of the world (of the tech sort, anyway) are people we might prefer taking on other careers. There are two streams to consider in Users, the sci-fi, if-this-goes-on, critique of the software industry, and the personal challenges faced by Miles. His home life is not exactly wonderful. It seems pretty clear from the git-go that his marriage should end ASAP. Miles is too wrapped up in his work life. His wife has alternate interests, and their interactions tilt far too heavily, with a few exceptions, on the side of that deadliest of marital interaction descriptives, scorn. He does not relate particularly well with his two daughters. The older one, Maya, ten for most of the book, should be checked out for sociopathy. Mia, the younger, has some issues as well. But Miles is mostly MIA as a parent. He is so wrapped up in his own head that he fails to read the signals the real world is throwing at him. It takes some effort, too. Both on the family front and on the work front. He fends off benign advice that he should probably take. Instead of the Me Generation, Miles may be representative of the ME-ME-ME-ME Generation. He is not a bad guy, per se, not overtly hostile. But his reckless disregard for the people using his product, and his unwillingness to do the right thing by his partner, makes his moral crimes ones of passivity. If there were a doll made of Miles it would have to be called an in-action figure. Oh, and then there are the death threats, on fancy stationery. These appear in his mail, sometimes even inside his home, offering cryptic portents. Generates a wee bit of stress, as one might presume. “Soon”. Then “Your Heart Will Stop.” They continue, keeping Miles in a state of chronic existential crisis. But it is actually more compelling to wonder who is sending these things and why than it is to empathize with Miles. As Miles does not really feel much for others, it can be tough for the reader to feel much for Miles, beyond some eye-rolling at some of his decisions, and a desire to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “Dude! Pay attention. How can you not be dealing with what is going on in right in front of your eyes?“ Again, maybe that is the point. But it makes for an unsatisfying read. We do not have to match our lead character in gender, age, career, nationality, religion, politics, education, or any of the many other descriptives applicable to humans, but we NEED TO FEEL SOME CONNECTION. And Users did not provide that. I applaud Winnette for an interesting, dark take on tech. There is much to admire there. But the downside of a main character one never really cares about, or much relates to, combined with secondary characters who were mostly of the cardboard sort, made this an unsatisfactory read. …he’d made an awful thing. An awful place where you could never be alone. Where other people could climb in, touch everything. Turned you against yourself. Turn what you loved into something reprehensible. You could turn it back, but what happened to you once you’d seen it? once someone else had seen you see it? Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 2/21/23 ----------Trade paperback - 3/19/24 Review posted – 4/7/23 I received an copy of Users from Softskull Press in return for an actual, not a virtual review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Winnette’s personal, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Profile Here is the beginning of Winnette’s Linked In profile: I’m a Narrative Designer with a literary career. In addition to years of experience as a writer and designer for interactive games, I'm an experienced screenwriter and the author of seven books, published internationally and translated into multiple languages. My writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and McSweeney's, and it has been praised in numerous high profile venues, including the NY Times, New Yorker Magazine, LA Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone (France), Le Monde, and others. I'm a prolific writer and a confident collaborator with experience working across departments.Interviews -----Zyzzyva - Q&A with Colin Winnette: ‘Users’ and the Underbelly of Tech by Charlie Barton -----Our Culture - Author Spotlight: Colin Winnette, ‘Users’ by Sam Franzini -----Weird Era Podcast - Episode 48: Weird Era feat. Colin Winnette Item of Interest from the author -----The Wayback Machine - An old list of stories by Winnette Song -----Rocky Horror - Don’t Dream It, Be It ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 02, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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1250284937
| 9781250284938
| 1250284937
| 3.48
| 997
| Jun 20, 2023
| Jun 20, 2023
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liked it
| Here’s what I can say with some certainty. Something is happening. Case in point: WZPE’s AM news show usually ends at 8am. Not today. They’ve basic Here’s what I can say with some certainty. Something is happening. Case in point: WZPE’s AM news show usually ends at 8am. Not today. They’ve basically got the phone lines wide open, and people are calling in by the hundreds. The last caller just sobbed, “They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead,” and disconnected.Dave Torres is a security guard at Daxalab. He and his co-worker and best friend, Matteo Leon, are having a bad night. After their shift they head, quite late, to a party only to find the guests mostly gone already. Of course, some are more gone than others. Like the one on the couch whom they had thought was passed out. Turns out he had passed on. Dave goes looking for their host only to find him in bed, in no better shape than the couch stiff. What is going on? And why are the roads so empty? [image] Willie Block and Jake Emanuel - image from Deadline.com Off to the hospital they head, to see that the bodies are handled, or, out of the frying pan…The body count there is impressive, and growing. They meet a tough nurse, Linda, who is doing her best to keep it all together, but things are clearly falling apart. Dave gets that sleep is the trigger and desperately calls his ex to warn her. Katie finally joins them. A large room, lined with storage bins and shelves, has been transformed into a morgue. Shoved along the west wall are gurneys bearing zippered white bags. Human-sized bags, arranged haphazardly, as though they were rolled into the room and released to drift where they may. Which is exactly what happens next: An orderly in a white smock bangs into the room through an adjacent door, back first, then drags a fresh gurney into the room, pivots, and releases it, sending it spinning across the floor. It thumps into another gurney, and both roll in separate directions. The orderly, not pausing to admire his handiwork, disappears through the door again.So we have a small group that sets out to decode the situation. There is a separate pair. Eli Broder (of the opening quote) is confined to a wheel chair. Boston is quiet, too quiet. His online messages begging for information on what is happening receive scant response. Millie is a narcoleptic coder, in the process of being fired from her job, who finally responds. She goes to him and they face the situation together. [image] Podcast episode 3 - the Black Triangle - image from Markiplier Wiki These are our two primary threads. Third is a lookback for Dave to events from this childhood. He has had sleep issues all his life, for which he has received some serious medical intervention. His miseries include nightmares about an elephant and a whale since he was a kid. When his dreams slip into the waking world, his life becomes seriously troubled. They all figure out in short order that going to sleep is a bad idea. To sleep, perchance to dream? Nah. More like to sleep, perchance to die. Each group goes through challenges in progressing to understanding, and getting, geographically, from where they are to where they want to be. Ergo, road trips. During these, we get more insight into the characters. As they begin to glean some truths behind the sleep-bomb that appears to be wiping out humanity, it becomes harder and harder to function, even to think, as their fatigue become profound. How long can the primaries remain awake? Where can they find answers to the why and how of it all? Even if they find answers will they retain consciousness enough to actually do anything about it? [image] Podcast episode 6 – The Dream - image from Markiplier Wiki The story is set, primarily, in Santa Mira, California. No, it is not a real place, but it may, still, sound familiar. That is because the fictional place has been used in many films. Santa Mira felt like a fun nod to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, a huge influence on the show. And we think it’s a cool tradition that many writers and creators have used the same town. - from Paul Semel interviewThe 1956 version of Invasion was set in Santa Mira, as was E.T., a Dean Koontz novel, Phantoms, and several Sharknado sequels. Edge all began with an eight-episode podcast, the first season airing in 2019. I have listened to some of the podcast, although not all of it, reluctant to spoil the read. There is a link to that in EXTRA STUFF. It was adapted for TV, filmed in Vancouver in 2021. I was unable to find definitive intel on where that might be available. A second podcast season is slated for release this year (2023). Emanuel and Block, authors of the podcast, already rewrote the podcast for the TV series, and with this novel, it is yet another version. They tried to keep it fresh with each rewrite. They even brought in a fresh set of eyes in Jason Gurley to help out. To keep themselves sane, they made changes with each rewrite, so you can expect that this book is not slavishly attached to the original podcast. After working on The Edge Of Sleep for so long, and in so many different iterations, we needed a fresh set of eyes. Jason had some really creative and cool ideas to expand the story. - from the Paul Semel interviewThe authors include a considerable list of one-off characters who struggle with fatigue, and succumb. Were they added for texture, or to establish them for future episodes? [image] Podcast episode 7 – The Pit - image from Markiplier Wiki The main characters had at least a bit of depth to them, but only Dave was really developed enough to hold much interest. On the other hand, if one looks at this as the first part of a longer series, it is usual to introduce the characters and plan on developing them later. There are elements that are creative and intriguing, having to do with dreaming, sleep disorders, and things too spoilerish to note here. On the other hand, there are some significant downsides. First is that the ending, while offering some resolutions, feels like too much of a cliffhanger. Explanations were interesting but far too sketchy. If you are interested in continuing on with this series, by all means, dive in. But if you are looking at The Edge of Sleep as a stand-alone read, you are likely to be very disappointed. The characters had a bit of depth to them, but only Dave was really developed enough to hold much interest. On the other hand, if one looks at this as the first part of a longer series, which it certainly is, it is usual to introduce the characters first and develop them later on. While it had conceptual bits that were satisfying, my bottom line on The Edge of Sleep was that it was a bit of a snooze. “Mama,” Davy, the child, moans. Review posted - 07/28/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 06/23/23 ----------Trade paperback - 8/27/24 I received an ARE of The Edge of Sleep from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. I was able to get some shut-eye between reading sessions. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Jake Emanuel’s Instagram, and Twitter pages Willie Block’s FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----PaulSemel.com - Exclusive Interview: “The Edge Of Sleep” Co-Authors Willie Block & Jake Emanuel -----Red Cow Entertainment – Discount Film School - Jake Emanuel and Willie Block, on Screenwriting with Frankie Frain Item of Interest -----Season 1 of the show, entire ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 23, 2023
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Feb 24, 2023
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Hardcover
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0593157532
| 9780593157534
| 0593157532
| 3.81
| 100,133
| Jul 07, 2022
| Jul 12, 2022
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really liked it
| My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or throug My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or through unintended consequences—by attempting to change something as fundamental as how Homo sapiens think?-------------------------------------- We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.OK, so if you had the chance to upgrade yourself, would you do it? I know I would. There are so many things about me that could be better. But, as we all know from the constant barrage of upgrades offered by the makers of every bloody piece of software, some have downsides. Such as new, bloated code slowing down your app. A feature you liked has been removed. You now have to endure ads. Are the benefits of greater value than the costs? Sometimes, but usually, we won’t actually know until the new version is installed, which can take anywhere from minutes to “really, this fu#%ing thing is still processing?” Sometimes, you have no choice, the app updates whether you want it to or not. [image] Blake Crouch - image from his site I suppose agent Logan Ramsay could tell us something about that last case. On a raid, he walks into a planned trap, which goes boom, and Ramsay is infused with version 1.0 of something, which gets busy rewriting his internal code to produce version 2.0 of Logan. There are upsides and downsides. This is no steroidal enhancement, trading zits and rage for increased muscle mass. A nifty bit of tech called a gene driver, (can’t help but see a tiny Uber with double-helix treads) is busy re-writing his actual DNA. (For a new you, no really, a totally, completely new you, call…1 800 FIX-THIS. Of course, we have a la carte if there are only some minor changes you would like. Operators are standing by.) Logan already had a complicated life. Mom was a geneticist trying to improve crop yields in China when there was a slight bit of collateral damage. Her altered-DNA material went where it was not supposed to. Oopsy. It was known as The Great Starvation. As noted in the quote at top, over two hundred million dead. Junior, who had been working with Mom, dead in the ensuing mess, wound up taking undeserved legal heat in her place, spent time in prison, but was sprung three years in. Now he works as an agent for the federal GPA, or Gene Protection Agency, (too late for Wilder) fiddling with genetic code having become a serious, felonious no-no, and Junior wanting to make amends for his family’s role in the global debacle. He is a geneticist like Mom, now dedicated to seeing that it never happens again. So, what happens in every single film and book in which our hero is altered by some weird outside force? They are dragged into enforced isolation for relentless study. Or base their subsequent actions (FLEE!!!) on the presumption that this is what the powers that be have planned for them. Of course among the changes that have been implanted into Logan is a significant increase in IQ. His perceptions have been enhanced as well, giving him a wider bandwidth for incoming sensory information and a much improved ability to process that new flow. This is both a chase and a pursuit story, as Logan must stay out of the clutches of the government, while searching for a dangerous geneticist, trying to stave off another potential global disaster. His personal upgrades make both running and chasing less of a challenge for him than it might be for an unaugmented person. Crouch offers a steady, if light, sprinkling of tech changes, letting us know we are in the future, if not necessarily the far distant future. Some seem more distant than others. Hyperloop, for example, is a widespread viable transportation mode. There is a mile-high building in Las Vegas. The book is set slightly in the future, because I wanted to accelerate where some of the climate change and more in-the-weeds technology was heading, but it’s a mirror of where we might be five minutes from now. - Time interviewSome of the alignments seemed out of kilter. The story takes place in the 2060s. But delivery drones and driverless taxis hardly seem much of an advance for forty years. Ditto electric cars with greater range. Mention is made of a Google Roadster. Google producing its own car has been a project in the works since 2009. So, maybe only five minutes into the future for a lot of the tech Crouch employs. The five-minutes vs forty-years lookahead was jarringly inconsistent at times, which pulled me out of the story. He also reminds us, with a steady stream of examples, that the underlying issue is humans having screwed up the Earth to the point where the continued viability of Homo Sap is called into question. Lower Manhattan and most of Miami are under water. Glacier National Park no longer features glaciers. Many wildlife species are only memories. It is raining in the Rockies instead of snowing. There are now seven hurricane categories. There are some things about this book that I would change. There is an escape scene in which I found the means of egress a bit far-fetched, given the year in which it takes place. Surely there is better tech available? I kept wondering who got Logan sprung from prison. If it was revealed, I missed it. I wondered, during a flight from hostile forces, at how little pursuit of the runner there was by the pursuing forces. Really? That easy to get away? I don’t think so. A couple of lost family members merited a bit more attention. And there is a decided absence of humor. Expected questions are raised. Things like what is it that makes us human? There are those who believe that enhancing, upgrading humanity’s intelligence-related genes to stave off the potential extinction of our species is the only solution, regardless of what collateral damage that might entail. If we are smarter, goes the theory, we will see that what we are doing is madness, and find more sustainable ways of living. While that notion is appealing, it seems pretty glaring that an intelligence boost alone will not cut it. I mean, so you make people smarter. What could possibly go wrong? Logan addresses this: What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists?The notion has been done a fair bit. Forbidden Planet is the classic of this sort. That most of the genetic manipulators in this tale ignore this suggests that maybe they were not so smart as they thought they were, enhanced or not. Might it enhance one’s appreciation of Upgrade if one had read his prior sci-fi thrillers? No idea. Have not read them. Cannot say. My unaugmented research capacities tell me, though, that this is a stand-alone, so at least there is no direct story or character connection to his prior work. Upgrade is a fast-paced thriller that keeps the action charging ahead. I often found myself continuing to read beyond where I had planned to stop. Logan is a decent guy who struggles with moral decisions in a very believable way. There are reasons to relate to him as an everyman, regardless of who his mother may have been. Crouch offers character depth enough for this genre. The tech never gets extreme, a beautiful thing. The concerns raised are very serious. Hopefully, it will boost, if not your muscle mass and speed in the forty, your interest level in the world of genetic manipulation, which, albeit with the best of intentions, could wind up degrading us all. TIME: You did a ton of research on gene editing for Upgrade. Was there anything you learned that stood out? Review posted – August 5, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – July 19, 2022 ----------Trade paperback -June 27, 2023 I received an ARE of Upgrade from Penguin Random House in return for a fair review, and not trying to change too much. Thanks, KQ, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages From the book BLAKE CROUCH is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include Upgrade, Recursion, Dark Matter, and the Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also co-created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He lives in Colorado. Interviews -----Time - Blake Crouch No Longer Believes in Science Fiction - by Anabel Gutterman -----Paulsemel.com - Exclusive Interview: “Upgrade” Author Blake Crouch Songs/Music -----“Träumerei,” from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood - Noted in chapter 6 as Logan’s favorite tune – if he says so -----Bowie - Changes - a live version from 1999 – just because ----- Yamer Yapchulay - playing a violin cover of Tonight from West Side Story - one was played in Chapter 15 -----Kyla - I Am Changing - you can thank me later Items of Interest -----Carson National Forest - a hideout -----Quantum annealing computing - mentioned in chapter 7 -----LifeCode is mentioned in chapter 9 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 19, 2022
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Aug 2022
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Aug 02, 2022
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Hardcover
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0062916475
| 9780062916471
| 0062916475
| 3.79
| 10,363
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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really liked it
| When nothing works anything goes.-------------------------------------- Be Prepared! - Boy Scout MottoEver since the Neolithic and the introduction When nothing works anything goes.-------------------------------------- Be Prepared! - Boy Scout MottoEver since the Neolithic and the introduction of sedentary farming, we have been a species that has evolved to rely on external supports to keep us going, an infrastructure that provides water, transportation routes and means, manufacturing, either by hand or machine, of things we need that we do not or cannot make for ourselves, and means of communication that do not require direct line of sight, or being within proximate hearing distance. So, what happens when one of the absolute necessities undergirding all our infrastructures vanishes? It’s not like the K-Pg asteroid that obliterated vast numbers of species across the planet in a day, 66 million years ago. How might people react when there is a sudden, if not immediately lethal, change in our way of living? Will we devolve to warring tribes? Will we come together for the common good? Some combination? Something else entirely? [image] David Koepp - image from his site This time it is a major solar flare, aka a CME or Coronal Mass Ejection. Which I prefer to think of, because I am twelve, as massive projectile solar vomiting. (Probably had too much to drink at that intergalactic frat party. It likes beer!) We have not seen the likes of such a mass ejection since 1859. (If we do not count the Braves-Padres game of August 12, 1984, when 17 players and coaches were asked to leave, but I digress). When it arrived back then it did not really make that much difference. We were a pre-electrical civilization. Telegraphy had a bad day. A few wires got fried. This and that went wrong. But no big whup, really. This time the solar storm is the same, but the results will be dramatically different. These days we are a species that is reliant on electricity for almost everything. Very big whup this time. The power spike of power spikes. Everything shuts down, or close enough to it. There are a few scientists who see what is about to happen. They warn the people who need to be warned, or try. Think the film Don’t Look Up, or almost any disaster film. Of course, the reaction of world leaders is not what Koepp is looking at here. The notion of extraordinary global events that deprive us of power—in ways both literal and figurative—is something I’ve explored in the past. But it was fascinating to shift my focus from the global to the hyperlocal, and the ways in which tiny communities might come together or split apart during hardship. - from the acknowledgmentsThere was a wonderful series of ads on in 2020 and 2021, for a shingles vaccine. A person would be shown doing something healthful, or telling how they take care of themselves. The sonorous voice-over would interrupt with “Shingles Doesn’t Care,” which was pretty funny, and memorable, getting the advertiser’s message across that people over 50 should get vaccinated. I thought of that while reading this book. No, no one in the book is suffering from that virus-based ailment, but we are reminded over and over that the best laid plans of mice and men…(Actually the original, from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns, goes The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley), which we will translate here into the modern patois of Doomsday Doesn’t Care! There are the usual suspects who insist that the bad thing is never gonna happen, deniers at full volume. (Sadly, these are all too much a mindless, know-nothing, demagogic trope in real life, so no reaching is required.) Why waste precious government resources (which reminds me of precious bodily fluids from another era) on things like girding for a known, expected emergency, when it can be redirected to building walls, jails, ethnic hatred, religious intolerance, and paranoia, or cutting taxes for the richest. Doomsday Doesn’t Care! Ok, so a very hard rain is gonna fall, and we need some folks to be our eyes and ears through the experience. Aubrey Wheeler is our primary POV. She is 38 and the default parent of her step-son, Scott, 16. Her ex, Rusty, is a disaster, enough so that when he left, Scott opted to remain with Aubrey. The guy who impressed Aubrey when they met has taken a nose-dive straight to the bottom, drugs, crime, amorality, and a willingness to use anyone to get what he wants. Rusty was a “shit,” used in the classical sense of “waste matter expelled from the body,” because he had been an enormous misuse of her time, resources, and love.They reside in Aurora, Illinois, a city of nearly 200,000. But within that, a much tinier slice. Cayuga Lane fit the model of what Aubrey had been trying to build since she was little. Ten minutes from downtown, it was a short cul-de-sac with six houses, most of them old builds from the 1920s or ‘30s. Small community number one. How about if you set up a safe house, a place where you can weather the storm, whether it is months or years, lots of supplies on hand, expertise being shipped there as we speak, lots of nice insulating earth between y’all and the incoming energy burst? Someplace out of the way, say, outside Jericho, Utah. Small community number two. Thom Banning is an obnoxious billionaire tech sort, brilliant in his way, but maybe not the most gifted person on Earth with people skills. He has reconfigured an old missile site as his personal bug-out retreat in the event of a catastrophe like this one. He even figured in all the professional sorts he might like to have at hand for a long time away from everything. Security, power, comms, food, food-prep, transportation, living space, lots of cash. Excellent Boy Scout work. But then there is that people-person chink. He aspires to reconcile with his wife there. Thom is Aubrey’s big brother. I was in NYC when superstorm Sandy set Con Ed’s Manhattan transformers sparking and popping like slow-sequence firecrackers. Prep all you like. Doomsday Doesn’t Care! There are smaller looks elsewhere. A city area does not fare well. Reports come in from other places, generally not in a very hopeful way. But the how-are-they-faring focus is primarily on Aurora, and Thom’s redoubt. Koepp wanted to write a ground-level, personal perspective to a disastrous global event, while contrasting someone who was uber-prepared with someone who was not prepared at all. The story alternates between Aubrey, in Aurora, and Thom, et al, in his tricked-out missile silo, living La Dolce Vita relative to most of humanity, with a few breaks, to see through other eyes. The supporting cast is a mixed lot. Rusty is a baddie from the build-a-loser shop. We have to wonder, even though Koepp offers us a paragraph of explanation, how Aubrey did not see through his act way sooner. He is a powerful presence, but pretty much pure id. There is more going on with Scott, the stepson. A young scientist photobombs the story then vanishes until called on for a cameo later on. An elderly scientist offers a nice touch of deep, zen-like appreciation for the wonders of nature, while shedding bits of goodness and optimism like a seed-stage dandelion on a windy day. The idea of how different communities might respond to disaster certainly offers us the chance to consider how things might develop in our communities. Would our neighbors come together to forge a way forward, or form armed bands to take whatever they wanted? The relationship between Aubrey and Thom is a connective thread that sustains a tension level throughout. What is the big secret, often hinted at, which binds them? What level of crazy will Rusty reach? How far will he go? I would have preferred a bit more on the science and details of how a newly power-free world slows to a stop, with discussion about what would be needed to crank things back up. But that’s just me. The story in no way requires this. Aurora does not break new ground with its local-eyed view of global phenomena, but it works that approach effectively enough. Aubrey is an appealing lead, disorganized, very human, flawed, but very decent at heart, thus someone we can easily root for. Characters do grow (some better, some worse) over the duration, which is what we look for in good writing. You will want to know what happens next, and next, and next, so should keep flipping the pages. There is not a lot of humor here, but still, I caught a few LOLs sprinkled in. It seems to have been written very much for the screen, with a minimum of internal dialogue, and an absence of florid description. Plot is uber alles here, driving the engine forward. Movie rights have been sold, which is not at all surprising, given the author’s impressive career as a screenwriter and director Kathryn Bigelow has been signed to direct it for Netflix. This is a wonderful Summer read, mostly a thriller to keep the juices flowing. Hopefully, it prompts you to give at least some thought to how your community might react when faced with a comparable crisis. High art it ain’t, but it does not intend to be. No Sleeping Beauty here, this Aurora is a page-turner of a thriller and will keep you wide awake while you read. …last year, things made sense. Last year, you walked into the grocery store, you paid a fair price, and you came out with your dinner. This year, you beg somebody to sell you a week’s worth of groceries for a thousand dollars. ‘if you’re lucky, they say yes, and you eat. If you’re not. They beat you to death, take your money, and they eat. Review first posted – June 24, 2022 Publication date ----------Hardcover - June 7, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - June 6, 2023 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, and Instagram pages From his site David Koepp has written or co-written the screenplays for more than thirty films, including Apartment Zero (1989), Bad Influence (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), Carlito’s Way (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), The Paper (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Snake Eyes (1998), Panic Room (2002), Spider-Man (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Angels & Demons (2009), and Inferno (2016). Interviews -----Author Stories - David Koepp - a lot on his experience of writing novels and screenplays rather than about this book in particular. But they do get to Aurora in the final third – audio – 43:20 -----The Nerd Daily - Q&A: David Koepp, Author of ‘Aurora’ by Elise Dumpleton Items of Interest -----FEMA - Catastrophic Earthquake Planning – New Madrid Seismic Zone ----- Mid-America Earthquake Center - Civil and Environmental Engineering Department University of Illinois - Impact of Earthquakes on the Central USA -----Deadline - Kathryn Bigelow To Direct Adaptation Of David Koepp Novel ‘Aurora’ For Netflix -----Doctor Strangelove - Precious Bodily Fluids ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 30, 2022
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Jun 11, 2022
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Jun 21, 2022
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Hardcover
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0593436776
| 9780593436776
| 0593436776
| 3.90
| 6,049
| Mar 17, 2022
| Mar 22, 2022
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it was amazing
| I now understand why desperate people find religion, or end up believing in aliens or conspiracy theories. Because sometimes the rational answer do I now understand why desperate people find religion, or end up believing in aliens or conspiracy theories. Because sometimes the rational answer doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you have to look outside the box. And my hope-desperation twofer had led me way outside the box, all the way to a Willow Green allotment in fact, where, God help me, I was waiting to meet a bunch of people who even the most charitable among us would label “raging nut-job weirdos.”You think your relationship is complicated? You have no idea what complicated is. Nick and Bee, now that is a truly complicated pairing. Guy sends a flaming message, raging about (and to) a client who has not paid for editing/ghost-writing services, and it somehow gets misdirected. Woman checking her e-mail receives said message and responds with great, subdued humor. And we have achieved our rom-com meet cute. [image] Sarah Lotz - image from A.M. Heath Obviously the pair hit it off, as messages go zooming back and forth across the wires, ether, or whatever, and we get to the big Deborah Kerr/Cary Grant rendezvous scene. As this is London instead of New York, it is set under the large clock at Euston Station instead of at the top of the Empire State Building. And, well, as one might expect, it does not come off as planned, putting a huge dent in the “rom.” Pissed, Bee is about to write it all off when her bff convinces her to keep an open mind, and a good thing too. Turns out, her correspondent had indeed shown up, well, in his London, anyway. The two have somehow been the beneficiaries of a first-order MacGuffin, well a variant on one, anyway. Nick and Bee, while they may be able to exchange messages, are actually living in parallel universes. So I guess that makes their connection more of a meet moot? [image] Big Clock at Euston Station image from AllAboard.eu Still, the connection, divided as they are, is real. They try to figure out what to do. And that is where the next literary angle comes into play. Sarah Lotz adds into the mix references to Patricia Highsmith’s (and Alfred Hitchcock’s) Strangers on a Train. But not for the purpose of knocking off each other’s unwanted spouse. (Although now that you mention it…) If they can’t be together, maybe they can use their insider knowledge to find their side’s version of each other. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries for very similar girl? I mean really, what would you do if you found the one, but were precluded by the laws of physics from realizing your dream? Lotz has fun with literary/cinematic references, even beyond the two noted above. There is a Rebeccan mad mate, chapters with titles like Love Actually and One Wedding and a Funeral, and on. This is one of the many joys of this book. Catching the references, the easter eggs deftly scattered all about. Cary Grant’s Nickie in An Affair… is Nick here. Rebecca of the story of that name is Bee in one world, Rebecca in another. There are lovely secondary characters, Bee’s bff, Leila, is the sort of strong supporting sort a fraught leading lady needs. Nick engages with a group of oddballs who have some off-the-grid notions about space-time, and what rules should apply when contact is achieved. There is a grade-A baddie in dire need of removal, a harsh landlady, some adorable pooches, and a very sweet young man. Another bit of fun is the repeated presence of David Bowie references, including an album you have never heard of. There is some peripheral social commentary as Nick and Bee compare the worlds in which they live, what programs have been enacted, which politicians have gained office, or not, where the world stands with global warming, things of that nature. These offer food for thought, actually more like dessert to go with the main course of the romance. Time travel romances have made an impressive dent in our overall reading time. The Outlander, and The Time Traveler’s Wife pop immediately to mind. Other stories have been written about people communicating over time, but this is the first use I am aware of that makes use of parallel universes as an impediment to true love. You do not want to look too closely at the explanation for the whole parallel universe thing. Just go with it. suspend your disbelief. In fact, send it off for a long weekend to someplace nice. Lotz has done an impressive job of delivering LOLs and tears all in the same book. I noted seven specific LOLs in my notes, and I expect there were more that I failed to jot down. On top of that, we can report that copious tears were shed. No count on that one. So Lotz certainly delivers on the feelz front. Bee and Nick’s relationship may be insanely complicated, but there should be nothing complicated about your decision to check this one out. The Impossible Us is not only very possible, but practically mandatory. This is a super fun read that you should find a way to make happen for you, whether or not you have a tweed suit, a red coat, a rail station with a large clock, or a dodgy internet connection. Review posted – March 18, 2022 Publication date – March 22, 2022 I received an ARE of The Impossible Us from Ace in return for a fair review in this universe. My much more successful self in that other place will have to handle the review on his side. Thanks, folks. And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Lotz’s’s personal, FB, Instagram, and GR pages Sarah Lotz writes under various names. Impossible Us (Impossible in the UK), is her eighth book under that name. Then there are four books written with her daughter, Savannah, as Lily Herne, five with Louis Greenburg as S.L. Grey, three with Helen Moffatt and Paige Nick as Helena S. Paige, and that does not even count screenplays. Items of Interest -----Parallel Universes in Fiction -----MacGuffin -----Rebecca -----An Affair to Remember -----Strangers on a Train Reminds Me Of -----Meet Me in Another Life -----The Midnight Library ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Mar 11, 2022
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Mar 11, 2022
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Paperback
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1982168439
| 9781982168438
| 1982168439
| 4.26
| 228,581
| Sep 28, 2021
| Sep 28, 2021
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it was amazing
| Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.Anthony Doerr has written a masterpiece of a tale, connecting f Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.Anthony Doerr has written a masterpiece of a tale, connecting five characters, over hundreds of years through their relationship to a single book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ancient story written by Antonius Diogenes around the first century C.E. (Only in the novel. While the author is real, the book was made up.) It tells of a shepherd, Aethon, seeking a magical, heavenly place in the sky, the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” of the title. Each of the five characters are introduced to this story, and we see how it impacts their lives. Each has characteristics that set them apart. But all have lost, or lose, at least one parent. [image] Anthony Doerr - image from Boise State Public Radio We meet Konstance, 14, on an interstellar, generational ship, maybe the late 21st century, maybe the 22nd. She is laying out on the floor of a large room the scraps of pages that comprise the book. (Sometimes he [Doerr] would lay out all these micro chapters on the floor so he could see them and discover the resonances between characters across space and time. - from the NY Times interview) She was born on The Argos, and the plan is that she will not live long enough to reach the ship’s destination, but will grow to adulthood and raise a family there, passing down humanity’s culture so that someday, homo sapiens can rebuild on a new, unspoiled home world, Beta Oph2. Hopefully that planet will remain better off once people arrive. She is driven by her need to know, a boundless curiosity, and a willingness to think outside the ship. Anna is an orphan. In 15th century Constantinople we follow her from age 7 to early adolescence. She and her older sister, Maria, work as seamstresses in the house of Nicholas Kalaphates. It is a Dickensian world of exploitation of diverse sorts. Anna is far too bright to be denied the world of words, and, once exposed to it, she pursues that world doggedly. On her travels through the city on errands she comes across a class of boys being taught Greek, The Odyssey, and attends, surreptitiously. The master agrees to teach her privately in return for modest items. Her literacy makes her a suspect to the adults around her, a criminal to others, and possibly a witch to the most ignorant, but leads her to a ruined library and eventually, to Aethon. [image] The Imperial Library at Constantinople [in better days] – image from Novo Scriptorium Omeir was born in 1439, like Anna, but with a cleft lip and palate. The superstitious country people in his home town believed him cursed, demonic even, so he is driven out of town, exiled to a remote part of what is now Bulgaria, where he does his best to remain out of sight, to be raised by his grandfather. But Omeir is a survivor. He becomes a marvel at the care of oxen, raising and training two to immense proportions. The team of three are remarkable workers. Downside is that the new sultan demands Omeir, now an adolescent, and his oxen serve in his army. He is planning to lay siege to Constantinople, a city with walls that have withstood such attacks for over eleven hundred years. Omeir will encounter Aethon later. [image] The oldest surviving map of Constantinople, by Cristoforo Buondelmonti, dated to 1422. The fortifications of Constantinople and of Galata, at the northern shore of the Golden Horn, are prominently featured. - image from Wikipedia Seymour does not fit in. He lives with his mother, who struggles to get by on low-wage jobs. Probably on the spectrum, he struggles with more than the usual travails of growing up. He cannot, for example, tolerate loud sound. He cannot or will not remain in his seat at school. The world overwhelms him and when the pressure of it builds too high, he screams, which is not conducive to a successful school life. A class library outing brings him into contact with a whole new world, when the librarian, Marian, (surely a nod to The Music Man) hooks him up with nature books. He finds comfort in the natural world, befriending a large, amenable owl, and reveling in walks in the woods adjacent to his home. We follow him from childhood into adolescence and into his development as an eco-warrior. Seymour is the avatar of Doerr’s concerns about environmental degradation, presenting a generational cri du coeur, however misguided in its application, about the destruction of a following generation’s natural heritage. We see Zeno as a child. He realizes he is gay at an early age. But it is the 1940s in Idaho, and this is simply not allowed. He has to keep that part of himself hidden. We see him again as a POW during the Korean War, when he learns Greek, and as an octogenarian teacher. He lives in a small Idaho community, and is leading five students in a stage performance of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a book he translated from the Greek, well, from what bits remained of it. As with All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, his characters here are young. (Not necessarily for the entire book, but for a good chunk) He says writing from a child’s perspective allows one to “to see more nakedly some of the things that we’ve elided or erased in our minds because of age.” (From the NYTimes interview). Each comes to the world with their own personal content, but also with a sense of wonder. Anna is amazed by the vast universe of story that can be reached through literacy. Seymour is dazzled by nature and nature books. Konstance is amazed by the things she can see, the places she can visit, the knowledge she can gain in the virtual library on the ship. Zeno also finds a refuge and a world of possibility in his local library. For Omeir, it is the tales his grandfather tells him when they’re out trapping grouse that capture his imagination. While all the characters have their individual stories, Zeno and Seymour’s stories converge in today’s Lakeport, Idaho; (Doerr and family spend a lot of time in McCall, Idaho, a likely model for Lakeport) Anna and Omeir’s stories converge in the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, and all their stories converge on the connection to that ancient book up through the somewhat near future of Konstance’s experience. [image] Mural at the Turkish Military Museum of the scene outside the walls of Constantinople in 1453 - image from Europe Between East and West It is these connections, these convergences, that provide the structure and core mystery of the book. How does this first century story find its way to fifteenth century Constantinople, to the world of today, and to the future in which Konstance lives? How is it preserved, by whom, and why? Asked about the spark for his focus on the preservation of literature, of culture, Doer said: I’m getting close to 50. And though I still feel and behave like a kid most of the time, my eyesight is fading, I can apparently injure myself while sleeping and my little baby boys are suddenly big hairy-legged job-working car-driving high school kids. I’m realizing that everything—youth, hairlines, memories, civilizations—fades. And the amazing technology that is a printed book seems to be one of the few human inventions that has outlived whole human generations. What a privilege it is to open a book like The Iliad and summon tales that entertained people almost 3,000 years ago.The folks doing most of the preserving are librarians of one sort or another. Each of the characters has a relationship with a librarian, Zeno and Seymour with the librarians in Lakeport, Idaho, Anna with scribes in Constantinople, Omeir with Anna, and Konstance with the AI controller of her ship. I hope that my readers will be reminded that librarians serve as stewards of human memory—without librarians, we lose perhaps our most important windows into the human journey. - from the QBD interviewPart of his growing-up environment was spending a lot of time in libraries as his teacher mom often made use of them as a form of day care for Doerr and his brothers. It’s not like he minded. In fact, he even dedicated the book to librarians. They were a place where I felt completely safe. And just the miracle of them, there's something that - talk about peeling the scales off your eyes. Like, here's the work of all these masters available to you for free. And you can take them home. - from the NPR interviewAs with All the Light…, Doerr found inspirations for the elements of the book in diverse places. It was while researching the walls at Saint Malo for his prior book that he came across repeated references to the millennium-long impenetrability of the walls of Constantinople, and dug into that a lot deeper. He is also interested in how technology induces change. In All the Light… it was radio. Here it is gunpowder and advanced armaments in the 15th century, allowing a new level of violence in the assault on supposedly impervious walls. In the contemporary world it is the internet allowing in both a world of information and a cannonade of lies and manipulation. He sees the future as being driven by artificial intelligence. One of the things that most stuck with me was the portrayal of reading, particularly the reading of material to others, as not only an act of kindness, of affection, but also be a source of healing, and certainly comfort. There are several times when characters read to other characters who are ill, to positive effect. We are a species that relies on stories to make sense of our world, and to inspire, to spark imagination. The story of Aethon inspires all the main characters to dream of more, to dream of better, to dream beyond realistic possibility. Doerr enjoys tossing in a bit of classical reference spice. The ship Argos, of course, recalls Jason and his crew. Zeno is saved by a dog named Athena as Hercules was rescued by the goddess herself. There are plenty more of these. I would keep an eye out for owl imagery, and roses come in for some repeated attention as well. Walls get special attention. The big one in Constantinople is the most obvious, but Konstance has physical walls of her own she needs to get through. Seymour tries breaching a physical wall, as Zeno tries to defend one. The notion of paradise permeates. The title alone refers to an unrealizable fantasy of heaven. It is the heaven that Aethon pursues. For Zeno it is a place where he can be accepted, loved, while being his true self. Seymour is lured by the promise of a sylvan environmentalist camp where he can embrace nature with others of like mind. A development in his beloved woods is called Eden’s Gate (close enough to make one think of Heaven’s Gate). He and his mother live on Arcady Lane. For Anna it is a dream of a better life outside the city. How Doerr weaves all this together is a dazzling work of genius. He will leave you breathless, even as he shows you the construction of his multiple threads, bit by bit by bit. “That’s the real joy,” Doerr said, “the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.” - from the NY Times interviewMirroring is employed extensively as the experiences of all five characters (and Aethon) repeat in one form or another for them all. The book lists at 640 hardcover pages. Do not take this at face value. In terms of actual words, Cuckoo Land is about the same length as All the Light. There are many pages holding only titles or section headings. There is a lot of white space. That does not make this a fast read. It would still be around 500 pages if one stripped it down to word-count alone. But it is less daunting than the presenting length of 640 pages. Also, Doerr writes in small chunks. You can always use a spare minute or two to drop in on this book and still get through a chapter or five. There is a reason for this. He had hit upon this approach for the most practical of reasons. As a parent, he couldn’t hope to get more than an hour or two of solid work done before having to attend to shuttling the boys to swim practice or some other activity. “I might have stumbled accidentally into that,” he said. - from the NY Times interviewWhile there are dark events that take place in this novel, the overall feel is one of optimism, of possibility, of persistence, and of the availability of beauty and hope to all, if only we can keep alive our connections to each other through time and place, keep alive hopes for a better place, for a better, meaningful life, and continue to dream impossible dreams. If you read nothing else this year, do yourself a favor and read Cloud Cuckoo Land, and be transported (no wings required) to a literary paradise by this book, which I hope will be read as long as there are people able to read. It is a heavenly book, and an immediate classic. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” Review posted – October 22, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 28, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - September 27, 2022 I received an ARE of Cloud Cuckoo Land from Simon & Schuster, but I first learned of it from Cai at GR, who passed on my request to someone at S&S, who sent me an ARE and passed on my request to the person responsible for this e-galley, who ok’d that too. Thanks to all, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating a (DRC) Digital Review Copy. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I usually move it to the comments section directly below. However, in 2021, GR further constrained reviewers by banning external links from comments, so to see the EXTRA STUFF part of this review you will have to continue on to my site, Coots’s Reviews, where the review is posted in its entirety. [image] Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 16, 2021
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Oct 16, 2021
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Oct 06, 2021
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Hardcover
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1982156716
| 9781982156718
| 1982156716
| 3.45
| 1,285
| Aug 10, 2021
| Aug 10, 2021
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really liked it
| Doesn’t the body remember, even after the mind has been wiped clean?The Shimmering State opens with a quote from Proust about the only true voyage Doesn’t the body remember, even after the mind has been wiped clean?The Shimmering State opens with a quote from Proust about the only true voyage being to see with other people’s eyes. What if you could? Meredith Westgate gives this notion a go, using a sci-fi perspective to imagine a real world application. A means has been crafted by which researchers can download memories, and store the contents in pill form. The science? Don’t ask. Memoroxin was developed with benign intent, to help people. Alzheimer’s patients struggling with memory could, in a controlled environment, take a series of pills, each filled with their downloaded memories, and re-live them, remember their own lives more clearly, hopefully improving their overall ability to remember. And then there are folks with traumas that have proven resistant to the usual treatments. Soldiers suffering PTSD, victims of violent assault, or abuse. Memoroxin therapy allows the caregivers to download all of a person’s memories, essentially reformat a person’s brain, then restore the load, sans the bad parts. Think bringing your virus-infected computer in to the relevant shop. How can they see, or know what memory is which, where one ends and another begins? Don’t ask. How do neurological bits and bytes find their way from the digestive system to the memory-holding parts? How is that dodgy blood-brain barrier impediment surmounted? Don’t ask. The science is not the thing here, just the notion. [image] Meredith Westgate - image from The Seventh Wave – shot by Maurizio Pesce But for every good thing there is a dark side. What if well-intentioned science was used for bad reasons, personal entertainment, say. Heroin, for example, was given its name because it was thought to be a heroic solution for those addicted to opium. What sort of rush might one get from having someone else’s memories present? Might you take on some collateral bits in addition to simple memory? What if you find out things you would be better off not knowing? What if you see things you would be better off not seeing? ”…to truly leave yourself, the one place you can never escape, and to experience a moment as someone else. That is the ultimate luxury.”Which makes one wonder how, if success is something of such value, so many of the successful seek to escape themselves. Sophie is a dancer from Minneapolis. Lucien is a photographer from Brooklyn. She is in LA to begin her professional career. He is working on a project of treated photos of his mother, a famous artist recently dead from cancer. We first meet both of them in rehab, a facility for treating people who have abused Memoroxin or been harmed by it. Lucien was in LA to help take care of his grandmother, who is in failing health. He regrets not having attended more to her in the past and is determined to do better. He is overwhelmed with feelings of loss for his mother, though. She was a huge factor in his life, but she was always focused on her work. He misses her now, but he has been missing her his whole life. Wanting to get more of his mother than he ever could while she was alive, Lucien takes some of grandma’s Memoroxin. He holds it, his grandmother’s life, between two fingers. He is sad for Florence [grandma], so trapped inside her body. Her life lost while still alive. But he is also jealous. She disappears into moments where his mother still lives, and where he exists, before all this. What could be the harm, in seeing what she sees? What damage would it do her to share? He needs to see her again. Just once would be enough.Yeah, you keep on thinkin’ that, Sparky. Sophie gets a great job, then runs into a stream of shit luck, and bad or uncaring people, and is dragged under. While the primary POVs here are Lucien and Sophie, there is a third perspective, from Dr. Angelica Sloane, one of the researchers who developed the drug and who now runs the rehab facility in which both Lucien and Sophie reside. She has a story of her own, with some complications. While interesting in its own right, I did not think this added a lot to the central tale beyond giving us some more reasons why taking Mem is a bad idea. Structurally, the novel looks at one character in the present, Today, at the rehab center, then peels back a layer of their history, Before. It is clear early on that Luc and Soph had had a connection before their brains got freeze-dried. If only one or both of them could remember what that was. The primary focus of the novel is the personal experience of memory-downloading tech, but Memoroxin is not the only shimmering thing (the pills literally shimmer) under consideration. California as a shimmering state also comes in for some attention. It is the only state where Mem is legal, for one, suggesting that the story is about Cali’s place in our imagination and memory. Westgate looks at the more specific Los Angeles experience, the wealth of creatives working in very non-creative jobs to get by, predation by those with power, and entitled fecklessness by the in-crowd, who think of Mem as the next cool drug. Sophie works in an exclusive restaurant, at Chateau Marmont, while building her dance career, so has to endure seeing these creatures in their natural habitat. Lucien’s mother had been involved in early Hollywood, so we get a taste of some of the mirage-ry (and extreme unfairness) of that time. Lucien and Sophie, in their Befores, encounter plenty of posers, way too many people with excellent teeth, nicely toned muscles, and beautifully tanned skin, people with hustles, but no souls. This gives us the best line in the book, for my money - Los Angeles, a city of extras. There are also some observations about East Coasters who flicker back and forth between coasts, truly part of neither. Westgate lives in Brooklyn now, but has lived in LA, so I expect she knows of what she writes, having encountered many such folks. It is generally held that our identity, who we truly are, is very much tied up with our memories. Lose your memories and you lose yourself. Thus the general terror about Alzheimer’s, a disease that whittles away memory, presenting an existential threat to us all. It is no surprise that stories that focus on the malleability of memory trigger our fear receptors, and gain out attention. If you add someone else’s memories do you become someone else, or less yourself? There is a whole Wikipedia page on fiction dealing with memory erasure and alteration. I leave you to explore that on your own. Suffice it to say there are many more titles there than I could ever remember. Such concerns have been present in film, TV, and literature for a long time, even slipping into entertainments that use them in a supporting way. Think Men in Black zapping those who have seen things they should not have. Similar memory-wiping takes place in The Incredibles 2. Sometimes memory is the focus. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, a man and a woman have the memory of their failed relationship wiped clean. Total Recall concerns itself with implanted memories. West World serves up a smorgasbord of memory issues. A 2019 novel, The Binding, posited a world in which one could go to a binder to have specific memories removed and locked up inside a book. And multiple personality (Dissociative Identity Disorder) tales offer a whole other track. What The Shimmering State focuses on, aside from the obvious connection between Lucien and Sophie, is how people might be affected by other people’s memories. Lucien is impacted by the family history he sees. Sophie has a much darker experience. Does anyone really want to see the world through the eyes of, say, a moron? There are supporting conversations, references and imagery throughout. Sophie gets a starring role in the ballet La Sylphide, which is a tale of, among other things, the appeal of the unknown and dangerous. Sophie totes around a copy of a seminal autobiography by Martha Graham, her dance muse. For Graham, “blood memory” is the innate knowledge we have of the physical experiences lived by our ancestors. - from the Garage Museum siteBut what does it all matter if we don’t care or relate enough to at least one of our leads to keep us turning the pages? While I would not put either character portrayal on the top tier, they were both relatable enough to merit the investment of some reading time. Sophie is hard-working, and offers us a painful perspective on the crap women have to take, and the misery some inflict on themselves. She was the more fully realized of the pair, maybe for her connection to the real world. I did take issue with one particular decision she made that seemed out of character to me, and not very smart. Don’t read this if you have not read the book. (view spoiler)[After having had the Mem equivalent of a bad trip, her response to the lingering effects is to believe that hair of the dog would somehow make it better. Are you kidding me? (hide spoiler)] Lucien seemed more singularly concerned with his mother and grandmother. While that may make him a decent guy, it also made him feel a bit flat as a character. There is one redemptive scene late in the book portraying how he sees, artistically, that worked wonderfully to counterbalance that. Bottom line is that the The Shimmering State offers a fascinating concept, carried along by a romantic connection between two people with obvious chemistry. It also offers a look at the LA arts scene, well, parts of it, anyway, and provides food for thought on what it might be like to see life, or even yourself, through the eyes of others. Of course, we see the world through someone else’s eyes every time we read a book. I expect you won’t mind seeing it through the eyes of Meredith Westgate. And if it doesn’t work out, well, there are solutions for that. Review posted – August 6, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - August 10, 2021 ----------Trade Paper - August 16, 2022 I received an ARE of The Shimmering State from Atria, but for the life of me I cannot remember when or how this happened. Thanks to MG. Re the stars, really 3.5, but rounded up for interesting content =============================EXTRA STUFF Book Launch on August 11 at the Powerhouse, a major indie bookstore in DUMBO in Brooklyn. Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter pages Items of Interest from the author -----Joyland - Chilean Fruit Bats - a short story by Westgate, from 2018 -----Joyland - Just Visiting - a short story by Westgate, from 2016 -----Amos Herr House - Emma’s Diaries - on the diaries of an early twentieth century resident of this Lancaster, PA historical home -----Girls at the Library - For Those “End of Days” Days (aka After Reading The News) - Westgate’s review of Tracy K. Smith’s book of poems, Life on Mars -----The Seventh Wave - “Oh, Galileo” - story by Westgate - 2017 Items of Interest -----Litscape - To _. (What can I do to drive away). by John Keats – Sophie quotes from it in Chapter 16 -----Nature - Memory editing from science fiction to clinical practice by Elizabeth Phelps – definitely check this out – it is alarming! -----Wiki on Chateau Marmont, where Sophie works when not dancing - a glitterati hotspot -----Pioneertown, CA a site used in many a Hollywood film, and in a fictional film of significance in the book – mentioned in Chapter 32 -----Garage Museum - A page on Blood Memory, an autobiography of Martha Graham that Sophie swears by Makes me think of -----The Binding - a 2019 novel by Bridget Collins - erasing memories -----Wiki on the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - erasing memories -----Wiki for the 2018 film The Incredibles 2 - erasing memories -----Wiki for the 1997 film Men in Black - erasing memories -----Wiki on the 1990 film Total Recall - implanting memories -----Wiki for the 2016 show Westworld ----------See also, from Psychology Today - Narrative Consciousness, Memory, and PTSD in Westworld -----Wiki for the 2019 film Frozen 2 re memories being present in water (they are not) ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 17, 2021
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Aug 2021
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Aug 01, 2021
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Hardcover
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0756417295
| 9780756417291
| 0756417295
| 3.52
| 2,317
| Jul 06, 2021
| Jul 06, 2021
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really liked it
| The EOS team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unav The EOS team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unavailable as a sexual partner—none of the expedition members were married—and this isolated her even further. There was no comfortable niche for her in the social structure. No connections to anchor her to the community.-------------------------------------- “I don’t think,” he said, “that humans can live here, Park.”Grace Park was not the sort of psychologist who sits with patients using talk therapy to unearth and resolve their deep-seated issues. No couch or cushy-chair sessions for her. Removed-from-people analysis was much more her forte. Frankly, she was a lot more comfortable with androids than she’d ever been with people. People lie. But when her boss, more of a traditional, people-skills psychologist, is pulled away onto a very hush-hush special assignment during their mission, Park is stuck as the remaining shrink. As noted above, the crew see her as a spy for the mega-company that is in charge of this expedition to a new planet, Eos. They are not entirely wrong. She had been given this assignment to monitor the mental well-being of the crew and report back, interceding where needed to head off potential morale problems. [image] Lena Nguyen - image from Voyage Phoenix It was weird having two shrinks aboard. And it was weird that there was something going on that only some of the crew were in on. And weirder still that something is making the crew of the Deucalion sick, not just unwell, but out of their minds, and a danger to everyone ar0und them, leaving Park to cope with the uninfected crew and the spreading madness. The security people are no help at all. The very suspicious Sagara sees threats everywhere, and his #2, Hunter Hanover, seems eager to get back into the combat she clearly misses, even if it is with an unarmed psychologist. Instead of carbon dioxide, she exhales hostility. So, there are core mysteries--what is going on? what is making everyone nuts? what is the secret project some of the crew are working on?--with Park trying to sleuth her way through those, while crew-members around her are either succumbing to madness or being picked off like the characters in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Grace suspects one or more of the unaffected might be part of the problem. She does have at least some crew members she can talk to. A cartographer named Fulbreech seems interested in her (which she cannot understand, seeing herself as not at all attractive) and a custodial android named Jimex, that (who?) assists her in a variety of tasks. There is a horror element as well. Park must fear for her own safety, of course, as an infected person might try to kill her. And then there is the decidedly strange. Passages in the ship seem to shift like Hogwarts staircases. And bizarre dreams add to the mix. I was sleeping, and then when I woke up—I couldn’t move. There were all these lights flashing in my face. I tried to open my mouth to yell for someone, but—I had no tongue.”And there is some visceral fear inducement, reminiscent of classic sci-fi/horror like Alien. It didn’t help that the air was so muggy and damp, as if she were walking into the gullet of something alive.Any good horror tale deals in feelings of isolation, and there is plenty of that here. The insiders on the ship have all the needed intel, and are not eager to share, even those who are not overtly hostile toward her. Grace is certainly outside the inner circle, not privy to operational intel, not allowed to go onto the planet after they land. It does not help that there are no windows on the ship, outside the bridge, so she cannot even see outside. Communication with the home base planet is cut off due to a radiation storm (or is it?) And why are there so many military sorts on this mission? What does it say about your situation when your most trusted allies are not human? But isolation was something with which Grace had had plenty of experience. Solitude for her was like a religious blessing to others: it was her church of one. Always she closed the doors behind her with the awareness that she was giving herself sanctuary, an opportunity to cleanse and be purified. Fulbreech was like the neighbor who kept her from shutting the door, asking if she was interested in participating in the annual bake sale.The story takes place in three time-lines. First is Grace and her ongoing, present-day experiences. This is augmented by flashbacks to her childhood on Earth. Not an idyllic upbringing. The third piece consists of field reports from another ship, the Wyvern, in which we follow the exploits of its two crewmen, who had landed on a very strange planet, and were seeking to basically claim it. We can expect that the Deucalion and Wyvern stories will eventually connect. The strangeness of the Wyvern crew’s exploration of the planet adds to the general feeling of menace. Overall, I was reminded of The Thing and The Terror, in addition to the Agatha Christie and Alien refs noted above. There is a persistent, mounting feeling of dread, that grows as we become more familiar with Grace, better understand why she is the way she is, why she feels more sympathy for machines than for people, and are able to root for her more and more. The explanation for it all is quite interesting. Nguyen’s constructed universe is believable, given the usual sci-fi shortcut of FTL speed. Mention is made of Privacy Wars impacting what is allowed re surveillance, and anti-robot riots on Earth, the latter seeming a lot more believable than the former. People seem quite ok with sacrificing privacy for convenience, but I could easily see the unemployed and those feeling threatened rising up to oust the mechanized other. I liked the parallelism of Park connecting with Jimex today, and a different caretaker android on Earth, while a Wyvern crew-member forms a bond with a very different sort of droid on that mission. There is intelligent consideration of what makes a person a person, and an interesting look at a less individualistic form of intelligent connection. (This hits home as I see my wife becoming one with her new iWatch) I quite enjoyed the Campbellian hero imagery, as Grace must descend into the bowels of whatever (the inmost cave) to engage in a Supreme Ordeal. Will she prevail? So, there is plenty to like about this book. There is a lot of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and craft on display. Nguyen is a young writer with enormous promise. And yet, even with occasionally feeling pulled in, feeling invested, particularly when reading about Park’s past, the feeling was only occasional. I worked my way through the book, reading regular chunks every day until I was done, but I never really needed to get back to it. It was not a read that pulled at my consciousness all that hard. I am giving this one four stars, but that is only because three and a half is not an option. Did anyone really have the capacity to care—truly care—beyond the instinct to ally, fuck, and raise their young to breeding age? Were there any decisions guided by pure selflessness? Not in humans, she supposed—in androids, yes. It was too bad no one else could see the beauty in that. Review first posted – July 2, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - July 6, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - July 12, 2022 I received an e-ARE of We Have Always Been Here in return for an honest review. Thanks to DAW Books in general and Elisha K in particular. While it may sometimes seem that way, this review was not written by a machine. I make no such avowals about any other reviews. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Bio from Penguin Random House The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Lena Nguyen lives with her partner in the alien desert of Arizona. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University, where she also taught courses in English, writing, and zombies. Her science fiction and fantasy have won several accolades, and she was a Writers of the Future finalist. When not writing, Lena enjoys editing and game development. We Have Always Been Here is her debut novel.Interview -----Voyage Phoenix - Meet Lena Nguyen Items of Interest -----John W. Campbell – as Don Stuart - Who Goes There - the full text of Campbell’s story, the basis of three film versions of The Thing -----Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None - full text of the book made into films using the original name of the book and also “Ten Little Indians -----Wiki on The Terror, a novel by Dan Simmons that was adapted into a wonderful series on AMC ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jun 20, 2021
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Jun 20, 2021
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Hardcover
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0063020203
| 9780063020207
| 0063020203
| 3.73
| 10,740
| Apr 27, 2021
| Apr 27, 2021
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it was amazing
| Santi steps closer as she holds the light up to the gears. 'Think we can fix it?' Santi steps closer as she holds the light up to the gears. 'Think we can fix it?'Imagine you are looking at the screen in a large cinema. There are blips in the image, fleeting, but present. As the film moves on to the next scene, there are more blips, holes in the image, with another image, another, pentimento film, going on behind the up-front film. Another scene on the big screen, with more blip, until the characters in the front film, look at each other and say, “did you see that?” As they slowly become more and more aware that there is something going on in the film behind them, they turn and watch, and their behavior in the front film changes, to take account of the new knowledge. [image] Catriona Silvey - image from Harper Voyager – photo credit – Hazel Lee That is what reading Meet Me in Another Life is like. Thora and Santi (Santiago) find themselves in Cologne. (neither is a native) They meet cute, at first, anyway. Until, oopsy, soon after they meet, tragedy. It takes only a short time to know that these two have a special bond, one that will persist through life after life, as one or the other is gone by the end of each of the eighteen chapters, to be reunited in the next. Their ages vary in each iteration. In a few they are the same age. In some, one or the other is older, a little, more than a little, or maybe a lot. Their positions of authority vary as well, parent/child, teacher/student, cop/trainee, patient/caretaker, if there is any such hierarchical relationship between them. They have varying personal relationships, with each other (bf/gf, married, prospects), or he with Heloise, she with Jules. But their passion for learning, for exploration, for science binds them together. It is clear to us early on that there is a mystery to be solved. Why the recurring lives? Why the disparate ages, roles, and relationships? After a time, it becomes clear to Thora and Santi, too. They begin to realize that they have known each other and remember things from their former lives. Also, there are some consistencies, some places and characters that recur, unchanged. Recurring elements (Santi’s cat, a tattoo on Thora’s wrist) first gain meaning through repetition, and then become touchstones, triggering inferences for the reader about how the characters have changed and where they might be headed. Once Santi and Thora realize they are trapped in a loop, they (along with the reader) must piece together the clues scattered through the narrative to figure out what might really be going on. - from the LitHub articleThe notion that sparked the book is very down to earth. But these are two characters who are reaching for the stars, and Silvey’s solution was very fantasy/sci-fi-ish. …the question was: can two people ever know each other completely? That led me to the idea of characters who meet again and again in different versions of their lives…I think of the book as an argument: Thora and Santi have very different attitudes to their situation, and that leads them to respond to it in different ways. - from the Deborah Kalb interviewThere are obvious similarities to other works that deal in re-iteration. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (when Thora refers to herself as the Fox to Santi’s Wolf, is that a nod to that book?) uses the method in consideration of England in the first half or the 20th Century, and looking at the possible branches life might take were one to choose A instead of B, or B instead of C, giving the available choices a go until a desirable path forward is found. Thora, in particular, and Santi try this out, but it is not enough to solve the puzzle. Cloud Atlas is another novel offering common characters in diverse times (and places. This one is all in Cologne). Groundhog Day is the most famous cinematic rom-com loop and Andy Samberg’s Palm Springs gave it a similar go in 2020. 50 First Dates anyone? There is a clear romantic element in this one, too, as Thora and Santi are souls who are clearly meant to be together, (Yeah, I know, some might see them as merely tethered. But my take is that there is greater depth to their connection.) despite the fact that Thora is bisexual and has major hots for a woman, Jules, in many of the stories. Santi and Thora are a couple in others. Their divergent perspectives offer a fascinating core to their discussions. He is religious, believes in God, an afterlife, and that there is a reason for being, maybe a mission even. Life should make sense. He thinks if he can figure out what God wants of him they can step outside their seemingly endless repetitions. She is an atheist and is having none of that. They talk about faith, determinism, eternity, and plenty more that raises this above the level of a simple entertainment. Santi has always trusted in fate: that there is one way thing have to go. He isn’t literal enough to believe that the future is written in the stars—he’s doing a PhD in astronomy, after all—but his memories of other skies still unsettle him. The idea that there are other possible configurations for the universe, that God could be running them all in parallel, cuts against everything he believes. The only way he can reconcile what he remembers is to think that it’s a message, one he’s not yet ready to understand. He watches the world like a detective, like a poet, waiting for the meaning to come clear.Santi’s faith seems more in fate than in the divine, given his inability to allow for a deity capable of managing multiple universes. But the faith he has, of whatever sort, is put to the test, repeatedly. They struggle to know themselves, as much as they try to understand each other. ”This’ll never work, you know,” she says conversationally.As in any good mystery, there are plenty of clues sprinkled throughout the eighteen stories. Making sense of them is the challenge for us readers as much as it is for Thora and Santi. I was only partly successful at sussing out what was going on, even with keeping an excel sheet to track differences and commonalities among the stories. (Don’t judge me!) This is a good thing. Of course, you may be a lot smarter than me and figure it all out early on. That would be too bad. Not knowing, trying to figure it out from the clues provided, was part of the fun. None of this matters if we do not care about our two leads. Not to worry. While both characters have qualities that raise them well above average, they often find themselves in everyman (and woman) situations and pedestrian lives. Their clear bond with each other is almost a third lead, so strongly does this come across. You will definitely be rooting for them to figure out how to get off what seems an eternal hamster wheel. The novel is as engaging and enjoyable as it is intellectually stimulating. My only gripe, and it is minor, is that there seemed a bit too much exposition. There is nothing wrong with exposition, but the telling/showing seesaw felt a bit too heavy on one end at times. Are Thora and Santi two star-crossed lovers or is their connection made in heaven? Only the stars (and the author) know for sure. Allow yourself to be delighted. There is plenty here that can generate that feeling. You may forget about this review, this book, for a while, but I am fairly certain the book, preferably, will turn up again in your life. Try your best. It will be worth your time. Remember. If God’s test were easy, it would be meaningless. Review posted – June 11, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - April 27, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - April 26, 2022 If you are looking for a SUMMER BOOK, this is my rec – no-holds-barred, #1 fab beach read, or anywhere read. The film rights have been optioned by Atlas Entertainment and Pilot Wave, with Gal Gadot to produce and star. I spotted much news coverage of this that was, IMHO, wrong-headed, in portraying the book as an LGBTQ sci-fi novel. Thora is indeed bi-sexual, with more story time with female than male partners, but that is sooooo not what this book is about. We do know that once Hollywood gets its claws on a novel, the end product can diverge dramatically (or even melodramatically) from the source material. This initial coverage is not encouraging. But then, many film-rights options are never exercised. So we, who favor hewing as closely as possible to written source material, are a long way from having to fret over this. [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, GR, and Twitter pages, and her academic site (Silvey has a PhD in language evolution, and has published numerous papers) Interviews -----Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb -----The Royal Institution - Formatted Q/A - thin, but fun Q/A I asked Silvey a question on the Ask The Author part of her GR page, to which she offered a response in very short order. Q - How did your research on the evolution of language manifest in MMiAL? A - That's an interesting question! My honest answer is "not really"... I did realise after writing the book that there is a linguistically informed way of thinking about time loops, and why they might be appealing to a reader - I wrote about that in an essay on LitHub: https://lithub.com/on-the-counterintu... But if my experience as a researcher influenced the book at all during the writing, it might be in the way Thora and Santi's situation mirrors the strange, lonely-together rootlessness of academics - people who are usually foreigners in the place they're living, brought together by shared passions, using English as a lingua franca but often talking past each other. Songs/Music -----Silvey’s Song list for Thora ----- Silvey’s Song list for Santi -----What Silvey listened to on repeat while working on the book ----------Tom Rosenthal and dodie - Years Years Bears ----------The Mountain Goats - Love Love Love ----------Michael Stipe & Big Red Machine - No Time For Love Like Now Items of Interest from the author -----Silvey’s site - Excerpt – Chapter 1 – Welcome To Forever -----Crimereads - Excerpt - Chapter 8 – 115 - We Are Here -----Lithub - On the Counterintuitive Appeal of the Literary Time Loop - in this article, linked in Silvey’s Q/A response above, she explains very clearly how time loop narratives work in a literary framework. This is MUST READ material! Items of Interest -----Smithsonian - Félicette, the First Cat in Space, Finally Gets a Memorial - referenced in chapter 3, et al -----Contact - referenced in chapter 7 -----The Odysseum in Cologne ...more |
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May 11, 2021
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May 30, 2021
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Jun 07, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593135202
| 9780593135204
| 0593135202
| 4.51
| 637,197
| May 04, 2021
| May 04, 2021
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it was amazing
| Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it wouldn’t be easy. These kids were going to grow up in an idyllic world and be thrown into an apocalyptic nightmare.-------------------------------------- Knock-knock-knock.At least Mark Watney was in the same solar system. At least Mark Watney had a rescue ship that might, at least, have been on the way. At least the sun that was shining down on Watney’s potato garden was not being nibbled to bits by some intergalactic pestilence. At least life on Mark Watney’s home planet was not looking at an expiration date measured in decades. Pretty cushy situation next to the one in which our astronaut finds himself in this story. At least Mark Watney knew who he was. I slide one leg off over the edge of my bed, which makes it wobble. The robot arms rush toward me. I flinch, but they stop short and hover nearby. I think they’re ready to grab me if I fall.The astronaut struggles to find out not only who he is, but where he is, and how he got there. Part of that is a running joke in which he makes up names to tell the computer. It’s pretty adorable. After working on a pendulum to help with an experiment, for example, he answers the computer with I am Pendulus the philosopher. Incorrect. He does, eventually, remember his name. [image] Andy Weir - image from his Facebook pages The title of the book may seem opaque to some folks outside the US. Weir is referring, of course, to a last-ditch play to win or tie American football games. It is called the Hail Mary pass. Keep enough blockers back to protect the quarterback while all available receivers head for the end zone as the quarterback lofts a pass, usually of considerable distance, in the hope that one of the receivers can haul it in through an act of divine intercession. The play is named for the prayer of course. It’s caused a lot of headaches with the translators. Nobody outside the U.S. knows this phrase. Even English-speaking countries like the U.K. don't have that expression. In most of the language translations, they're changing the title. In one of them it’s just called The Astronaut or something like that. - from the GR interviewIn Andy Weir’s latest novel, the survival of life on planet Earth, and whatever other life might be swimming, flying, creeping, or otherwise meandering about in our solar system, is imperiled by an invasive species. (Not really a spoiler, more of an aside. (view spoiler)[OK, a pet peeve here. We have a few names for our home planet, and for the rest of the rocky and gaseous chunks floating about our particular star. So why has humanity been so singularly unable to come up with a decent name for our solar system? I mean calling our solar system “the solar system” is like slapping a label on a can that says “food.” (Yes, I know this was done in the movie Repo Man, but it was intended to be ironic. At least I hope it was.) I mean how generic and undescriptive can we be? There are billions of solar systems out there, and I bet there are plenty that have nifty names. So, I am gonna go for it and claim that from now on our solar system should be called the Will Byrnes Planetary System (WBPS). Recognizing that this is in no way deserved, I will happily cede it to a more reasonable name, one grounded in actual achievement or cultural significance…for a cup of coffee (20 oz at least) and a couple of doughnuts (one glazed, one jelly). Until then, it’s mine, all mine. (hide spoiler)] The nasty little buggers have a talent for converting energy to mass and mass to energy. Their little eyes (if they had eyes) light up in the presence of an active power source the way some of us feel compelled by the sight of pastries in a shop window. Which would make our sun a doughnut shop with a few quadrillion hungry customers beating down the door. Not a wonderful situation for the shop. A more apt, if somewhat less entertaining image, is that of a vast swarm of locusts denuding a landscape. Hoping for an act of god might be worth a shot. His ship, and the project that spawned it, are named for the prayer, even though by way of a sport. Hail Mary full of…um…Ryland? Well, Ryland Grace. It remains to be seen whether or not the Lord is with him, or his ship. But he is not alone, although, after finding that his crew-mates did not travel well, it seems like he would be. Luckily for Ry, Earth is not the only populated planet imperiled by this galactic pain in the neck. He encounters another, and thus begins a beautiful friendship. I won’t bother with describing Rocky, other than to say that Rocky is not at all humanoid. Through engineering ingenuity and commonality of purpose the two find a way to communicate with and help each other in their mission to save their respective planets. There is a child-like quality to Rocky, as well as a very creative brain, and a universal decency, that will make you care about him/her/it/whatever. There is no one better than Weir at writing adorable. Weir, the Ted Lasso of science fiction writing, has been trying to work on his character-writing skillset. He is amazed that so many people loved The Martian, despite the fact that his hero goes through absolutely no change during his ordeal. He had given Watney his best personal characteristics, on steroids. Then had a go at a less idealistic character in his novel, Artemis, using what he saw as some of his lesser personal characteristics to inform his lead. Ryland Grace was my first attempt to make a protagonist not to be based on me. He's a unique character I'm creating from whole cloth, and so I'm not limited by my own personality or experiences. - from the GR interviewI am not sure he has succeeded. The special energy that powered astronaut Watney was a combination of superior technical skills, a wonderful, wise-ass sense of humor, a can-do attitude, and a deeply ingrained optimism. Mark Watney could have been on the Hail Mary in place of Ryland Grace and I am not sure most of us would have noticed, well, except for a couple of personal downsides. The sense of humor is pretty much the same. Ditto for the technical talent and scientific problem-solving predisposition. He may be a tick down from Watney on the optimism chart, but you will get the same satisfaction from watching Grace as you did his Martian predecessor. But while Weir’s character development skills might still be…um…under development, his story-telling skills remain excellent. The stakes are high, global extermination, multiple global exterminations actually, and the future of life as we know it, and some life we know very little about at all, is dependent on two creatures working together to solve the biggest problem of all time. No pressure. So, a buddy story. A tale of friendship far from home. The narration alternates between two timeframes. In the contemporary one, Ry uses his special scientific-method powers plus base of knowledge to figure out the situation he is in, and come up with serial solutions to serial challenges. This is totally like The Martian, although this guy is maybe a bit less funny. I’m a smartass myself, so smartass comments come naturally to me. For me, humor is like the secret weapon of exposition. If you make exposition funny, the reader will forgive any amount of it. And in science fiction—especially with my self-imposed restriction that I want to be as scientifically accurate as possible—you end up spending a lot of time doing exposition. - from the Publishers Weekly interviewThe other is the history of how he came to be there. This will also remind one of the back and forth of the on-Mars and Earth-politics alternating streams of Weir’s mega best seller. Although his writing is out of this world, Weir’s process ain’t exactly rocket science. Like his characters, he uses available parts, plus a base of knowledge, to build what needs to be built. He had a few lying about in his shop. After The Martian, I had this idea for this massive space epic—a traditional sci-fi pilot with aliens, faster-than-light travel, and telepathy and a war and, yeah, a ten-book series and everything. I worked on it for about a year; it was going to be called Zhek. I got 70,000 words in, and…I realized that it sucked…But there are a few nuggets in Zhek that were solid. There was one interesting character who was this absolutely no-nonsense woman with a ruthless drive to get what she needs to get done and a tremendous amount of secret authority. And she became Stratt in Project Hail Mary. The other thing is, in Zhek there was this substance called black matter, which was a technology invented by aliens that would absorb all electromagnetic waves, all light, and turn it into mass and then turn it back into light…if humanity got ahold of some of that, it would be neat, but it would suck if we accidentally let any of that get into the sun—that would be a disaster. I'm like, “Wait a minute, that would be a disaster! That's where books come from!” - from the Goodreads interviewAnd divorce lawyer billables. Love his evident excitement at this EUREKA moment. There is a decided innocence to it, and a natural-born optimist’s way of seeing the bright side of life, a characteristic with which Weir very successfully endows his leads, well, some of them anyway. I quite enjoyed The Martian, despite Watney’s immutable self. And I liked Artemis as well, with its more nuanced lead. This one feels like more of a throwback to his earlier work. If you loved The Martian you are gonna love this one. Tough situation, far from home, charming, brilliant, smartass lead, with an adorable, brilliant, very non-human mensch of a pal, lots of mostly accessible science, and some fabulously interesting concepts. For a book that is pretty down to earth in many ways, Project Hail Mary is absolutely out of this world. Science teachers know a lot of random facts. Review first posted – May 7, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - May 4, 2021 ----------Trade Paperback - October 4, 2022 Thanks to Ballantine books for an early look at Project Hail Mary and to MC (you know who you are) for interceding on my behalf to make that happen. You have been an answer to my prayers. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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Apr 16, 2021
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Apr 23, 2021
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Dec 04, 2020
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Hardcover
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125020402X
| 9781250204028
| 125020402X
| 4.14
| 78,355
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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it was amazing
| There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.-------------------------------------- A nameless s There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.-------------------------------------- A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.Franny Stone has always had large volumes of wanderlust coursing through her veins. From? To? Both? Neither? It seems that this is an ancestral gift. Excellent for seeing vast swaths of the planet’s landscape. Maybe not so good for establishing a secure base of operations in, say, maybe, a family, living in, oh, a home. [image] Charlotte McConaghy - image from Fantastic Fiction About twenty minutes into the future, a breathless Franny turns up at the town of Tasiilaq, in Greenland. The fauna of planet Earth have been vanishing at an alarming rate for a long time already. Mass extinctions are no longer the exception, but the rule. Franny wants to hitch a ride with a fishing boat. Her mission? To track the last Arctic terns on the planet as they make their globe-spanning annual migration from the Arctic to the Antarctic. She is happy to take on seamen’s chores while aboard, although her skill-set is somewhat slim. But what she can offer of value is tracking hardware. Terns with trackers on them and a computer that can check where they are. This is of significance to a particularly hard-core fishing boat captain, Ennis Malone, as terns are excellent locators of large schools of fish, and Malone is desperate for one last ”golden catch” before he, and all other fishermen, are banned from practicing their trade, the oceans having been pretty much drained of sustainable piscine life. [image] Tasiilaq Greenland - image from Travel with 2 of us Franny’s time talking her way onto, and then shipping out on, the good ship Saghani, is our home-base present for the novel. From here we flip back to several times in Franny’s life. Two, four, six, ten, twelve, nineteen years, and one year before. Each peels back a part of her life. We learn more of Franny’s many secrets with each look back. McConaghy sustains tension by showing us just enough, getting us to bite, then yanking us into the next chapter, the next time and place. Franny has several loves as well as secrets. She is a creature of the sea, an amazing swimmer, having an unnatural tolerance for oceanic chill, which she demonstrates by diving into such frigid water on rescue missions, with no apparent attention being paid to her personal safety. You wouldn’t be surprised if she crawled out of the water sporting an Ariel-like flipper instead of legs. The sea for her is one of the great loves of her life. Maybe it’s the family she never had. She feels more connected to her body, and weightless, and almost able to fly like the birds she loves. - from the -WriterUnboxed interviewShe is smitten with birds. We learn that she had had a particularly connected dealing with crows as a child. In another one of the lookbacks she is working at a University, decides to pop into an ornithology class, to bolster her innate interest, and finds, unsurprisingly, that she loves it, that she has an excellent feel for the course material. This does not go unnoticed by the professor, who is soon gaga over her. Niall’s love for the natural world, birds in particular, is as great as Franny’s love for the sea, but he is able to fulfill this passion by study, research, and teaching, without having to give up everything to pursue his interest. His is a stable passion, although no less a passion than hers. Niall is absolutely symbolic of the birds for Franny. He represents the idea that you can study what you love without taking away from the magic in those things. - from the Dead Darlings interviewTheir relationship takes flight, Franny’s third true love, but her wanderlust remains overpowering. It was always there, still is, and e’er will be. I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.The family piece is important. Her mother encouraged her to read a lot. In addition to expanding her brain, it was a way for Franny to leave, without having to physically take off. And it worked. Her mother was particularly sensitive to leaving, having been abandoned by her mother as a child. Franny knew about this, and her mother’s promise that if Franny ever left it would be the last straw for her. The call comes when Franny is ten, and she does an adventurous runner with a fellow adventurer. But when she comes back two days later, Mom is gone. And Franny is packed off to her grandparents in Australia, her father having been out of the picture for a long time. Adult Franny goes on a search to find out what had happened to her mother, one of several lookback threads. It was really important to me to write the moments in Franny’s past that make her who she is, and for the reader to be able to experience those moments on an intimate level with her, because I felt that this would allow readers to connect more deeply with her and what drives her through the story. There’s also a lot of tension to be built in using suspension and mystery—you leave clues peppered throughout and only reveal information at moments that will create catharsis for your readers. - from the Amazon interviewFranny sustains a number of secrets. Aboard the boat she suffers from night terrors, even to the point of some life-threatening somnambulism. Why? What’s the deal with all those letters she writes but fails to send? What happened with her mother? Is that even a secret or just a mystery? There are more. And she is not the only one. Some of the Saghani crew have plenty of their own. [image] Arctic Tern – image from Discover Magazine The migration theme is worked vigorously. Franny’s innate pull to here or there is certainly of a kind with the migration urges of birds. We get to see the migration of the terns in action. There is even mention of a very long-term migration involving ocean currents. The fishermen must migrate to follow the fish, who also migrate. One of Franny’s needs is to try to find or construct a family. Niall presents one way in which to have an actual home base. He offers her a lot of space to be who she is. One can also see the Saghani crew as a kind of family. They certainly look after one another in a familial way. She can be herself to a significant degree with them, salve her loneliness as they have theirs. Franny’s searching for her mother is also driven by this familial need. Even if you are going to be in and out, you need a place to hang your hat, or maybe it is not so much defined by the place but by people. Home, then, is wherever you are, when you are with the people you love. The future McConaghy portrays is grim, but she had not set out to bum everyone out, or parade back and forth wearing a sandwich board, screaming “Repent!” She is not interested in tossing harpoons. One measure of this is how sympathetically she portrays the fishermen, even knowing that their work is part of the problem. It is a very human look at things. I didn’t want to write a dystopian novel about the physical impacts of climate change, such as what would become of our food supply. I wanted this to be an existential look at the way the loss of the animals would make us feel, and I think this was a refusal of the idea that humans are the most important things on this planet, and that everything exists in service to us. I wanted the world I drew to look almost identical to the world today, apart from that one major difference, hoping that this would be a more confronting way to predict how close a future without animals really is. - from the Amazon interviewFranny Stone is a fascinating and engaging character. Admittedly, most of us will not share her compulsion to just go. But, while it is likely that our traumas do not match hers, we have all suffered trauma of one sort or another. And while few of us have had to endure the chained up, tied down feelings or experiences Franny has, many of us have spent long stretches of time in places and/or situations we would rather not inhabit (I certainly have). And while we may not have the NEED that Franny experiences, we all have things we want, desires that are unfilled, whether in lower case or bolded caps. So, while we may or may not identify with the specifics of her experience, we can certainly identify in one way or another with Franny’s pain, with what remains unquenched, fueling potential movement. Migrations is a remarkable book that will transport you, but to a place you will want to see. You will meet interesting characters along the way, try to figure out some mysteries, uncover some secrets, and consider that we are not all made alike. There is on offer here a look at love made difficult by what is inherent, but also a look at how that might be managed. Hopefully, you will consider optimism, the possibility that courses through these pages as well as the dark future they portend. Migrations is a journey well worth taking. A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together. Review posted – August 14, 2020 Publication dates ----------August 4, 2020 - hardcover ----------July 6, 2021 - trade paperback I received an e-book ARE of Migrations from Flatiron via NetGalley. No long-distance travel was entailed. I did, however, feel unshakably pulled to write a review. And thanks too, to MC. You know who you are. Ok, sometimes I get a dark urge, a compulsion that I cannot resist, try as I might. The result is safely tucked under a spoiler tag to protect the innocent. But if you are driven by investigatory instincts, I urge you to reconsider before going there. (view spoiler)[ Ok, my real closing line… In writing Migrations Charlotte McConaghy has left no Stone un-terned. Ok, there it is done. Yes, I know I have a problem. Don’t judge me. (hide spoiler)] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, Twitter and FB pages This is the author’s first book for adult readers My review of McConaghy's 2021 follow up, Once There Were Wolves Interviews -----Amazon - An interview with "Migrations" author Charlotte McConaghy by Al Woodworth on 8/6/20 -----Bookpage - Charlotte McConaghy - To the moon and back three times by Cat, Deputy Editor - 8/4/20 -----Bookweb - A Q&A With Charlotte McConaghy, Author of August’s #1 Indie Next List Pick By Emily Behnke – 7/21/20 -----Dead Darlings - Interview with Charlotte McConaghy, Author of Migrations - 8/4/20 -----Libro.fm Audiobooks - Author Interview: Charlotte McConaghy by Kelsey Norris – 8/8/20 -----Writer Unboxed - A Glimmer of Hope from a Dark Future: An Interview with Charlotte McConaghy by Julie Carrick Dalton – 8/6/20 Items of Interest -----Chasing daylight - tiny trackers reveal the incredible flight plans of the Arctic tern -----Nemo’s Point -----Reading Group Guide -----The Wild Geese - a poem by Mary Oliver – it is referenced in chapter 2 – four years ago in Franny’s life - not really a spoiler, just a piece of the poem (view spoiler)[ Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. (hide spoiler)] Songs/Music -----Luke Kelly - Raglan Road - Franny gets weepy in Chapter 22 on hearing this song ...more |
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Jun 17, 2020
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Jun 22, 2020
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Jun 22, 2020
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Hardcover
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006298442X
| 9780062984425
| 3.19
| 429
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 30, 2020
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it was amazing
| “You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”------------------ “You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”-------------------------------------- Short, thin, with narrow shoulders. The head just a little too big for that slight body, skull-like, all forehead and cheekbones, narrow as a trowel at the mouth.First, let’s get something clear straight away. While there is a sci-fi-ish element extant in Nine Shiny Objects, this is not really a sci-fi novel. We never really get more sci-fi than a newspaper account of Kenneth Arnold’s seminal saucer sighting. The only actual extra-normal element is a bit of fantasy in the final chapter, and a bit of dream work. The novel is a linked-stories narrative of historical fiction. Just so’s ya know. It begins in 1947. Oliver Danville had just washed out of a not very promising acting career. But, in a local drinking establishment, he got to see the curtains close on a charmer named Necky, someone Oliver feared mightily, someone to whom Oliver owed two hundred bucks, someone who was expected to take partial payment in the form of broken bones. Knowing a sign when he sees one, and now relieved of that particular debt, Oliver heads out, determines to straighten up, live an upstanding life, maybe marry a librarian. He slips into a booth at the local automat, and, over his tuna, coffee, and apple pie, reads about a pilot over the Cascades who reported seeing nine shiny objects that reminded him of tea saucers. With twenty eight bucks to his name, Oliver begins hitchhiking west, feeling a calling, (…he felt the buzzing coming on, like a drug.) and the game is afoot. The nine shiny objects of the title refer not only to the UFO MacGuffin, but to the interlinked stories of Oliver and eight other characters. The tales cover the period from 1947 to 1987, a look at the United States over that forty-year span. Central to all the stories is the notion of ideals, of dreaming. (Everybody’s looking for something.) Maybe American dreams, maybe just human dreams. Everyone wants something that feels, or is, wrapped up in a maybe someday. Castleberry presents us with a range of hopes. But there is a dark undercurrent as well, whether we call it a stain on the American soul, or the presence of evil in the world, light versus dark, hope versus despair, optimism versus pessimism. The challenge is there, and few hopes slip past its Argus-like gaze unaffected. Claudette Doneo, twenty years old, had aspired to emulate her high school teacher, Mrs Garfield, and see the world. She would also love to find someone with whom she could share life’s adventure. But her aggressive boss at the greasy spoon where she is getting by in Del Mar, CA, definitely ain’t it. When she meets Eileen (Oliver’s sister), who is running a new local church from an old warehouse, some new possibilities are revealed. They are an odd lot, looking to space ships to take them up to heaven. But Eileen seems pretty nice. Marlene Ranagan, in 1957, is living a life of suburban despair. She and her husband are a Jewish couple in a not-so-welcoming NYC suburb, one featuring covenants no deity would inspire. She yearns for something better than having to pop a mother’s little helper whenever her feelings get the better of her, and having a husband who is content to spend his free time in front of the TV watching cowboy movies and drinking beer. She is not without her interests, though, a neighbor who might become more than just that, and an education in art she had ignored to become a homemaker. A stranger comes to town looking for a war-buddy who had taken up with some crazy UFO cult, and the town does not know how to deal with him. [image] Brian Castleberry - image from his site Stanley West is a struggling black writer, living in Harlem with his uncle, a professor at the City College of New York. A bit of a poser, he is trying to find himself, poet, painter, ne‘er do well. He has a very dark run-in with a suburban crowd that find him a convenient target for their misplaced fear and rage. Take one Black man. Add a dollop of Bircher-level mentality leading a fearful suburban enclave, and the results are grim. In 1967, Skip Michaels sells Great Books subscriptions door to door, partaking of the product in hotel rooms, diminishing day by day in a soul-suck of a marriage, and tries to cope with being a northeasterner living in very southern Jacksonville. But in his heart of hearts, he always had an artistic yearning. He never got far with it, but fate has a surprise in store, in the form of a gumdrop-shaped insurance salesman, who passes on some information that sparks Skip’s long-sidelined dream anew. Alice “Listen Up People” Linwood is a forty-eight-year-old counterculture radio personality in 1972 Phoenix. She spouts what a lot of people see as conspiracy theory folderol. But her audience is growing, particularly since she began focusing on Nixon and Watergate. Alice used to belong to a group whose motto was “Look to the Stars,” but after JFK was assassinated she cast her gaze a bit lower. The big deal impending is that her primary source is in town, on the run, with major dirt for her that can change her world. Joan Halford still lives in Long Island’s Ridge Landing in 1977, about ten years after her bigot of a husband passed. The guy was so sweet that their son, Scott, a drummer in a band, declined to return home for the funeral. She and her husband had done some damage with their intolerance, but time and reflection have taken a toll. Joan may be ready to move past some of her boundaries and enjoy a wider vista. This was the hankie tale of the bunch for me. If she had a choice, if she’d learned anything tonight, she would never speak to any of them again. But she knew, here, too, that this wasn’t how things would work out. She would find a way to call Stacy, and later find a way to ask Wolfboy’s forgiveness. And inside she would hate them both a little for knowing her too long, for not letting her change, not letting her find out who she really was. What she was, what she wanted to be, or what she wanted others to see in her was that song “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols, just emptied out and gone, as if someone better than Ted or Chris or anyone ever asked her, that’s what she would say and if they laughed, she would beat them to the ground like she had Wolfboy. Or she wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.1982, Debbie Vasquez is playing Ms. Pac-Man at the Crazy-Eight Arcade in Waterbury, CT. Her friend Nathan, aka Wolfboy, invites her to a party being held by Brain-Dead Ted. (She’d rather dig her eyeballs out with sporks.) But Nathan’s brother’s band will be playing at the party and she’s got it bad for them. Her father is/was a rock star, so music permeates, but he was not much of a father. She’s got issues, which manifest in her being tough-as-nails. She has very push-pull relationships with her friends. Debbie lives with her mother, and has not yet found her dream, but grows a piece over a tough night of experiencing and remembering. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the late ’80s a mall was built in the next town over, and at its center — as far as I was concerned — was this dark arcade where I would occasionally run into people I knew from school or others of my age from nearby towns. I feel like in my pre-teen imagination the place was a kind of salon for dorks like me. Of course, I’d only have 15 or 20 minutes to roam around wasting quarters while my mom was looking at shoes or something. But it’s buried deep in there, and through that memory I discovered the character of Debbie, who is much cooler than I ever was, and much tougher. - from the Bookweb interviewIn 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were talking treaty, the former trying to hold the wolves at bay over his Perestroika and Glasnost policies, the latter contending with his Robert Bork failure and Iran-Contra scandal. Jack Penrod has troubles of his own. Originally, he’d pictured retiring at fifty-nine to be filled with travel and projects around the house. Instead he’d spent most of his time puttering from room to room and getting on his wife’s nerves. She wasn’t used to him being around all day…what he really wanted to tell her he couldn’t put together in words. Something about how he missed her so desperately, how it seemed anymore they were strangers passing on a sidewalk, how he’d started to itch with this feeling that he’d wasted all his life doing next to nothing.His dead brother keeps appearing to him, alive as you or me. He is not, sadly, visible to Jack’s long-suffering wife, who had thought her husband was done with this delusion years before. It seems Jack’s brother has a mission, a twelve-step-like need to make at least some amends. The late brother had not led the most exemplary life, although he did hold the family together after their parents left, when the brothers were teens. There was a particular apology he needed Jack to give for him. Road Trip! Jack speaks of the past with the partner of the apology recipient. As she spoke about it all, he began to see it in his mind, and as it formed, he felt a warm glow at the base of his neck. Here was a dream, yes, and the two of them, connected to it only by hearsay, frolicked in its possibilities. A town was more like a family, spreading out in all directions, changing its neighboring towns like falling dominoes. The vision of this better place seemed so easy to make true, and he had to stop himself from reaching out and taking her hand in his. To his surprise they had already become friends.There are two seminal events from which the rest emanate like shock-waves from a blast, the UFO sighting in 1947 and a Tulsa-like pogrom years later. They serve to tie the tales together, giving the hum of historical background sound a structure. Cults come in for a bi-polar look. The Seekers of the 1940s may have had some nutty canon, but they were a benign, hopeful group, forward-looking, cheerful, friendly, warm. A very different sort of cult forms around a rock star, based on hedonism and nihilism. That musician is another character who gets minimum direct screen time, but whose influence permeates the stories. Characters are linked to each other from story to story, one or two at a time. The image I kept in my head as I wrote and revised was of a painting with a foreground and background. In the foreground are these characters in each of their stories, but looming behind them is this shared background…this structure allowed me to create a sense of characters flowing through history, absorbed in their personal lives even though we (readers, I mean) can see and understand that history, those bigger shifts happening around and to them. - from the Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviewCastleberry has given his characters range, even if we only see them for a ninth of the book, and a smattering beyond. They question their lives, their futures, and their pasts. There is, however, a character who appears in person or by reference in most of the stories, Zelig-like, whose goal seems to be to make the most misery for the most people, to pour buckets of cold water on the fires of passion, to spark fires where the potential exists to cause a conflagration, to lie, deceive, and worse, much worse. He embodies the antithesis of hope, the line you may not cross. Castleberry gives him a human form, and banality to boot, although I wondered in reading if he may have hopped off one of those 1947 saucers, if it had come from a hostile civilization. Overall, this is an exceptional book. The linked-stories form succeeds in offering close looks at a diverse cast of characters while still taking us through a stretch of 20th century America. Castleberry looks at hopes and dreams, the challenges they face, and how they might vary from era to era. For this first novel, we might refer to Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, misquoting Shakespeare, for a suitable summary. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. He looked up into the deep vastness above, hoping for a shooting star to arc earthward, something he could take home as a sign. But there was only the chill in the air and the big country around him, floating loose, unmoored, starved for meaning. Review posted – July 10, 2020 Publication dates ----------June 30, 2020 - hardcover ----------August 17, 2021 - trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2020
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Jun 16, 2020
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Jun 16, 2020
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ebook
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1542019508
| 9781542019507
| 1542019508
| 4.11
| 46,080
| Mar 31, 2020
| Mar 31, 2020
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really liked it
| Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beaut Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures. It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better. Mind—and heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.Dorothy Hummell smells of death. Kipp, her golden retriever for the last three years, knows. And when Dorothy finally crosses the rainbow bridge, Kipp follows his nose, well not his nose, exactly. He has been picking up an odd murmuring sound coming from the west by northwest, and is determined to check it out. It feels important. Kipp is not just a very, very good dog, he is a very, very special dog, and even he does not realize just how special he is, or what that specialness represents. [image] Dean Koontz with a special friend - image from his FB pages Lee Shacker is a very, very bad man. A young CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company, he has salted away enough money to live the rest of his life in luxury, in Costa Rica. Lee is on the run. Seems the lab he was in charge of went boom, but instead of going down with the ship, this captain of dodgy industry fled in his well-appointed lifeboat, a very flashy Dodge Demon. Lee is special too, and not in a good way. Always a malignant narcissist, at best, he picked up a little something extra in the lab explosion, and is finding that it is possible for him to become even worse. Of course, he believes he is getting better and better. He is determined, to rekindle a flame that was once lit only in his tiny mind, by force if need be. A woman he had briefly dated years before. Neither the law nor any code of morality constrains him, because he knows them to be fantasies of order. In truth, the only rule by which anyone can live successfully, either in the wilds or in civilization, is the sole mandate of cruel Nature: Prey shall submit, and predators shall reign supreme. [image] Lee’s ride. For a guy on the run he is not exactly going for a low profile - image from autoevolution.com Megan is a very good woman. Her husband, Jason, was killed years ago in a helicopter crash. She found the circumstances concerning enough that she keeps a gun in her home. Megan is mom to Woodrow Bookman, eleven. Woody is on the scale, has never spoken. Has not cried since he was four, when he began reading. He now reads at a college level and is an accomplished hacker. He has been looking into the circumstances surrounding his father’s death for some time, and has reached a conclusion. But has his poking around been noticed by people with things to hide? To Woody, the internet was a planet of its own, every site a village or a city with its neighborhoods and streets, a planet across which he traveled as if by magic, typing a brief incantation and, with a click, teleporting from one continent to another.There are a few more characters who figure significantly; Lee’s Bond-villain-evil boss, Dorian Purcell, a passel of hit-men, Dorothy’s good-as-gold caretaker, Rosa Leon, an honorable Medical Examiner, Carson Conroy, a white knight, Ben Hawkins, who is not only a retired SEAL but a writer of novels, and offers Koontz a chance to gripe about critics, and others; but Kipp, Megan, Woody, and Lee are the four pillars of the novel. This is a fast-paced page-burner of a thriller, offering characters that are not exactly deeply drawn, but who engage us nonetheless. The bad guys are really, really bad, the good guys are really, really good, and you will come away slightly out of breath, but very satisfied. The fun includes some sci-fi elements. Kipp can tune in on a special wavelength and pick up messages, or calls, or emanations, something, telepathically, and it is Woody’s unknowing distress call that sets Kipp off on his road trip. The implications of Kipp’s peculiar gift are considerable. Are there more like him? How did he come to have this ability? The science that was going on at Lee’s lab is of interest as well, both of the criminal/frankensteinian and potential-for-human-advancement sorts. Dean Koontz is nothing if not efficient. He is also predictable. I do not mean this as a criticism. When you pick up a Dean Koontz book, you know what you are getting. A thriller that may contain elements of horror, fantasy, and/or science fiction. I have read several, but that was before Goodreads, so retain only dim memories of them. The Nobel committee will not be poring through Koontz’s lifework. But that is like faulting an elephant for not being a gazelle. They are different creatures and do different things. Koontz cranks out a startling volume of work, and has since he began writing as a career in 1968, with over 105 novels to his credit, on top of novellas and collections of short stories. He has sold over 450 million copies of his sundry works. The guy’s gotta be doing something right. I was unable to confirm rumors that Koontz is actually an AI construct designed by some of the brighter lights at PARC, and that revenue from the resulting computer-generated novels funds ongoing research. On the other hand, he is a bit of a crank about things governmental and this took me out of the story at several points. A couple of examples: On Interstate 80, south of Colfax, they pulled into a rest stop that provided bathrooms as filthy as any in the state’s most deteriorated public schools.and As a citizen of the modern state, he had uncountable reasons to understand that a slight excess of power rapidly became a lethal excess, that when an agent of the state insisted he had come to help, there was at least a 70 percent chance that he had come to punish or pillage.There are more. Dude, please, switch off Rush and get back to the very engaging action. And it is one thing to show a recluse’s perception of a hostile government, but another to state that perspective as if it is a universally accepted fact. It’s the equivalent of a politician beginning some very partisan take on an issue with “Everybody knows that…” There are some shortcuts that are taken, which I cannot go into without being too spoilery, so I am putting those under a spoiler tag here (view spoiler)[How did The Mysterium get its name? How did the Wire get its name? Is Kipp’s fondness for audio books a plug for Amazon? Even humans need to be taught language skills. Who taught Kipp to spell? Or is that included in how Kipp gains his language skills? How does Kipp know that grizzlies do not live in California? (hide spoiler)] And then there are some really lovely motifs spread throughout the novel that let you know you are in the hands of a pro. The title is echoed throughout. It is not just Kipp who is devoted, to Dorothy, and later Woody. Rosa was also devoted to Dorothy, Megan is devoted to her son, Dorian Purcell is devoted to himself, Lee is devoted (or would that be obsessed?) to regaining what he sees as a lost love. Birds make frequent appearances. Ravens, for example, show up during at least two of Lee’s crimes. Birds are flapping about in a mall when Dorian is set to meet a contact. Dreaming is also featured. Woody is a dreamer of the highest order. Kipp dreams of his experiences. The most frequently used motif is wind, whipping up as events are coming to a climax. Koontz has a lot of fun with it. the wind howled down on the house, not a nature sound empty of meaning, but a shriek of blackest madnessAnd there are plenty more. I enjoyed the opposite paths taken by Lee and Woody, each touched by something alien, one becoming more human, the other becoming more bestial. I was also impressed with the concept that joined human and canine. In this, Koontz may have gone from notion to actualization in very quick steps, but this is why we have the lovely tool of suspension of disbelief. In short, you will certainly enjoy this very good book. And who knows? Maybe your dog will too. We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us. - Maurice Maeterlinck Review first posted – February 7, 2020 Publication date – April 16, 2020 The publisher provided a review copy in return for a fair review. It was done in the usual way, no dogs or telepathy involved. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages Items of Interest -----Special Agent Lewis Erskine -----How Dean Koontz Proved Anyone Can Be a Bestseller - by Travis McBee -----Wiki for the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog -----Wiki for the Harlen Ellison A Boy and His Dog stories on which the film was based -----Just a weeeeee bit fringy - Telepathic Animal Communication: What Is It? - by Mary J Getten – animal Communicator -----A wiki on The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo -----From an Introduction to Nineteenth Century Art, on Goya’s painting, Saturn Devouring His Son Music -----Bridge Over Troubled Water -----Hopelessly Devoted to You -----Audrey Hepburn - Moon River - from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s -----Boyz II Men - 4 Seasons Of Loneliness -----Daniel Baremnboim plays Pathetique, a Beethoven sonata ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 17, 2020
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Jan 26, 2020
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Jan 26, 2020
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Hardcover
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1984826786
| 9781984826787
| 1984826786
| 3.91
| 49,793
| Jun 16, 2020
| Jun 16, 2020
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really liked it
| I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in them that is wonderful. I’m just different and I love these bears enough to do it right. I’m edgy enough and I’m tough enough. But mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right. – from the video diary of Timothy Treadwell, self-proclaimed “Grizzly Man,” recorded right before he was eaten by a bear On April 1, 1969 the Board of Commissioners of Skamania County, Washington State, adopted an ordinance for the protection of sasquatch/bigfoot creatures (Ordinance No.69-01). Although it sounds like an April Fool's Day joke, it was an official ordinance. It was published in the local weekly newspaper, Skamania County Pioneer on April 4 and April 11, 1969. Because people did not take it seriously, the newspaper publisher had the article notarized on April 12, 1969, and printed both the ordinance and an Affidavit of Publication in a subsequent paper edition. - Courthouse Libraries- BCThere are several things going on in Max Brooks’s latest novel, Devolution. First and most obvious is the notion of Bigfoot. The conceit of the novel is that following Mount Rainier going full lava, a small community in Washington State is cut off from the world and is massacred by a troop of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) or Sasquatch. This is a fun look at the real-world possibility of something being out there. Well, maybe not so fun for the victims. If there are yeti-type creatures tramping about in the woods, how did they get there? Where did they come from? Why did they come? Or did they originate here? [image] Max Brooks looks like he is prepared for a rough day (meeting with his agent, maybe?) - image from his site Second, there is a satirical look at a group of supposedly back-to-nature enthusiasts who have little appreciation of what nature is really all about, and that does not just mean the possible presence of a superpredator in the neighborhood. The story points out the downside of our reliance on the conveniences of the modern age without considering the need for backup in case something should interrupt, or end, many of the services we take for granted. Something that might ring a bell in this plague year. For example, in one of his talks for the military, Brooks points out how advanced communication technology has made it increasingly possible for soldiers in the field to sustain real-time contact with their commanders. But what if they are being hacked by a hostile force? In that case the advanced tech has become an unwarranted risk and the soldiers need to be able to proceed with their mission on their own. They have to be able to go electronically silent. They need to have the necessary equipment and training required to accomplish the intended goals on their own. In the case of Greenloop, WA, if you lose your communications and have only enough supplies to last for a relatively short time, how do you sustain yourself? And then there is that third element. [image] Image from NH1 in Vermont The need to recognize and prepare for real threats in the world. Well, the Greenloop folks might be forgiven for not heading to their exurban happy place, a small, planned community, expecting to be contending with incoming zombies, or whatever. (they clearly had not read Max’s earlier work) But they find themselves a bit light on death-dealing hardware when faced with fearsome furry foes. It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl. [image] These guys do not figure in the novel, although it would be pretty frightening if a herd of them descended on a small community en masse. But their band name, Devo, comes from the concept of 'de-evolution'—the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society. (Like dressing the same?) Brooks has some experience planning for unpleasant possibilities. He is the author of, among other things, World War Z, and, most relevant here, The Zombie Survival Guide. One could reasonably expect a bit of overlap between preparing for a zombie apocalypse and Survival Sasquatch. He is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and Senior Resident Fellow at the Art of Future Warfare Project, at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security of the Atlantic Council. His expertise on how to contend with surprising enemies is taken pretty seriously by the United States military and a top tier international relations organization. The guy might be worth checking out. And I would heartily urge you to watch some of his presentations. [image] Image from Closet.fileswordpress.com – I know that look, bunions Part of the look at how unprepared we are has to do with a larger question of how those who are aware of impending problems (for example the CDC for disease-related threats, or the leadership of our national intelligence apparatus for the current cyber war Russia is waging on us) can engage the public. Most of the population tends to fall into one of two categories, denial (my children can’t possibly get measles or [insert your favorite not-quite extinct disease here], so there is no need for them to be inoculated) or panic (don’t go anywhere near a person with AIDS or you may become infected). Brooks plays those out in this scenario as well, while having a bit of fun at the expense of the frou-frou, and expressing some appreciation for those who can bring real-world experience of relatable challenges, and those who are able to apply their creativity to finding solutions to unthought-of problems. [image] Image from The Daily Beast The story is presented with a lightly drawn framing device. It will feel familiar to readers of World War Z. In this one, an unnamed narrator presents to us material about the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre from several sources. Prime among these is the journal kept by one Kate Holland, a resident of Greenloop, and first-hand witness. (One must wonder if Kate Holland’s name might be a nod to Ranae Holland of the Animal Planet show, Finding Bigfoot). Her descriptions show how the social dynamics of the tiny community change in adapting to their newly perilous circumstances. Who rises, who fails. It makes for a very entertaining version of a Big (No, I mean really, seriously BIG) Brother type scheme. There will be heroes and villains. We get to see how the threats arrive, are seen, and how responses evolve as well. [image] Image from Closet.fileswordpress.com – Maybe upset because it is so tough to get a pair of decently fitting shoes? Other intel sources include bits of interviews with Ranger Josephine Schell, and with Frank McCray, brother to one of the Greenloop residents. There are occasional one-off bits from other sources as well. These offer exposition about what was going on in the world around the time of the massacre, and historical and scientific insight. Each chapter is introduced with a quote. These are from very diverse sources, like JJ Rousseau, Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, Cicero, Cato, Aesop and more. These are fun, often informative and/or thought-provoking, some grounding the more fantastical elements in a base of reality. One of the things that I enjoyed most about this book was the trial and error approach the Greenloop residents went through in trying to find ways to contend with their new situation. Really makes you wonder what you would do in their place. It reminded me very much of the hard science fiction of Arthur C. Clark and Neal Stephenson. And the musings on the possible roots of Sasquatch were also quite fun. [image] Image from Satanfudge.com Overall, this is a fun read, with page-turning tension that will keep you at it while delivering a subliminal (or not so subliminal) payload of suggesting you check out your own reliance on things not readily replaced should something really, really bad happen. Adversity introduces us to ourselves. Review First Posted – January 31, 2020 Published – May 12, 2020 I received this ARE from del Rey. Thanks, folks. Must have been because of my size 14s. And thanks to MC. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Where to go to see Bigfoot -----Boring, OR - North American Bigfoot Center -----Felton, CA - The Bigfoot Discovery Museum -----Blue Ridge, GA - Expedition Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum -----Portland, ME - International Cryptozoology Museum -----Animal Planet – Finding Bigfoot Items of Interest -----Hollywood Reporter - Excerpt -----Free Download of Germ Warfare by Brooks -----Muy review of Germ Warfare by Max Brooks -----Wiki on the band Devo -----Wiki on Gigantopithecus -----Muppet Show episode 211 - Us-ness - with Dom DeLuise -----Courthouse Libraries BC - on Sasquatch in the law ----- Battle With Bigfoot at Mt. St. Helens -----Wiki on the Patterson Gimlin film from 1967 - you know the one ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 24, 2020
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Jan 24, 2020
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Hardcover
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4.20
| 288,335
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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really liked it
| But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. -- Matthew, Chapter 18It’s good to be King. As Stephen King well knows, 2019 is a banner year for him, with written production continuing apace, and with many of his previously written materials being brought to screens large and small. The second installment of the cinema-sized production of It is now the largest grossing horror movie ever. In April, Lisey’s Story was optioned by Apple TV +, to be produced by J.J. Abrams, starring Julianne Moore. His sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, starring Ewan MacGregor, will be released in theaters on November 8. Season three of Mr. Mercedes began airing on September 10. Season two of Castle Rock begins airing on October 23. In the Tall Grass, co-written with his son, Joe Hill, was released with Joe’s story collection, Full Throttle, on October 1, and the film was released on Netflix on October 4. A remake of the film Pet Sematary was released in April. And only King knows what else. Not counting upcomings, like a novella collection due out in May and a film of The Outsider, due in January. It’s good to be King. [image] Stephen King - image from The Washington Post – by Shane Leonard And just to make sure you know that the 72-year-old author is not resting on his considerable laurels, (and vast financial resources) he keeps cranking out new product. He is doing what he loves, calls it the best job in the world, and will continue pecking away at his keyboard until God tells him to stop, or if the quality of his work deteriorates, which is probably the same thing. So how does septuagenarian King hold up? Like fine wine, he ages well. The Institute may not be on the same level as the best of King’s work, not as scary as It or The Shining, not as epic as The Stand, but even garden variety Stephen King novels are still pretty good. Tim Jamieson, an ex-police office through misadventure, is hitchhiking from Florida to a likely job in New York, when he finds himself at the back end of nowhere, a place called DuPray, SC, rich with free time and privately owned firearms. It has a certain appeal and they just happen to be in need of a little light constabulary assistance at the moment. Tim is in no hurry, which may be the town motto. The single significant business in town is a depot, that will figure later in the book. We get to watch Tim scope out the diverse personalities of the place. King does this so bloody well. And then we leave Tim for a considerable stretch until the back end of the book. The intention is clearly that you will forget about him, until the time is right, and then think, Oh, yeah, that guy. BTW, Jamieson winds up in Dupray when the car in which he was hitching a ride gets stuck in godawful traffic on I-95, so much so, he is informed by the woman who had picked him up, that he’d do better just walking to the next town. King and his wife make the trip from Maine to Florida and back every year so he knows of what he writes when he tells of death by traffic jam on the South Carolina side of the interstate. Things are much more unpleasant for young Luke Ellis. Kid has an unreasonable IQ. He is merely 12, but eager to move on to MIT AND Emerson, yes, at the same time. The head of the very special school he is currently attending thinks he is up to it. He also has a touch of telekinesis, or TK, although this is not on his school applications. It is this ability that gets him noticed, and not in a good way. A black SUV shows up on Wildersmoot Drive, in Minneapolis, one night, and Luke’s life is forever changed. He is dosed and carted away, (not, sadly, on a flying motorcycle) his parents eliminated. When he wakes up, he is in The Institute of the title, somewhere in the Maine woods, one of a handful of young people at the front half of the facility…for now. They are treated unkindly, brutalized for any resistance, featuring zapsticks and no-holds-barred slapping, and subjected to troubling experiments, by a harsh group of Nurse Ratched level caretakers. The concept for the book dates back more than two decades, when King — who has depicted similar psychic characters as loners in books such as “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “Firestarter” and “The Dead Zone” — pictured an entire schoolhouse filled with such kids. When he began writing the book in March 2017, he thought of it not as a horror story but as a resistance tale, with 12-year-old telekinetic genius Luke, teenage mind reader Kalisha and 10-year-old power-channeler Avery forming a rebellion inside their detention center.Luke’s TK is present, but is not considerable. The genius part, though, that’s fuh real. Kalisha is a barely teen with pretty good telepathic talent, and an attitude. But she and Luke hit it off straight away. Avery is a ten-year-old with scale-busting telepathic talent, which has also made him a major-league spoiled brat. There are others, but these are the core. The nice twist here is that there are so many tales of schools where kids with special abilities band together, but few are as tough on their charges. I mean Hogwarts had its Death Eaters, but it was still a pretty cool place. Professor Xavier’s school, ditto. The Institute? Not so much. Stranger Things also shows kids joining forces against the dark side, but it heads off in a very different direction. King has always had a particular gift for writing kids. As they did in It, kids band together to fight off the evil forces that mean them harm. There is similarity to Firestarter in which a paranormally talented kid is taken by the government, eager to study and utilize her particular talents. This time it is a private entity, with a global perspective, and a nifty excuse for their wrong-doing. But global or local, public or private, it boils down to decent kids vs dark-hearted adults, no matter how they salve their consciences with ends-justifies-the-means logic. (One cannot help but imagine a Kevin Mulvaney, speaking for management, telling critics to ”get over it”.) Did I mention that King does kids supernaturally well? The guy’s still got it. Just in case you thought SK was intending this as a political effort, pointing out our Mad King caging children at the USA-Mexico border, it turns out not so much. As noted above in the NYT quote, the notion seriously predated the political event. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, King says that he tries to keep his political opinions separate from his writing. I would take this with a shaker of salt. One does not have to look hard at Under the Dome to get the sulfurous fragrance of Dick Cheney, for example. But sometimes a story is just a story, and that appears to be the case here. There is an excellent bit in which kids at the Institute are allowed as much booze and cigarettes as they want, available in exchange for tokens they earn for cooperation, as a means of keeping them pliant. That looks to me like genius at work. King’s gift for portraying human interaction extends from the kids forming a community to the people imprisoning them, and the population of Dupray, SC. He shows plenty of the sort of in-house politicking in The Institute that anyone who has ever worked anywhere knows. You can count on there being at least one maybe-friendly face among the staff. The portrayal of how Dupray’s natives interact is also a thing of beauty. I liked that the best talent of all turns out to be brains. (That is not a spoiler) Of course brains alone do not suffice. TP (telepathy) and TK (telekinesis) factor in big-time. It is also heartening that King, as he has done many a time before, brings fear and awfulness to the stage early, but, as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, uses that darkness as a terrifying background against which to shine a light on hope, on optimism, on the gains to be had when small players join together to challenge a large foe. Per usual, for me, I did not lose any sleep from reading The Institute. While I very much enjoy King’s work, it rarely leaves me with the heebie-jeebies. This is not a knock. Serious chills is a nice-to-have, but not a prerequisite for enjoying a Stephen King book. The Institute is not a short book, at 557 pages. King’s novels rarely are, but I found myself extending my reading time every night while reading this, eager to see what happens next, and concerned for the safety of favorite characters. So, for me, certainly, it was a page-turner. In short, while I would hardly rank The Institute among the top tier of King’s novels, it is certainly a fine, engrossing read that will hold your interest and probably raise your blood pressure for a while. And if the terror of kids being torn away from their parents, being held incommunicado, and being handled by people who can be very poor caretakers indeed, reminds you of any real-world outrages that should be raising your blood pressure, and if you are led to give more thought to the challenges of moral decision-making in matters of global significance, that would be a bonus. The king is not at all dead. Long live the King! Review posted – October 18, 2019 Publication date – September 10, 2019 =============================EXTRA STUFF SK's personal and FB pages my reviews of some other books by this King -----2023 - Holly -----2022 - Fairy Tale -----2020 - If It Bleeds -----2014 - Revival -----2014 - Mr. Mercedes -----2013 - Doctor Sleep -----2009 - Under the Dome -----2008 - Duma Key -----2006 - Lisey's Story -----1977 - The Shining Other King Family (Joe Hill) books I have reviewed: -----2019 - Full Throttle -----2017 - Strange Weather -----2016 - The Fireman -----2013 - NOS4A2 -----2007 - Heart-Shaped Box -----2005 - 20th Century Ghosts Interviews -----The Guardian - Stephen King: ‘I have outlived most of my critics. It gives me great pleasure’ by Xan Brooks The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book?-----NY Times Life Is Imitating Stephen King’s Art, and That Scares Him by Anthony Breznican -----Rollingstone - Stephen King on His New Horror Novel, the ‘Nightmare’ of Trump, and ‘Stranger Things’ By Andy Greene “I wanted to write a book like Tom Brown’s School Days,” King says, referencing the 1857 Thomas Hughes children’s classic about a British boarding school. “But in hell.”-----Stephen Colbert - The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Items of Interest -----The Island Packet - Stephen King’s new book finds horror in Hardeeville: Standstill traffic on I-95 - by David Lauderdale -----Porter Square Books Presents Stephen King & Joe Hill at the Somerville Theater - video – 64 minutes – King and Joe Hill, Hill reads an excerpt from The Institute - King reads from Full Throttle, then they interview each other and take some audience questions. This is wonderful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 17, 2019
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Oct 03, 2019
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Oct 04, 2019
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Hardcover
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0062854038
| 9780062854032
| 3.30
| 1,895
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
| Only in the Westside could a woman with blood in her hair stroll down the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon, wearing nothing but a slip and hearing o Only in the Westside could a woman with blood in her hair stroll down the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon, wearing nothing but a slip and hearing only the chattering of a few far-off birds.Gilda Carr is a young woman who looks into what she calls “tiny mysteries.” Leave those murders for someone else. Big mysteries mean big problems and Gilda has had enough of those. Her mom died when she was a kid, and her father, one Virgil Carr, aka “Clubber” was not only the founder of a notorious Westside gang, he later became a notorious cop, vanishing in a notorious disappearance some years back. [image] W.M. Akers - image from SqueakyBicycleProductions Speaking of vanishing, in this magical reimagining of the Manhattan of 1921, considerable bits of the island have been doing just that. Odd objects, coffee pots, stairway railings, entire buildings are being swallowed up by something. This is not totally new. Akers notes an apocryphal 1628 letter from early arrival Peter Minuit about the oddity of the west side of this newly colonized island. (Our homes shift on their foundations…Our wood comes loose from its joints, and my dreams are plagued by visions of pestilence, stigmata, and the armies of hell.) Things tend to degrade faster, rust races instead of creeps. Machines cease working. Guns fail, automobiles sputter. The trees do pretty well, though, growing tall and fast. Streets become streams instead of the other way around. Occasional waterfalls form and descend from rooftops. It is where Gilda lives. In a brownstone facing Washington Square Park (mom came from money). [image] The American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute - image from Corbin Plays And then there is the increasing vanishing of humanity. Enough so that when over three thousand people went pffft! on the Westside in 1914, thirteen miles of fence was erected down Broadway to separate the Westside from the rest of Manhattan. Not her problem. She can get back and forth through the security gates readily enough. Gilda is engaged by one Edith Copeland. It seems Mrs Copeland had mislaid a glove, one of a pair her oft-absent husband had given her as a gift. She would like the glove found and returned, as she does not want to face awkward questions about its absence. But in this version of New York, tiny mysteries have a way of leading to very large questions, and Gilda’s gumshoeing leads her to a very, very dark side of the city. [image] Fourth Precinct Police Station - Image from Patch.com The action is non-stop, rising to breathless as we near the end. Sleep is in short supply for Gilda, in inverse proportion to exhaustion and perpetual movement. There is a pretty neat explanation for it all, but don’t think about it too hard. Just roll with it. Gilda is a particularly appealing hero. Not just for the expected intelligence, wit, and derring do, (a hair gel for heroes?) but for being a fan of the New York Giants baseball team. I imagine Akers’ work in creating a game, Deadball – Baseball with Dice, might have been mined for this part of Gilda’s profile. Greasing the wheels of forward plot movement, Gilda picks up a few more tiny mysteries to solve, which lead to other leads. Delightful, this element. [image] This stop is on your route – image from NY Subway Mosaics Damon Runyon and Gangs of New York kept running through my head as Akers introduces colorful character after colorful character. Underworld sorts, of both the thuggish and white shoe varieties, loom large in this landscape. And the baddies balance out very nicely between hims and hers, leadership and field force. There is bootlegging, gun-running, (sins of the fleshier sort are kept on the down-low here), arson, assault, kidnapping, police corruption, and the odd murder. Plenty of dark deeds to keep the juices flowing. [image] Bex Red’s house – 75 ½ Bedford Street is 9.5 feet wide - image from The Daily Mail Akers offers a wonderful portrait of what Manhattan might look like if part of it was stuck in some version of the Victorian age, while the other part had moved on to the next century, and if raging against the dying of the light were made into a nice business opportunity. He makes fun use of a variety of Manhattan landmarks, and notes others in passing, in case anyone wanted to structure a walking tour. Bex Red, an artist, lives in a singularly narrow building. A train station and its associated tunnels has been put to alternate use, as has one of the city’s most famous theaters. Penn Station is not what it was. (It still isn’t) A seaman’s hotel, notable for being a place where some of the survivors of the Titanic were put up, remains a going concern. A police precinct noted here is still in operation. A socially conscious village church is given a trot or two across the stage. Such things may be fun for non-Noo Yawkahs, but are an absolute delight for us natives. [image] The Longacre Theater- image from The Shubert Organization Gripes - It seemed that there were occasional bits that did not compute. For example, the next day after a particularly large vanishing, Gilda heads to Ebbett’s Field in Brooklyn for reasons that were inexplicable, to me, anyway. Did I miss something here? I found Akers’ explanation for the underlying goings-on less than entirely persuasive. And I thought Gilda’s solution to a particularly dark situation required a rather large leap of faith. [image] Judson Memorial Church But I would not worry too much about all that. Fact is, this was a wonderful read. Fast-paced, engaging, with an appealing lead, a creative take on a fantastical alternate Manhattan, a very colorful supporting cast, and plenty of twists and turns. You might need to catch your breath a bit after you put this one down. Gilda Carr may be in the business of solving tiny mysteries, but reading Westside is nothing less than HUGE fun. [image] Penn Station - image from NY.Curbed.com Review first posted – May 10, 2019 Publication date – May 7, 2019 November 28, 2019 - Westside is named to the NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2019 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages Items of Interest -----Interview - NPR - Steeped In Fantasy, 'Westside' Novel Follows A Young Detective's Quest For Clues by Scott Simon -----Music - East Side West Side - Yes, I know the actual title is Sidewalks of New York, but the stretch seemed worth it. I seem to have come across (and reviewed) a fair number of novels in the last few years in which a Fantastical New York offers a setting, and I am aware of at least two more in my personal pipeline coming up. Here are the ones I could think of -----Zone One -----The Golem and the Jinni -----Ahab’s Return -----Winter’s Tale ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 28, 2019
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May 07, 2019
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May 07, 2019
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ebook
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0062458736
| 9780062458735
| 3.58
| 18,955
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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really liked it
| “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”Bitworld meets Meatspace in Neal Stephenson’s latest novel. Those of you who were around in the 70s and 80s may remember an ad campaign for Miller Lite. Two manly men would stage a faux argument over the best quality of the product. “Less filling,” one would say, the other responding with “tastes great,” the first repeating “Less filling,” but louder, and back and forth they would go. It was cute. And pretty successful for the makers of that product. For a more cinematic image, you might consider Faye Dunaway in Chinatown “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter.” You might find yourself in a similar back and forth (hopefully without the slapping) with Stephenson’s latest novel. It's science-fiction. It’s fantasy. It’s science fiction. It’s fantasy. Stop yelling. You’re both right. Calm down. Have a drink, on me (but please not that Miller Lite swill). [image] Neal Stephenson - image from his Goodreads page Stephenson begins where his 2011 novel Reamde left off. Despite carrying forward some characters, Fall is not really a sequel, but a totally different book, and can most definitely be read as a stand-alone. In the earlier book, Richard Forthrast was the creator of a massively popular multiplayer on-line game that was hacked by people whose game was theft, and led to a rollicking action-adventure tale that paralleled the real-world with the immersive on-line gaming experience. In Fall, a sixty-something Forthrast goes to an outpatient facility for what is supposed to be simple procedure. There are complications, and Forthrast’s game-over announcement is played. But hold on a minute. On checking his will, his bestie, one Corvallis, or C+ from the earlier book, learns that Forthrast had left instructions for just what to do in case of such an event. Along with other billionaire sorts known as Eutropians he had ensured that his brain would be preserved, and then, when the tech was available, scanned with the best available means, and uploaded to the cloud. (Doubt there are any harp-wielding angels there.) [image] Serial sectioning of a brain - image from Wikipedia One of the things that Neal Stephenson does best is walk through the steps necessary to get from notion to reality in a very logical, scientific manner. He is for hard sci-fi what Arthur C. Clarke was in the 20th century, limiting himself to the scientifically possible (although he does take liberties from time to time, as in his explanation for the moon’s sudden demise in SevenEves). So, what tech will be needed to scan brains? What sort of algorithms might be needed to make sense of the scans? What sort of power might be needed, both in computational and real-world energy requirements, and how might that be provided? How would this all be paid for? Great stuff. Love this! Stephenson gives serious consideration to what the experience might be like for a person, a consciousness, an entity, a what? that finds that their death is not quite so permanent as they’d thought, and now find themselves in a totally alien environment, floating in a sea of chaos, with little clue as to how to move on, in any sense of the word. How much does memory define personality? Can you have a meaningful being without a meaningful place? These discussions are going on as we This is not so far out a notion as you might expect. There is considerable interest among the silicon valley gazillionaires in life extension through technology. A recent NY Times article told of attempts to revive decapitated pig brains. I will leave you to construct your own joke out of that. The article (link in EXTRA STUFF) also addresses the approaches to recording the brain’s layout and activity. All for neuro experiments that have immediate medical application, of course, but you have to know that such work will be gobbled up by those with the means to advance the work from the theoretical to the actual. Stephenson’s stories tend to take place over protracted periods. This one covers about a century, well in real-world time, anyway, and we are kept abreast of some of the ongoing social and technological changes that occur over this period. In BitWorld, time sometimes runs faster and sometimes slower than it does in real time. Changes are considerable. I expect this also mirrors the author’s experience of how the writing of a book progresses. Stephenson is also fond of carrying forward character and institutional names from earlier work. That continues here. The mysterious and very long-lived Enoch Root, for example, shows up, having survived untold ages in earlier books. Will he snuff it in this one? There are plenty of other links to the past. I did not keep track. He is also fond of cryptography. That shows up in Fall as well, although mostly in a symbolic form. The first third, or so, of the book takes place primarily in what is referred to as “meatspace” in the extant culture. It is set a bit into the future, but not really all that much. In addition to looking at the technological possibilities for the digital extension of life, Stephenson offers a harsh satire of a United States that has become divided between the coastal, educated, better off, parts of the country, and Ameristan, a vast flyover area generated by the Facebookization of the nation, to the point where truthers insist that a fake nuclear bombing of Moab, Utah took place, despite the very obvious, provable truth that it did not. This dumbing down of the population, often deliberately and for dark purpose, has created a need for actual paid humans to serve as editors for people’s internet feeds. It helps to be well off. Those not so fortunate are left with an internet that is referred to as “the Miasma.” Religious kookery comes in for a look, very much a part of the triumph of disinformation and know-nothingism. It is way, way too resonant with contemporary trends in digital media and the impacts of those on our sociopolitical reality for comfort. PC Mag: What's the larger message you were trying to get across through the Moab hoax?The middle of the book offers a back and forth between Meatspace and BitWorld, until it is taken over almost entirely by the goings on in the digital sphere, at which point it becomes, to my taste anyway, less filling. Back in the day, Ace published sci-fi books in pairs. They were called Ace Doubles. Read one, maybe 125 pps, then, literally, flip the book over and read an entirely other novella, maybe another 125 pages. You don’t need to flip this one over, and it would take particularly fit wrists to manage it, in any case, but it really is two books in one. The second is a fantasy, with battling gods, flaming swords, giants, angels, talking birds, a fortress, rebirth, a quest, secrets, familiar elements of many a fantasy. In Reamde, Stephenson alternated between the real world and the gaming environment. The stakes are a bit higher in Fall as the alternating universes may flip between life and after-life worlds for the reader, but for the characters there is no such back and forth. The notions of consciousness inside the game T’Rain and the consciousness in the Bitworld of Fall, when you step back from it, do not seem all that different, as, even if one passes on in Bitworld, one’s connectome (map of a brain’s neural connections) can just be uploaded again. So, maybe the two are not so different after all. Just rebooting within one sphere of existence instead of going back and forth between bits and bods. It would take a much larger review than even this one to go, in any detail, into what happens in BitWorld. Suffice it to say, and it should be pretty obvious from the title of the book, that the first man in Bitworld, the shaper of things, is cast out of his particular brand of heaven (it looks a lot like Iowa, no, really). [image][image] The D’Aulaires’ Greek and Norse myth books In the beginning of the novel much is made of the D’Aulaire books about Greek and Norse mythology. You would do well to keep both volumes (at least) near to hand for tracking which names have been lifted from which book, and how they relate. And let’s not forget the good old-fashioned Bible (old Testament) in which Lucifer is cast down from heaven (a directional joke is made of this). There will be smiting! Adam and Eve put in an appearance, the firmament comes in for a bit of attention. There is a lot of destruction, rebirth, hubris, people failing to make it to the promised land. And then they get reborn after incurring their personal game-overs, so a single character can have several iterations, and names, as time in Bitworld moves along during their absence. Maybe in a book a third the length I would have been up to making a chart, but other books await. I am sure there is someone out there who has already begun. I did not find such a chart on Stephenson’s media sites, but I suppose it is possible there might be one somewhere in there. Regardless, it can be fun keeping track of who’s who, and who was who, through their sundry lives. Things that bugged me. Let’s reiterate that I liked this book quite a bit. That said, is it really necessary for Stephenson books to go on for such duration? Unlike Stephen King, who has produced a considerable number of doorstops, and who will brook no editing, Stephenson allows his work to be edited. I am told this one came in at least a hundred pages heftier, so I take some comfort from the fact that it could have been even longer. Also, one wonders how a process that is, by all indications, extraordinarily expensive, and is able to accommodate enough people to cause, or at least assist in causing, a decline of Meatspace population, might be sustainable. No, this toy would have been reserved for the uber wealthy and the rest of us would have been relegated to our minimal single lives slaving away to produce sufficient profits for the one-percenters to continue exploiting us forever from their digital realm. Turns out, in this look anyway, you can take it with you. What would happen if, from catastrophes natural or unnatural, the machines were shut down? I could certainly see an angry Meatspace global mob doing all in their reach to cut the power cord to the BitWorld masters. Tough for the post-mortal to feel totally comfy about their eternal prospects if eternity were reliant on such variables. But I guess I shouldn’t be too irked at such things. The point of the book is the ideas, and those are explored wonderfully. What might a digital afterlife look like, on an individual basis and a communal one? Any book informed, as this one is, by the author’s conversations with the likes of Jaron Lanier (originator of virtual reality, among other things) and technology historian George Dyson is bound to keep your gray cells whirring. On top of that, Stephenson’s extension of the current madness in media, looking at the impact of our current sociotechnical trends on civility, the organization of our nation, and on sanity itself, is quite wonderful, and hopefully not too prescient. Finally, while his bridge-crossing to fantasy from hard sci-fi seems odd, it is also very daring, and it is clear he had a lot of fun mixing sundry mythologies into a pretty interesting literary brew, regardless of whether you prefer to think it tastes great or is less filling. Dodge may suffer a significant demise in Fall or, Dodge in Hell, but you are unlikely to join him. I expect most readers will, instead, feel uplifted by the fun of tracking myths, and the intellectual excitement of considering the large ideas Stephenson has brought to bear. In short, Fall or, Dodge in Hell is, for readers, a bit of heaven. Review posted – 7/5/9 Pub dates -----6/4/19-hardcover -----6/2/20- trade paperback November 28, 2019 - Fall is named to the NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2019 EXTRA STUFF has been moved to the comments section below the review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 04, 2019
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Jun 30, 2019
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Feb 06, 2019
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ebook
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0062669605
| 9780062669605
| 0062669605
| 3.69
| 20,062
| Jun 05, 2018
| Jun 05, 2018
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it was amazing
| Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me… --- Psalm 23But what if you were walking thro Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me… --- Psalm 23But what if you were walking through the valley of the death of shadows? Who or what might be with you then? If, as Macbeth proclaims, life’s but a walking shadow, what becomes of the poor player when even the shadow has walked? [image] Peng Shepherd - from her site - Photo by Rachel Crittenden There have been two major periods in my life when I kept a journal. The first was when I was fifteen and could not remember what I had done on all of the New Years’ Eves of my brief existence. It ended badly. I dipped into journaling again in my twenties, during my dating life, only in fits and starts though. Looking at those now-ancient texts is how I know that I really did go ice-skating once in Rock Center, something I still cannot actually recall. Pre-personal-computers, so no accessible files to download, only scraps of writing in small notebooks. I went at it more seriously for a few years when my first marriage died, decades later. Better data retention this time. Those documents are all storehouses of memory. Not that my memory is so feeble that I recall nothing. But the texture of times long past can succumb, along with details, to the erosive force of age. I can go back whenever I wish, which is very seldom, and get at least a taste of who I was before I became who I am today. And if those documents all faded entirely, I would not keel over and expire, but I would be damaged. [image] photo by Pol Pol Ubeda Hervasof Barcelona We are more than the collection of our memories. It is the events in those memories that help shape who we are, but who we are is a living thing, not a construct. If I lose far more memories, I may have trouble recognizing faces that should be familiar. I may lose capabilities I take for granted. I confess to dreading that possibility. But I would still be able to throw together a decent sentence, I expect, although I cannot say for certain. It seems likely I would still enjoy listening to classic rock and movie soundtracks, as that would require no retention of actual skills. My senses would perk up when a Mets game appeared on the tube, (although if I was still able to recall the state of the team in 2018, I might yearn for a deeper forgetting.) I would find comfort in a fluffy feline curling up on my lap or by my side, and I would still thrill to the amazing light that dawn and dusk use to beautify the sometimes stark reality in which we live. It is not just the elderly in Peng Shepherd’s novel who succumb to a bleak forgetting. The entire population of the planet is at risk, with vast swaths succumbing to deep memory loss. Not only do people lose recollections of events in their past, their memory deteriorates to the point of threatening existential functioning. Forgetting who they are, where they live, where they were going, forgetting to eat, there is a widespread and rapid erosion of core capabilities, of innermost being. They often become violent and dangerous. It begins to happen when they lose their shadows. I just knew that I wanted to write a book that had something to do with shadows because, you know, they’re just cool. They’re eerie, mysterious and there’s a lot of different art, and stories and beliefs about shadows in different cultures. But I did not have anything more than that. I just knew I wanted to write about shadows. I started googling things about shadows and then I saw something about Zero Shadow Day and that was the rabbit hole. - from the Red Carpet Crash interviewWe follow four primary characters, Orlando Zhang, his wife, Max, an unnamed man referred to as “the amnesiac” (residue of an auto accident), who is later called The One Who Gathers, and a young Iranian woman, Mahnaz Ahmadi, an Olympic-level archer, studying and competing at a Boston university. [image] image from Researchgate.net Out of the blue a man in India loses his shadow. In short order this condition spreads across the planet. Weird and alarming, but not necessarily menacing. Interesting gives way to oh, hell in short order, though. The loss merely foreshadows loss of memory. It kicks in faster for some than for others, and progresses with variable speeds, but the implications are fairly immediate and dystopianly dire. What if makers forget to make? What if repairers forget not only how to repair, but what their work is at all? What if the shadowless forget their names, their history, forget, even, that they are hungry, or where they live? Big mess time. So Zero Shadow Day, it's a real actual day in India where every year on a certain day, everyone's shadows actually do disappear for just a few minutes. It sounds completely fantastical but it's a real thing… I think humans have been fascinated with shadows for a really long time, but I didn't have a story until I started researching and then when I came across Zero Shadow Day it was just — I mean that was it. The idea sparked and I started writing. - from KJZZ interview[image] photo by Pol Pol Ubeda Hervasof Barcelona Orlando (Ory) and Max were at a wedding in Virginia, a woodsy area, pretty exurban, when the event first becomes a thing. Ory is ok so far. Max, well, she lost her shadow pretty early on. Ory is determined to help her keep her memories for as long as possible. They have a code they use with each other, a kind of password exchange, based on when they first got together. Not knowing the response would be an indication of a serious loss of self. It is a moving mechanism that encapsulates their bond. Max fears that she will become unstable as her memories slip, and might become dangerous, so leaves their sanctuary, hoping to spare her beloved the harm she might cause him. Also, they have heard rumors of something going on in New Orleans, something that might offer a beacon of hope to the shadowless. Max heads south. Once Ory discovers she has gone, he determines to follow and find her. One of the things he did to help her retain her capacity was give her a tape recorder. It is through the voice-entries she makes there that we hear her story. We meet the amnesiac when he is still recovering from the accident that caused his massive amnesia, follow his interactions with his doctor, and his meetings with the first victim of shadowlessness and see his transformation into The One Who Gathers. Naz must contend first with contacting and then dealing with family members back in Iran, and later, with staying alive, and following the siren call south. Arrows will be shot. …it seemed to me like, obviously shadows and memories are very different things, but on some kind of a very deep level, they both feel like, kind of integral and permanent parts of you as a person and if you were missing, you know, one or the other, would you still be yourself? I think the book asks that question a lot, you know, what can you lose and still be you? What would make you not you anymore? So they seemed to fit together really well, even though they're very different things. - from the KJZZ interview[image] Image from DavidBordwell.net The use of magic is hardly unprecedented in dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels. In a piece for Tor.com (Five Books About the Apocalypse) the author notes a handful of them. But still, we are used to there being at least some attempt to assign the cause of our group demise to an identifiable, and presumably preventable or curable, agent. Viruses (viri?), nano-tech gone wild, alien invasion, global warming, loss of reproductive capacity, weirdness in the space-time continuum, the list of possibilities goes on. The inclusion of magic shifts the narrative significantly. Usually, we have scientists, or experts of some sort or other, racing the inevitable clock to figure out how this or that particular form of misery got started, and how to stop and/or reverse it. But when the source is non-scientific, the usual story line changes significantly. Magic just is. You may be challenged to figure out its source, or how to use the magic, but it is presented here as a fait accompli. No backsies. But shadowlessnes comes with a surprising side-effect, a strange form of magic. Interviewer - …the memory aspect strikes much closer to home and I’m sure it will for a lot of readers, aging, dementia, Alzheimers and such. Did you recognize that as you were writing this?A core element here is that The Book of M is a love story. Max leaves Ory in order to protect him from what she expects to become. (a Trump voter?) Ory is determined to follow her, to find her, and at least share her final days as herself. Their love and determination are quite moving, as Ory’s quest, in particular, moves the narrative along. What would you do to help the love of your life, before they become a mere shadow of their former selves? So, a love story, but also a road trip of self-discovery (self-forgetting?) and a quest. Ticking a lot of boxes here. One cannot have an entire book about missing shadows without calling in at least a mention of Peter Pan. In a much larger way the saying an elephant never forgets comes in for some attention. A motif that permeates is varieties of communication. Is it possible, for example, for one consciousness to share memories with another consciousness, even though the two did not experience the same event? Are books means of communication alone or can they hold more? What about audio recording? And where does the essence of the thing recorded, in whatever form, diverge from the person who recorded it? There is no mention of a shadow economy. Small bits of the eerie are inserted here and there. Unexplained strange things occur just out of sight, (Ory heard something inhumanly heavy cross the interstate, walking over the top of it instead of below.) adding texture. [image] Peter and his wandering shadow – image from Buzzfeed The primary characters in the book are drawn well enough. I would have liked a bit more on their individual histories, but my ARE comes in at 484 pages, and it is understandable that we are given what we need to sustain interest and keep things moving. While I can enjoy the unknowable when used as a Maguffin, I do prefer that authors make at least an attempt at explaining why such-and-such happens. But the joining together of fascinating concepts is magnificent. It may be the dystopian love story that keeps things moving along, but the strength of this book is the ideas. It is immensely creative. I would also take the combat scenes seriously. Before she opted to pursue writing as a full-time gig, Shepherd worked for Aegis Defence Services. One of the things that I did was go to Iraq. I was in Baghdad and Basra and then up north in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. There were some pretty tense situations there. It was such an amazing place, so amazing, but yeah, there were some really tough situations there and actually, there was a moment, there was a rocket attack that happened very close to us and that was actually the moment that made me really decide that I should write this book and really go for it…. It was like, you have to try. You have to do the thing that you have wanted to do your whole life. You got to do it now. (presumably before the incomings landed too close) - from the KJZZ interviewWhether looked at in the full light of day or glimpsed in the gloom of a darkened room, it is eminently clear that, lest you forget, The Book of M is an engaging, imaginative, exciting read and is destined, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to be one of the most memorable books of the Summer. Published – 6/5/18 Review first posted – 6/29/18 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram, and FB pages A short story by Shepherd – Wolf Eyes A wonderful story of her relationship with the book Perchance about time travel Interviews -----Video - Arizona PBS - Arizona Horizon - 28:00 - by Ted Simons -----Audio - Red Carpet Crash - 11:25 -----Audio plus transcript – KJZZ – 91.5 - Arizona Native Makes Novel Debut With 'The Book Of M' - 7:21 – by Steve Goldstein A fun article on Zero Shadow Day (ZSD) from The India Express - Zero Shadow Day: How shadows played hide & seek with Chennai kids - by Sowmiya Ashok Songs -----Memory – Betty Buckley -----Me and My Shadow - Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. -----I Remember it Well – Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier -----Remember Then – The Earls -----Remember - the Shangri-Las -----I Will Remember you - Sarah McLachlan -----Remember Me - Benjamin Bratt -----Try to Remember - Jerry Orbach ----- I'll Always Remember You - Hannah Montana Radio -----Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 26, 2018
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Jun 24, 2018
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Jun 24, 2018
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Hardcover
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0440000785
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| 3.54
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really liked it
| Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia, with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, how k Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia, with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, how kids can turn into monsters, how they can learn that killing is right and oppression is just, how in one single generation the world can change on its axis into a place that is unrecognizable. Easily, I think, and push out of my chair.Words matter. If your ideal of womanhood tends toward the Stepford-ish, Vox will present an image of paradise. For the rest of us, it offers a dark vision of a possible future in which the lines between religion of the extremist, fundamentalist sort, and government are not just blurred, but erased. (See Taliban, ISIS, or any of many Christian sects that insist that civil law should be based on the Bible, or, recently, SCOTUS) God knows there are plenty of places in the USA where a large number of folks would be just fine with that, as long as it is the proper religion. Well, probably not the majority of the women. Instead of the saying “Children should be seen but not heard,” substitute females of almost any age for children, and you have the core of this dystopian novel. [image] Christina Dalcher - image is from her site Woody Allen’s 1971 film, Bananas, satirized Central American (and American) politics. A deranged leader had let power go to his head and decided to shake things up. From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.There are different lunatics in charge in Vox, but the restrictions are just as insane, if much less amusing. Females are allowed only one hundred words per day. (The official language of American women is silence?) And they will have to wear wrist-band counters that keep track. Exceeding the daily quota results in a painful electrical shock. Run off at the mouth and the punishment becomes deadly. Girls at school are given rewards for speaking the fewest words in a day. [image] Image from HuffPo Jean McLellan is a cognitive linguist. She is as shocked as most are by the imposition of outrageous strictures on her, and on all females. Makes it tough not only to do the work for which she was trained, (or, maybe not, as women have been relegated to homemaking, so don’t worry your pretty little head about that whole job thing) but makes it a challenge even to carry on normal human conversations within her family. Her husband, Patrick, is the science advisor to the president, surely a jokey position in a country where science is silenced and faith of a certain sort is given all the bullhorns. But then Jean is approached by representatives of El Presidente. Her professional services are required. It seems the dear leader’s brother had an oopsy while skiing and now has a particularly nasty brain injury, one that impacts his ability to use language. Jean negotiates a deal, and goes to work. Complications ensue, not least is the presence on the research team of the incompetent rectum who stepped up to leadership when the women were kicked out, and someone from her past. Will they be able to use their scientific super powers for the forces of good, or be bested by the forces of evil? [image] Image from MissMuslim.com Yes, it is not a realistic projection of things to come. If millions of women marched in response to the election of Swamp Thing, I seriously doubt that a program like the one presented here would have been instituted as quickly as this one was, or at all. (well, in most states, anyway) The response would, I expect, have been less Lysistrata and more Wonder Woman, with maybe a dose of Medea tossed in. Despite the excesses of the Trump administration, there are limits beyond which people actually would respond, and actively resist. But the point of the novel is not, clearly, to present a real potential future, but to highlight the importance of speech, of language in personal and political freedom, particularly for women. [image] Image from Betanews.com These are notions that merit consideration. Schools in Vox are made to offer AP Religious Studies classes that not only crowd out class time for Biology and History, but omit the comparative element of the study of religions in favor of promoting the religious track favored by those in charge. So, propaganda. This is hardly a huge leap from school systems that insist on teaching that lovely oxymoron, creation science, alongside actual, reality-based, testable science, and pretending equivalence. Similar to the approach of some news providers who seem to think that balance consists of offering equal time to truth-tellers and liars. Linguistics. Language. Call bullshit a rose often enough and weak-minded people will begin to enjoy the scent. (Fake news?) We live in a NewSpeakian world, so looking at the power of language, or words and how they are used and controlled offers considerable insight into the non-science-fiction reality we currently inhabit. It is also of note how those words and notions are so often internalized. (I’d been fighting to keep the weight down ever since my last pregnancy.) It seems the norm, sadly, for those in power to want to silence those who object, whatever their gender. Colin Kaepernick knows, and I remember well the cries of Vietnam war supporters who regarded opposition to that debacle as treason. America, love it or leave it! [image] Image from Yomyomf.com Dalcher offers examples of how language denigrates women in common parlance, without getting all, you know, hormonal about it. Jean’s husband refers to her outings with friends as “hen parties.” Her son, Steven, sees an activist on television protesting the demise of freedom and suggests “She needs to pop a chill pill.” Familiar, no? The religious nuts running this show incorporate anti-gay bias into their new world order as well, making what they consider aberrant behavior a criminal act. (stifling half the population would not be considered aberrant here) Back in the real world, as of 2014 there were still 17 states in which laws against certain sorts of sex by consenting adults were still on the books, so this is not even a small stretch. The chastity movement in the book is based on real-world insanity as well. There was …a late 19th-century/early 20th-century movement in America called the Cult of Domesticity, “The idea was to go back to Biblical roles, to separate men and women,” [Dalcher] says, explaining that women were expected to conform in four ways; piety, purity, submission and domesticity. She adds that there is a modern version of the Cult of Domesticity active in the US right now; the True Woman movement, part of a larger religious campaign called Revive Our Hearts. - From the Bookseller interviewVox is very much in line with the current boom in feminist dystopia novels and with those of the past as well. What pops to mind are The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, wonderfully realized in the Hulu series, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke, and, of course, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. There are plenty more, but these are the ones I have read. [image] image from Wikimedia Dalcher brings to her novel a background in science. She is a theoretical linguist, with a strong concern with how language affects development. What would women become after a few generations of bearing the yoke of silence? Is it ok to train your daughters to become, essentially, pets that double as sexual vessels? Dalcher’s love of things Italian is given a voice here, as Jean’s parents are living in Italy, where Jean has spent considerable time, and a major character is Italian. The story moves along at a nice pace, making this a pretty fast read. It is engaging and stress-inducing, in a good way. But I found the resolution even more unlikely than the underlying notion. If tight plotting is your thing, you will probably be disappointed. But then this is not, IMHO, about the action-adventure element, as entertaining as that is. It is a warning about the cost of silence, and how not speaking up now can shut you up later, to the detriment, not only of yourself, but of generations to come. [image] Image from HappyGeek.com Before the craziness becomes implemented policy, Jean is warned by her erstwhile bff, a prescient activist, about the coming madness, particularly the massive importance of voting, and participating in political action like calling one’s representatives, or showing up for marches. ”Think about what you need to do to stay free,” she says. It’s good advice. Use your words. Review first posted – June 1 ,2018 Publication – August 21, 2018 Berkley provided an advance review copy, but shhhhh, don’t tell anyone. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram, and FB pages Other work by the author -----The Things I Learned About Swans -----Company Man There are scads more on her site Interview -----May 11, 2018 - Bookseller Excerpt -----from Time magazine Other -----Language Log – on the truth about the difference between how many words men and women speak per day - An Invented Statistic Returns ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 25, 2018
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May 11, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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3.86
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really liked it
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Mar 05, 2024
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Mar 06, 2024
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2.64
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it was ok
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Apr 02, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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3.48
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liked it
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Jul 23, 2023
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Feb 24, 2023
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3.81
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really liked it
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Aug 2022
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Aug 02, 2022
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3.79
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really liked it
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Jun 11, 2022
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Jun 21, 2022
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3.90
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it was amazing
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Mar 11, 2022
not set
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Mar 11, 2022
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4.26
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it was amazing
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Oct 16, 2021
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Oct 06, 2021
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3.45
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really liked it
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Aug 2021
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Aug 01, 2021
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3.52
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really liked it
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Jun 20, 2021
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Jun 20, 2021
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3.73
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it was amazing
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May 30, 2021
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Jun 07, 2021
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4.51
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it was amazing
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Apr 23, 2021
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Dec 04, 2020
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4.14
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it was amazing
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Jun 22, 2020
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Jun 22, 2020
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3.19
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it was amazing
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Jun 16, 2020
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Jun 16, 2020
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4.11
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really liked it
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Jan 26, 2020
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Jan 26, 2020
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3.91
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really liked it
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Jan 24, 2020
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Jan 24, 2020
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4.20
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really liked it
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Oct 03, 2019
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Oct 04, 2019
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3.30
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really liked it
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May 07, 2019
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May 07, 2019
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3.58
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really liked it
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Jun 30, 2019
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Feb 06, 2019
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3.69
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it was amazing
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Jun 24, 2018
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Jun 24, 2018
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3.54
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really liked it
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May 11, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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