As you can probably surmise from the huge collection of tags I've attached to this book, there is A LOT of stuff going on here!
Even the structure of tAs you can probably surmise from the huge collection of tags I've attached to this book, there is A LOT of stuff going on here!
Even the structure of this book is complex and multifaceted: two stories, told by two narrators, in alternating chapters. The first narrator is Shira Shipman, a young, upper-middle-class Jewish woman who has recently become a wife and mother. Her life is also almost completely controlled by her employer, a huge biotechnology corporation, not only because they have a very strict, conformist corporate culture (there are even rules, unwritten of course, dictating how women of varying degrees of seniority within the company should dress), but also because Shira lives in what is essentially an upscale version of the company town: it's like a sealed-off, climate-controlled suburb/office park where everyone in the middle and upper ranks of salaried workers and management lives and works. Shira's narration, especially in the early chapters, is therefore suffused with nervousness, and a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, since her husband has recently been promoted and their family moved into a bigger, nicer house. Shira is certain there must be a catch, since she knows she's not exactly a team player, and not exactly in her bosses' good graces.
When the other shoe does drop, Shira packs up and leaves, heading to a place that's the polar opposite of the stuffy corporate-controlled environment she's just fled: it's a free Jewish settlement out in the middle of nowhere, unaffiliated with any of the major corporations that dominate this denuded, radiation-spoiled future Earth. Her grandmother (who brought her up) lives there, and she soon learns that her mother, who left her when she was born, is also coming to stay there. She also soon finds that her grandmother and the father of one of her childhood friends are working on something mysterious and fantastical: a robot that looks, talks thinks and feels exactly like a person, but has superhuman physical and mental abilities.
This robot, who is named Yod (a letter in the Hebrew alphabet; Aleph through Tet were his predecessors, all but one scrapped because of horrible, sometimes deadly, flaws), might be the most interesting character in this novel. That's saying a lot, because this novel is stuffed to the gills with interesting characters. Unfortunately, Shira Shipman isn't one of them --- that's the biggest thing that disappointed me about this book, that practically all of the real-time narration is done by the most boring character. (The other narrator, Shira's grandmother Malkah, spends almost all of her chapters telling the story of the seventeenth-century Rabbi Judah Loews --- also called "the Maharal" --- who created the Golem to protect his people, living as they did in the ghetto of Prague, where Christian mobs could attack them at will. This story is also hugely interesting, but because it's all very external to Malkah herself, the reader doesn't spend as much time in her mind as they do in Shira's. And that's a pity, because Malkah's mind seems like a fun place.) Yod owes his moral and emotional complexity entirely to Malkah's programming; her involvement may well have been the thing that saved Yod from the fate of all the failed attempts before him.
(And now, a random note on terminology: Yod is not a cyborg. There are some cyborgs in this book, but Yod is an android. Cyborgs are people who have been technologically augmented; androids are humanlike technological constructs. Carry on, then.)
Chaos ensues once people outside the tight circle of people who've been working on "the project" learn about Yod and his abilities. There's a lot of corporate-espionage type stuff, amped up by both the apparent absence of laws in this future world (assassination raids, abduction and hostage-taking are apparently standard practice), and the immersive nature of the "cyberspace" the denizens of the free settlement must navigate to earn their livelihood, since they specialize in cybersecurity. (Cybersecurity being very important in this world, what with all the aforementioned corporate espionage.)
This conception of cyberspace --- a three-dimensional "space" that you, virtually embodied as an avatar, move around in to talk to other people, download data, build firewalls or "patrol" existing firewalls looking for signs of intrusion --- is pretty much ripped from the pages of William Gibson's novels, as is the anarchic, impoverished megacity in which Everyone Else (i.e., the poor and the non-corporate) lives. "The Glop" (from "megalopolis," which is one of my favorite science-fiction neologisms ever, and one of the minority that seems like real people might use it) looks a lot like a lower-tech version of the Sprawl from Gibson's novels; Marge Piercy even acknowledges this debt in an afterword.
Derivative as all this is, I still found the worldbuilding in this book to be pretty solid. It helps that Piercy spends most of her time developing settings that aren't the Glop or corporate bubbles: her most original, most interesting "world" is the small, tight-knit community of Tikva, which marries freedom and openness with airtight security and a technological specialization that basically buys them their autonomy. (As in, every major corporation wants to buy their firewalls, so they all tolerate the upstart little city-state's existing outside any one of their control). It's a really interesting, well-realized picture of an intentional community, with a sharp focus on day-to-day survival in an uncertain world.
Another juxtaposition this settlement (and the book as a whole) tries to embody is that of future and past. Everyone in Tikva is a practicing Jew, and Jewish religious and cultural identity are just as integral to the place's cohesion and survival as its cutting-edge technology.
But the best thing, in a novel where everything is done amazingly well, has got to be the characters. I did not find Shira very interesting, but almost every other character who was in the book for longer than a scene or two was absolutely fascinating. And even Shira, though boring (to me), was well-developed, believable and even relatable. She evolves over the course of the book, and we see a lot of different aspects of her character: her feelings of confusion and betrayal when she has to confront her mother for the first time, and her slow metamorphosis from a closed-off, emotionally stunted, timid woman to someone bold, spontaneous and loving, which coincides with her finally moving past a schoolgirl crush on another character. And Yod! Yod is an absolutely masterful work of creation; he's not human, exactly, and he's also not male in the way that a man is male (psychologically, that is; physically he's quite male), but he is certainly a person, and despite the title he is not an "it." (His ambiguous status comes up when he wants to participate in some ritual, I forget which, that is restricted to Jewish men. He wants to be considered, not just human, not just a man, but specifically a Jewish man). His emotions were about half familiar to me (as an autistic person, I am well acquainted with the angst of wondering whether one is really human or not) and half alien (he was made for violence, and takes a predatory delight in it that bothers the moral and relational parts of his psyche), and all beautifully described and conveyed through his confused-but-eloquent speech and his halting, work-in-progress manner. He's definitely one of my favorite non-human characters I've ever encountered....more
This book was pretty uneven. There were parts of it that I loved, and (usually longer) parts I was bored by. It could have benefited from some tightenThis book was pretty uneven. There were parts of it that I loved, and (usually longer) parts I was bored by. It could have benefited from some tightening up; the parts that bored me seemed to be just waiting for the plot to catch up with the exposition.
However, even though it probably contributed to the book's length, I liked the fact that the story was told from so many characters' perspectives. Especially because this isn't a story about individuals, but about societies, it seems necessary to have many characters' interpretation of the same huge, earth-shaking events.
This is also possibly the funniest, wittiest book by Sheri S. Tepper that I've read yet, as well as containing some really thoughtful discussion of religion and patriarchal cultures.
The plot, as brief as I can make it: on a sparsely populated farming planet called Hobbs Land, the settlers notice that one of the settlements is becoming unusually prosperous. Its harvests are always good, and its people get along really, really well together. As it turns out, this is due to the presence of a temple built by the previous inhabitants of the planet; a real god lives in that temple. The god (actually a sort of sentient, telepathic fungus) adopts the settlers and spreads to all of their towns, which attracts off-planet visitors to Hobbs Land to check it out. At the same time, religious fundamentalists on another planet are trying to overthrow the interstellar government, and this plot intersects with the other plot by the last few chapters.
I've seen the idea of a living god before, in some of Frank Herbert's books, where the deity is called "Avata" and is a kind of sentient kelp. I think a fungus is a better choice than a plant, though: fungi, with their extensive mycelial nets, are likelier candidates for joining people together into some kind of hive-mind. ...more
Very, very interesting --- if confusingly structured and sometimes awkwardly written --- discussion of something really bizarre that happened in AmeriVery, very interesting --- if confusingly structured and sometimes awkwardly written --- discussion of something really bizarre that happened in American psychology during the 1980s and 1990s.
People would go into therapists' offices, looking for help with various psychological problems --- eating disorders, depression, relationship problems, etc. --- and, sometimes, the overzealous therapist would leap to the conclusion that the person must have been abused as a child, and would insist that memories of the abuse must lie buried within the patient's unconscious mind, waiting to be dug up.
One of the writers of this book, Elizabeth Loftus, is a memory researcher who found herself in the middle of a bunch of court cases relating to repressed memories, which she believes were mostly fictitious. (She doesn't think anyone knowingly lied about being abused; she just thinks some very desperate and suggestible people and some therapists who were very, very strongly committed to the idea that all psychopathology stems from childhood trauma got together and created these lurid, nightmarish stories of abuse, which both patient and therapist believed in). Loftus describes her research, especially the turns it took as she tried to prove her suspicions about the origins of these bizarre memories: at one point, she is able to demonstrate that you *can* create a memory of a traumatic event where none existed before, just by suggesting to someone that they actually experienced whatever it is you want them to remember. (Loftus's example was getting lost in a mall --- something scary enough, to a child, that "remembering" it caused distress, but not so horrific as to do lasting psychological damage to the people she suggested it to).
Besides the bizarre, unreal nature of so many of the uncovered memories, I was also struck by just how *unhelpful* so much of the recovered-memory "therapy" was to the people undergoing it. In the cases Loftus describes, the patients would go into the therapist's office with persistent, but manageable, psychological problems, and would become so consumed by the memories of abuse they discovered in therapy that they would become totally unable to cope with daily life. It really brings home the magnitude of the ethical violations these therapists committed, giving traumatic memories to people who had none....more
The original telling of how Wolverine got his adamantium skeleton, first serialized in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84. Very confusing, nonlinear storylThe original telling of how Wolverine got his adamantium skeleton, first serialized in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84. Very confusing, nonlinear storyline, chaotic art/panel arrangments, dialogue mostly medical technobabble (from the doctors/nurses operating on Wolverine) or inarticulate grunts, yells and roars (from Wolverine). For most of the story, Wolverine is either anesthetized or freaking out and going into berserk rages, so there's not a lot of focus on his character. Instead, the narrative focus is mostly on the doctors, technicians, nurses and various military personnel at the Weapon X facility, and questions of who knows what about what the Weapon X project really is, and who lied to whom about it. This stuff could be interesting, but since I never got much of a sense of who any of these characters were, their machinations and discoveries meant little to me....more
This book surprised me in a lot of ways. I was expecting a feminist-inflected retelling of "Sleeping Beauty," and while Beauty started out in that veiThis book surprised me in a lot of ways. I was expecting a feminist-inflected retelling of "Sleeping Beauty," and while Beauty started out in that vein, it didn't stay there long.
Briefly, the story is about the title character --- a half-fairy daughter of a duke in fourteenth-century England --- roaming through time, space and other worlds after the famous sleep-for-a-hundred-years spell is placed on her family's castle. Among the places she goes are the present day (well, the 1990s), the End of the World (a dystopian future society where every square inch of the Earth is covered by huge, cramped, hive-like apartment complexes or the vast stretches of farmland needed to feed all those people), and Faery. Along the way, she and her descendants play parts in six different fairy tales: "Sleeping Beauty," as previously mentioned, "Cinderella" (Beauty's daughter, Elly), "Snow White" (granddaughter), "The Frog Prince," "Rapunzel" (great-grandson) and "Tam Lin" (Beauty plays a minor role).
Besides all this, which would be enough (besides tying all the stories together in interesting ways, Tepper also provides a thoughtful look at the complex relations between mothers and daughters who don't really know each other that well), there's also a powerful environmentalist pseudo-allegory going on. Beauty is more than just half-fairy: she also incarnates beauty itself (and magic, and life, and lots of other stuff --- Tepper conflates it all under the heading "beauty," which she considers indispensible. The horrible vision of the future that we, and Beauty, see is Tepper's idea of a world without beauty).
There is also an interesting riff on the Garden of Eden myth, and the relation of fairies and humans. They need each other, but don't realize it --- the fairies, while they like to steal the occasional human child, find humans disgusting and animallike, and the humans casually destroy the wild woodlands and meadows where fairies live. Yet, without the creative principle that humans have, the fairies will slowly fade into nothingness, while the humans, without the fairies' long collective memory and respect for the natural order, will destroy their only home.
Overall, it's like "Fractured Fairy Tales" mated with Derrick Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe.
I thought this was a really wonderful, thought-provoking book, packed full of a lot more things than I would have thought possible for one novel. To introduce so many ideas, and at the same time create complicated characters who grow and change, and render so many different worlds, each with their own internal logic, is an amazing trick. ...more
I've only read this first volume so far, but for now The Invisibles is rivaling Alan Moore's Promethea as the weirdest comic-book series I've ever reaI've only read this first volume so far, but for now The Invisibles is rivaling Alan Moore's Promethea as the weirdest comic-book series I've ever read.
The two series have more than weirdness in common: the protagonists of both are young people who quickly learn there's a lot more to the world than meets the eye when they are attacked by mysterious, shadowy creatures that are clearly not of this world. There's magic in both series, particularly astral projection: going to other planes of being in your mind while your body is sleeping or meditating. And both series see a relationship between sexuality --- especially male sexuality --- and creativity: in Promethea, there's the whole wand/chalice rigmarole, while here, the mysterious extraterrestrial Enemy, whom our protagonist, Dane, first encounters in a bleak, Orwellian reform school and whose goal is to enslave all of humankind, mutilates those people who join them by removing their genitals. "We will make you smooth between the legs and between the ears," they say.
Other than that, The Invisibles is a very different kind of story, set in an entirely different moral universe. The main protagonist of this first volume is a teenage boy named Dane, whom we first meet as he's throwing a Molotov cocktail into a library. That ought to tell you right now that this book's central conflict isn't really about Good and Evil, it's about Freedom and Slavery. As Dane's (and another character's, the actual, honest-to-goodnessevilness Marquis de Sade) inclusion on the side of the freedom fighters implies, the freedom being defended includes the freedom to do evil.
It's a compelling story, but told in kind of a confusing way. I suspect some of these mysteries will clear up as I get further in the series, but there are a lot of jarring transitions, especially at the beginning. (Examples: we see John Lennon on the streets of Liverpool where Dane is also hanging around. What does one make of this? Is Lennon really there? Is he a spirit? A little later the Invisibles' leader, King Mob, mentions having evoked Lennon magically, calling on him for guidance; this also probably explains a bizarre interlude of panels showing Lennon's silhouette amid psychedelic patterns and word salad; there's also a long interval where Dane wanders through London with a mysterious beggar calling himself Tom o'Bedlam, who teaches Dane about magic and gives him a hallucinogenic "blue mold" to eat. It is unclear how much of this stuff has really happened).
Anyway, the Invisibles rescue Dane from the sinister boarding school, and after his stint of on-the-job training with Tom, Dane joins them. Their adventures include being menaced by various other agents of the enemy, and going back in time to commune with past Invisibles and gather information about who the bad guys are and what they're trying to do. This is clearly the start of a long, very strange trip, and it looks like one I'd like to go on. ...more
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