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115th out of 468 books
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1,440 voters
Amnesia Moon
In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny second novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.
It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Mel...more
It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Mel...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
August 8th 2005
by Mariner Books
(first published September 1st 1995)
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Jonathan Lethem did it to me again! I am not a great fan of science fiction but I enjoyed "Amnesia Moon" just as I enjoyed "Motherless Brooklyn" and yet do not read many murder mysteries. Here is one gem from the book, "Vance being real doesn't mean the aliens are, said Fault. It's just another dream, Everett. What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort." This is a story about a lost, single man named Chaos who discovers t...more
I have several recurring dreams that haunt me. One that I have at least once a month has me living in a rotten, fetid house. There's mold, insects, falling beams, trash...a vile, vile place. And according to that dream, I have lived there for some time.
I've never been able to understand why I have this dream. What does it represent? I've consulted those silly dream books, watched a few things, and thumbed through a few new agey magazines. Should I buy the pyramid power cap or not? I am leaning t...more
I've never been able to understand why I have this dream. What does it represent? I've consulted those silly dream books, watched a few things, and thumbed through a few new agey magazines. Should I buy the pyramid power cap or not? I am leaning t...more
A protagonist, in search of his memories, travels through a world that may or may not have suffered a global catastrophe after which people have become able to alter reality with their dreams. Whether or not you should read this book depends on what you want out of it. Here is a quote from Lethem that might help you decide:
"Cornell Woolrich, one of my favorite writers, was the master of the paranoid amnesiac plot, in which protagonists would wake up not knowing what they’d done and spend the ent...more
"Cornell Woolrich, one of my favorite writers, was the master of the paranoid amnesiac plot, in which protagonists would wake up not knowing what they’d done and spend the ent...more
Chaos is holed up in the projection booth in an abandoned theater in Hatfork, Wyoming. He’s become a bit of a de facto public enemy in the aftermath of whatever happened—nuclear fallout, plague, civil war, who knows—but his position is all Kellogg’s fault. Kellogg runs the supply trucks but he also runs the dreams. When every citizen, be they human or slightly unhuman, closes their eyes, they all dream the same dream, in which Kellogg is often a mythical hero and Chaos an archetypal villain. Tho...more
Because I’m obsessed with rhythm, I’ve started reading Jonathan Lethem’s books in order, from first to latest...as I do with pretty much all authors from whom I start reading more than one book. “Amnesia Moon” is the second Lethem book and I liked it as much as the first.
This book can only be called science fiction noir. It takes place in a futuristic world. A world where you’re never quite sure if Chaos is living in a reality or a dream world...where the lines of Chaos and Everett blend and mi...more
This book can only be called science fiction noir. It takes place in a futuristic world. A world where you’re never quite sure if Chaos is living in a reality or a dream world...where the lines of Chaos and Everett blend and mi...more
Each chapter we learn more about Chaos' world yet each chapter we know less. Amnesia Moon is a trippy dystopian novel that follows around Chaos, a movie theater dwelling survivor, in his trek to find what is wrong with the world, and what is wrong with his memories. Lethem effectively throws us into a weird place with memories that can't quite be counted on and situations that take a few paragraphs to start making sense. The characters are all well defined (when appropriate) and I was always int...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Finished reading the (supposedly) post-apocalyptic Amnesia Moon which I really liked. Lethem's world-building is similar to these other New Weird writers, Jeff van der Meer and Michael Swanwick. The idea of hinting at a world that is bigger than the protagonists who walk through it, or rather of how any world presented in fiction is a fragmented world (best done in Viriconium, if I remember right). While Lethem has some sci-fi elements to his narrative, most of it is the spiralling journey of se...more
As the cover says, futurist road trip noir written in obvious homage to Lethem's hero, Philip K Dick. An American world completely transformed by a disaster which could be, but somehow isn't quite, a nuclear holocaust. Chaos, the hero, breaks out of his refuge in the mutant town of Hatfork to find out what has happened, and discovers in his travels that reality now has the quality of dreams dreamt by mysterious, dominant dreamers. Finding out here they are is the moody, discontended task of a re...more
Gosh Lethem. I love so many things about you, but every now and then you stumble and it's hard to watch.
This is the fourth Lethem novel that I've read. It is not as good as Gun, With Occasional Music, though it's certainly not as meandering as You Don't Love Me Yet. This one is very clearly his love letter to Philip K. Dick, an author I enjoy, so I'm fine with that.
Having recently read PKD's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - with all of its dreams-within-dreams and resulting confusion - I fou...more
This is the fourth Lethem novel that I've read. It is not as good as Gun, With Occasional Music, though it's certainly not as meandering as You Don't Love Me Yet. This one is very clearly his love letter to Philip K. Dick, an author I enjoy, so I'm fine with that.
Having recently read PKD's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - with all of its dreams-within-dreams and resulting confusion - I fou...more
more like a 3.5 rating, in between 'liked it' and 'really liked it'
nice read with fantastical-dream elements good for if you're waiting for a flight or in the line at the DMV
reading this, you're very much just along for the ride. i found it absorbing and entertaining, but will concede it doesn't provide a lot of closure. This didn't bother me so much as it wasn't a massive work, but I would almost feel better if it were a less-answers bare-bones story work rather than a practically full length n...more
nice read with fantastical-dream elements good for if you're waiting for a flight or in the line at the DMV
reading this, you're very much just along for the ride. i found it absorbing and entertaining, but will concede it doesn't provide a lot of closure. This didn't bother me so much as it wasn't a massive work, but I would almost feel better if it were a less-answers bare-bones story work rather than a practically full length n...more
In a line: not as inventive as it thinks it is, but definitively strange.
Or: Cloud-Atlas lite.
Or: Nightmare Invisible Cities.
Certainly the general concept of Amnesia Moon is solid; I'm all for multi-hued-dynamic-post-apocalyptic-landscapes, but at many points the novel begins to feel just a little too smugly pleased with its own surrealism. While reading I was driven by a great sense of unease. Not unease like "The Road," where I was perpetually worried for the main-characters, but unease where...more
Or: Cloud-Atlas lite.
Or: Nightmare Invisible Cities.
Certainly the general concept of Amnesia Moon is solid; I'm all for multi-hued-dynamic-post-apocalyptic-landscapes, but at many points the novel begins to feel just a little too smugly pleased with its own surrealism. While reading I was driven by a great sense of unease. Not unease like "The Road," where I was perpetually worried for the main-characters, but unease where...more
Well, it is phildickian, but it's also a lot like Ursula Le Guin's homage to PKD, The Lathe of Heaven. It's something of a post-apoc road novel, but if you are looking for The Road, look elsewhere. The characters in this novel mainly come across as boho stoners, which is fine, because that's the kind of novel that it is. Every town seems to have befallen its own apocalypse (some nuclear, others alien invasion) and they each have their own bizarre rules. There's a dude called Cale who can only be...more
Jan 11, 2009
R.
marked it as to-read
Features Little America, Wisconsin. I still have a card I picked up at a hotel there (2002); featuring a penguin pointing to phone numbers for road conditions, highway patrol, the sheriff in Green River, the hospital and the Little America fax machine. One fax town. Yes. I-80 Exit 68. See ya, there mutants!
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I did not like this book at all. Usually if I don't like a book I can say that even though I don't like it someone who likes X type of book might. I just didn't get this book at all. I can't tell you what it's about because even after reading it I still have no idea. It made absolutely zero sense to me. I could tell from the first page that I wasn't going to like it because it is somewhat post-apocolyptic, and I never like those kinds of books. However this was even worse than that because nothi...more
It is always difficult to read an early book by a writer without being influenced by the quality of the later works. That said, this is an early work in many ways, yet well worth reading.
The dream-like plot reminded me of Steve Erickson's novels, as well as the laisse-faire approach to plot. Now, I have never minded Erickson's handling of plot because the logic of his narratives seems more archetypal. In Amnesia Moon, the plot seems to reach a moment where resolution is possible, and then falls...more
The dream-like plot reminded me of Steve Erickson's novels, as well as the laisse-faire approach to plot. Now, I have never minded Erickson's handling of plot because the logic of his narratives seems more archetypal. In Amnesia Moon, the plot seems to reach a moment where resolution is possible, and then falls...more
Chaos, also known as Moon, lives in a post-apocalyptic America, or perhaps some other reality. Reality, however, is shaped by dreamers, and Chaos is a latent dreamer. He sets out on a quest to find a better way to live seeking not only truth but also, as it turns out, community and family.
One way to read the book is as an analogy about postmodern society. In this view, reality is created by us, that is by social consensus. This certainly includes dysfunctional aspects. In the book, the dysfuncti...more
One way to read the book is as an analogy about postmodern society. In this view, reality is created by us, that is by social consensus. This certainly includes dysfunctional aspects. In the book, the dysfuncti...more
Generally I never would have picked up this title because science fiction is not my cup of tea, but it was a book club selection so I grabbed a copy and dove right in. I was surprised to find myself quickly engrossed in the "post-apocalyptic travelogue." I genuinely enjoyed the beginning of the book, but found the end to be a major disappointment. It almost seems like Lethem just ran out of stem. He created a world filled with dreams, mind control, fur covered girls, and robot evangelists but in...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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Amnesia Moon is a very surreal post-apocalyptic story about dreams and memories. It's essentially what you'd get if you asked Philip K. Dick to write the great American road trip novel. It starts out a bit difficult to get into, especially if (as I have) you've grown a bit sick of the staples of the post-apocalyptic wasteland genre. A good portion of the book has Chaos wandering around aimlessly in a sort of indifferent daze, as though he were stoned the whole time. Many of the other characters...more
"Amnesia Moon" is excellent sf in the tradition of Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick. In keeping with that style, Lethem's surrealism is much more overtly on display than in his later works. Combining elements of post-apocalyptic fantasies and near-future science fiction with questions of dreams, reality and existence, "Amnesia Moon" is difficult to pin-down. It traverses close to where the reader may expect but never falls perfectly in line. It asks questions, but only hints at answers. The sen...more
*sigh* I just typed a review, but then accidentally deleted it. I don't have enough to say about this book to make it worth retyping, so I'll just sum up:
I didn't "get" this book. The first half seemed potentially interesting, but the second half seemed to wallow around in a muddled plot involving dreams. Because I only read one chapter a night for a few days, I lost track of what was dream and what was real. Alas, I didn't care about the characters or the original plot enough to sort it all out...more
I didn't "get" this book. The first half seemed potentially interesting, but the second half seemed to wallow around in a muddled plot involving dreams. Because I only read one chapter a night for a few days, I lost track of what was dream and what was real. Alas, I didn't care about the characters or the original plot enough to sort it all out...more
I'm increasingly fond of Lethem. I've read him totally out of chronological order, but found this, his second novel, I believe, almost my favorite (I still like his latest, Chronic City, with its slight turn away from hyper-fantasy). The ending disappointed me a bit, but it reminded me of Christopher Nolan's latest movie, Inception. Actually, the whole novel did, in many ways: the sharing of dreams, levels of reality, dreams within dreams (they even inject a solution to share certain dream reali...more
Amnesia Moon proves once again that Lethem has great difficulty finishing a book. In this case, however, it's unclear whether the ambiguity is a curse or a blessing.
Though Amnesia Moon's strange and psychedelic dreamscapes never recieve a good explanation, it's almost better than if they had. Truly great science fiction is so tied to the reality of science that it's refreshing to read a novel in which the fiction plays a more important role, but the book doesn't suffer from the same trite fantas...more
Though Amnesia Moon's strange and psychedelic dreamscapes never recieve a good explanation, it's almost better than if they had. Truly great science fiction is so tied to the reality of science that it's refreshing to read a novel in which the fiction plays a more important role, but the book doesn't suffer from the same trite fantas...more
i wish i could give this book more than 3 stars. but i just can't. it seemed like a book that fit into the specific framework of modern story-telling, the formula, the writing, the outline. it was just so... tidy. and i hated it that way. i figured if he ran with it, just took the idea of existentialism and subjective reality and ran with it, pulled the characters with him, it would have worked. however, it wasn't a complete waste of time, it was enjoyable and a great imaginitive story from a gr...more
The book was hard to get into, because it seems to start in the middle of a story and is very confusing. But, once I got into it, it was really interesting (although, to be quite honest, I still don't understand what it's about) because you are constantly trying to figure out what happened to the main character and what happened to the world in general. The stories are interesting, the characters are interesting, but I found I was left wanting much more. I actually felt Lethem ended the book in...more
First of all, I love being dropped into the middle of a story and having to figure out what's going on--seriously. Secondly, Lethem's got an easy-to-read style that just flows well and gets the pages turning right away. So, knowing all that, why only three stars?
Unfortunately, my interest started waning toward the end. I'm not sure if the book actually became less interesting, or if it was a matter of lost momentum for me: I had a busy weekend where I was hardly able to get any reading in, and w...more
Unfortunately, my interest started waning toward the end. I'm not sure if the book actually became less interesting, or if it was a matter of lost momentum for me: I had a busy weekend where I was hardly able to get any reading in, and w...more
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Amnesia Moon takes you on a wild careening ride through dreamscapes - exploring the mutable nature of reality. At the center of this collection alternate worlds the character Chaos is the connecting thread - reacting to and creating our shared reality. This is my favorite Jonathan Lethem book despite the fact that I didn't care for the ending. After the beautiful expansive worlds unfold and draw you in - the ending seems constrained and self conscious - but don't let that stop you from enjoying...more
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JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of seven novels. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harpers, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among others.
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