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| 059309932X
| 9780593099322
| 059309932X
| 4.28
| 1,438,777
| Jun 01, 1965
| Oct 01, 2019
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okay unfortunately maybe i was wrong when i was 19 and this book is a masterpiece or whatever i like how the dialogue is bad. it grows on you. it becom okay unfortunately maybe i was wrong when i was 19 and this book is a masterpiece or whatever i like how the dialogue is bad. it grows on you. it becomes biblical-mythical in a new testament way. this book is a very pleasurable read in that it feels very intentionally written to be picked apart layer by layer in a college literature class (compliment sorry it sounds like it isn't). it's got delicious foils! it's got concrete capital-T Themes! more than one! it's got Symbolism! it's got narrative Arcs like the Hero's Journey! so anyway i guess just a few bits that caught my attention this time: - i wrote this book off as being a weird power fantasy for 15 year old boys, i was especially put off by my read of Jessica and Chani and Alia as just being support charas for Paul. This is definitely Not the case. or it is, but i think these women have a lot of Opinions about being the emotional and political servants of the men in their lives. I had such a good time tracking that. this book literally begins and ends with Jessica / Chani wrangling with being concubines and not wives; 'real' lovers/servants and not political pawns. the Bene Gesserit's whole modus operandi working on the soft-turned-hard power the political institutions and cultural imagination of reverends mothers, concubines, witches, and wives was just spicy. - again gender is doing Something in this book; one of the two most campy old SF things is this jungian sex bifurcation where men are "takers" and women are "givers", which is why there is a place in the future that the Bene Gesserit cannot peer into but the male chosen one, Paul, can. - religion is WACK in this book. intentionally seeding memes to control political situations happens TWICE to the Fremen. the Bene Gesserit do it to the Fremen so that people like Lady Jessica can spoof their way into being holy ppl and not be hurt by them; incidentally it also means the Fremen believe Paul to be their savior. Kynes does it to the Fremen as well, seemingly requiring their mystical belief and fervor over a water-ful planet more than a 'rational' understanding of terraforming. these are both faked religions that become real; Paul does become a savior of the Fremen and they do make progress terraforming Arrakis, making enormous sacrifices and exuding terrible discipline to do so. there's definitely something that smells colonialist about the Fremen being susceptible to religion; a real like colonizer/colonized dynamic here; esp w how the Fremen seemingly "need" to be driven by religion instead of ... just the pure ecological fact that having water is good and worth sacrificing for? however the way these religious seeds spin out of the control of the colonizers makes it interesting; Jessica Is recognized as a holy man of sorts according to plan, but ends up taking part in an unpredicted religious ritual that fundamentally changes and almost kills her + her child. and it's a real religious revelation for her, as well. - religion is WACK in this book p2; the Kwisatz Haderach thing is interesting because the Bene Gesserit seed fake religions while also believing in their true religious project; breeding a man who is able to do futuresight the same way the women in the Bene Gesserit do, but to the places even they cannot see. i guess theirs is a 'real' religion in that it is a genetic breeding program; it is science? but the closeness of science and religion (we firmly believe something to be true and will expend many many resources to interact/verify that truth) is exciting, as ever. Paul again spins the Kwisatz Haderach outside of the Bene Gesserit control; over and over he denies it, or becomes more than what they wanted; uncontrollable by the Reverend Mother. so i dunno! interesting. the comparison to Kynes' eco-mysticism is fun too; again there seems to require religious wrappings around genetic breeding / terraforming to inspire ? obedience, consistency, safety. technology is not meaningful or intentional without a culture on top of it, though of course technology is itself also culture. - colonization is also weird in this book. there is something that actually got me this time about Paul and also Kynes and Lady Jessica Becoming Fremen. as I discussed this w M ve pointed out that the idea of being able to 'become' Fremen is itself worth thinking about; a lot of SF sort of erases the idea of getting to integrate into a culture, even though in our world that happens all the time (a chinese immigrant Becoming american + their children Being American). ultimately Paul leverages both his Imperial political power and his Fremen political power to become top of the pile in both; and this fusion is definitely more than just a imperial power exploiting a backwater myth to impose his culture on the locals, right? hm hm. - the second old-school SF camp stuff was defo the idea that the Fremen are elite fighters because they have a harsh environment that makes them strong and disciplined - when Paul resolves to turn Arrakis into a fecund and green planet, he even mentions he still needs to leave aside some desert so his people don't lose their edge. but it's fine, just a Classic. - i was really interested in Duke Leto's father, who is seemingly a harsh man who dies gored by a bull (symbolically relevant somehow i suppose). he comes up repeatedly, Jessica disliking the older Leto's traits within the younger; at the end the observation that Paul is in many ways more like his grandfather than his father because of his harsher experiences. this feels related to the harsh environments create strong men thing; but i do like that it's a tradeoff; the older Leto seems like he was a cold and vaguely unlikeable man. usual compliments; worldbuilding and political machinations were absolutely top tier, loved them. even the weird spice-magic got me when i usually get annoyed about it. paul's futuresight rarely seems to help him or get him out of trouble or make his life easy in a way that feels bad. this book definitely flitters into science fantasy with ease, and it got me the way fantasy i think can get you; which is that the angst of accepting or refuting your destiny is just kind of always fun to read about when pulled off well. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 25, 2021
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Oct 28, 2021
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Oct 25, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0756400597
| 9780756400590
| 0756400597
| 3.90
| 15,706
| 1981
| Dec 01, 2001
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as expected this shit fucks! like it's just what space opera is for. obviously all the factioning - system, earth, union, company, mazianni - and pers as expected this shit fucks! like it's just what space opera is for. obviously all the factioning - system, earth, union, company, mazianni - and personalities are off the chain. i'm not going to get into it but that is like, primarily what i think people like about this book, is that it's just good galactic politics and history stuff. the history and the way things fall and the creation of the alliance and the poor envoys from Earth and the decisions they must make for their planet and how mallory ends up deciding what she decides is all just straight fire. that's all there is to it. anyway. i'm not a big military SF person, but mallory and mazian as these sort of like, scary stubborn proud skilled immoral people with charismatic personalities touched on something i really enjoyed. these strong character building moments felt to me like history class, like SF written by someone who is actively interested in the 'is history driven by individuals or by larger forces' question. i do think some moments around the Konstantins felt pretty fairy tale flat in a way that was a little offputting. there was a bit of a vibe that this hereditary ruling class of Pell Station were innately good, generous, and wise rulers, and the short-shrifted Lukases who married into the family were sort of deservedly shafted for being innately selfish and impatient and cruel. Cyteen also had this family-ruling-class construction, and it did seem slightly uninvestigated in both books that hereditary rulership is back in this future and noone in the working classes seems to have beef about it and it also hasn't gone sideways several generations in. the fairy-tale vibe was especially present around the Pell natives, little furry creatures called Downers, who referred to all good people as Konstantins and all bad people and people with guns as Lukases ... idk, seemed kind of sus but wasn't presented as such. the Downers were their own fascinating snarl. this book is about occupation, right? Pell Station contends with occupation by the Company Fleet and by Union, two sides of this war they are neutral in but are pulled into as a critically located station. but the Downers were seemingly this primitive alien culture that are now also occupied by the humans living on the Station in turn. Downers are integral to growing food and other resources on the planet and passing them up to the Station, and with maintaining critical things like life support in the Station itself. Cherryh elides exactly how they are compensated for this work. human workers have credits and bank accounts, and there is mention that the Downers only work in exchange for 'gifts'. the work is consensual and the Downers are innately happy and helpful, but that depiction is in and of itself suspicious - there are a lot of 'no problems here no questions to ask' depictions of aliens as essentially willing slave labor across the whole history of SF that are obviously like colonialist fantasies. i think there might be a bit of a complication here because it is perhaps (again fairytale) that the Konstantins are good because they founded Pell Station while influenced by the Downers. there is something romantic about the Downers. they are clearly non-capitalistic in their own culture. it is repeatedly mentioned that it takes work to manage the Downers because they sort of work when they feel like it and still have seasonal mating patterns like animals; they seemingly resist, or the humans in this world fail to follow history in our world in forcing, a more systemized and coercive form of work. it is also repeatedly mentioned that no Downer has ever harmed a human being in their years of first-contact-and-then-some. that when humans came, the Downers greeted them with "empty hands". in a way i think this book tries to rewrite colonial history, with the idea a capitalism-driven, post-industrial visitor that really does take lessons from the natives and actually collaborates with them. an uncomplicated read is that the Pell colonizers - and esp. their leaders the Konstantins - by necessity develop a genuine respect for the Downer's planet and Downer's culture, the only way to get the Downer's help in establishing a station based around Pell World at all. there is something truly disarming about the fact that the human politicians of this world have to keep saying "Okay, Love You" to a bunch of furry little teddy bears as part of like, their daily political-social life. it makes me want to think that does something good to your brain. i think the presence of the Downers also makes Pell's non-allegiance to either side in the war feel a little different. the government of Pell just has other priorities anyway, but also obligations to a people who have like, super extra no stake in this war and also culturally have never had war to begin with. the final piece that made the Downers feel a little less weird is that one of them does express sort of a larger political intention with regards to her work with the humans. Satin believes humans to be the Downers' eventual link to the stars, and there is something romantic abt the fact that sapiens all just sort of want to reach the stars i guess. it's a classic adventure-fic-turned-SF-thing right? that space is the next frontier, is symbolic of bigger and better civilization and way of life. so having multiple Downer POVs baked into the narrative and seeing that they have their own intentions other than 'be sweet and helpful and loving' is helpful. read this book!! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2021
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Feb 12, 2021
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Dec 28, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0679767835
| 9780679767831
| 0679767835
| 3.97
| 1,055
| Nov 11, 1997
| Nov 11, 1997
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i think all these stories aged fairly well! in many ways i liked more than stars my destination. this is my first re-read of this collection since hig
i think all these stories aged fairly well! in many ways i liked more than stars my destination. this is my first re-read of this collection since highschool. the context of Bester being a tv writer also felt a little relevant to how these stories stood as a whole collection; in general they have a focus on human psychology with science as sort of just maguffins/the genre to get there. this isn't a criticism, it just to me felt more understandable as a 'tv human interest story' approach to creating 'enjoyable content'. there is a Sort of formulaity here; but i think unlike feeling like weak writing sometimes like with asimov or other 'science'-side writers, it just felt like a skillful understanding of genre/plot/pacing. the stories are funny, always a delight with older science fiction. bester has style, something i really appreciated, a lot of these stories undergirded with a fervency and dizzying speed careening from one scene to the next. the characterization was also just quality; just truly interesting characters, a little unreal in again this sort of tv character way, but consistent and with depth. few things came up repeatedly -- the end of the world and humans contending with the post-apoc; the dangerous appeal of shortcutting into wealth and fame, and relatedly the idea of instant-magical wish fulfillment; people spontaneously developing super powers as the novum. i don't really know what to make of these; i this readthrough felt the instinct to interpret these themes as being an articulation of a cultural moment instead of a bester-specific interest. he did write an ep or two for the twilight zone, and adapted 1-2 short fictions into television in the 50s; the post-apoc stuff definitely felt like a cold war thing, and yeah! man-makes-faulty-deal-with-the-devil just feels super twilight zoney, or maybe also just a post-nuclear-bomb thing, or maybe a 'newly-emergent-suburban-peace-isn't-as-nice-as-you-think' thing. the shorts i enjoyed most were obviously fondly fahrenheit, and also galatea gallant (really enjoyable campy moments; like a mad scientist who builds sapients for paying customers, and thus lives with a literal lisping hunchback Igor servant that was a 'returned product'). there's something about the portrayal of women that seemed better than i expected, also; the women in these short stories just seem more competent and to have more agency across the board. all my favorite stories were the more lighthearted ones; there were a few pickings that were truly sad that were a lil more meh. all in all delightful. didn't make me think anything too new about science or history, but did make me enjoy some v well rendered characters in some fun scifi settings. read this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 29, 2021
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Jul 03, 2021
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Dec 28, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0679767800
| 9780679767800
| 0679767800
| 4.06
| 52,331
| Jun 14, 1956
| Jul 02, 1996
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obviously dated on social, moral, and scientific axes, but (1) the datedness is so hokey that it's just pulpy fun now for the most part (2) the stylis
obviously dated on social, moral, and scientific axes, but (1) the datedness is so hokey that it's just pulpy fun now for the most part (2) the stylistic choices and general swashbuckling made it good anyway. cw: sexual assault mentions so the orientalism was mostly funny - the fact that Alfred Bester wrote for the Charlie Chan tv show twinned with the below is just extremely good to me: For two hundred years the IPAF had entrusted its intelligence work to the Chinese who, with a five thousand year history of cultivated subtlety behind them, had achieved wonders. Captain Y'ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech. Why the apostrophe in Y'ang? the Secret Speech is further elucidated to be like, 4000 years old or something which makes it extant in the 1950s itself, a sort of techno-advancement-fantasy-of-the-present within this larger techno-advancement-fantasy-of-the-future. it's just too hokey to be anything too perturbing. also i just enjoyed it for being such a perfect example of techno-orientalism: the sneakiness that suggests inhumanity, with the terrifying advancement that suggests supremacy over western culture, with the ineffable mysticism that makes them impossible to confront with western tools. the women were a little rougher for me. the protagonist rapes a woman, who is a primary character that goes on to being coerced to work with him, and in the far future even forgives him. the act is definitely depicted as a horrible crime, but the horribleness is centered around his moral growth from heartless ruffian to man with conscience, and is not really about her as a person. it ends up being a spin-off form of fridging, so that felt kind of bad. same with the other women Foyle abuses by seducing and then betraying in this book. as always all women have to be married by the end of this book. i think i was really interested in this book's flavor of social darwinism, a common attitude in early science fiction (or like, just science fiction. or like, society). like Shockwaver Rider and several of the Walter M Miller shorts, there's this depiction of the criminal class as a species that is influenced by evolution/the environment. so when humans discover they can teleport ('jaunt'), Bester feels the need to create the class of jaunte criminals who teleport from city to city, avoiding the sun (??) to do night crimes around the clock, as well as other criminal classes besides. Gully himself goes through a moral arc that seems to echo a social-darwinist-skull-measurement-y understanding of development. he starts out sort of catatonically in surviving in a storage locker (womb) in a shipwreck, too apathetic to do anything to save himself other than the bare minimum to survive hour over hour. then he becomes inspired by revenge to read enough ship manuals to jerry-rig himself out of this situation and goes on a brutal revenge-themed rampage of rape, torture, and betrayal, all while speaking a guttural deformed form of English that only criminals know. then he learns 'real' English, enters high society, falls in love, etc. and finally declares he's developed a conscience, and gives up his blood feud and turns himself in to the police. i mean, i am reading ontogeny and phylogeny also, so defo biased by that; but this leap from consciousness-lessness to brutality to civilizedness definitely seems to be the same general concept as the developmental path of consciousness-less child to brutal 'savage' or criminal to white european 'true' human that cast a long shadow from like the 18th century onward. the social evolution is blended with libertartianism also, which is fun to think abt. the book's climax describes how the average person is lazy and stupid and doesn't have the will to make something of themself, and partially needs to be empowered to do so by a trial by fire - or in this case two: (1) everyone needs to know about and physically have this new material that creates a nigh nuclear explosion if anyone Wills it telepathically to (2) everyone needs to know how to teleport between the starts (not just on earth). and either the species destroys itself or it becomes better with this distributed, democratic power. the problem is that all the firebrands who make something of themselves gain power and try to govern the masses, and therefore aren't letting all the lowlies figure it out too after the fact. this sort of individualism + survival of the fittest blend is? indicative and interesting. the above did not really depreciate my enjoyment; but i think as with many of the more outmoded parts of old SF it is more fun to take it as a primary source about movements and attitudes in science and culture and science fiction than to take it in full. anyways deepshit aside the book is fun. i'm a big fan of count of monte cristo and so revenge stories are just cool - the hunting down of bad men in their dens of sin, their gibbering fear at being confronted with their past betrayals, the unraveling of a galactic conspiracy - just all fun. the sort of gothic hauntings of Gully's evil tattoo and the flaming spirit of himself that begins to haunt him as he gets deeper and deeper into his revenge (and it's ultimate scientific explanation) are both cool. there's some really fun stuff with font sizes and weird visual stuff with the text at the end that were really charming. the science is really hokey but again the camp is nice in this context: telekinesis, teleportation, radiation men, weird drugs that make you revert to your specific animal state (pythons vs tigers vs gorillas, etc) , weird cults, and on and on. and finally i think despite all its sort of classic survival-of-the-fittest and humans-are-naturally-sucky vibes, the ending did get to me. Gully Foyle as sort of an inspirational/aspirational sign of a future that humans can have beyond this current war, with a classic SF colonial thing about further physical expansion to the stars representing civilizational and evolutionary expansion, too. flimsies aside i am a sucker for when the future is unspecified, but bright. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 08, 2021
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Mar 14, 2021
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Dec 28, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 3.88
| 34,331
| Oct 06, 2020
| Oct 06, 2020
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M keeps giving me shit for not being sure if this book is good and therefore not being sure if i liked it. i think i fucking respect it, that's for sur M keeps giving me shit for not being sure if this book is good and therefore not being sure if i liked it. i think i fucking respect it, that's for sure. and also it made me cry so many times, so i think that counts as liking it. it's the casual optimism right? it's the ease with which KSR just claps his hands and says "and then the India for Indians movement happens and India successfully nationalizes its farming, kicks out attempts at outside intervention, and gets super into clean energy and they're SO proud of themselves and SO united for the cause as a whole country" and you kind of believe him and you believe it's possible, almost easy if everyone just believed it could work enough to dedicate themselves to a cause? and then yeah tears. well-researched as hell. these truly incredible human character-study moments (its what made the mars trilogy great too). these two attributes did not really intersect though; just interpolated paragraphs of both. the genre-fuck was cool, from infodump to surreal Voice of History Itself to anonymous POVs of climate refugees, of a temporary commune re-occupation of Paris, of an old hongkong independence activist, etc. but like Years of Rice and Salt there's just such an absolute breathtaking ambition in this book to cover so much (like four decades i think, at a geopolitical and ecological and economical as well as personal scale) that the broad sweep, and the direct instead of scenic route - just punchy facts and figures delivered patly, no plot - made sense and was pretty forgiveable. i think what was most interesting to me this read was that this pullaway to other POVs aside from the main plot, or to chapters of just acidly deployed facts ("The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history ... which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts") kinda reminded me of The Female Man? POV descriptions of other people's oppressive experiences and rant-y deployments of statistics both pointing to a more universal female experience -- in that one I didn't question this technique as being a little too on the nose or dry, because i guess it was about feminism, where I'm already pretty softened up to make the connections between political and personal. as KSR suggests in The Ministry For the Future, we are ready for a new structure of feeling, in relation to the earth and our place in it, one better informed by indigenous practices and science and socialism. so this connection definitely was cool, again this ambition (or earnestness) on his part to enact through his writing that the rate of extinction IS personal, that a refugee's perspective IS universal, that eco-humanism fucking rocked and also worked. techno science corner -- i think this book is cool because KSR makes several Takes about how changing history works; sometimes they slide into something that smells like law good violence bad, but it's definitely not it. he chooses to describe the legal side of change in significant detail - board room meetings with big banks, legislative fights, peaceful street protests - but writes in the Ministry's black-wing, suggests but doesn't depict the behind the scenes assassinations and coalplant bombings etc. i feel this book would have been stronger in some ways if he went deep instead of just a glancing note about, say, how world cow consumption goes down because terrorists infect industrial bovine farms with mad cow disease again. but this is a book that is trying to embody and practice a hope, it's not about the horrors of war (culture war and physical) that go into making change, so i understand the choice. in any case i thought the carbon coin thing was super fucking wild, a bitcoin-a-like based on amount of carbon sequestered. i was least romanced by the rise of blockchain finance being a key turning point in equalizing wealth - the logic being that blockchained money can't be hidden in tax havens etc - but i think that the argument that straight up not everyone has a phone or good internet is pretty played out at this point (thinking about senior citizens and ex-convicts struggling to 'do' society because they can't understand emails etc), and he kinda skips how everyone on earth gets highspeed internet and tech. but the larger concept of "money is here to stay for now and we have to work with that - and here is a way for us to leverage the pre-existing system into accidentally annihilating itself without falling into another centrist-liberally absorption trap" was really fun. the idea of pebble drone attacks -- hundreds of drones sent from all over coalescing at a target at the last minute -- was fun, did it in the book "2312" as well. but i feel the tech got off easy; it's this panacea for terrorists to take down private jets and stuff, in that drones are cheap and seemingly untraceable and unstoppable? i think pointing to the larger dream here, that the common man actually has a gun that can take down a government body, that might can still make right, is cool. but realistically i guess we didn't in this book hear of even a single attempted countermeasure to pebble drone attacks; the airline industry just folds and gets super into airships and other clean solutions. as always my post-haraway thing where I love when animals matter a lot. KSR is genuinely into the half-earth movement, which is the idea that we can and should make half the earth wildlife again. i love scenes of humans seeing animals in their quasi-natural, post-natural habitats and it being 'right' and inspiring them to see themselves in a more global and ecological sense. ofc animals get citizenship by the end of this book, in a way, too. probs read this book! stylistically questionable but the horizon is sweet sweet sweet ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 07, 2021
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Dec 14, 2021
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Dec 23, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0441009425
| 9780441009428
| 0441009425
| 3.99
| 56,988
| 2000
| May 28, 2002
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this is a re-read! i read this book probs when i was 12-13. it's good pulpy fun for the most part and my eyes absolutely glazed in the back 200 chapte
this is a re-read! i read this book probs when i was 12-13. it's good pulpy fun for the most part and my eyes absolutely glazed in the back 200 chapters, which is rough. it's just one of those space operas that's popcorn fun because it has like everything. xenoarcheaology and weird cults and fucked up nano-mechano-plagues and cyborgs and gengineered post-humans and powered armor and mindupload and hacking and spaceship combat and orientalist future-samurai-ass motherfuckers and of course one of my fav things, very very very old people / long timescales caused by sub-FTL travel. so in short the book is about vast and extremely ancient alien conspiracy that ends up smashing slightly insane militaristic spaceship dwellers, a shithead xeno-archeologist, and a far-from-home soldier together while none of them really know why. the eye-glaze for the back half was that it felt like reynolds was trying to sew up too many threads too fast, and there wasn't an elegant way for any of his charas to Discover the conspiracy; instead they kept having these revelations spelled out for them in a very shoe-horned way by you know, advanced aliens, AI who are in the loop, etc. so nobody really has a lot of agency and you start to see the author's puppet-strings a little too clearly. conspiracy aside ultimately the protags are all saved by alien tech they discover by accident and don't understand, which again is a bit of a bore agency-wise. the futuristic tech tropes can be fun but when they became relevant to the plot it became a bit of a drag, just a little too perfect. there was a particular moment where one of the characters has damaged cyborg eyes and quickly explains hot dust, a submicroscopic atom bomb type device pretty much, that he smuggled into an enemy spaceship within his eyes. he says any attempt to remove the hot-dust will simply cause it to explode. but he later is able to undergo surgery to fix his eyes aboard the ship. so the fineline where this tech is perfectly situated to be undetectable, to be hooked up to his physiology such that his death would trigger the explosion and that removal would also trigger the explosion, but that somehow tinkering with the eyes themselves wouldn't cause an issue just seemed kinda annoyingly ideal for the plot. basically there wasn't enough rigor to make stakes or puzzle solving interesting, but there as enough gushing detail - reynolds is a astrophysicist by trade - that the worldbuilding itself felt fun and rich. there was just so much of it! anyway i think i have read many books where the male scientist-professor is supposed to be a "lovable" asshole but kinda is just an asshole, and i think this one comes closest to the protag being an asshole not being extremely extremely annoying. he is aware of his pompousness and so is everyone else he meets, so that's nice. i liked how the other 2 protags were just like, jacked mean women who are forced to be allies even though they lowkey don't like each other. i think i liked these more conceptually in an outline, but the details of the dialogue and character dynamics were pretty unconvincing and like, B-movie-esque. while i loved the inclusion of the emotionless aloof evil japanese man with the katana or whatever is at least have to say its probs a lil orientalist right, but it's fun! it's pulp! mostly this book made me want to read reynolds short stories. he's definitely a cool ideas man, and it felt like this novel was just trying to awkwardly railroad us through a bunch of cool ideas theme park ride style, stringing them together with character and plot with relative efficacy but just barely not enough of it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2021
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Dec 04, 2021
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Nov 30, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0671833049
| 9780671833046
| 0671833049
| 3.77
| 634
| May 1951
| May 1980
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doing this new thing where i try to write a review in 15 minutes because it is occurring to me that writing a review for a book four times a month is
doing this new thing where i try to write a review in 15 minutes because it is occurring to me that writing a review for a book four times a month is uhh a lot of commitment! anyway this was an interesting read, though in many ways disappointing and not like 'first-order' enjoyable, but a really interesting slice of a time and attitude. for one, the misogyny was practically freudian. my theory is miller was writing pulp pop stuff, and pulp pop stuff has to have romance, but his fixation on men putting hysterical women into their place (including a scene where a man Actually spanks an adult woman to discipline her??) is extremely weird. vengeful. in general i wonder if canticle is a near-perfect book because like, by virtue of being about christian monks, women simply don't play a large role in it, so miller couldn't fuck it up. The Lineman was literally incomprehensible to me in terms of what it was trying to say about gender and sexuality, but it seemed to be primarily about men (non-magically/sci-magically) turning into just slavering beasts around women in a way that didn't make any sense. i think i was most surprised off the back of canticle by how much miller's shorts had the themes of like, (1) technologically intelligent science-minded lone wolves vs dumb uneducated masses, (2) service to the technoscientific regime justifying sacrifice, and (3) conflating evolution into some sort of progress or social darwinism. Crucifixus Etiam was especially jarring, because it is about these men sort of tricked into agreeing to terraform earth but under extremely cruel conditions explicitly so their employers can squeeze profit from their work, and in the end one of them decides it is worthy labor, compared to christ-like labor, as he sacrifices his body for the people of 2000-years-from-now who will live on a terraformed mars? point (1) above is making me kind of reconsider Canticle; i definitely read it as about protecting science and technology from scientists who think science is 'above' lay problems like war and ethics; not about protecting it from the average tv-addicted drone who can't appreciate it, which is the vibe i got here ... it just felt really incongruous, the takes between these shorts and Canticle, i guess. But the Roman Catholic glimmers and the apocalypse moments were so good. Big Joe and the Nth Generation - just a sucker for superstitions cropping up around machines as people forget technology, as a trope. Dark Benediction had my favorite moment, of this island of proto-zombies - this is before zombies, but they're people infected with an illness that makes them compulsively want to touch healthy ppl to infect them in turn - but run by some zombie catholic monks who have decided their compulsion to touch is another carnal sin ... so they resist it through their principles ... it's just cool ... i am tickled at Miller's use of religion as a vehicle for human optimisms, for goodheartedness and generosity. i was surprised overall by this book's repeated statement that this human goodness in fact takes the normal kinds of disciplines and shames and elitisms to achieve. weird on that front. my second favorite moment was definitely in Darfstellar, just a tech moment, where it's a classic thing where acting is fully replaced by robots who contain imprints of old famous actors in them, to the detriment of the art of theater and therefore humanity. but the tech moment is that when a human actor gets on stage and completely beefs the first scene due to nerves, the central acting machinery starts to compensate by inflecting dialogue and body language of the robots differently to make the human's character less likable and more of a heel. this understanding that acting is about reading the audience and adjusting interactions between characters and having that be part of how the machinery works was just smart techbuilding. ...more |
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Feb 13, 2021
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Feb 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0345524497
| 9780345524492
| 0345524497
| 3.89
| 32,695
| May 17, 2011
| May 17, 2011
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okay this book absolutely fucked i loved it a lot in the spirit and lineage of sapir-whorf-y books, language-is-mind books, which i was a huge sucker f okay this book absolutely fucked i loved it a lot in the spirit and lineage of sapir-whorf-y books, language-is-mind books, which i was a huge sucker for as a child, so that helped i think it just followed that really good SF thing where SF is just About One Topic right and this was just About How Language Is Identity in a deeply philosophical and truly interesting way. i thought the final scene where the Ariekei attain a truer sentience by discovering the idea of Names, that objects have Names distinct from their thinginess, really really breathtaking. and on top of that the worldbuilding was just so cool and dovetailed nicely into the topic. i think there was this really stunning little juxtaposition when the god-drug is first introduced to the Ariekei by accident and they start Acting Strange, Wyatt is not initially worried because miscommunications and political mishaps between aliens happens all the time and it's really never a one-and-done disaster like it is in the adventure books. he's wrong, almost immediately -- because this is not a political disaster, but an ecological one, and ecological disasters are one-and-done all the time. t and so, what is happening with the introduction of this human-spoken Ariekei language that ruins the Ariekei is a virus, a meme that is also a gene. the collapsing of the two around language; language being social and also biological, is just so so cool! and it's so elegantly done - the worldbuilding note where all Ariekei technology is biological was just so so smart to bring these ideas home; ecology and biology (natural) and civilization (above-natural) aggressively twined together and flattened and the same for these aliens. and then the next wrinkle, which is that the Ariekei, born knowing Language and never taught it, through the course of the book learn to construct a more normative language that makes them immune to the god-drug and gives them the capability to lie and also recognize humans as subjects; language sort of flittering back and forth across this line of being both (1) biological imperative or a constraining framework and (2) emancipatory or frameworking-widening construction; it's just good ! it's just complex and so tasty i was also weirdly fascinated by the protag Avice's romance. i don't really know what's going on there but something is going on; all four of the men in her life end up very very aggressively relating to and thinking about the Ariekei and influencing human relations with them . i think it is worth thinking about how and why they are drawn to Avice and vice versa, and tracking their different attitudes towards her and towards the Ariekei. the other thing worth digging into is like, Ehrsul's whole fucking deal? she's the third mirror, right? human, Ariekei, and automaton. her disquiet with the Ariekei shedding a imperative Language and learning language and becoming in a way more sentient because of it feels related to her state as sort of a very very convincingly complex neural net of some sort. her personhood is Not cut and dry; Avice's husband definitely thinks she's just a tool, and Avice considers Ehrsul her best friend. Ehrsul is not going to transcend her built-in 'code' the way that the Ariekei have a revolution beyond their genetically-instilled Language; so something something Something is happening. this book is just so pleasurable in that way where it is so carefully written and there's so much to chew on. there's just so many moments and characters reverberating off each other and they're all still orbiting these ideas about language and the difference between signifier n signified and the collapsing of these things, and the human utility of language and thinking about what gets talked about vs what is speaking, and idk! it's just good. read it. ...more |
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Sep 27, 2021
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Oct 03, 2021
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Nov 18, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 3453161815
| 9783453161818
| 3453161815
| 4.11
| 9,915
| Sep 1997
| Feb 2000
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god i love science fiction. this was an incredible book and i almost cried like 3 times during it. spoilers throughout. it has what i've discovered is god i love science fiction. this was an incredible book and i almost cried like 3 times during it. spoilers throughout. it has what i've discovered is one of my favorite narrative occurrences, which is individuals confronting enormous timescales - this one on the order of billions of years. and it's not only in this way that this book explores what does and does not endure in a person. in the simulated reality that the majority of humanity lives in, you can change your 'body', you can integrate whatever 'outlooks' you want, and i love how easily egan makes the call that the line between change and death is very very thin. the lack of materiality is a freedom that is also a frightening lack of consequence - if you can become anything you can become not-yourself. if you can clone yourself and make new life and freeze your consciousness, the possibilities to complete lose connections with other humans are an extremely real and easy threat. The people in Egan's world are so beautiful - the lack of scarcity means they have the capacity to be humane without risk; it costs nothing to be giving and curious and vulnerable - and it really purifies these existential tragedies of societies struggling to find meaning, of trying to be connected, of caring about things. on top of that is issues like being able to clone instances of yourself, and what family dynamics are like when you and your child have lived over 1400 years, etc. it's just good! i really liked how much Egan cares about physics and math; i mean it was heady and sort of 'unstuck' the plot and stakes once the physics Really got away from me; but i love science fiction that feels heavy and real because the author is so dedicated to articulating the world. i was so romanced by the themes of materialism vs abstraction. i liked how the polises had different cultural attitudes to it, from the Konishi polis who are all about understanding abstract math, to the main POV of the Carter-Zimmerman polis, who look down on the 'solipsism' of the Konishi and are all about studying the 'physical' world. i think there is a thread here where Egan works so hard to build up this complex math and physics, and then ensures that it still has stakes to matter. I really enjoyed going through Yatima's character growth from wanting to be a mathematician in the 'Truth Mines' of Konishi to, after witnessing the brutal destruction of Earth's atmosphere and its last flesh-wearing human inhabitants, immigrating to Carter-Zimmerman to explore the physical universe. in the end maybe the physical world doesn't matter, but people-society-community-sharedhumanity do, right? or that is sort of a realism that always has stakes. as an aside i love that this book has consciousness-cloning that Matters; you don't just make 1000 copies of yourself on a whim, because each of these individuals are People that are also you, and that existential angst doesn't really go away or stop being difficult. i think at many points i compared this book to Accelerando, and this book has a way more optimistic understanding of sentient life (sentient life is all like humans in that they become wise and generous and chill once they meet all material needs; not like humans in terms of all becoming AI-driven hypercapitalists for some reason) as well as a more realistic understanding that the creation of human life is a big fucking deal; and that is also what cloning is; and each clone is a citizen and their life matters. orlando - a flesh human who unwillingly joins the uploaded polises when his Earth community is destroyed - was so fantastically sad and noble in carrying the torch that it in some way is important to 'see' the 'real' stars, to have 'biological' children. this cultural gap with his son (created post-upload), who barely understands why physical immolation is a 'threat' also creates this stunning immigrant narrative that really fucking got me. paolo is really threatened by ver father's strong beliefs, and also doesn't really understand fatherly relations in the old-guard way; but feels the pressure and instinct to connect, to understand or get orlando to understand/change his ways; and in the end when ve tries on a few 'human' forms in simulated space before settling on ver normal amorphous icon and then self-deleting ... whew ... anyway my 15 minutes are almost up so just gonna say the characterization in this book is just so good. it's just so romantic. it's just a lot of sacrifice and kind-of-death-by-change and also loyalty and determination and idk! it's a really rich book and there's a lot going on it wrt to what the purpose of life is (after? without?) mortality. read this book! ...more |
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Mar 29, 2021
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Apr 15, 2021
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Nov 12, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1892391201
| 9781892391209
| 1892391201
| 4.18
| 4,483
| Jun 01, 1990
| Nov 01, 2004
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god james tiptree jr was a fucking powerhouse. this entire collection made me feel like i've been reading work from the 70s all wrong; been forgiving
god james tiptree jr was a fucking powerhouse. this entire collection made me feel like i've been reading work from the 70s all wrong; been forgiving the camp and the bad politics and the bad writing all too easily as 'of the time'. i remember the first time i heard the phrase 'a better world is possible' i had this dizzying split-second where i thought it was a lament before it settled as a call to action. this book gave me the constant feeling of walking that line. "the women men don't see" and "houston, houston, do you read?" and especially "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" held up the cruel societal matrix - especially the cruelty of men - that stunts women; and held next to it escapes - postapocalyptic post-patriarchical futures and alien futures. in other writers i think this would be purely utopian but she very consistently writes from the male perspective or normative chara's perspective, so we get the confusion and dangerous anger and the death and the loss coming from men seeing women do things that, from their perspective, are baffling. so the stories center sort of a futility with connecting with men or changing existing society. you don't change the world, you escape it, basically. heteretopic at most. sex and death are so entwined so consistently across these stories. there is this thread across like "houston" and "screwfly solution" and "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" and "slow music" where especially male sexuality is about dominance - of man over woman ofc, but of human over alien and ultimately Life over Death. and there is a comeuppance always, that this life-sex to avoid/dominate death just leads us closer to it. and i think that's a very neat and powerful punch she's able to slip into so many stories. it's also of course sad. i want to read this theme as a criticism of our neuroses about sex and death, that we (esp for her men) don't need to use sex this way; but that might be wishful thinking. there is definitely in screwfly and "love is the plan the plan is death" a biological inevitability to the sex-death connection. i will say some of the sex stuff i think stung less because i knew she was a woman; there is a lot of gnarly - intentionally most of the time - sexual abuse and sexualized perspectives of women. i think most of the time it felt intentional and some of the time it felt like she was spoofing male writers by making sure the male gaze was in there? or idk, something's going on with the gaze that i don't know how to fully register. a bisexual woman pretending to write as a man and speaks primarily through male charas but also explicitly writing feminist scifi that is trying to lay bare societal misogynies so like, describing a woman's ass or how a scientist is cute-small-bubbly or whatever else is just a complicated morass to interpret. but heady stuff aside i was utterly breathtaken by the breadth of tiptree's understanding and implementation of scifi tropes(prototropes???) "the girl who was plugged in" is cyberpunk, with more cultural criticism than later cyberpunk, a full decade before gibson ... like wow. she had a really gritty way of writing spaceship life that felt so believable and not poorly aged to me. her multicultural humanity ship in "A Momentary Taste of Being" -- was anti-black, actually. but aside from that the asian characters felt super real n cool. her horrific space colonialism worldbuilding in "We Who Stole the Dream" was really on point. scifi around puzzling phenoms in science and in alien culture, scifi around big dumb objects, scifi around madness, scifi around pandemics, soft surreal clarke-y scifi and hard gritty asimov-y scifi ... in this antho it just shows she could do everything. incredible stuff! it's sad but i'd recommend it ! ...more |
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May 15, 2021
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Jun 03, 2021
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Jul 27, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1529001587
| 9781529001587
| 1529001587
| 4.12
| 60,594
| Mar 26, 2019
| Mar 26, 2019
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this book really got away from me at the end; really just skimmed my way by the last 50 pages. which is a shame because the themes of the confusing hy
this book really got away from me at the end; really just skimmed my way by the last 50 pages. which is a shame because the themes of the confusing hybrid of imperialism and want felt really fresh and new, like going in an interesting direction. complaints. usually i slowly become inoculated to stylistic pet peeves as i get further into a book, but this one really mounted for me. kinda that schlocky thing where all the characters talk the same and have the same sense of humor happened here. i think that happens often in fiction, but i think it bothered me more because i did not also share in their style of speech/humor. also big one for me was the aggressive use of italics - it was pretty much 3 words per page had to be emphasized, by the end of which i really saw as some sort of stylistic crutch to indicate to me to take things seriously or think the characters felt things especially keenly, instead of simply having more convincing writing or depiction. don't really feel the need to get into it but I think a big thing for me was the character motivations were very unconvincing. I feel like there was high court and political intrigue in theory, and in practice everyone was really nice and had very underdeveloped political motives. toothlessness. we're introduced to the ideas of insurrection against empire, on empirical conquest, and on the idea that there are different political factions within the empire; and no individual 'good character' seems to have any opinion on any of these hot button issues. the turning point for me is when war is declared on Lsel; and somehow that does not elicit any repercussions to the Lsel Ambassador on Teixiclaan. like, she is not put under arrest or under further surveillance, for some reason her cultural liaison is still her ally; she just sort of gets to run around? there is also a plot point where she ends up evading Information Ministry spies with the help of her liaison, an employee of the information ministry, to go find a back alley doctor to help her with [scitech stuff here]. when they get to the doctor we meet seemingly activist rebels who are suspicious of the government, but ?? they're neutral ground or almost scary; we never get their motivations. somehow, actively working against the government as an ambassador of a soon-to-be-invaded-entity does not involve engaging with any local rebellions or even asking what their politics are. again, it just feels toothless; but also unrealistically toothless because all the characters are political figures and none of them have any articulated or in-depth political opinions. so it just feels like shallow flowery court drama only, with the attempted gravitas of something more. the tech was also pretty grating at times, which i think would have been really easy for me to wash down or integrate if it weren't for the above more ingrained worldbuilding discrepancies. it felt really bad that this book sets up a central AI on this planet that monitors everything and controls transportation, and makes it clear everyone in society has 'cloudhooks' (aka google glass type things), but even evasive techniques that //we currently use today for our cell phones// - like throwing them away?? like turning them off??- are not used consistently or rigorously when the protags do illegal things or plot against high-level government figures. it drove me crazy that it's an open question on if the city police force, the Sunlit, are human or computer or android, even to the local citizens of the place, even to people 'in the know' (ie, the government officials that litter the plot). it felt bad that someone could sabotage a computer chip by scraping their especially sharpened fingernails over it in a way that it runs perfectly fine for 3 months and fails at a plot-specific critical moment. and on and on. i said above that i think one of the big ideas being explored here is falling in love with an invading, imperial cultural that is not your own and reckoning with that, and that that is an interesting idea to explore. i think it didn't actually go anywhere here though. i think the places it did go felt especially unrelatable in this current political climate. the ambiguity of thinking of yourself as a barbarian and wanting to be civilized, while still knowing that this is propaganda, that this is empire at work; would have been an interesting resonance right? like immigrant relations to america perhaps, like an investigation into soft power on the brain. Mahit the protag is simply too nice to Teixcalaani culture for someone who grew up knowing its object is to conquer and to call other cultures barbaric. it felt weird how surprised she seemed about her own sadness when she was faced with micro-aggressive reminders that she doesn't belong. i expected a thicker skin or again, more cynicism, more survival instincts in a quasi-colonized person. felt unrealistic !! overall this book felt like that thing where someone fell in love with a world and a 'vibe' and with their characters, and wrote from that place, without doing enough legwork to set up or introduce this world or characters to a reader and convince them to love it too. and also again just not enough or maybe not the kind of political thought for what the set up of this book is! anyway i think this is probably fun and court intriguey but not to my taste!! ...more |
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Mar 14, 2021
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Mar 26, 2021
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Jul 09, 2020
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Paperback
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| 076539135X
| 9780765391353
| 076539135X
| 3.91
| 13,246
| Feb 06, 2018
| Feb 06, 2018
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i had some stylistic quibbles but by the end this book won by over by what it was interested in, and how good a job it did with bouncing ideas off of
i had some stylistic quibbles but by the end this book won by over by what it was interested in, and how good a job it did with bouncing ideas off of each other. structurally this book feels like that thing where someone writes a really good short story and it takes off so they write a whole book, which i don't mind, but it does mean it's split into basically 7 short stories that are from different points in this human colony's history. stylistic beef: some of the hand is just a little overplayed, there was something almost young-adult-novel-y about say, the section where one of the charas kept observing that it was a perfectly quiet day and everything was working exactly as planned for several pages, when it was extremely obvious that everything was in fact going to go to shit. cognitive aesthetic beef: i think the premise of plants using chemicals to manipulate their surroundings, and specifically the animals around them, is good, but i do think this the sheer power of Stevland, this sentient ancient bamboo, seems a little ridiculous. it is seemingly able to generate any medicine or chemical that is helpful for the plot, including ones effective on not only one but two different species not indigenous to the planet, so like, there were moments that felt more fantastical in the "we have this semi-worshipful relationship with a wizard" way that undercut the sciencefictional elements at times. i had a bit of a skeptical reaction at first (more later) to some of the ways violence is deployed in this work, as well. the second story describes a revolt by Gen2 humans against Gen1 humans. Gen1 humans - who established this colony called Pax explicitly on the grounds of not wanting to recreate Earth-ly violence, war, etc. - hide information from Gen2 and abuse/murder/rape them to keep them in line politically, which just doesn't make any sense, or belies a laughably pessimistic view on how humans work. the sheer gore-violence of the serial killer plotline in a later short story also just felt kinda weird to me at first blush; you'd think you'd want to talk about how to contend with murder and violence in an attempted utopia in a more nuanced way, other than nobody-was-wrong, this person was "just sick" line. however there was a lot of play in this book that i really enjoyed that vindicated these bits later. (1a) really fascinated by the flickering between plant/animal and "citizen" throughout. Stevland as a member of his species regularly "keeps" animals; this is sort of the central extrapolation of this book, the way that plants can create chemicals to induce bugs to idk, eat pests or bring it pollen or whatever. Stevland keeps animals the way humans keep cows, or dogs, or whatever. Over time he has his own gratifying character arc of ascribing to Pax's values, human values, and becomes himself a citizen, making a leap from ecosystemic "mutualism" to sentient "society" that was pretty cool. in general that's sort of the knife's edge that Pax and Stevland walk; he relies on them to live and they on him, but the humans are repeatedly wary on relying on him because if he makes the food, and the chemicals in the food, and the medicines they rely on, then he really can just control them like animals, hack their biology, or just blackmail them. Stevland in turn before learning citizenship is all about controlling humans biological and societally so they can better serve him. the materiality of this situation never changes; Stevland does rely on humans and humans rely on Stevland; but over time darwinian mutualism turns into society based on values, right? so that's really cool, this interest in making a "leap" from nature to society, or pointing out that the line between the two is thin indeed, or even perhaps asking why we in our world don't consider what the plants and animals around us "have a right to", given that we literally rely on them for our survival too. (1b) the introduction in the later chapters of the Glassmakers, the aliens that came before humans, makes this whole thing more complicated as well. Pax - with its pacifist values - doesn't want to kill the Glassmakers, and explicitly wants to ally with them. when the Glassmakers attack the Pacifists do not kill them, but do drug them via Stevland and then take literally all their clothes and tools. this is explicitly a way to coerce them to cooperate; if they are willing to join Pax and become Citizens they are allowed their clothes back. there's definitely this undercurrent of basically de-sentientizing them until they are willing to become sentient the way the humans are; citizenship. there's this underlying biology here too; ultimately the Glassmakers who still have a matriarch of their family (in the biological queenbee sense) are able to be civilized; the "Orphans" who have lost their matriarchs are cruel torturers, unwilling to speak to humans, and are ultimately slaughtered like animals; or even slaughtered by nature. the humans don't kill the Orphans, but Stevland entices a native hunting animal pack to come and finish the job. so again this flickering of sentient to animal and back; the underlying deciding factor being this biological fact of motherhood. the serial killer arc also ends with the discovery of a brain disease; you become a murderer and a non-citizen when your biology is unbalanced. you become a citizen when your biology is balanced with the ecosystem around it. there's just something super wacky about this , but compelling. (2) other thing i really enjoyed seeing played around with was what role secrets play in a functioning society. the initial rift between Gen1 and Gen2 is because Gen1 hides both the truth about Earth - afraid to teach their children the realities of war and sin in case they Get ideas - and about the Glassmaker's city; which they deemed too dangerous because of Stevland. other secrets are that Tatiana fails to stop the serial killer because instead of announcing anyone was murdered she thought it'd be safer to keep it to herself so nobody would suspect her of investigating. Sylvia murdering the first moderator (leader) to become a better one is sort of a original sin that is passed on from moderator to moderator until Stevland finally announces it to everyone at the end of the book. so there's something there, i think, about trusting people with knowledge, perhaps. idk, but definitely fun to think about. (3) the key role that having a relationship with the animals on this planet as well as the plants was really interestingly depicted. partially because they stay pretty agricultural, there is always a "fippmaster" who has to be wolf-pack style become the alpha of the "lions" that the villagers rely on for things. the fippokats are domesticated as well but are smarter than any animals from Earth, and basically dig holes and stuff but think they are playing games. the plants Stevland talks to and also needs - he convinces the turnips to grow food for the humans, etc. are on a very gradated line of intelligence as well, from extremely stupid and barely sentient to full on personalities. much like in Children of Time, this alien world where sentience isn't black and white and so you have to negotiate and think about the world around you's intentions and needs urges the reader to re-think how little shrift we are giving to the living things on our planet, right? the idea of making a "contract" with your livestock or your food supply is just v compelling to me. v readable, and an easy read as well ...more |
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Oct 14, 2021
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Oct 18, 2021
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Jul 09, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0345467175
| 9780345467171
| 0345467175
| 3.92
| 4,121
| 1975
| Mar 01, 1995
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bit of a campy ending but this book is really good. just incisive takes on the way big data feeds into consumption and the construction of a consumer
bit of a campy ending but this book is really good. just incisive takes on the way big data feeds into consumption and the construction of a consumer personality, leading to the dissolution of a personal self and community. i will say this book is good in the way it articulates the psychological and sociological impact of a data-driven society and government, as opposed to blowing me away with any revelations in and of themselves. there are so many cool moments in this book so here's potpourri about it. it just feels so pertinent? but it was written in 1975?? so that's fucked up. the big one is Brunner futurecasting that the future would be everyone is trackable by their phones and credit cards and has a data profile sitting on a global network and that that makes it very hard to drop off the map and hide. i was also stunned at the depiction of a government infrastructural failure to help millions of people displaced by 'the Great Bay Quake' because there wouldn't be profit from it. granted parts of it feel idyllic and campy because of its age, too. for example, the fundamental articulation of people being estranged and disillusioned from others because the economy is increasingly designed to keep people moving from place to place and keep people from knowing their neighbors is good. the hard-edge that this is specifically because it is easy to transfer your mail, your job, and your physical belongings and travel is cheap because of technology all the time feels? i mean it always feels a little bad when the dystopian bureaucracy in a book is still way better than the existing bureaucracy irl. the interstitial debates between freeman and haflinger was hard for me to follow because i am lazy, but it was still really interesting. just setting up critiques of numbers-driven, profit-margin governance, and poking out homogeneity and measurability of citizens is one of the goals of government, and and and -- so dense !! worth dissecting !! also, foucault! it was hamfisted but there was an interest in character in this book that i really enjoyed. it was a classic arc where the protagonist starts as a total loner and can't have any ties to any place or person because he is on the run, and learns to ask for help and rely on other people. i think it just felt charming because i had low expectations for a book from 1975, but it was really nice and satisfying to have a woman berate a dude for being unnecessarily and unhelpfully independent and have her be depicted as in the right. on a more ideological note the utopian town of Precipice was just really cool against Nick Haflinger's independent streak; he starts the novel wanting to do a revolution all by himself, and it does take a community to bring about change. i also really enjoyed Freeman's flip from government interrogator to ally. NB i do think race is sort of old in this book. Brunner brings up whether people are black or not and takes pains to explain that most people are cool with mixed marriages but it's still a little contentious in this world. i get the sense he was swinging for intentionally non-white world-building, like having the mayor of the utopian town of precipice be black. freeman also ends up being a critical good guy, but it still shocked me every time Brunner described freeman's black and skull-like evil smile. i was really charmed by the idea that after the arms race and brain race there'd come a time when there was the wisdom race, and that all these countries are fighting to tune their populace for wisdom but in the dumbest most data-driven hyperrational way possible, which obviously doesn't work. i think there's a kernel of optimism that wisdom is something our societies will intentionally pitch for, and perhaps a hint of pessimism that we'd have the hubris to believe it is achievable in a measurable, technological way. there is something interesting about the solution to future shock being to slow down. i still don't know entirely what it means. the book doesn't really show that part, it just shows the takedown of the government network itself. the revolution without the aftermath. Brunner certainly is not pointing back to some sort of pre-technological state, i feel. the little hint we get is some sort of computer-based populist voting system on two policies: (1) elimination of poverty via computer-based distribution systems of money and food (2) a complex algo for determining salary by usefullness and difficulty of the job. this is very campy and at this point the book had gone off the rails for me a bit because Brunner made it seem so easy (Freeman seems to build this algo whole cloth by himself and nobody is mad about it and there's minimal angsting? trusting in the population to say yes to making life better for everyone this easily when *gestures at everything around me * ). but yeah, a computer based planned economy is part of this. i think slowing down was clearest in the town of Precipice, in that people actually stick around for years and years here, and it is a 'paid-avoidance zone' - aka it gets a government stipend for not getting the latest technology and infrastructure (another 'the dystopia is better than our world' because imagine at least getting paid for not having a train line in your city). people in Precipice have many jobs as opposed to just one, and help each other out with their jobs without being paid. a real commune. Brunner does depict a life that is slower, and without any downsides to the slowness. the other thing i liked about this book is that ever since Haraway i'm always a sucker for human-animal relations. Precipice has a pack of extremely smart dogs (gengineered, sharkjump) that provide childcare and defense from local 'tribes' (gangs of kids) and are somehow also part of governmental decision making, vetting people before they're allowed to settle in Precipice. I just like when a better configuration of society involves more kinship with non-humans. it sort of feels like a mindfullness exercise; if you're extending kinship and community to nonhumans, you're more appreciative of your ecosystemic place in the world and how you are part of a interconnected species-level community. Kate, the wise woman who teaches Nick how to ask for help and be loved and shit, also has an animal companion. One effect of her having this lion is that it slows her down; she stays in the same place and doesn't move because she can't move a lion across state lines. There's this piece of worldbuilding that people rarely have children or will swap or abandon their children because their lives are so busy and they move around so much; Brunner points to having dependents as part of being grounded and living a full life, and how the capitalist fast life including having only shallow personal attachments. read this book! it's hokey but it has one hella heart of gold! ...more |
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Jan 07, 2021
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Jan 15, 2021
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Jun 29, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0380813947
| 9780380813940
| 0380813947
| 3.48
| 6,773
| 1996
| Jan 23, 2001
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hard to say i disliked this book as much as it isn't for me , but also i think maybe this book is just very polarizing generally? generically it has e hard to say i disliked this book as much as it isn't for me , but also i think maybe this book is just very polarizing generally? generically it has elements of magical realism, and is intentionally very open-ended about (1) this global conspiracy to use malaria to achieve immortality (2) the full extent of the powers and mechanics by which malaria can be used this way (3) what even happens to any of the protags by the conclusion of this book. i think the surrealism and the inconclusiveness can skew unsatisfying, but idk! i can kinda see how that'd be ok to some other reader, in like a book that is a poem or a book that's just vibes way. thematically i think this book was trucking in some Very interesting philosophical ideas about colonialism and colonial science, about 'western' forms of knowledge and non-western forms of knowledge. but it was pretty damn smoky. there was this sort of ongoing theme about Silence, about this cult that worked in the shadows to get Western scientists on the right track about malaria so that the cult could harvest the fruits of a more concerted effort towards the right research tracks; that seemed to be opposed to non-silence, this obvious paper trail of journals, papers, and diaries that these Western scientists leave behind. it seems pertinent the man that Muragan fixates on, Ronald Russ, is not even a scientist who is interested in science as much as a hobbyist interested in prestige, visibility. it obviously is very pertinent that the way this cult influences Western science is by being native assistants and batmen to these Englishmen in colonial India. however i think the whole set up of a cult of eastern people doing mystical shit - complete with a ritual involving the decapitation of pigeons - does smack of orientalism itself, so who can say. structurally i think this book can be considered weak technically, in that it does that arthur c. clarke-ass thing where it's just chapter-length guy monologuing the history of the study of malaria, complete with pull-quotes from primary sources and exact dates. however i think there's enough style and the information being relayed is compelling enough that it's really not like, viscerally wooden to do it that way. i was really interested in *how* this book was science fiction. i didn't have the sort of detective-fiction mechanism of using science/logic to resolve a mystery, nor did it have a "novum" and play out the ways some new phenomenon affects society or reality; i think it just was about this historical moment in malaria research and seemed to be interested in saying something about science/knowledge itself as a social practice. however i think the other thing about this book is that the mechanism by which it is trying to transfer what it is saying about science/knowledge is not through a "cognitive/scientific" metaphor either, which tends to be the case in science fiction. this itself is probably "the point"; all these scenes about trains disappearing, all this lack of resolution about the actual motivations of the cult or how they use malaria to become immortal, all these literal scenes of smoke and chanting without explanation, is itself i guess a statement to the reader of how we don't get to know things, i guess? that works because of this blending moment, where we do know things about malaria and we're learning about how malaria research is conducted, and then it fades out into this no-knowledge-zone? so i guess that's something. idk, weird one! ...more |
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Sep 14, 2021
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Jun 10, 2020
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| 0553384945
| 9780553384949
| 0553384945
| 3.90
| 424
| May 28, 2013
| May 28, 2013
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hey this was a lot of fun, defo an improvement from the second one. spoilers throughout. i really enjoyed that it was a followup to the consequences o hey this was a lot of fun, defo an improvement from the second one. spoilers throughout. i really enjoyed that it was a followup to the consequences of the first in that the bose-einstein relays that knit the UN empire together are failing because the protag, Catherine Li, incidentally was involved in stopping the mining of BE material. i liked how the consequence of that is sort of a degeneration into highwaymen and piracy. and that's where it gets really really fun, because Moriarty just fucking gunned for a full on space pirate adventure with the direct aesthetics of the 1800s, w ppl's names like Avery and Llewelyn, and the AI mind palaces being all Victorian era inflected, etc. so i really enjoyed the middle half of this book for being the classic navy-man-turned-pirate, betrayed-by-his-second-mate shit. i thought there was something truly interesting about how Most of the space ship AIs are women. as in, these AI are grown and choose their own names and genders. this is because the book is ultimately about how the UN navy is enslaving AIs, gaslighting them into fighting the war with the syndicates in a very literal way; the Victorian set-dressing mind-palace metaphor where the AI 'lives' becomes about doctors and unwanted injections and not being told what's happening other but being told she is very sick etc. at the end it is explicitly revealed what we as the reader already knows, which is that the spaceship AIs are fully sentient and not just subsentient-but-pushing-it, and the crime of creating life in this skewed way for politics/warfare/domination is called out as one 'that doesn't have a name yet' and idk ! something about creating a category of person that's position/purpose (killing ppl you have never met within a society structure you are not a part of) is intrinsically untenable and having them sort of instinctively choose to be women just had a lil som som going on. i liked it. mostly this was popcorn pirate fun with sort of cheesy character studies, so i was pretty onboard for the double sciencemagics of (1) 'the drift', this region of space where physics works weird so FTL still works (2) literal alien tech stumbled upon rotating a planet that allows quantum parallel processing. also as is my fav it's very clear Moriarty really did her research to make it sound authentic. I was also really into the idea of 'wild AI' that jumps quarantine, and genetically platformed AI as a concept! that was so cool, that our DNA is complex enough to support a host of information and processing that servers and computer chips could not. the sort of cyberpunkmanifestoadjacent fusing where the wild AI infection is slowing down humans and technology alike on a space station - causing flus and infections And air purifier failures etc. - was just genuinely fun. i thought the character work was really great too, again in a popcorn fun way. i really bought the complexity of Cohen as a character, especially for Catherine. there's a lot of love in their relationship and then there's the fact that he's a 500 year old AI that's personality is huge and fractured and has these manipulative and overwhelming aspects, and the genuine truth that she set aside her life to be for him, etc. the narrative choice to break him up post-death and also to break Catherine up into multiple ppl and let these contradictory parts of themselves really see the light individually was really cool. Llewelyn was also really great as this sort of complex figure who is lonely and disciplined and repressed and goodhearted and those bits all just sort of collapse him into an broken person by the end in this cool way. anyway there are a few things to quibble with, but the classic one is the ending comes up suuuuuper fast, a little too fast. llewelyn sort of j disappears from the plot. korchow and arkady are sort of shoehorned in there and get like a scene or two to acknowledge their arcs of sorts but it feels like a whole side story was cut on that front. but catherine/caitlyn's endings were still satisfying. i'd say this book was really fun and readable! i mean there are definitely really dark , angsty, and hard parts but it's wrapped up in this television-y pirate-y thing so it comes off lighter than it would be on a much closer inspection or darker spin, so not too hard to swallow at all. ...more |
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Aug 08, 2021
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Aug 16, 2021
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May 21, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0553586254
| 9780553586251
| 0553586254
| 3.80
| 1,050
| Jun 2006
| Jun 26, 2007
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wow this book was meeesssssyyyy it got increasingly problematic and distracting that the setting is that it's like 2400 and palestine and israel are at wow this book was meeesssssyyyy it got increasingly problematic and distracting that the setting is that it's like 2400 and palestine and israel are at war (again, after 200 years of peace), and depicting palestine as sort of in an equivalent and symmetric actor to israel in this war. chris moriarty is jewish, and i have no idea what her politics are really, but what i got from this book was that sort of insipid apathy or two-side-ism that itself sort of takes sides, right? at one point a character remarks something like "nobody knows why these wars start up again". so clearly a book that wouldn't touch on the settler colonialism aspect with a ten foot pole, doesn't think of it that way. and the book is primarily about both israeli and palestinian spies and soldiers and spymasters who are kind of the same flavor of bad and good and conniving, just on opposite sides, no super clear political motivations about the war they are embroiled in, no opinions on ppl from 'the other side', this political situation is just happening to them. i think it was especially grating with Gavi, who is half-Palestinian and half-Israeli (which feels like one of those eye-rolling as-fate-would-have-it liberal parable set ups), but whose nationality is Israeli, and who married a Palestinian woman ... and had a son with Palestinian citizenship ... and it's like ... why ... are you in the highest echelon's of the Mossad then ... bro ?? like political motivations-wise why is this happening? ultimately the most groan-worthy part was that the whole thing is resolved when Cohen 'wakes up' the emergent AI networks that have been powering both sides' flesh-and-bone-armies by?? downloading onto it a huge repository of testimonials from The Holocaust?? so the rogue AIs put a temporary stop to the war? which just feels like a wildly cheap thing to do with the Holocaust, some really mid-2000ts pulp. whew. lots to unpack there and i'm not gonna. so obviously long dark shadow there. i think the other issue was this book felt like that thing where the author built really elaborate backstories and emotional patinas for all these characters in her notes, but only put in the emotional payoffs in the book itself, so they all seem shallow. for example, by the time the book starts it has already been 2 years since a disastrous spy mission ruined the israeli spy Gavi's career and broke his relationship with his squadmates and the AI Cohen. but we don't see it, not even as a flashback, and we don't get more than a few sentences about it from Cohen's perspective. It's clear that the squadmates and Cohen physically seeing Gavi again is supposed to be this huge emotional impact scene, but it doesn't hit right because the history isn't heavy enough for the reader. a lot of moments happen like this. in general like in the previous book, the plots within plots were a bit too whirling and yanking the reader from scene to scene , or maybe i'm just stupid, so hard to follow there. but what did fuck was the non-set-on-Earth stuff. the Syndicate research ship exploring an obviously terraformed, abandoned planet and all the inter-team tensions was just fun. this series i think is fun in the popcorn sense 85% of the time, and that really delivered here with all the inter-party tensions. was a little disappointed about depictions of Syndicate life, in that i feel like she took 'society made of just clones' and went flat-socialism-critique on it a little, borrowing cultural ideas like lots of committees and structured conversation time that reminded me of "struggle sessions" more than anything and fear of being deviant lest you get sent to a 're-norming center'. but i did like the bits of worldbuilding there, like that the older Syndicates have more 'human' values and the newer ones are like, "why don't we have a clone-based caste system? what's wrong with that?". other worldbuilding was also cool; i liked the political tension between Earth and 'the Ring', literally a ring of technologically advanced humanity orbiting earth and enforcing a tech embargo on Earth for its own political benefit. i liked the consequences of infertility in the Earth human population and how that is itself a threat to the Syndicates, who need fresh genetic variation but don't want to implement it themselves, of course. i liked the detail about how much water Earth gets to keep vs the Ring gets to harvest is calculated on its population, and water is therefore heavily measured out. so idk, this is problematic popcorn fiction with like fun scifi tropiness in it. i'll read the third one, it's like cozy and easy to read. ...more |
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Jul 13, 2021
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Jul 23, 2021
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May 21, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0553586246
| 9780553586244
| 0553586246
| 3.79
| 2,501
| Oct 2003
| Nov 23, 2004
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absolutely a hidden gem, this book rocks on so many levels. spoilers throughout. extremely high quality writing at the characterization level mostly. absolutely a hidden gem, this book rocks on so many levels. spoilers throughout. extremely high quality writing at the characterization level mostly. i think in today's era everyone would be talking about it because the protag is a queer POC and all the lead characters are (casually) women and it directly addresses the idea of AI-operating-in-human-society being pangender. but the protag Catherine Li is just so intricately rendered, a very convincing internal look at someone who is very guarded for so many reasons. she's a genetically engineered human pretending to be 'normal' in a society that fears and exploits 'genetics'. A cybersoldier devoted to the military out of an Extremely well-rendered sense of it being stable and normal compared to her previous life as a non-citizen in a miserable mining planet. full of weird trauma from being a veteran. the fact that she is a 'genetic' that interacts with other 'genetics' but also fought on the side of the 'humans' against the breakway genetic Syndicates in the war, becoming an iconic butcher at the bloodiest zone of battle; the fact that she is hiding the fact that she's fully 'genetic' and not merely 1/8 (legally she is only 'human' because she claims her grandmother on one side was 'genetic'). idk! it's just so interesting. it definitely has a really authentic sense of displaced race / diaspora to me tbh. i really liked the moments where she and other genetics search each other's faces, clocking a phenotypic similarity that belies a shared historical origin, but not really sure what to do with this information because so much history has happened since that origin, so many weird divisive political moments. the other character thing that worked is that there's probably the best romance thread since KSR's Mars Trilogy throughout. Catherine and Cohen's relationship just makes a lot of sense? but also is popcorny in a good way, i really bought the like, earnest all-powerful AI who loves freely and is vulnerable because it is easy to be vulnerable when you're 200 years old and limitless vs. a PTSD-ridden human woman who is super cagey and rebuffs the AI a bunch first. the tech was super cool also. god this book had everything. genetic stuff, a really strong cyberpunk streak. it's a future where 'Bose-Einstein condensates' are mined, providing raw material for quantum entanglement to be used for instant communication and travel. the universe is networked and stim-sim is strong; you can have dinner with someone halfway across the galaxy and taste/feel over the network. the world is ridden with AR *and* VR for the super wired like our protag, and it's v convincing and cool. the AI is also great; Cohen is so well written to be convincingly sentient without collapsing into just being a human inside a bunch of servers. there are pieces of him, loved the scenes where Moriarty takes parts of him offline because of networky reasons and his affect etc change. the worldbuilding is also so good; between the implications of quantum tech, the AI emergent factions, the breakaway 'genetic' Syndicates, the intricacies of the UN, the Incredible idea of there still being this horrible mining planet where miners are being exploited, with their own unions, vs the cultists around the BE condensates, and on and on. it's so rich and space opera-y and i love it a lot. it's just a fun book for book reasons. like the fight scenes are bomb, and it's a murder mystery about who killed the most eminent quantum physicist and why, and there are intricate political plots. i do think the back half got away from me for a few reasons; for one i definitely got that thing that happens in noir where instead of piecing things together both the character and the reader are just being thrown from one confusing scene to the next, or maybe i'm just stupid. for another i was a little unenthused by deus-ex-BE-condensates are a weird mystical hive mind alien that can commune with AI and human alike as the ending to this book. it is a little too goofy when the rest of the science is so hard. also fundamentally the idea of 'naturally occurring quantum entanglement rock' is a little pulpy, collapses a bit under the weight of it being sort of just a scifi skin over 'factions exploiting and fighting over a natural resource' as a narrative thing. however the political implications of 'natural resource is alive, is first contact' discovery seem so spicy; so i'm v excited for reading the sequels. finally, idk! i'm a little suspicious of the Syndicates. it seems the 'genetics' rebelled and then just went on to form their own evil corporations that are still making clones they sell back to human society as abusable labor? which sort of defeats the purpose/intention of rebelling i'd imagine. we don't get much of their perspective, what their moral/political values are. so maybe hoping for more color on that also. again underappreciated/talked about imho! read this book. ...more |
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Jul 04, 2021
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Jul 09, 2021
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May 21, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1447273281
| 9781447273288
| 1447273281
| 4.30
| 135,129
| Jun 04, 2015
| Jun 04, 2015
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i think this book was fun and had some baller worldbuilding moments, but kind of spotty in places, too. i really appreciated the dedication to biomater i think this book was fun and had some baller worldbuilding moments, but kind of spotty in places, too. i really appreciated the dedication to biomaterial technology because spiders make silk and insects have pheromones to communicate. i thought that was so cool, especially the tension between the spider's technological advancements as influenced by their biology, as opposed to dr. avrana kern's primate-biology assumptions; for example the utter confusion over what and why one would need a wheel. the novum of this book, a virus that encourages intelligence and kinship, was also just absolutely killer. his virus infects most insects on this terraformed planet, though the spiders are the most 'advanced'; ultimately this leads to the the idea by the dominant lifeform of the planet that other species could be intelligent and conscious on a sliding scale, a stark opposition to the human belief that only we are sapient. a worldview that encompasses the idea that cattle (for spiders, they use ants) are in their own way intelligent ripples out and influences how the spiders interact with all life and that's just sick as hell. there were a lot of moments where the tech fell on "symbols and tropes of science fiction genre you can take out of the box" vs a studied interest in hard science, and so therefore was camp i liked and camp i did not like. on the liked end of things is my ever-present appreciation for extremely long timescales, in this case on the order of millenia w cryogenics etc. i really liked avrana kern being this insane, fused ai-human even though i didn't buy that that's what would happen if a human was in cryogenesis watched over by an AI for millenia. similarly i loved the breakdown of guyen who seemed kind of like just an asshole captain at first but cracks under the strain of being the guy in charge of all of humanity, and makes a bid for immortality via ancient upload-into-ship-computer technology and starting a cult of his shipboard colonists' children to make it happen. as mentioned the worldbuilding was bomb; using genetically engineered ants to host an AI? growing spider muscles to act as pulleys? extrapolating from fire ants to ants that can brew molotov cocktails in side them? extrapolating from the tension of spiders as non-social creatures vs the upload virus that encourages kinship to make loose, libertarian-y cities with low governance and high might-makes-rightness? i was also very intrigued by the injection of avrana kern, human, into this equation; i liked how the first full on spider war was well past the industrial age because avrana kern starts encouraging them that they need iron, a human premise based on primate and Earth technology and resources, which is an actual resource that must be fought over as opposed to renewable ones like wood. something interesting there, i think. interestingly, the idea of these half-baked guyen AI ghosts running rampant through the ship's systems only felt kinda campy and incongruous because the evolution, social science-y stuff with the spiders developing consciousness/civilization was more detailedly explored/explained/grounded. i have definitely in other contexts taken AI mind upload totally at face value without feeling like it was a bit cheap cardboardy. maybe just a stylistic simplicity there, with how it was written, with the AI upload being too implicit and not trying to earn my belief. i think the other 'out of the box' thing that felt a little weird was this observation made early on by Holsten that the last ark of humanity, the Gilgamesh, had no society or culture, it just had the Key Crew which had a captain that was certainly not a governor, ship protocol but no law, etc. It really does just rest on Guyen's shoulders. A lot of the way things fall apart seem to stem from this central incompetence. maybe i'm a softie but i simply found this to be unbelievable, that humanity wouldn't have thought it out more, established some more rigorous system to for example, make decisions about whether to abandon a planet to the spiders or try to take it that isn't just deferring to one guy, or for another example, ensured some way of establishing or passing on culture or history. interestingly the poor planning here felt unrealistic partially because i think i have simply read other more well-thought out ship-society scifi n military scifi? so in that intertextual way this book just felt behind the times, like Tchaikovsky hasn't tracked the trends of post-apoc or military or generationship SF or whatever. similarly i felt like the biology was super behind. i kind of lost it at this fast-acting virus that could quickly change your brain chemistry such that within minutes humans are no longer grossed out by spiders and can see them as kin, in general tchaikovsky was working off of a v dawkinsian understanding of natural selection at the gene lvl that felt a bit silly, i think the idea of human beings being able to develop a universal 'upload virus' , aka there is a universal set of characteristics that regardless of circumstance can encourage the development of consciousness, was pretty pop SF in the michael crichton-y way. this didn't bother-me bother me, but i think again it made me evaluate parts of this book as "fun camp" and "bland camp" as opposed to not camp at all. also old school was all this extremely weird, kinda jerkoff-y male emancipation subplots. extrapolating from the premise that female spiders eat male ones, male spiders are extremely disenfranchised on tchaikovsky's vision of spider society. this is fine, though i think there is a bit of indulgent suffering porn in there that might have been a well-meaning attempt to do a gender inversion of woman's oppression? but came off weird. but anyway what actually put me off was that men ultimately gain civil rights because one male genius, Fabian, invents war technology so enticing that he is able to leverage an entire city-state into giving men rights so they can have it. this rubbed me the wrong way because it's such an obvious engineer-hero power fantasy that one man can just be smart enough to make society change. i assure you sheer demonstrable talent does not, historically, solve patriarchy. he doesn't go as far as to say that all these women spiders stop being misandrist because of one guy, which helped. my other quibble is a style quibble; for some reason this book softly breaks the fourth wall when writing about the spiders. i think i'm very used to close third person, so it is weird to see sentences kind of like "[SpiderProtag] wouldn't recognize that this beetle is a close relative to a beetle from earth of the Scarabaeidae family ...". i think it just made the spider sections come off as this first-SF-novel-gotta-explain-the-science thing that wasn't as interested in the spiders' internalities as much as just raw worldbuilding at first? this fell off as the story and setting became more established. though on the subj the other thing is that i did sort of fall for Holsten's angst about being the last historian in all of human civilization, but it did feel weirdly narrow because presumably many, many civilizations and their histories and cultures had already disappeared before the dredges of humanity got on this ark ship. the idea of a universal history that can be lost felt a lil chauvinistic or low-granularity vs the reality that there are many cultures and many systemic reasons some might be more preserved than others. ultimately though, the ending got me good. i am a sucker for this setup and punchline; (1) the humans assume the prisoner's dilemma, that they cannot negotiate across this enormous cultural gap with the spiders, and must attack first. the scientist emphasizes repeatedly that the prisoner's dilemma crosses all culture, is just pure math (2) the spiders have a different worldview because of biology and circumstance and for them the idea of a communication gap that cannot be fixed is not as easily grasped; they have been doing cross-species communication with crabs, ants, beetles for millennia (3) peace can be drawn because the spiders do what they have always done, bio-hack the alien until the alien is useful and not dangerous, extend it the generosity of assuming they are thinking and useful and collaborative. as mentioned the virus itself feels a little cardboard but the idea is good! the idea is just nice. it flows nicely with all the socialist ecology stuff i've been reading. it's utopian and i'm into it. i'll read the sequel but i'm not racing to do it! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 19, 2021
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Sep 04, 2021
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May 13, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0765300966
| 9780765300966
| 0765300966
| 3.76
| 4,214
| Jan 2006
| Oct 17, 2006
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this book was good but has some v concrete flaws that latch on to, maybe ! Complaints first. i think the central premise - of an alien species who don this book was good but has some v concrete flaws that latch on to, maybe ! Complaints first. i think the central premise - of an alien species who don't know charity, selflessness, or equality + coming upon Christianity and learning through this religion to challenging their own cultural norms - is impossible to extricate from narratives justifying christianity's hand in colonialism, so that was definitely buzzing in the back of my mind the whole time. some of the writing was a little clunky around the science - Flynn felt the urge to identify technology and scientific concepts by name for the audience in a really awkward way - for example, when the priest is shown listening devices he decides they look like insects and calls them 'listening bugs' ... by this method he names 'mikro-foneh' and 'bits/bytes' etc etc ... that a 14th century priest names tech exactly how we do is pretty excruciating and kinda broke the worldbuilding /fourth wall too hard to me tbh the present day has these utterly insufferable characters, seemingly for no reason. Tom and Sharon absolutely despise each other, and Sharon doesn't think her life partner's field of study is valid and is constantly dismissing it. at first i thought there might be a point to the fact that they hate each other, but ?? there really didn't seem to be one at the end. i mean i think Flynn was maybe going for something about how fields of study being overly concrete would cause blindspots, or how there are always things outside your paradigm that fall through the cracks, and have Sharon the physicist and Tom the historian stand in for their fields? but definitely just made me unnecessarily heterophobic instead. Judy Cao was i think a weird character - the idea of a younger researcher - especially an Asian one - hitting on an older established white professor is one of those eyerolly academic male fantasies. The fact that she is Vietnamese + references her family having to live as refugees on a boat for years completely unprompted just seemed ?? like one of those representation gone wrong sort of things. some of the characters go pretty 'easy', which I think bothers people sometime. Manfred is a very wise and easygoing feudal lord, in that convenient way that allows the Krenken aliens to be horrified and inspired by how much freedom(???) peasants have (??) . On the other hand, this book is again seemingly intentionally touching on themes of perspective and context. I feel like Flynn wanted to kind of debunk the flat 'feudalism was just straight oppression that peasants accepted' take and dug into the nuances of the rights peasants did have, and their understanding of the social contract, and the differences between different types of non-nobility and their lifestyles. Dietrich's secret background seems weird? i dunno he was clearly a leader in a series of pogroms and that was his dark backstory by which he claws himself back into the light kind of, by self-exiling into a backwater and becoming a priest. for one thing when you google armleder massacres it's clearly an anti-semitic historical event, so it seems extremely revisionist to imagine one of its leaders that considers it a populist revolt against the rich, which happen to include Jews, instead of just being directly and virulently antisemitic. the Jewish people who show up in this book do feel just like ? little plot pushers for the Christian's moral development in this way; Dietrich meets a Jewish man and just sort of like, becomes slightly more able to believe Jewish people are equal to Christian people? rough one There's something going on here about feudalism vs populism that might be worth unpacking but also might have just been part of a tapestry of complexity-feeling-ness that didn't try to go anywhere. Dietrich is as mentioned part of a populist revolt against "the rich". There are scenes of Manfred being sued by his peasants, and discourse on the limits by which he is allowed to profit from their work, discussions about the rights peasants have and how as a group they consent to Manfred's rule, discussions about despotism being bad ... but again nothing really head-on. by Krenken standards of "killing people who disobey" and "might-makes-right", Manfred seems pretty weak as a leader, and later by Krenken standards the peasant life is relatively free of stratification. one Krenken attribute is that it seems they are compelled perhaps genetically to have leader classes vs worker classes. they claim they evolve from bugs - and are compared repeatedly to grasshoppers - so maybe am ant or bee thing? the lowly Hans is beaten and looked down on by his own Krenken leader Kratzer, and revolts against him midway through the plot, but ultimately the book depicts him loving his old master. something's going on that's supposedly complicating 'oppressor-oppressed' into some sort of 'confusing social contract perhaps gone a bit sideways', and it smells kind of sus but i also haven't unpacked it. that being said the rest of the 'hard SF' components were extremely appreciable to me. I really like how Father Dietrich, with his 14th century parisian education, is able to still have scientific conversations with Hans, an alien technologist from a civ capable of interplanetary travel. It seemed like Flynn took a lot of pains to depict how a 14th century educated man could map an our-science-level-adjacent understanding of the world onto experiments he has himself seen or read about from his contemporaries. I liked that a lot. the Krenken themselves were really cool in that sort of soft-touch-alien-implications way; implications that they romance in triads; implications that they believe in 'genetic' station, the way their mouths work, etc. in addition to the hard-science stuff it feels like a very complex world because Flynn clearly really put points into historical research. i liked all these medieval people talking politics about popes and church doctrine and local feudal squabbles and how all of it matters so much to them, though not to the plot. idk! just grounding. i thought the physics was a bit hokey but i Did love cliology, the field of using math and statistics to guess where civilizations or towns or cities would/should have sprung up. in general the science field problem of 'all my models say a town should have existed here, so why isn't there one or why isn't there a historical record of one ?" being the kick off to discovering Eifelheim is just ... really cool ... i was reading the Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the same time, and this book literally shoutouts Kuhn, and I really wanted to read Kuhn into this book. Obviously Hans knows 'more' than Father Dietrich in a lot of these conversations. However, Hans is never really able to explain his scientific understanding not only because Father Dietrich doesn't have the scientific training Hans has had, but also because Hans hasn't had the scientific train Dietrich has had. They don't share paradigms, so they sort of talk past each other as opposed to Hans being 'ahead' and Dietrich being 'behind'. They are able to speak at all because they both do share a base set of values around science, like around proof, or around the idea that maybe electricity is a field of study that exists. The result is this pleasingly fresh thing where Father Dietrich is never absolutely dazzled by Hans' technological prowess and know-how. He approaches all this clearly advanced science and tech with an acceptance that this is probably explainable and achievable, though his civilization has not yet achieved it. Nor is there this techno-scientific Renaissance sense that these aliens will completely transform society with their tech. Hans and Dietrich are in a way equals in that they are both scientists; it's sort of a pleasing subversion of colonial first contact, of the primitives "pre-science" and utterly uncomprehending and agog. the thing about using the black death as a jumping off point for writing about sacrifice and humanity and how you still matter even if you're fated to die is that Connie Willis' the doomsday book is already just very very good. but this book did it fine. i did like character-wise how the Krenken, starving to death, learn charity or salvation, in parallel to the humans plaguing to death. the idea of a shared faith? value-system? around death and sacrifice and charity was in fact very touching and a good play. so all in all i think this book tried + succeeded to be heady but was defo p clunky in places! ...more |
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this aged super well. the themes were still truly interesting and the writing was extremely funny. it is hard to triangulate a response to these stori
this aged super well. the themes were still truly interesting and the writing was extremely funny. it is hard to triangulate a response to these stories, i think, because generically they are sort of fable-satire-parables, and i don't know nearly enough about the context in which stanislaw lem was living to really get a sense of many of the angles. i think what i really enjoyed about this collection is how pertly it sat on top of and therefore totally elided existing canon about robots and planets and machines. this felt like science fiction while being utterly devoid of scientific rigor. like we've been here before so don't worry about it: it is the future, and our constructor heroes can build anything and their machines can do anything and materials are limitless. and against this backdrop of a given scientist-thinker-builders' individual power, the worlds are still monarchical and bureaucracies still stagnant and police states still blind-brutal and the masses are still oppressed; science has not changed this wholesale and each story is sort of how Trurl and Klapaucius get out of the binds set upon them by sapients in power. what makes this still 'feel' like scifi is that i think these stories talk about science and progress. a lot of them are about civilizational advancement, and if it is possible, and how to best organize a more perfect world, and this utopian streak, or critique of utopian streaks, does have a long SF lineage. one specific story that charmed me was where Trurl outwits a space pirate who demands knowledge, not gold, but building a machine that spits out an endless stream of information. however, of course the pirate is totally paralyzed by this mountain of info and literally buried in it; big data without organization is useless feels like a science-fable ending to me. there are stories about whether or not constructed beings or clones are 'real', and there are stories about trying to identify if someone is a human or a robot, and there are stories about how to live after achieving a perfect society where nobody works ... idk! everything is there idea-wise but wrapped up in this charming knights-princesses-kingdoms fashion that belies some really complex classic questions. a good time ! ...more |
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