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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
|
date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1857230744
| 9781857230741
| 3.99
| 27,316
| 1969
| 1992
|
The meagre 2* is more a reflection of my enjoyment rather than an objective measure of the book (it has won prestigious awards). It wasn't to my taste...more
The meagre 2* is more a reflection of my enjoyment rather than an objective measure of the book (it has won prestigious awards). It wasn't to my taste, and that was exacerbated by mismatched expectations. It is not really sci-fi, but is part political intrigue and part boys-own adventure in an inhospitable climate. The setting is another planet in the future, but right from the start, mentions of rain and reign contributed to the non-sci-fi feel. There were some some fascinating ideas, but I felt they weren't really developed. Also, the multiple names of many people and places made it a little less reader-friendly than it might have been. PLOT Genly Ai is a single human envoy sent to very cold planet (Gethen, aka Winter) to see if the humanoids there want to join the inter-planetary alliance, the Ekumen (etymologically related to "ecumenical"). He isn't first contact, but he is the first overt contact. The idea of him being alone is that "One voice speaking the truth is a greater force than fleets of armies", and also that although the planet might change him, he won't be able to change it. The planet does not have a single government, and Ai inevitably becomes enmeshed in power struggles between different realms. He starts off in Karhide, and compares subsequent events and encounters in Orgoreyn with those in Karhide. The other main character is Estraven, a senior courtier in Karhide, who is the second narrator. SEX This is the book's USP: not people leaping in and out of bed with each other, but the fact that the Genthenians are ambisexual: most of the time they are both/neither sex (hermaphrodite neuters, or more positively, potentials or integrals), and when they go into kemmer (like being on heat), they can be either. It's easy and convenient to pigeon-hold people based on sex, and Ai understandably struggles with that framework not applying. One manifestation is linguistic: he admits defeat and mostly uses male pronouns (in part because he often meets people in male-associated roles, such as King), but it makes it hard for the reader to view the characters as anything other than male. Feminine qualities are rarely mentioned, but when they are, it is invariably pejorative, which feels strange coming from a female author. For example, "effeminate deviousness", "sullen as an old she-otter", someone's behaviour was "womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit". Furthermore, an earlier female investigator from Terra comments, "A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated... On Winter... one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience." For Ai, awkwardness extends to distaste: "It was impossible to think of him as a woman... and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture." Much later, there is grudging acceptance: "I saw... what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him". Gethenian sexual behaviour and taboos are necessarily different from those typical on Earth, though this includes very relaxed (though still regulated) traditions regarding incest. DUALISM In some ways, Winter is a very samey planet with one season and one/no gender (being fixed in one of two sexes is considered a peversion, though is tolerated). Does that make Gethenians more or less complete than Terrans? The title of the book is said to come from a Handdara poem, and after hearing it, Ai says to Estraven "You're isolated and undivided. Perhaps you are obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism". The phrase is also likened to the duality of yin and yang. WAR There are feuds and rivalries on the planet, but no war, and no word for it. This is curious, but not really explained, other than that in Karhide hospitality, "The stranger... is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbour", along with another dig at women: they don't have war because "They lacked... the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals in that respect, or women"! They may not have a word for war, but they do have 62 words for snow, so The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax continues... ;) TRUTH The book opens with the narrator brazenly stating that "Truth is a matter of imagination", facts are not fixed, so the reader "can choose the facts they like best". However, although the book is mostly told in the first person, by either Ai or Estraven, there appears to be little contradiction in their accounts, so the point is wasted. Ai's people have developed mindspeech (telepathy), which clearly limits the scope for privacy and lying, but apart from one scene, this is another lost opportunity. RELIGION The first-person narratives are occasionally interspersed with snippets of Gethenian folklore. Two religions are mentioned: Handdara, which is "a religion without institutions" and which involves meditation, trance-like superstrength (dothe) and foretelling. The other is more monotheistic, and mentioned rather less. The predominant religions and consequent (or caused) different cultures in the two countries may be a factor in their political differences. ALIEN WORLD A short appendix explains quirks of the Gethenian calendar compared with Earth's, but the only interesting aspect is mentioned on page one of the story: it is always year 1; all other years are counted relative to now, which is potentially confusing (though not in practice). Another curious idea (even more so nowadays) is that "Karhiders don't read much... and prefer their news and literature heard not seen; books and televising devices are less common than radios, and newspapers don't exist"! Gethenians are adapted to the cold climate biologically (enduring low temperatures) and socially, in that they live somewhat communally. Their technological development has been steady, but slower than that on Earth. They have no flying vehicles, and it's suggested that, lacking any flying creatures on the planet (not even insects?), the possibility never occurred to them. Karhiders also have an important system of protocol/face/etiquette, called shifgrethor, which is mentioned often, but somewhat opaque (which is fair enough, as it puts the reader in a similar state of disquiet as Ai is in). CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT There isn't much (it's primarily plot-driven), but some characters do change their opinions of others as events unfold. Although the King is often described as mad, he didn't seem particularly so. 42 I was reminded of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide", which is possibly no coincidence. There is a discussion of what sort of question one could or should ask Foretellers, including the danger of asking "What is the meaning of life?" In fact, they perfected foretelling "to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question". A FEW QUOTES * A powerful person "cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to. He knows it,and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur." * A grand palace is "the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale". * Patriotism is "fear of the other. And its expressions are political not poetical". * "my landlady, a voluble man" * "The coldness of it was perpetually incredible. Every morning I had to believe it all over again." (Shades of believing "six impossible things before breakfast" in Alice in Wonderland.) The blurb from the GR description says in the final paragraph that this is "science fiction for the thinking reader", so I guess failing to like it must be a fault in me as a reader, rather than Le Guin as the author!(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Apr 24, 2013
| May 2013
|
Apr 21, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0340837942
| 9780340837948
| 4.15
| 40,988
| 1966
| Mar 14, 2005
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None
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| not set
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Apr 17, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0312863551
| 9780312863555
| 4.15
| 40,988
| 1966
| Jun 15, 1997
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Recommended by Kyle. Apparently it has some interesting language-type things that make it unique. It's about (broadly speaking) a lunar prison colony,...more
Recommended by Kyle. Apparently it has some interesting language-type things that make it unique. It's about (broadly speaking) a lunar prison colony, and the book is written from the point of view of someone who speaks in a "Lunar" dialect. Fun stuff and political/social shenanigans ensue(less)
| Notes are private!
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0
| not set
| not set
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Apr 11, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0575079215
| 9780575079212
| 4.08
| 21,180
| 1969
| Aug 01, 2006
|
A clever, original and often very funny sci-fi story. It is about psychic power battles, the nature of death, alternative reality and changing the pas...more
A clever, original and often very funny sci-fi story. It is about psychic power battles, the nature of death, alternative reality and changing the past. Or not. FUN It was published in 1969 and starts off in a sufficiently plausible but amusingly implausible 1992. In particular, the clothes take the flamboyance of the late '60s to extraordinary heights, for no obvious reason, other than fun. On the second page, we meet a man wearing "a tabby-fur blazer and pointed yellow shoes", which is fair enough, but only three pages later, an elderly man wears "a varicolored... suit, knit cummerbund and dip dyed cheesecloth cravat". After that, you're on the lookout for them, so here are more: (view spoiler)[ * "gay pin-stripe clown-style pajamas" * "a sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel" * "electric yellow cummerbund, petal skirt, knee-hugging hose and military-styled visored cap" plus gauntlets. And that's a man. * "a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts" * "wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride" * "floral mumu and spandex bloomers" * "natty birk-bark pantaloons, hemp rope belt, peek-a-boo see-through top and train-engineer's tall hat" (a man, as most of these are) * "hip-hugging gold lamé trousers, yet somehow created a stylish effect. Perhaps the egg-sized buttons of his kelp-green mitty blouse helped... he exuded a dignity"! * "a shift dress the color of a baboon's ass" (a man) * "fuchsia pedal-pushers, pink yak fur slippers, a snakeskin sleeveless blouse and a ribbon in his waist-length, dyed white hair" * "the elastic band which - fashionably - compressed her breasts... had elegant embossed fleur-de-lys" * "tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and purple airplane-propeller hat" * "green felt knickers, gray golf socks, badger-hide open-midriff blouse and imitation patent-leather pumps" * A girl wearing jeans, a canvas work shirt and muddy boots is told she's "dressed oddly"! (hide spoiler)] Another distinctive feature is that every chapter is prefaced with a short advert for Ubik, and each one demonstrates a different and amazing use for the wonder product. Each ends with a slightly worrying caveat about only being safe if used exactly as directed. Twice, characters say "so it goes", which I assumed was a nod to the famous catchphrase of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), but both were published in the same year, so I guess it's just a coincidence. There is also mention of a dead parrot, but that can't be a nod to Monty Python as their famous sketch also dates from... `1969! Spooky, eh? Runciter's space transporter is called Pratfall II. PLOT Anyway, the crux of the story is the constant battle between people with psychic powers (such as precognition and telepathy) and "prudence" organisations that supply "inertials" who block such powers (often by using such powers themselves). Who are the goodies and who the baddies in such a setup: "A policeman guarding human privacy" or "trying to turn the clock back"? Glen Runciter is the larger than life figure who heads one such prudence organisation, and Joe Chip is his right hand man. Pat is a new recruit who can change the past in such a way that people don't even know it. She and Joe may or may not have a thing for each other. They and eleven of their best go to Luna for a rather mysterious job. After that, things turn strange: perceptions of reality shift, and time seems to slip back as well. Some objects age, some change, but not everyone's experience is the same. Are they going back in time, or is the past receding, or are they in some other reality? The only shame is that from this point on, the clothes are less mad. Joe is the principal character trying to work out what is going on, how to survive and so on. It's hard to explain further without spoilers. THE FUTURE Dick's 1992 is very commercialised: you have to pay for almost everything, though it's mostly coin-operated - even one's own front door! When someone couldn't find a coin and tried to dismantle the lock, it threatened to sue him! But on Luna, "All our medical care... is free. But the burden of proof that he is genuinely ill rests on the shoulders of the alleged patient." A few governments might like that idea, especially the word "alleged". Dick doesn't foresee mobile internet etc (who did?), but the pape machine is rather like a printer connected to the internet. HALF-LIFE Runciter's wife, Ella is at a moratorium, in cold-pac half-life. She died, or near enough, but is in cold storage which provides a sort of life-extension. Most of the time she's unconscious, but she can occasionally be contacted; how many times, over how many years depends on lots of factors around the death and the freezing. The moratorium and its inhabitants are significant plot elements, but are also used to explore the fuzzy boundary between life and death. Runciter consults with Ella, but how is this different from using a medium to consult the properly dead? Those in half-live can sometimes communicate with each other, "wandering through one another's mind gives those in half-life the only -", but they can't initiate contact with those outside. "'She exists... she merely can't contact you.' Runciter said 'A metaphysical difference which means nothing to me.'" MISCELLANY * "Herbert felt the weight of the hand, its persuading vigor". Runciter's hand (and vigor). * "Nothing touched his mind... He chuckled, but it had an abstract quality... his voice always boomed, but inside he did not notice anyone, did not care; it was his body which smiled, nodded and shook hands." (Runciter again.) * A messy apartment "radiated the specter of debris and clutter". * "On his face, a feral, hateful expression formed, giving him the expression of a psychotic squirrel." * "His voice had a squeaky, penetrating, castrato quality to it, an unpleasant noise that one might expect to hear... from a hive of metal bees."(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Apr 04, 2013
| Apr 12, 2013
|
Apr 04, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0575076917
| 9780575076914
| unknown
| 3.82
| 2,824
| 2004
| unknown
|
WOW! What a cracking - but crazy - read. I'm still reeling from it. It doesn't get muddled or daft and yet it has everything... really... everything:...more
WOW! What a cracking - but crazy - read. I'm still reeling from it. It doesn't get muddled or daft and yet it has everything... really... everything: time travel, spies, archaeology, cyborgs, a love triangle, wars, wormholes, virtual reality, a quest, death and sacrifice, murder mystery (with all the usual clichés lovingly included), nanotech, code-breaking, genocide, bodysnatching/ swapping, bootleg music, ecological disaster, white-knuckle chases, wraith-like horror characters, alternative history, secret passages, ethics of immortality, terraforming, some steampunk, a nod to Casablanca and an even bigger nod to (view spoiler)[The Truman Show (hide spoiler)], and the weirdest biological weapon I've ever heard of! It even has some strong and significant female characters, which is not exactly the norm in sci-fi. SETTING & PLOT It is primarily a detective drama in a noirish sci-fi setting. Whereas all the other Reynolds' I've read have three threads of story, this has only two: Paris in 1959 and Paris in 2266. The difference between the two versions of the city were enhanced because I read this before and after Mieville's "The City & The City" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), which is also a noirish detective thriller, featuring archaeologists and set in two versions of a city, albeit a very different sort of separation. Floyd is an impoverished private eye in 1959, whose excitement at the prospect of a case echoes my own feelings about the book: he "felt a weird sense of vertigo: a combination of fear and thrill that he knew he would not be able to resist. It would pull him deeper and it would do what it would with him." Similarly, there's a character who doesn't want to be a detective, but gets sucked in - just like the reader. One thread starts off as a slightly odd murder investigation; the other is a slightly odd quest to retrieve historical artifacts (though the most important artefacts turn out to be a rather bigger concept). As with any good thriller, what seem like trivial asides often turn out to be important later. WRITING STYLE As usual, Reynolds' story is told in a very visual way: at times it is almost like watching a film: the chases, the wraiths, and especially a nail-biting scene where someone is looking for a vital bit of paper that is not quite hidden (will they find it or not?). There are a couple of places where the exposition of backstory and science is explained in a slightly heavy-handed way (and a couple of the baddies are not much of a surprise), but those are trivial issues when there is so much good stuff crammed in barely 500 pages. THEMES When you climb off the walls from the relentless excitement, this raises many profound issues: * How do we know what is "real" and what is simulated - and does it matter? Who decides? (view spoiler)[Do simulants have the same rights and feelings as "real" people? How would you cope if you thought you yourself weren't real? (hide spoiler)] * If you could be immortal, or virtually so, would you want to be, and to what lengths would you go? * If you could have the (appearance of) whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, would you tire of it? What if you could even conjure things we can't imagine: "colours were unfamiliar (and heart-wrenchingly beautiful) , but she could hear them, fell them, smell them"? Four more (view spoiler)[ * Every archaeologist's dream must be to travel back in time to see and experience things first hand. But the risks - ethical, practical, psychological - are high. "As much as she longed for all the time in the world to explore it, she did not want to become its prisoner." * What are the ethics and etiquette of taking over someone else's body?! Once there, would you evict a friendly usurper if it meant they would die? What if they wanted to do something altruistic, but which imperilled you body: "My body was mine to throw away... [but] you just don't do that with someone else's." * If the Nazis had failed to invade France so that Enigma codes were not cracked, how much later would the computer revolution have happened, and with what consequences? * What are the dangers of digital (over physical) storage? Or maybe the past has nothing to teach us, so we can we live in the present and not worry about the past? (hide spoiler)] MISCELLANEOUS QUOTES * "New patterns would begin to emerge from the doughy grey of unstructured cloud... But right now the clouds were bickering. The patterns formed and decayed at an accelerated rate, with lightning of a kind of emphatic punctuation to the dialogue. The clouds fissioned and merged, as if negotiating age-old treaties and alliances." * "Charm was what he excelled at. If anyone sensed his underlying shallowness, they usually mistook it for well-hidden great depth of character, like misinterpreting a radar bounce." * On the dangers of studying maths too deeply (Reynolds was a physicist before turning to writing): "she had studied mathematics so furiously that after an evening manipulating complex bracketed equations, simplifying forms and extracting common terms, her brain had actually started to apply the same rules to spoken language, as if a sentence could be bracketed and simplified like some quadratic formula for radioisotope decay." * "like an electric shock without the pain... a sharp inquisitional light... it lasted an eternity and an instant." * "The trains waited with snorting impatience, pushing quills of white steam up towards the roof... Its red tail light spilled blood on to the polished surfaces of the rails." No technology is omnipotent even if, to quote Arthur C Clarke, it is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic: "In the presence of a wizard, she wanted miracles, not excuses." With this book, I felt the story was being told by a wizard with words; no excuses were necessary. WOW!(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 06, 2013
| Feb 13, 2013
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Jan 06, 2013
| |||||||||||||||
| 033053419X
| 9780330534192
| 3.89
| 14,996
| 2009
| May 06, 2011
|
Mieville is the sort of author I expect and want to like, but I didn't feel the love with "The Scar" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). This...more
Mieville is the sort of author I expect and want to like, but I didn't feel the love with "The Scar" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). This second foray into his works was far more rewarding, and my third, Embassytown, was even more so (there are some interesting parallels, too, which I've outlined in my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). I enjoyed the concept, the wordplay, and the impossibility of categorisation: it's a detective story, but it's set in a world that is not exactly dystopian or futuristic or fantastic - but it isn't quite realistic either! One of the characters sums it up nicely, "There's a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there's a dead girl." It is self-referential in another way: a book called "Between The City and The City" is mentioned several times. Very meta. ;) SETTING The title relates to a divided city that operates as separate cities, but it's not like Berlin, Budapest, Belfast or Jerusalem because (view spoiler)[the two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) occupy the same geographical space. Instead, the separation is psychological and sensorial: citizens of each learn to unsee, unhear and even unsmell anything from the other city. If they don't, they invoke the vague but terrifying wrath of Breach. There is also the mythical secret place/power of Orciny. (hide spoiler)] It is this brilliantly weird central premise that makes the book so good. If you don't know about it when you start reading it, the clues are gradually built up, but knowing it, as I did, didn't spoil my enjoyment. Ultimately, the division is maintained by consent, like the Emperor's New Clothes: "It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and Ul Qoma... It works because you don't blink. (view spoiler)[That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. (hide spoiler)]" Mind you, there is very limited political freedom in either city (UQ is a one-party state and in Besz, dissident groups are monitored - and both cities are under the mysterious power of Breach), so the idea of consent is somewhat moot. MURDER MYSTERY & THEMES This situation creates a variety of intriguing and sometimes amusing complications and paradoxes which hamper police operations. The impetus of the story is the discovery and subsequent investigation of a woman's body, and uncertainty about which domain the crime occurred in. There are disputed zones - shades of Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" and even when authority is agreed, the normal difficulties of solving a crime are compounded by the complexity of the two cities. (view spoiler)[It's difficult to get witness statements from people who are used to unseeing people and things, and who are ever fearful of accidentally seeing what they should not. There are even "Places that no one can see because they think they're in the other city". Chasing criminals without breaching is comical, but crucial. (hide spoiler)] "Smuggling itself is not breach, though most breach is committed in order to smuggle." These issues raise all sorts of questions about the nature and power of the state and its police (one of the cities - maybe both? - allows only one political party), and particularly about the relevance of intent in determining whether something is a crime. "Because you may not see the justice of what we do doesn't mean it's unjust" (neither does it mean it is just). COP DRAMA TROPES I'm not really a follower of detective stories, either on the page or on screen, but Mieville tips a hat to many of the clichés of the genre: good cop (Borlu)/bad cop (various, fluctuating, minor), the sparky relationship between partners (Borlu with Corwi and later with Dhatt), following hunches, breaking the rules for the greater good, messy love life, a few car chases and so on. The chapters are mostly short and punchy, and each ends with a revelation or cliff-hanger (or both). Yet it doesn't feel hackneyed, perhaps because the setting is so startlingly original. In fact, Mieville confronts the risk of cliché head-on, saying of one character "His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate". WORDPLAY AND WRITING STYLE Mieville has fun with neologisms and a few existing but esoteric words. At times he explicitly defines them when context and etymology make that unnecessary (e.g. gudcop and mectec), which is irksome, but nevertheless, some of the words are good. For example: * Grosstopically: (view spoiler)[Two locations, each in a different city, but occupying the same georaphical space in other terms. (hide spoiler)] * Topolganger: (view spoiler)[When grosstopical places look alike. (hide spoiler)] * Alterity: (view spoiler)[Alternative, a grosstopically equivalent place, "A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach". (hide spoiler)] * Insiles: Sort of the opposite of exiles. * Glasnostroika: Glasnost + Perestroika, and the cities have echoes of central and eastern Europe. * Gallimaufrians are mentioned: perhaps a nod to Dr Who? * Cleavage: The reason for there being two cities - in both senses of the word: "was it schism or conjoining"... "split or convergence"? * Crosshatching: A whole new meaning to a familiar word. As in The Scar, there are a few awkward or ugly sentences that I had to reread, but far fewer. A couple of examples (for my own reference more than anything else): "He came to UQ, from where he went to B, managed I do not know how to go between the two of them - legally I assure you - several times, and he claimed..." Just adding a single comma would make all the difference. "Unlike for my distance viewing of the night, up close the walls blocked off the site from watchers." There are others that are convoluted in a clever and amusing way, though: "I couldn't help fail to completely unsee"! I think my only quibble with the story-telling is the quantity of rushed explanation and exposition towards the end, rather as Goldfinger or another James Bond baddie would do. FAVOURITE QUOTES * A dead body: "skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh... like someone playing at dead insect, her limbs crooked, rocking on her spine... Her face was set in a startled strain. She was endlessly surprised by herself." (view spoiler)[* "Architecture broken by alterity... The local buildings are taller... so Besz juts up semi regularly and the roof-scape is almost a machicolation... laced by the shadows of girded towers that would loom over it if they were there." (hide spoiler)] * "Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary... had to observe it most carefully." * At an archaeological site, "Security guards, keeping safe these forgotten then remembered memories". * "the explosive percussion of the bullet into the wall... Architecture sprayed." * There is an unreal, almost supernatural quality of Breach (and their forces have a distinctive and intimidating gait): "The soundlessness was enervating... he was a cutout of darkness, a lack... clothes as vague as my own... Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out." And yet it turns out that Breach uses cameras to watch the fringes (shades of Peake's "Titus Alone"), when I was expecting something less tangible. * "Students might stand, scandalously, touching distance from a foreign power, a pornography of separation." * A helicopter is "percussion in the otherwise empty locked-down sky". * "Schroedinger's pedestrian... That gait... rootless and untethered, purposeful and without a country... He.. strode with pathological neutrality." DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE CITIES I didn't get hung up on which real world cities might have inspired this (I doubt there would be a simple answer). However, I was interested in the ways in which they apparently differed, the "intense learning of cues" required of all children (and the few tourists). "We pick up on styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself." Some colours are actually illegal in one city, and one is more diverse (view spoiler)[(UQ has more Asians, Africans and Arabs, and it has spicier food, whereas Beszel has a more potato-based diet) (hide spoiler)]. As a reader, one has to learn these cues very gradually. Even half way through I didn't have a very clear picture of the different appearance, culture or politics, other than that (view spoiler)[UQ was somewhat richer, more technologically advanced and with better archaeological sites (hide spoiler)]. Their languages use different alphabets and it is heretical to say they are the same, and yet they are mutually intelligible. Borlu, the hero and from whose point of view the story is told, is from Beszel, but I would rather live in UQ. MISSED A TRICK The book mentions fracturedcity.org - twice - but it just redirects to http://www.randomhouse.com/! GOOD BOOK TO PAIR THIS WITH I read this in the middle of reading Alistair Reynolds' "Century Rain" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Neither is typical of the author's works, but both are noirish detective thrillers, featuring archaeologists and set in two versions of a city, albeit a very different sort of separation. Reading one enhances enjoyment of the other. An interesting Q&A with China, here on GR: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5..., including references to TC&TC. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 17, 2013
| Jan 30, 2013
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Aug 20, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0345524497
| 9780345524492
| 3.82
| 7,949
| May 17, 2011
| May 17, 2011
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How can a novel about language leave one speechless? In a good way, I hasten to add! This was the third Mieville I’ve read, and they are all very diffe...more How can a novel about language leave one speechless? In a good way, I hasten to add! This was the third Mieville I’ve read, and they are all very different in style, content and my liking (or not). The core idea of this one is language: how minds shape language and how language shapes minds. Wonderful as it was, I can see reasons why some people would hate it, or find it too weird, or just not sci-fi enough. If you don’t delight in polysemy and are not interested in the difference between simile and metaphor, this is unlikely to be the book for you. Because of the tantalising style of storytelling, drip-feeding the reader snippets about things from the trivial to the fundamental, it’s definitely a book worth rereading, and that is especially true on the subject of language, to which I’ve devoted a whole section of this review (which I will doubtless need to rewrite after a reread!). The plot is to some extent secondary, but it is the reminiscences (going back to childhood) of a woman from Embassytown who travels, comes back and becomes enmeshed in the extraordinary Language (capital letter) of the alien Hosts. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The first section left me exhilarated but reeling. It was so vague and yet specific, nearly familiar, yet also strangely different, and in such an enticing way. It hints at all sorts of weirdness that I couldn't quite put my finger on (odd units of time and some odd typography in the pages ahead) and others that I couldn’t even get my head around (what are “alien colours”- related to Douglas Adams’ Hooloovoo, a “super intelligent shade of the colour blue”?). Even the names and numbers of the sections were hard to fathom, making the reader as disoriented as an ambassador in an alien land. This teasing bafflement continues throughout most of the book: Mieville doesn’t pad with early exposition, so the reader is fed occasional snippets about what things mean. Occasionally I wondered if I’d missed something, particularly things that were clearly fundamental to the book (e.g. what was special about the Ambassadors, what the Hosts were like, and what being/performing a simile means) but as I read on, and gradually learned more, I realised that was just part of the style of the book. Having just read Mieville’s The City & The City (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), I was also struck by parallels: there is lots about borders, separation, boundaries, outsiders, the strange duality of the city ("the Host city, where the streets changed their looks... not quite a hard border but was still remarkably abrupt, a gaseous transition.") and one character is "cleaved", when cleavage is a significant aspect of TC&TC. SENSE OF PLACE Embassytown is a trading outpost used by Earth (Terre) in the future. It is on a planet inhabited by the Ariekei, more respectfully known as Hosts. They have a unique Language (view spoiler)[that requires two simultaneous voices from one mind (hide spoiler)], and the Ambassadors are the translators. The Hosts are also experts at biorigging, so many aspects of the city and its technology are appealingly bizarre, giving a very strong sense of place, even though some aspects are left to the reader’s imagination. The immer is more amorphous concept of space or outer space, and Avice’s first experience of it is “impossible to describe”. “There are currents and storm fronts in the immer” as well as borders, but the usual laws of physics, and even direction, don’t apply. For instance, “in the first one [universe]… light was about twice as fast as it is here now” and some places are closer together in the immer than in the everyday. “The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation.” Also, “People get lost in the overlapping sets of knownspace.” NARRATOR Avice is an immerser (traveller of and in the immer). She isn't a fluffy, girly sort of woman, but I would have little interest in reading about her if she was. Even so, she came across as plausibly female to me, which is not something all male writers can achieve. She wasn’t especially endearing, and in the middle of the book she was often faffing around, trying to find out what was going one, but not actually achieving much. In particular, there are some key plot points where she relies on hearsay (“I wasn’t there but that’s how I was told it happened”), which is brave decision on Mieville’s part, though I think he just about retains her credibility. Despite those instances, she is central to the story, mainly in her childhood, and then towards the end of the book. THEMES Given that the Host’s Language is thought and literal truth, the most obvious theme is the nature of truth and lies and the question of whether we make language or language makes us. See the section on Language, below. I don't think we're meant to have a clear idea what the Hosts look like. Mieville drops little clues throughout the book, but it takes a long time to build up a picture, which remains somewhat fuzzy, but utterly alien. I think that's indirectly telling us not to judge by outward appearance. When newly arrived crew stare, unashamedly, at the Hosts, Avice recounts a theory that “no matter how travelled people are… they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race… our bodies know we should not ever see [them]” (Of course, the vagueness is also a teasing tactic, which entices the reader to keep reading, and avoids distracting from the main force of the story.) Related to that is Ehrsul: an autom who is Avice’s friend, albeit they rely on “all the exaggerated intimacies of our friendship”. Scyle can never quite think of her as human enough to be friends with her, whereas Avice pushes any doubts to the back of her mind. Maybe an autom who is TOO realistic is more unsettling than one that is clearly not human? On the other hand, “She only ever used one corpus, according to some Terrephile sense of politesse or accommodation… having to relate to someone variably physically incarnate would trouble us [humans]” and her apartment is decorated with pictures on the wall, so that visitors feel relaxed and at home. Would Ehrsul pass the Turing Test? The fact she runs on Turingware suggests she would, but perhaps it would depend who tested her, which then questions the whole nature of the test itself. Other aspects of what it is to be human touch more on Brave New World, and Soylent Green. In the latter case, the Hosts’ natural “last incarnation was as a food store for the young.” Having given that up, they “respectfully shepherd the ambulatory corpses until they fall apart”, despite their “dignified mindlessness”. The former (view spoiler)[ relates to the way Ambassadors are bred: identical twins, raised to be able to think, act and, crucially, speak, as one, as that is the only way to be understood by the Hosts (hide spoiler)]. Colonialism and all the socio-political and practical issues around it are central, though not my main area of interest. I saw many echoes of (view spoiler)[the Opium Wars, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_wars) (hide spoiler)] a particularly shameful episode in British colonial history. I suppose the main difference is (view spoiler)[that the Language Ariekei were addicted to (albeit a corrupted form) was something previously regarded as unequivocally good. Does that change the ethics of addiction, drug-pushing, treatment (“they might not be addicted any more but they’re not cured; they’re changed”), and do the means justify the ends? (hide spoiler)] IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE This is the heart of the book, but so hard to do justice to, but I’ll attempt it. HOSTS’ LANGUAGE The Hosts’ language (called Language) is the most important to the story, and it is wonderfully strange: it must be spoken simultaneously in two voices by a single mind: “The sounds aren’t where the meaning lies… it needs a mind behind it”. The Hosts themselves have two means of vocal output (cut and turn), but it’s more of a challenge for humans to utter it in a way that the Hosts even register as speech, let alone understand. The other distinctive feature of Language is that it is an utterly concrete and literal language: lies and multiple meanings are not possible: “For Hosts, speech was thought” and “Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language?” Side-effects of the strangeness of Language are that the Hosts have no system gestures nor of writing (Mieville accommodates the duality by writing simultaneous words above each other, like fractions). However, it’s not quite so straightforward or static as that sounds… SIMILES The Hosts use similes to express things that are not literally true – the catch being that the similes themselves must be concrete and must continue to be true. (“The man who swims with fishes every week” has to swim with fishes every week. If only the simile had been in the past tense, his life would be much easier.) Avice was a simile (“You speak Language. I am it”), but others were examples and topics, and later, Avice declares, “I don’t want to be a simile any more. I want to be a metaphor”. One puzzle is how the Hosts know they need a simile, let alone define it, before they have it in Language? Similes are the thin end of the wedge where truth is concerned: “Similes start… transgressions. Because we can refer to anything. Even though in Language, everything’s literal… but I can be like… anything… Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying.” It’s a relatively small step from “You are like x” to “You are x”. A metaphor is a step further: a lie that is the truth. LIES The Hosts can understand lies, and they also have a Festival of Lies, where they entertain each other by trying to lie. I was reminded Lister, in the comedy sci-fi, Red Dwarf, trying to teach the mechanoid, Kryten, to lie –using fruit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-NnV...). There are several tactics to lying; they tend to be incremental and often use similes: collaborative, going slow, going fast. But does lying have a moral cost – does it inevitably lead to evil? And what is “evil” in a non-religious place where some barely have a concept of the word? SAPIR-WHORF The ideas of Sapir-Whorf underlie much of this: “Without language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them”, with “hardly” being the crucial get-out. What about Hosts who lose the power of speech? “If they can’t speak, can they think? Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once.” Do we make language or does language make us? As the book progresses, some Hosts have a strong desire for the former: “We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.” Avice realises “Their longtime striving for lies [was] to make Language mean what they wanted”. Another way of looking at it is whether “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means”, as one character claims, or whether it’s cooperation, as another claims. OTHER LANGUAGE-RELATED IDEAS Other odd languages are fleetingly mentioned, such as Homash: “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes… which their interlocutors eat”. There is also mention of “Tactile languages, bioluminescent words… Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests [a favourite word of Mieville’s] of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy.” The quirks of Language affect the writing of the book. In particular, are Ambassadors singular or plural? The answer is both, even in a single sentence, for example, “Ambassador JasMin was in earshot and I made a point of asking them…”. This makes sense, the more you understand about them. The vagueness of some things, and the neologisms (see below) only added to the appeal for me: maybe I became a little addicted to Language? There is a wonderful passage describing the joy of a Helen Keller moment, when one who lacked the power of communication suddenly “got it”. A trivial surprise was that in a largely non-religious future society Christian-based swearing continues in recognisable form, “Jesus Pharoahtekton Christ”, whereas I’d expect the words to have morphed a little (like “crikey”). Finally, I’m not enough of a linguist to be sure of the truth of this, but it’s thought-provoking: “Sometimes translation stops you understanding.” SOME VOCAB Most of the coinages are thrown at the reader early on, and there is no glossary (this isn’t one either). However, the meanings are usually clear from context and common-sense etymology: Shiftparents, voidcraft, exoterre, biorigged, immerser (versus landstuck), plastone, bookware, newsware, alt reality, sidereal, monthling, basilisking (I love that one), oratee, augmens, datchip Less obviously: Floaking: “the life technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah”. Trid: This seemed to cover quite a lot of things, but all involved a video player/display. Miab: An acronym (view spoiler)[ Message In A Bottle, i.e. cargo from afar. (hide spoiler)] Floak is my favourite, and I think Mieville is fully aware of its appeal and the perils of overuse: ‘”Did they tell you I can floak?” I said. “I wish I’d never told them that fucking word… they just want the opportunity to say ‘floak’.”’ I also like the fact that "exot", which refers to exo-terre (of or from Earth) conjures strong implications of "exotic". MISCELLANEOUS QUOTES • “Like all children we mapped our hometown carefully, urgently and idiosyncratically.” • “Its surface sheened with the saft that evanesced out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing.” • “It was an insinuation at first, composing itself of angles and shadows. It accreted itself from its surrounds, manifesting in the transient. [Things] spilled toward and into the swimming thing, against physics. They substanced it. Houses were unroofed as their slates slipped sideways into a presence growing every moment more physical, more suited to this realness.” • Someone flirting was “using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics.” • “the gluttony of the architecture… the frantic eavesdropping of the walls.” • Because the building are biorigged, and thus alive, when demolition happens “construction site like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries”! I read this in part because of Betsey's review, focusing on the fact it's about language: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... An interesting Q&A with China, here on GR: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5... (less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 20, 2012
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| 3.94
| 4,733
| Jan 20, 2003
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The third in the Revelation Space series, picking up where Redemption Ark left off. I have been impressed by all the Reynolds I have read, but around...more
The third in the Revelation Space series, picking up where Redemption Ark left off. I have been impressed by all the Reynolds I have read, but around the half-way mark, this one was struggling to be worth 3*. However, it redeemed itself in the last quarter, to deserve 4*. Like many of Reynolds' books, this is a story with three main, interrelated, strands, though it is simpler than the previous two Revelation Space volumes - or perhaps that is just because there are so many familiar characters and fewer new ones. On strand is on the Juggler planet, Ararat, where Clavain, Scorpio and others ended up in Redemption Ark. A second strand concerns ultras looking for alien relics, though this one joins with one of the others about half way through. The third focuses on a moon called Hela, which is home to humans, many of whom follow (in a literal sense) a cultish religion trying to observe the occasional fleeting disappearance of their sun, Haldora. The book is plot-driven, rather than character-based, as is common with sci fi, and that is fine - until the plot stagnates, which was what I found in the middle: it became mired in too much detail of church hierarchies and infighting, without enough happening, and not even balanced by much character development. A decent editor would fix that, but perhaps Reynolds is too successful for his own good and does not need to submit to such indignities. Anyway, I'm glad I stuck with it; in the end it was definitely worth the ride. The church caravans are rather steampunky (shades of Mortal Engines), which doesn't feel very Reynoldsy, and their obsession with blood sometimes brings vampires to mind - "the threads of blood that bound them all". Mind you, I did like the fact that the most powerful indoctrinal virus was called Deus-X. The main themes are the related ones of life, death, extreme longevity, faith, artificial intelligence, and the nature of reality. Imagine what it must be like to know your belief comes from virus: "the feelings it brought were too superficial... He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuro-anatomy." Reefersleep coupled with life extension becomes almost like time travel: "'I wasn't made for these times', he thought. He had been yanked from the ordinary flow of time and now he was adrift, unmoored from history." And that sort of thing affects one's attitude to mortality, "In every significant respect he approached the matter of his own demise with the bored acceptance of someone waiting to sneeze." Technology does offer compensation, though: "The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan... because the ship knew him so well,m he had in a sense extended himself into it." Despite the distractions and imperfections, this does conclude the trilogy in a satisfying way, building on what has gone before as well as introducing new themes. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 22, 2011
| Dec 19, 2011
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Nov 22, 2011
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 044101173X
| 9780441011735
| 4.07
| 6,883
| Jan 01, 2002
| May 25, 2004
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Number two in the Revelation Space trilogy; you could read it as a standalone story, but it's better to read in sequence, and it helps if you've also...more
Number two in the Revelation Space trilogy; you could read it as a standalone story, but it's better to read in sequence, and it helps if you've also read Chasm City. This is a long treasure hunt for super weapons, conducted by two competing factions (though both have the same intention), with a life-or-death deadline. Although that is true, it does it an injustice because there is far more complexity and intrigue than that implies. Reynolds has really thought out his technology, worlds, people and how they interact and evolve over very long time periods. In fact, deceit and integrity are the main themes, with many characters living a lie (or several) and double-dealing, though it is never confusing. The context is a power struggle amongst the Conjoiners (also known as Spiders), who are winning a war against the Demarchists (democratic anarchy), while The Inhibitors are trying to destroy intelligent life once it embarks on interplanetary travel. This creates plenty of threads to the story, keeps it exciting and prevents it being a simple, butch shoot 'em up or war story. The ending (always tricky in the middle of a series) is particularly good balance: semi-satisfying if you have to wait a while before reading the final installment, but tantaliseing enough to make you keen to read on. Interesting ideas: * The practicality of a hive mind. The Conjoiners are a human group who have developed the ability to link minds, but also, and crucially, to limit it to some extent. There are some wonderful dscriptions: "Skade peered into his mind, glimpsing a surface slurry of recent experiences and emotions... Beneath the slurry were deeper layers of memory, mnemonic structures plunging down into opaque darkeness like great drowned monuments... Down at the very deepest level, Skade detected a few partitioned private memories... she was tempted to reach in and edit the man's own blockades... Skade resisted; it was enough to know that she could." And it affects emotions too, "He felt Skade's irritation bleeding into his own emotional state." When shutting it out/off, "he felt the million background thoughts of the Mother Nest drop from his mind like a single dying sigh". * Accelerated neural processing, which means someone could "watch an apple fall from a table and compose a commemorative haiku before it reached the ground." * Space wars are fundamentally different from those on Earth: "no element of surprise. But there almost never was in a space war... war in space was a game of total transparency. It was a war between enemies who could safely each assume the other to be omniscient." * Issues of extreme longevity. If you live for hundreds of years, should marriage be for life? Should youthful crimes taint later life or is it right to declare "There is no need for us to be puppets of our past"? Random quotes: * "In zero gravity, heads did not loll lifelessly... in space the dead were often difficult to tell from the living." * "The growths [melding plague, on a ship] had a mad artistry about them, a foul flamboyance which both awed and revolted... There were places where some major structure had been echoed and re-echoed in a fractal diminuendo, vanishing down to the limit of vision." * "For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars." * "I need to have a word - a serious word - with weapon 17." (I like that because it echoes the wonderful film, "Dark Star".) * "The symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalized stanzas of some [Vogon?] poetry." Inevitably, there are irritations, but they are minor, especially when you consider the length of the book. * There are a couple of sections where there is too much backstory in too short a time, in too unsububtle a way. * There is plenty of detail about all the many characters and yet most of them still lack personality. For example, although there are strong and significant female characters, they could be men, if it weren't for their names and the use of her/she. * In other books, I had wondered at how little mention there was of relationships (not that I want gory or slushy details in sci fi). This book demonstrates that Reynolds is best avoiding them. Antoinette and Xave's love scenes are awful and the sexual tension between a couple of other characters is just banal. * Characters make Biblical analogies (the Promised Land, the Lamb, the prodigal son), though I'd be surprised if they would be understood so far away in time and space. * There is an implausible reliance on paper documents and pneumatic tubes on Resurgam, even allowing for the fact it is a relatively poor and backward planet. Similarly, a doubt about paternity in as more advanced community could be easily solved (even with current technology). * Too many dead people aren't really dead, or only slightly and/or temporarily so. I don't object in principle but it gets irritating when done to excess. Overall, another riveting Reynolds. (My Revelation Space review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....)(less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 08, 2011
| Sep 10, 2011
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Aug 08, 2011
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| 0712358315
| 9780712358316
| 3.96
| 26
| May 03, 2011
| Jul 15, 2011
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A very faithful version of the exhibition at the British Library (and a good substitute if you can't visit). It is lavishly illustrated with covers an...more
A very faithful version of the exhibition at the British Library (and a good substitute if you can't visit). It is lavishly illustrated with covers and plates from books in the exhibition. It looks at the history of sci fi, chronologically (from Homer's female robots to cyberpunk and Avatar) and also thematically (alien worlds, time and parallel worlds, virtual worlds, future worlds, the end of the world, and the perfect world). It constantly puts stories in the political and social context that gave rise to them and turns them round to ask what they tell us about people at that time and also about ourselves. It was good to see firm favourites, but also to be introduced to new authors, or even to learn more about ones that I knew about. On a trivial note, I was intrigued to see the earlier term scientifiction used in the 1930s (funny that it never caught on) and William Gibson's definition of cyberspace as "consensual hallucination".(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 18, 2011
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Jul 18, 2011
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| 4.44
| 1,582,800
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| Jan 05, 2009
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If I were a teenager or recommending this to a teen, I might give it 3*; as an adult, I give it 2*. PLOT It's a potentially exciting but gruesome story,...more If I were a teenager or recommending this to a teen, I might give it 3*; as an adult, I give it 2*. PLOT It's a potentially exciting but gruesome story, but most of the characters were rather flat, much of the plot was predictable (it's not hugely original; in particular, it is VERY similar to the Japanese "Battle Royale"), and there were too many flaws in the plot. I fail to understand its very high ratings. Post-apocalyptic America (Panem) is divided into a wealthy and technologically advanced Capitol and twelve subsidiary districts of oppressed people who exist in dire poverty, with inadequate food, housing, and health care and hardly any technology. To reinforce the power of the Capitol by instilling fear in the population, once a year, two children from each region are selected by lots to fight to the death in a reality show. If that were not bad enough, the whole thing is utterly corrupt in multiple ways, plus the public bet on the outcome, and sponsors can sway the results. Did I mention these are children? (Some are as young as 12, though the narrator is 16.) A compulsory full-body wax on a teen seems rather pervy and who would want to bet on, let alone sponsor a child-killing tournament, even if it's by helping one of the contestants? As the book keeps reminding readers, one person's survival is only possible by the death of all the others. CRUELTY TO CHILDREN I realise that horrendous things are done to children around the world every day (extreme poverty, child soldiers, sexual assault, genital mutilation etc), but in none of those cases is the sole intention that all but one child dies, and nor is it organised by the government for a sick combination of sport, entertainment, punishment and profit. Humans often lack compassion, but I was never convinced by Collins' world - especially the fact this outrage has continued for three generations (it's the 74th games), apparently without the Capitol even needing to invoke gods or supernatural powers to justify their cruelty! Could a barbaric annual tournament really be such a powerful incentive not to rise up in all that time? (I don't think so.) BIG ISSUES Nevertheless, it tackles some big themes that are particularly pertinent to teens: the nature of friendship; divided loyalties; the difference between love and friendship; who to trust; whether the ends justify the means; the need to repay favours; the danger of power, wealth and celebrity; the corrupting influence of reality TV; the need for independence, and whether you can trust a parent who abandons you. It all feels rather laboured to me, but it might not if I were a teen, which only reinforces my puzzlement at the number of adults who have enjoyed it. I must be missing something. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE Nearly half the book is backstory and preparation for the games; the remainder is a tale of hunter and hunted. I predicted the main plot twist less than a quarter of the way in (and the fact that Katniss is telling the story limits the possible outcomes), but the suspense was broken when it was made explicit way before the end. There are some other twists between then and the final page, but by then I was rather annoyed with the whole thing. IMPLAUSIBILITY AND INCONSISTENCIES If I'd enjoyed the book more, I would have found it easier to suspend my disbelief, but as it was, I was constantly irked by questions and inconsistencies. * The contestants (and their parents and grandparents) have been forced to watch the games every year of their lives. I suppose they had become inured to it, but on the other hand, that meant they knew the horror of it. I just didn't believe there was as little fear in them as there appeared to be - given that they are children. * Participants don't want other participants to know where they are, yet sponsor gifts occasionally drop out of the sky, via silver parachute; not a risk, apparently. * It's all filmed by numerous invisible floating cameras (I can buy that), but that somehow includes filming inside a cave that is virtually sealed (I can't). * How (and why) would any of these participants be able to measure time to within half hour intervals? * How big is Panem? It can only be a tiny part of the USA because each district specialises in only one thing (coal mining, agriculture etc) and has just one town square that can accommodate everyone (8,000 people in District 12) and yet it's a day's train journey from District 12 to the Capitol. It doesn't seem like a very plausible settlement pattern in a post-disaster world, even given the totalitarian regime (concentrating people in a few centres makes it easier to observe and perhaps control them, but it also creates more opportunities for opposition movements to develop). COMPARED WITH LORD OF THE FLIES There are some similarities with "Lord of the Flies" (my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), but although "The Hunger Games" is likely to have more appeal to modern teens, I think there are (at least) two crucial differences: * In LotF one person's survival is not necessarily at the cost of everyone else's. (It is even possible that they could all survive.) * LotF has much more depth and symbolism: it tackles original sin; the mystical "Beast"; leadership, tribal allegiance and group dynamics (including bullying and attitudes to difference and minor disability) and the importance of ritual and belief. The second point is what makes LotF a better book, in my opinion. Of course, there are other, more obvious, parallels with extreme "reality" shows such as "Survivor" and "I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here", but the fundamental differences are not just that contestants in those shows do not fear for their lives, but that they are adults who have chosen to enter. I TRIED TO ENJOY IT! Any fans who read this will now hate me. I wanted to enjoy this book, and I read it all the way through, making notes as usual, but to no avail. Sorry. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 17, 2011
| Jun 20, 2011
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Jun 17, 2011
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| 0752889087
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| 3.95
| 13,061
| 2000
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A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and oth...more
A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking. It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some furniture. "So it goes." (That is the catchphrase of the book, and I found rather annoying after the umpteenth time. It's used, apparently deliberately, in Philip K Dick's Ubik (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), which I assumed was a nod to Vonnegut, until I discovered both were published in the same year) Spoons are mentioned oddly often, as a description of how people lie (lovers or fallen soldiers). Then, near the end, actual spoons are briefly important. I have no idea whether this is significant. It starts with an old man reminiscing about his life. He is asked about the point of writing an anti-war book, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" After that, it jumps about, much as Billy does, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time... he is in a constant state of stage fright". The most thought-provoking bits for me were Billy's mother who tried "to construct a life that makes sense from things she found in gift shops", the bathos with which some war events were described (e.g. being executed for stealing a teapot) and the Tralfamadorian's multi-dimensional and multi-sexual world. For instance, they have five sexes, but their differences were in the fourth dimension and they couldn't imagine how time looks to Billy (they also told him that seven sexes were essential for human reproduction!). A main message is surprisingly positive: if we could only see or feel the fourth dimension, we would realise that "when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past". It has strong links with several other books: as it's Vonnegut, the "fictitious" sci fi writer, Kilgore Trout, gets several mentions; the mode of time travel clearly influenced Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and when he watches a WW2 film in reverse, it's very like Amis's Time's Arrow. It also left me wanting to read a Tralfamadorian book with its simultaneous threads, "no beginning, no middle, no end... What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time", which is surely what Vonnegut was trying to create for mere human readers.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 07, 2010
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Nov 07, 2010
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| 0765321610
| 9780765321619
| 2.56
| 120
| Feb 03, 2009
| Feb 03, 2009
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A moderately interesting premise, written in a basic and repetitive way, that is ultimately far too predictable. A former marine takes 100 problem chil...more A moderately interesting premise, written in a basic and repetitive way, that is ultimately far too predictable. A former marine takes 100 problem children of the super rich (plus various staff) to live in a totally isolated, self-sufficient former monastery on Mount Clothos, to avoid the coming apocalypse. Or not. He "doesn't so much believe in God; he wants to be a god." The children are dragooned into submission in very primitive circumstances by "the protective power of control" and everything is OK, till everything goes wrong: one sort of dire bug takes out the IT infrastructure and another sort puts large numbers in the infirmary. The story is told mainly via the inner thoughts of some of the main characters, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third. The problem is, bar a self-conscious peppering of valley-girl "like" for a few of them, all the characters sound the same and it is all so plodding that some passages are more like a Ladybird book for beginner readers. "He's never seen this much green in his life. He loves these growing things. He loves them so much!" It also repeats itself too much: I lost count of the number of times I was told, in very similar words, that everyone at Clothos had a story and was there for a reason. Somehow it manages to be disjointed as well. For example, an early chapter focuses on a transgender child, who is then not mentioned AT ALL for another 150+ pages. It is clearly meant to be a mystery/thriller, and I stuck with it because I hoped it would surprise me (and it was a quick, easy read). It isn't and didn't. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 30, 2010
| Oct 13, 2010
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Sep 30, 2010
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| 0141042133
| 9780141042138
| unknown
| 3.41
| 8,787
| 2009
| unknown
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This book starts at a disadvantage: I don't think Douglas Adams should have written a sixth volume, and I certainly don't think anyone else should, ev...more
This book starts at a disadvantage: I don't think Douglas Adams should have written a sixth volume, and I certainly don't think anyone else should, even with the encouragement of his widow and daughter. Eoin Colfer is a successful author of children's books, and this reads like a young adult pastiche of Adams: the Bantally tree can perform hexes when it isn't hibernating, which sounds more like something from Harry Potter. Various things happen, but I'm not sure I'd describe it as a plot. Colfer regurgitates most of the familiar characters (except Marvin) and situations in a repetitive, inconsistent and often abrupt and banal way. The excerpts from the Guide are sometimes too long and there is a rogue section that suddenly has about a page each of the inner thoughts of the main protagonists. In particular, he takes the delightful word "froody", that Adams used so sparingly, and peppers the entire book with it (three times in the first two chapters alone). Although Adams had a bit of a thing about Thor and, as an atheist, enjoyed mocking religion, I think it is too major a theme in this book: Hillman Hunter (named after a car, like Ford Prefect) interviews gods to maintain cosmic order on his planet. Cue lots of silliness. The only dash of originality is a nice Vogon who dislikes paperwork and killing. However, I like the ideas of me-vangelists and symmetrophobia (a feature of a hideous Vogon ship) and there are glimpses of Adamsesque ideas and language: "Ford nodded with a wisdom beyond his ears"; "Zaphod stepped into as foul a den of broken dreams as he had ever been thrown out of and felt instantly at home"; "Fate was dropping him a wink, destiny was slipping him a brown bag, providence was beating him over the head with the hint hammer", and "handed... a gift-wrapped basket of mill grist". Nevertheless, they don't salvage it for me. This book is anything but froody.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 31, 2010
| Sep 09, 2010
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Aug 31, 2010
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| 034073356X
| 9780340733561
| 3.92
| 55,111
| Jul 19, 2001
| Jul 19, 2001
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I didn't enjoy this. It tries too hard to be clever and to cover many different genres (humour, sci fi, horror, detective, literary and more) whilst a...more
I didn't enjoy this. It tries too hard to be clever and to cover many different genres (humour, sci fi, horror, detective, literary and more) whilst also being annoyingly silly. After 100 pages I ditched it - something I rarely do. Thursday Next is a woman who is a literary detective in one of several alternative realities round about now. In hers, the Crimean War is still going. Somehow, in her society, manuscripts are stolen and guns are involved; she also manages to get into books and meet characters in them, though I was never convinced as to why any of it happened. WHO... WHY...? I don't understand who this book is written for. You need a love and knowledge of classic literature to know what is our reality and what is an alternative (e.g. whether or not Jane Eyre does marry Rochester), but having those characteristics would seem to me to make one unlikely to enjoy this, though as that is clearly not the case, I am in a minority and evidently missing something. It has a surprisingly colloquial narrative style for a self-consciously "literary" book; jarring Americanisms (a "parking lot") for a British book; basic grammatical errors (using "flaunt" instead of "flout"); too much exposition is delivered in clichéd ways (e.g. a police interview); ludicrous names (Jack Schitt, Acheron Hades (a baddie), Thursday Next, Victor Analogy, a vampire called Stoker, Edmund Capillary and Landen Park-Laine) and even sillier futuristic inventions (pizza by fax and a 2B pencil with built in spell check). Anthony Trollope had a penchant for jokey names, but at least he restricted them to minor characters and made up for it in other ways. This book doesn't. (less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 18, 2010
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| 0330323113
| 9780330323116
| 3.92
| 41,055
| 1992
| Sep 21, 1993
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Hitchhiker's, volume 5. There are some good lines in this, but I can't help feeling it would have been better if Adams had left it unwritten, or at lea...more Hitchhiker's, volume 5. There are some good lines in this, but I can't help feeling it would have been better if Adams had left it unwritten, or at least unpublished. It is very disjointed, with Ford, Arthur and Trillian mostly in separate stories. It starts in what would be a parallel universe - if such things existed, which they don't, because "it makes as much sense as the sea being parallel". "If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion". "The messages that one part of her brain was busy sending to another were not necessarily arriving on time or the right way up". "For something she hadn't expected... it wasn't going the way she expected". Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Pointlessly Working out the Surprisingly Obvious. The future is "just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air". "It occupied the same co-ordinates in space time [as Earth:]. What co-ordinates it occupied in probability was anyone's guess". "The sun was quite bright but the day was hazy and vague". "A common mistake... when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools". "Her mood swings were very unpredictable but so far they'd all been between different types of bad ones... She had been sent as a test of his faith, if not his patience". AmEx "gave cards exclusively to just about anybody". "about three other customers... it was not the kind of place that you felt like being that specific in". "The possible continually interfered with the probable". Brief summary and favourite quotes from the other four of the five books, as follows: Hitchhiker's Guide (vol 1): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Restaurant at the End of Universe (vol 2): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Life, the Universe and Everything (vol 3): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (vol 4): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... (less) | Notes are private!
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Jun 19, 2010
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| 0330284983
| 9780330284981
| 4.04
| 54,131
| 1984
| unknown
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Hitchhiker's, volume 4. This is noticeably less good than it's three predecessors, particularly in terms of plot, but it still has plenty of splashes o...more Hitchhiker's, volume 4. This is noticeably less good than it's three predecessors, particularly in terms of plot, but it still has plenty of splashes of brilliance: Arthur and Fenchurch fly. Wonko the Sane declaring the world beyond his inside-out house is an asylum. Rob McKenna is a rain god but doesn't know it - only that it always rains wherever he goes - the loving clouds just want to water him. "All eyes were on Ford Prefect. Some of them were on stalks". "As stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for 5 years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat" (one for or from Blackadder, surely). "She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at". "Waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn't happen". "The recurring impression he had that just when he was least expecting it, the universe would suddenly leap out from behind a door and go boo at him". A hotel "they would enjoy being puzzled by". Two women looking at the Pacific for the first time and one says "It's not as big as I expected". A & F find God's final message to creation ("We apologise for the inconvenience"). Brief summary and favourite quotes from the other four of the five books, as follows: Hitchhiker's Guide (vol 1): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Restaurant at the End of Universe (vol 2): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Life, the Universe and Everything (vol 3): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Mostly Harmless (vol 5): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...(less) | Notes are private!
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| 4.15
| 63,754
| 1982
| Sep 21, 2001
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Hitchhiker's, volume 3. Mostly about Krikkit - and the Bistromathic Drive, which is better than mere Infinite Improbability. The immortal Wowbanger the...more Hitchhiker's, volume 3. Mostly about Krikkit - and the Bistromathic Drive, which is better than mere Infinite Improbability. The immortal Wowbanger the Infinitely Prolonged gave himself the task of insulting everyone in the universe - individually (but nearly did Arthur twice). It has the usual wonderful Adamsness: The "knack" of learning to fly is to "throw yourself at the ground and miss". "Aggressively uninterested". "One thing has suddenly ceased to lead to another". Slartibartfast, who has one of the best names in literature, "wrote a monograph to set the record wrong about one or two matters he saw as important". "Time travel is a menace. History is being polluted. The past is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there". "They obstinately persisted in their absence". To attack a transdimensional planet you need to work out how to "fire missiles at 90 degrees to reality". "sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind". "One of the least benightedly unintelligent organic lifeforms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not be able to avoid meeting" (Boris took that idea with "I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less"). Brief summary and favourite quotes from the other four of the five books, as follows: Hitchhiker's Guide (vol 1): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Restaurant at the End of Universe (vol 2): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (vol 4): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Mostly Harmless (vol 5): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...(less) | Notes are private!
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Jun 19, 2010
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| 0330262130
| 9780330262132
| 4.18
| 76,094
| 1980
| Apr 19, 1980
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Hitchhiker's, volume 2. The beginning of human life on earth and the end of the universe, aided by infinite improbability. As with the others, it's the...more Hitchhiker's, volume 2. The beginning of human life on earth and the end of the universe, aided by infinite improbability. As with the others, it's the ideas and writing that make it so good: Marvin makes a heavily armoured tank guess what weapon he has (nothing). "The guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate". "How are you? Fine if you like being me, which personally, I don't". "Everything's cool and froody". "Little expense had been spared to give the impression that no expense had been spared". "The terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy". Like most car parks, it "smelt mostly of impatience". "He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, then interrupted". Spend a year dead for tax reasons. Meat bred to want to be eaten. "Life. Don't talk to me about life". The ruler of the universe doesn't know it, and doesn't believe in anything anyway. Dump hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, management consultants and advertising execs - then die from dirty phones. Can't invent fire without knowing what people want from fire; can't invent wheel till decide on a colour. "We were about to do nothing at all for a while, but it can wait". Brief summary and favourite quotes from the other four of the five books, as follows: Hitchhiker's Guide (vol 1): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Life, the Universe and Everything (vol 3): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (vol 4): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Mostly Harmless (vol 5): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...(less) | Notes are private!
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| 4.15
| 516,841
| 1979
| Jan 01, 1982
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Hitchhiker's, volume 1. Earth is destroyed to make way for a bypass. Fortunately for Arthur Dent, his friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien and...more Hitchhiker's, volume 1. Earth is destroyed to make way for a bypass. Fortunately for Arthur Dent, his friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien and manages to escape, with Arthur. The plot is not bad, but it's the writing that is fantastic: Vogon ships "hung in the sky in exactly the way bricks don't". The Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue. The old man who said nothing was true but was later found to be lying. "After a second or so, nothing continued to happen". "This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays" (borrowing from Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's). "Bits of it were dullish grey. Bits of it were dullish brown. The rest of it was rather less interesting". "An acute attack of no curiosity". "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". "It's unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so bad about being drunk? Try asking a glass of water." God refuses to prove he exists because proof denies faith and without faith he is nothing. But the Babel fish is a dead giveaway - so God disappeared in a puff of logic. Infinite improbability drive. Brief summary and favourite quotes from the other four of the five books, as follows: Restaurant at the End of Universe (vol 2): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Life, the Universe and Everything (vol 3): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (vol 4): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Mostly Harmless (vol 5): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...(less) | Notes are private!
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| 0060830956017
| 3.90
| 548,935
| 1932
| 1969
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Wow, how does such a slim volume explore so many BIG issues, whilst also telling an interesting story? Although published nearly 80 years ago (1932), i...more Wow, how does such a slim volume explore so many BIG issues, whilst also telling an interesting story? Although published nearly 80 years ago (1932), it presciently exposes many issues that are problematic in our time: consumerism; the nature of happiness; what it means to be civilised; cloning and other reproductive technologies; parenting, families, loyalty, promiscuity; recreational drug use; social mobility and equality of opportunity; individualism versus group loyalty; pornography; benevolent dictatorship; censorship; religion; the power of language, and so much more. Clearly some of the details of a future world are more plausible than others, but that doesn't matter because the book is about ideas and dilemmas, not the specific technologies that give rise to them. Read it once for the plot, and read it again to get full value from the powerful issues within. NB Review to be updated and lengthened soon. [Oops. Missed that boat!] See also BNW Revisited: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 05, 2010
| May 08, 2010
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May 05, 2010
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| 0812580346
| 9780812580341
| 3.54
| 5,945
| Jan 01, 1999
| Apr 15, 2000
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The only thing this shares with the TV series of the same name is the concept of everyone in the world simultaneously blacking out for two minutes, du...more
The only thing this shares with the TV series of the same name is the concept of everyone in the world simultaneously blacking out for two minutes, during which they have a “flashforward” of their future. In the TV series that is 6 months hence; in the book it is more than 20 years hence, so the implications are very different. It’s a fantastic concept and it’s explored in a variety of interesting ways, but it is really badly written (how has Sawyer won literary prizes?). Although it is primarily sci fi (set at CERN), there is a murder investigation to widen its appeal, and a poor pastiche of Arthur C Clarke's 2001. After the flashforward, people pool their sightings on a website to see if they match (e.g. if I was lunching with John, was he lunching with me?). Some find their visions reaffirming and others want to fight against their apparent destiny - echoes of Oedipus and Scrooge. Meanwhile, investigation is under way as to what caused it, amidst recriminations regarding those who died, e.g. when vehicles crashed and surgeons passed out. Would you want a flashforward? What are the political implications for governments; insurance implications; would patent offices be swamped; would it weaken or strengthen religious belief; how would small children cope with what they see as an adult 20 years hence; could you marry someone if you knew that you would be with someone else in 20 years time? And of course the big one: is our future immutable or do we live in a multiverse? One oddity is that most of it is set last year (2009), which was the near future when it was written in 1999, so there is unintended entertainment from the things he got wrong, though I do live in hope of newspapers voluntarily dropping horoscopes because "printing such nonsense was at odds with their fundamental purpose of disseminating truth". Despite the high ideas, this book has weaknesses common to poor sci fi: teaching readers the science with dialogue between experts who would already know whatever it is along with trivial references to life in the future which irritate rather than illuminate or amuse (Ikea's Billy bookcase will still be around in 2009, but George Lucas still won't have filmed all of Star Wars). And there is plenty of other plodding prose, "As headquarters of numerous international organisations, Geneva attracted people from all over the world." Wow (not). There are also odd holes in the plot; for instance we are meant to believe that CERN has no emergency procedures, even of the kind that an ordinary office has? So, read it for the concept, try to let the poor writing wash over you, and pay attention when Sanduleak is first explained.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 13, 2010
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Apr 13, 2010
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| 3.69
| 758
| 1956
| 1959
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Varied short stories by John Wyndham, some from before WW2 and some decades later, and still fresh, 20 years since I last read them. Chronoclasm is a t...more Varied short stories by John Wyndham, some from before WW2 and some decades later, and still fresh, 20 years since I last read them. Chronoclasm is a thoughtful (non-action) time travel paradox. Time to Rest is a pastoral tale, where a human loner travels the Martian canals, living a tinker's life. Meteor is a pre-war adventure. Although basic plot is obvious from the start it presents an interesting slant on how one's insular perspective (life, experience, body) skews one's objectivity and ability to interpret what is around us when we are in an unfamiliar situation. Survival seems like a cliché, but of course it predates most of the sci fi films it brings to mind - and it has a good twist. Like other Wyndham works, some of the characters express very misogynistic views, albeit perhaps typical of the time. It also has a prescient insight into the power of tabloid media and the power of celebrity (as in Midwich Cuckoos). Pawley's Peepholes is the story I remembered most vividly from my first reading of this collection. It is a comic slant on time travel, with satire of the media and its approach to "truth". Opposite Number is about parallel universes, with an original ending. Pillar to Post is, like Meteor, about disorientation when one cannot even begin to understand one's circumstances, but it is a more complex narrative. It also posits that the end of the world could be that it "just died... of government-paternalism" because there would be so much order, there would be no need to adapt. Life is an accident and maybe survival is too. Dumb Martian is good because, finally, a man with no respect for women gets his comeuppance. Compassion Circuit is a very short exploration of the relationship between humans and personal robots. Wild Flower is completely unlike the others, being rather twee, like its title. And after all these years, I think Pawley's Peepholes is still my favourite (though perhaps not the best).(less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 23, 2009
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| 3.88
| 5,106
| 1957
| 1960
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Sci fi, horror, dystopian...? A bit of all of them. This is a straightforward and somewhat leisurely story that touches on very deep and difficult them...more Sci fi, horror, dystopian...? A bit of all of them. This is a straightforward and somewhat leisurely story that touches on very deep and difficult themes, mostly indirectly, but explicitly in the last quarter. Midwich is a sleepy English village in the late 1950s. One day, everyone in the village blacks out. They awake, apparently unharmed, only to discover that all the fertile women are pregnant - but the children they give birth to are not like other human children, and turn out to have extraordinary and disturbing powers. It starts off by establishing the uneventful normality of the village. With dawning awareness of what has happened, most people indulge in denial and eventually a degree of acceptance. The abnormal becomes normal, and things get stranger still. The big flaw of this book is its neglect of female characters, especially given that it is the women who are violated in such a profound way. More understandable is the overprotective attitudes of some of the men, exercising "benign censorship", especially for the less educated women. That may not be acceptable now, but surely typical of the period. It also oddly omits almost all mention of older and younger siblings of the Children (the capital C is used) and barely mentions the pain of the putative fathers. The strength of the book is the way it raises so many philosophical issues in a relatively light way and barely 200 pages: fear of tabloid exploitation; the nature of self and individuality (and how it is affected by mind control and shared consciousness); whether scientific dogma overrides religious dogma; societal and biological pressures on mothers to bond with their babies; original sin; triumph over adversity and the desire to see good in situations; whether ends justify means; what it means to be human; evolution versus creationism; the nature of evil and what can be done in the name of self-preservation; the politics of colonisation and revolution. The ultimate question is whether humanitarianism trumps biological duty and hence whether civilisation could ultimately be our downfall in a hostile environment. One of the problems Wyndham suffers nowadays is that to modern readers, his work can seem derivative, which is a dreadful injustice when in many cases it's because more modern writers have derived ideas from him. (less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 22, 2009
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| 0330392905
| 9780330392907
| 4.14
| 11,583
| Jan 01, 2002
| Apr 04, 2003
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** Update: Since reading this, I have read "The City and The City", which I thought was MUCH better (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and the...more
** Update: Since reading this, I have read "The City and The City", which I thought was MUCH better (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and then "Embassytown", which was fantastic (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). This review stands as my reaction to reading it, though I now think it probably does Mieville an injustice. ** A very hard book to rate because it is so inconsistent in plot, pace, language and even genre. It could possibly be turned into a good book, but it needs a lot of work to achieve that. On the evidence of this book, I can only conclude that Mieville is not a very good writer. The weird fantasy cum steampunk story concerns a floating pirate city (made up of stolen vessels lashed together) and particularly three characters kidnapped on their way to settle a new land: a 15 year cabin boy, a remade slave and a translator needing to start a new life. Once in the city, there are power struggles between rulers, particularly over a grand, vague and probably dangerous plan to harness unknown powers emanating from a rift in the planet (the eponymous “scar”). It opens with a commentary about sea creatures and landscapes that could be lifted from the Discovery Channel – until mention of a he-cray with a hunting squid. But that’s OK because Meiville is quirky. Very little happens in the first third of the book, but it’s saved by some wonderfully vivid descriptions of extraordinary lifeforms and the architecture of the floating city (tree silhouettes “wetly inked onto the clouds”; “the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes”; a man “crippled with the understanding of his own inadequacy”; a vampire’s moonship being “opulent and unwelcoming” and “urgent” bonhomie from dockside pubs). There are even some funny things (bureaucratic pirates) even though it isn’t a funny book. But as the plot picks up, the structure and language fall apart: minor niggles from earlier become more pronounced and new problems arise. However, I'm putting the examples in spoiler tags because although I want to keep them for my own reference, I've since revised my opinion of Mieville: (view spoiler)[ • There is very little back story, even for the main characters and people/creatures are mostly described in isolation (no mention of family structures, and only a couple of mentions of children), so they feel flimsy. • In places the narrative is quite confusing, especially when after pages of not much happening, there is suddenly a lot of poorly explained action. • For all the vivid description of some things, there were many others that I couldn’t really picture or understand. • As well as the main narrative, there are numerous interludes: letters and first person monologues, which just seem a gimmicky cop-out for filling in a bit of background. • The first part is moderately realistic (Shawshank came to mind at one point), but about half way through, magic becomes more evident and there are shades of Harry Potter (invisibility, grindylows) and Hitchhiker’s (possibility mining). • There are 5 words he consistently spells oddly, for no apparent reason: chymical, seawryms, wyrd, elytricity and vampir. • The swearing is usually too sudden, graphic and out of character, and similarly with the only two sex scenes – more reminiscent of a pubescent trying to shock. I was not offended by the words, but by their awkwardness. • He uses the word “puissant” ludicrously and distractingly often. • There are some egregious phrases, such as “the Brucolac was leaned over”, “all of you wouldn’t have died” and “I can’t hardly imagine”; awful metaphors such as “watching his influence spread like antibiotic in diseased flesh”; tenses skipping all over the place, even within a paragraph, and carelessness when a crucial statue is suddenly referred to as a “statuette” and then a “statue” again – all on the same page. Yet there are a few glorious passages, particularly concerning the joyous liberation of becoming literate and of becoming amphibious, as well as some interesting ideas near the end about alternative realities and parallel universes (“reality rippled about him”). If only there had been more of that. I don't understand why he is a lauded as much as he is or how come he teaches creative writing at Warwick University. Well, I suppose his writing is unarguably "creative", just not very good. At 795 pages it is easily the longest bad book I've read! (hide spoiler)](less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 20, 2009
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Sep 29, 2009
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| 0747585776
| 9780747585770
| 3.36
| 92
| 2006
| Jan 15, 2007
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"Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible." A quick and mildly amusing male fantasy gone wrong, with a d...more "Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible." A quick and mildly amusing male fantasy gone wrong, with a dash of sci fi, detective novel and quasi-Buddhist philosophy. An old man falls in love with an actress from a black and white cowboy film and gets someone to bring her to life by dissolving particles of her (from video) in a "suspension of disbelief", adding it to a primordial soup and zapping with electricity. The problem is, she needs blood to gain colour and stay alive, which causes problems for those who created her and comes to the attention of the police. I like the idea that "I've never read the whole Heart Sutra, but if form is emptiness, then not reading it is the same as reading it", but the best line has to be, "Her feet looked open minded." (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 22, 2009
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Aug 21, 2009
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| 0575077164
| 9780575077164
| 4.07
| 3,601
| 2007
| unknown
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A multi-faceted space opera detective story. It's detailed and pretty exciting, but a lot of characters are introduced in the first 20 pages or so, an...more
A multi-faceted space opera detective story. It's detailed and pretty exciting, but a lot of characters are introduced in the first 20 pages or so, and it's a little hard to keep track of who's who when you don't know who are going to be the important ones (clue: they all are). The habitats of the Glitter Band (satellites around planet Yellowstone) are part of a libertarian demarchy (democratic anarchy), which means constant polls of everyone about everything. Paonoply is the organisation in charge of the polling cores in each habitat and general policing. Within that framework, each habitat can apply whatever system its citizens sign up for, including obscenely vile "voluntary tyrannies", hippy-esque idylls and others where everyone is in PVS or other forms of abstraction or virtual reality. The story opens after a habitat (and nearly 1000 inhabitants) has been blown up, apparently in a dispute over the purchase of an artwork. It turns out that far more powerful forces are at work. Tom Dreyfus is the Panoply prefect in charge of investigating the case. Meanwhile, one of his deputies, Thalia Ng, visits four other habitats to install trial polling software upgrades. Their stories diverge for much of the book, which gives it breadth, even though you know there will be plenty of overlap between the two. As befits the writing of a "proper" physicist, the future science is (mostly) plausible, but Reynolds doesn't fall into the trap of explaining too much at a time (which would be artificial and disrupt the story). In fact often things are mentioned and the reader is left wondering what on earth it is until there is the first hint of explanation several chapters later. It all adds to the suspense. I have only minor criticisms plot-wise. Very early on, one of the prefects seems to have another agenda. I would have preferred it if that plotline had come later, or been vaguer in the early stages. The other niggles concern the end of Thalia's time on the last habitat she visits and the qualifications (and disqualifications) for being Supreme Prefect - rather too far-fetched for my liking. Many different types of being/consciousness fill the pages, but whilst hints are dropped about racism against hyperpigs by baseline humans, the main themes of the book are much bigger: freedom, democracy and power; consciousness (of "live" beings, machines and hybrids thereof); the old quandary of whether the ends justify the means (whether a benevolent tyranny is better than anarchistic collapse, whether the police should be armed (you can tell he’s a British writer!)); machines going rogue, and whether revenge and justice can ever be the same thing. Fortunately, he lets the reader decide on these issues; there are plenty of shades of grey. For example, there is a degree of understanding for those that could easily be labelled bad, one time explicitly saying such a character is not "a bad man" but "a man who believes bad things". If you prefer moral absolutes, or you’re particularly fond of clocks and clockmakers, this is probably not the book for you! (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 21, 2009
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Jul 12, 2009
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| 0586090452
| 9780586090459
| 3.85
| 30,076
| 1985
| 1994
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Rewritten after rereading in July 2012. This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity...more Rewritten after rereading in July 2012. This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity with current times ends), leading to WW3 – though it’s not really about either: it’s fundamentally about adaptation. A million years in the future, the only “humans” left on Earth are the descendants of a small but diverse group of survivors of a Galapagos islands cruise, and they are more like seals than 20th century humans. Most of the story is set between the run up to the cruise and the passengers’ first few years on the island, but it is certainly not a Robinson Crusoe type story; it is far more provocative than that, raising issues of fate/independence, the meaning and importance of intelligence and ultimately, what makes us human. Like all good dystopias (if that's not an oxymoron), the individual steps to it don't really stretch credulity (few of them are very original), but the final destination is more startling - and even somewhat positive. NARRATIVE STYLE The story arc is fundamentally chronological, but with an enormous number of tiny jumps ahead: right from the start, Vonnegut sprinkles the story with so many snippets about what will happen to everyone, why and how, that you don’t know if there will be anything left by the time the main narrative catches up. He even prefixes the names of those about to die with an asterisk, at which point I went with the flow and stopped worrying about "spoilers" (on rereading, this aspect became pure comedy). The final chapter, which I would have deleted, fills in a few random gaps that didn’t really need filling. The narrator is Leon Trout, a long-dead man who helped build the cruise ship. He reminded me a little of Snowman in "Oryx and Crake" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), so if you liked that, consider this. (Kilgore Trout, the father of Leon, is a recurring character in Vonnegut: a prolific but not very successful writer of sci fi. This book mentions his “The Era of Hopeful Monsters”, with a plot that echoes this.) The book also has random quotes from Mandarax, a hand-held computer and translator that is a little like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They are either bizarrely obscure, like the Oracle at Delphi, or comically inappropriate. THEMES The main premise is that humans have evolved badly, though the reasons for this are never explained, which is odd, given how much weight is given to subsequent natural selection in the story. Most significantly, our “big brains” are the cause of all our troubles: they lie (so we don’t trust them or other people), we can’t switch them off, they confuse us with too much information, distract us from the important matters of life and death (though often causing death, e.g. by fighting or suicide), and ultimately cause global financial collapse because the value of so many assets is only maintained by belief in virtual money whizzing around. Accepting the idea that our big brains are a handicap is a bit of a challenge, which Vonnegut backs up with typical bathos by suggesting alcohol is just a way to relax with a (temporarily) smaller brain. Our long, protected childhoods accustom us to the idea of an omniscient carer and hence account for belief in god, whilst wealth makes us blasé about our doom. Full stomachs are part of the problem, too: a full belly puts people off-guard and all the powerful people are well-fed, so don’t worry about impending disaster. Outsourcing our skills and knowledge by developing machines to take over many brain tasks reduces the need for big brains, and indeed, for people. No wonder humans, in their twenty-first century form, are doomed – even at a comical level: a million years hence, “evolution hasn’t made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human lifespan down to about thirty years”! By contrast, animals are happy to survive, feed and reproduce, and once stranded on an inland, natural selection leads to humanity being reduced and enhanced to such basics, “everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be” and “everyone is so innocent and relaxed now". No more lies or deceit, and no hands to use for evil – it sounds positively Utopian. In addition to the above, it also touches on the nature of intelligence, eugenics (voluntary and not), consent, disability, incest, contraception, mate selection, truth, marriage and alternatives to it, and all sorts of other things. You could make a whole PSHE curriculum from this! HUMAN-NESS Amongst all the big issues and ideas the book explicitly raises, there is one that is always assumed, but never questioned or defended: in what sense are the "humans" on Santa Rosalia in a million years’ time actually human (and by extension, what does it mean to BE human)? And if they are human, then surely we should call ourselves apes, or even fish. And fish and fishing, literal and metaphorical, are recurring themes: many of the characters are "fishers of men", albeit not in a good way, and we’re reminded that “so much depends on fish”; even the narrator’s surname is Trout. I would hesitate to impose a New Testament analogy on a secular novel by a secular writer, but there are many Biblical allusions: creation, flood, an ark, Adam and Eve, the danger of knowledge, the power of belief, the existence of God, David and Goliath, souls, redemption, and… fish. Vonnegut toys with why we are as we are and clearly doesn't think it's brain size or capacity that makes us human (which is surely good, as otherwise, what would be the implication for those with learning difficulties and brain damage etc?), but he leaves the reader to decide what “human” means. FATE AND PURPOSE Throughout the book, Vonnegut keeps reminding us of the significance of random and apparently trivial events, whilst at the same time implying the apparent opposite: the inevitability of the outcome for humanity (the butterfly effect versus fate). There is a clear message that most people are irrelevant; we can't know who the few important ones are, but they're probably the ones we least expect. Trout admits his prolonged observation was pointless: he was addicted to the soap opera qualities of the story, but accumulated knowledge rather than understanding. MAIN MESSAGE? The world ends up a happier place, because of the power of natural selection, echoing the very upbeat quote from Anne Frank on the title page, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” Yet, given his ideas about fate, is Vonnegut suggesting the book is pointless too (not that I would agree with that), is he actually trying to make a point (if so, what?) or just entertaining us? Mostly the latter, I think If Leon Trout is reading this, or any other discussion of the book, he is doubtless chuckling at how seriously people are taking it. Mind you, as a pretentious late teen/early twentysomething, I would have had a field day of profundity! Overall, not a long book, but one to savour, ponder, chuckle over and reread. OTHER QUOTATIONS • “Mere opinions… were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.” • “It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth.” • Big brains make marriage hard because “That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions” and switch between them so quickly “that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up light a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates”. • “Typical of the management of so many organisations one million years ago, with the nominal leader specialising in social balderdash, and with the supposed second in command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked.” (less) | Notes are private!
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| May 28, 2009
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May 23, 2009
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| 0441010644
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| 4.07
| 5,439
| Jan 01, 2001
| May 27, 2003
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I read this because Alistair Reynolds is my teenage son's favourite author. Although it is sometimes labelled as Revelation Space book 2, he reckoned...more
I read this because Alistair Reynolds is my teenage son's favourite author. Although it is sometimes labelled as Revelation Space book 2, he reckoned this was the best book and has the advantage of being readable as a standalone story. Although you could summarise it as a long chase story of hunter and hunted, it is a complex and well-written page turner (and there are quite a lot of pages), the main theme of which is the nature of identity and the effects of various ways of changing it (e.g. body mods, memory implants, nanotech, DNA manipulation, immortality, reefersleep to travel through time and space). There are three main stories, set in different times and places and it swaps between them without ever being confusing. The main one concerns Tanner Mirabel's attempt to track down and kill Argent Reivich for revenge. This involves leaving his home planet of Sky's Edge and travelling to Chasm City on Yellowstone, once rich and technologically advanced, but now devastated by a nanotech virus. The gap between the poor who live in the Mulch and the rich in the Canopy is extreme and the idle rich liven their lives in dangerous ways. Previously, Mirabel was an ex soldier, hired as private security/bodyguard for Cahuella, a rich arms dealer with many enemies. Cahuella, and one hunting expedition in particular, is the second thread. The third strand follows Sky Haussman and is set a couple of hundred years earlier. Sky grows up as crew on one of a flotilla of space ships sent to colonise a new world. There are rivalries within and between ships, including deaths. Obviously as the book progresses, the links between these different stories gradually emerge. The science is plausible and invariably explained as a natural part of the story, though occasionally he kept me waiting for the explanation rather longer than I wanted. Reynolds has a good feel for characters' inner thoughts and emotions (something that is not always true of sci fi) and manages to make each distinct without resorting to gimmicky dialects and non-standard spelling, although they somehow seem a little flat at the same time. He's also very good at helping the reader visualise all the strange worlds in glorious detail - at times I could "see" it as if I was watching a film. There were a few sections that were a little clichéd, especially the ending, which felt a little rushed after nearly 600 leisurely pages, but overall, I thought it was a very good read. (less) | Notes are private!
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| May 04, 2009
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Apr 21, 2009
| Mass Market Paperback
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