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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 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0765329476
| 9780765329479
| 3.71
| 455
| Nov 13, 2012
| Nov 13, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The Inexplicables is the fourth book I've now read in Cherie Priest's remarkable "Clockwork Century" steampunk series, and in fact a quote from one of my earlier reviews ended up making the front cover of this one; and that surprised and delighted me but also felt very natural, because this is one of my favorite genre series of all time by now, and I look forward to the point seemingly every year when Priest has a brand-new volume done and ready to come out. They all take place in a what-if Victorian America in the late 1800s with just layers upon layers of fantastical details piled on: there's a giant wall around the ruined remains of the former Seattle, for example, because a mad scientist once ruptured an underground cave during a bank heist and released a heavy gas that turns people into zombies; but like a first-person-shooter videogame, there are also miles of underground tunnels, businesses and residences under this gassed zombie wasteland, full of outlaws and Chinamen who take this gas and distill it into a heroin-like drug that is then shipped across America in giant armed dirigibles; and in the meanwhile, the Civil War is still going on decades after it did in real life, because here the South develops railroads, submarines and robots to help even out the fight; and in the latest development in this speculative universe, it turns out that none other than Bigfoot has managed to accidentally enter the walled wasteland of downtown Seattle, and that the poisonous gas is slowly turning him into an unstoppable force of violence. And that's what makes these books so delightful; for while her characterizations are not much more than minimally solid enough to pass muster, it's Priest's plotting skills that are her real forte, delivering exciting after exciting tale that in epic scope has now taken us all the way across the United States and back, this newest volume set back in the walled Seattle where the story began. Breathtaking in its pacing, and such a mega-pastiche that you'll be in awe simply over how well she melds it all together, this is the literal definition of an intellectual's guilty pleasure, and should be highly enjoyed by one and all if read with this attitude. Highly recommended, as are all her books. Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for steampunk fans (less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Apr 17, 2013
|
Apr 17, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 159448242X
| 9781594482427
| 4.05
| 3,056
| 2006
| Mar 06, 2007
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0747553866
| 9780747553861
| 4.15
| 5,402
| May 08, 2000
| 2001
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0812993802
| 9780812993806
| 4.08
| 6,108
| Oct 31, 2011
| Jan 08, 2013
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| Jan 07, 2013
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 07, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1597804002
| 9781597804004
| 3.74
| 146
| Jan 01, 2012
| Aug 07, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It's true: just as some people always love them some Scandinavian crime fiction, I always love me some steampunk! And in fact, this is what has directly led to me taking it easier recently on fans of subgenres I find silly, precisely from realizing that I'm a big fan of a subgenre that a lot of others find ridiculous; and there's nothing wrong with that, either, as long as you recognize that you're basically letting your fetishistic love of the accrouchements surrounding that subgenre forgive what is sometimes only mediocre storytelling, and vow to make that easy love only an occasional treat instead of the main ingredient of your reading diet. Take this charming but forgettable title, for example, which I confess even just a month between finishing it and now has already become hazy in my head, just another Sherlockian actioner containing the same beats as all the others; although certainly I haven't forgotten the great and unique central premise, the thing that's gotten it most of its press, that Payton's speculative alt-history Victorian London includes a sexually transmitted disease that turns people literally into the opposite gender, and that the resulting panic regarding human intimacy has among other things created an entire new industry of robot prostitutes. That's what makes subgenres work, after all, no matter which one you're talking about -- they mostly all concern themselves with roughly the same general type of storyline, and it's the very specific details where one book will stand out over another among readers -- and for existing fans of steampunk, Constantine has everything you could want regarding this, although it's only okay as a general piece of literature and will drive non-fans of Victoriana batsh-t crazy. This should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for steampunk fans P.S. I'll never be able to think of steampunk the same way after seeing Felicia Day's take on it in The Guild… [video removed](less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| Aug 22, 2012
| Feb 21, 2013
|
Aug 22, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 9781469904
| 4.25
| 4
| May 15, 2012
| May 15, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Well, when you pour through a book a day like I've been doing this month, in an attempt to whittle down my now gigantic to-read list before the holidays are over, it's inevitable that you will eventually come across some clunkers; so I decided to save them up and share all of them in a row this week, so that my so-so reviews will hopefully have less of an audience and therefore less of an impact on these books here right before Christmas. First up, the self-published The Never Fable by Steven Brandsdorfer, which actually has a pretty decent premise: it tells the dual stories of a gentleman named Daniel Never, who exists simultaneously as a mental patient in contemporary New York City and as a foot soldier during Andrew Jackson's Florida campaign in the early 1800s, as both these lives are affected by various dark, seemingly fantastical touches. No, the problem lies directly in a subject that is common among self-published writers, which is pacing or more precisely a lack of one; namely, Brandsdorfer must have saved all the interesting bits of this story for the second half of this overinflated manuscript, because in the half I read, he will often go ten or twenty pages at a time while getting not a single interesting point across, just entire chapters that can literally be summed up with a simple "and then he sat in his car some more" or "and then they walked through a swamp for another eight hours." I know it's unfair to judge a book without finishing it, but it's also a fact that a book needs to be interesting enough during any particular part of it to compel a reader to continue; and after trudging through a literal 150 pages of The Never Fable with still not a single major plot point occurring, I feel this is a large enough chunk that I can at least say with authority that it's not really worth your time. In its defense, the book has received good reviews from others, so I suspect it's worth finishing if you have a particular interest in these subjects, but otherwise my recommendation is to skip it altogether. Out of 10: 6.8(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 23, 2012
| Dec 17, 2012
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Jul 23, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1616145358
| 9781616145354
| 3.80
| 398
| Jan 10, 2012
| Jan 24, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This is the third volume now of Mark Hodder's steampunk series, in which the real-life Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton and libertine artist Algernon Swinburne fictionally team up for a series of adventures in an alt-history 19th century, and nicely illustrates the problem with missing the first title in such a series when it comes to following along with the rest; for while I didn't seem to have much problem following along with the second volume, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, mostly I suspect because it didn't contain much background material about the first volume, this third chapter contains just a huge infodump about the book that started it all (The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, that is), a complicated backstory that involves time travel, multiple possible histories, and a sacred prehistoric meteorite that holds the key to the far-future quantum mechanics that are causing all the space-time-hopping messes in the first place (or, um, something like that), and I have to confess that I had a hard time simply trying to keep up with all the complex exposition. (Also, series fans, be aware that Hodder seems to have grown tired of the entire premise of Swinburne playing Dr. Watson to Burton's Sherlock Holmes, and that this third volume is mostly a Burton adventure with a few drunken wisecracks by Swinburne randomly thrown in here and there.) Granted, this universe is a much more original and creepy vision than most steampunk novels, the main reason to read the books in the first place -- in particular I really love the idea of genetic engineering being mastered long before electronics, so that the streets and skies are filled with giant dead bugs whose hollow exoskeletons are used as industrialized human vehicles -- but I also have to confess that by not getting hooked on this series from its start, I'm finding it increasingly difficult with each new volume to stay emotionally connected to the proceedings, the problem in a nutshell with all these endless so-so series that sci-fi publishers love putting out. It should be kept in mind when deciding for yourself whether or not to pick up a copy. Out of 10: 8.2(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 12, 2012
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Apr 12, 2012
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| 1616145331
| 9781616145330
| 3.64
| 94
| Nov 01, 2011
| Nov 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This is volume two of a new "steampunk meets superheroes" series from Andrew P. Mayer, a rather potboilerish adventure tale about masked vigilantes with fantastical weapons fighting crime in late-1800s New York; I reviewed the first volume last year and found it only so-so, while after finishing this latest found it…er, only so-so. And that's because Mayer never really does anything with this admittedly fascinating premise once he comes up with it; the action scenes are ho-hum, the dialogue purposely written with a kind of comic-book simplicity, and in general with plot developments that never rise above the clunky pulp serials that Mayer is obviously trying to emulate. And that's not bad if that's specifically what you're looking for, which is why it's getting at least an okay score today; but I'll warn you now that you'll be bored and disappointed if you're expecting even an ounce more than a competent genre quickie, and that this should be kept in mind if you're picking it up yourself. It comes recommended to steampunk fans who have a high degree of patience, but pretty much no one else. Out of 10: 7.6(less) | Notes are private!
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| Feb 22, 2012
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Feb 22, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1616143673
| 9781616143671
| 3.60
| 136
| Jan 01, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember last year's Ghosts of Manhattan, from genre veteran and Doctor Who scriptwriter George Mann, and how I found it only so-so when originally reviewing it myself; and now its sequel is out, Ghosts of War, which I decided to go ahead and read as well, partly because a copy was nicely sent to me by our buddies at Pyr and partly because I've always suspected that I didn't give the first volume a fair shake. And indeed, the good news is that this "Art Deco Steampunk" actioner came off this time as much better than the original, I suspect partly because both Mann and myself have grown more into these characters and setting; for those who don't know, it's set in an alt-history 1920s New York, in which a Shadow/Batman-style crimefighter is assisted by lots of fanciful tech gear, while facing complications not from German spies but ones from a still-strong and now antagonistic British Empire, who has been locked into a cold war of sorts with the US for decades on end by now. Of course, in my defense, it's also clear that this sequel is simply better than the original as well, and very specifically addresses some of the problems that I mentioned about the first book; for example, while I found what Mann actually did with this milieu in the original to be rather uninspiring, this time he comes up with a real corker of a dilemma, one I'll let remain a surprise but let's say ties in nicely with the work of HP Lovecraft, who in real life was writing his best-known stories right in these same years. Essentially more of the same but now just a little sharper, a little brighter and a little smarter, it comes recommended to both traditional steampunk fans and aficionados of Early Modernist noir serials, a rousing thriller that stands strongly against the Victorian setting where most of these types of novels are usually placed. Out of 10: 8.4(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 20, 2011
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Oct 20, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0765327449
| 9780765327444
| 3.78
| 573
| Sep 27, 2011
| Sep 27, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The whole reason I picked up this 2011 novel is because a sequel to it is just now being released, and I was so fascinated by the concept behind them that I thought the two books might make for a good double-review; that concept being, "What if some of the ancient clans from Scotland and Ireland who eventually emigrated in the 1700s to the American Appalachian Mountains were in fact not human at all, but actually varying families of fairies who had fled Scotland and Ireland a thousand years before that, and that some of those backwards, closed-off small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee are in fact now entirely inhabited by people who can perform magic?" (Or in other words, if you consider something like Neil Gaiman's 1990s work to be "urban fantasy," this might best be called "rural fantasy.") Unfortunately, though, author Alex Bledsoe never finds anything interesting to actually do with this fascinating concept, turning in a molasses-slow story that repeats all its relatively small amount of plot points five or six times in order to fill pages (I get it! Our Iraq-veteran hero is going to heal more quickly than humans! I GET IT, BLEDSOE!), and that paints its overly obvious villains as broadly as a cartoon might. And worst of all, although there's an NPR enthusiast's amount of obsession over the true-life folk songs of Appalachia (I suspect one of the main reasons Bledsoe even wanted to write this), barely any actual magic takes place, aside from occasional weird hand gestures and Jedi Mind Trick headaches; and without the magical element, this is simply a story about feuding hillbillies in red state hell, and Lord, I have no interest in reading that. Not actually badly written, it's still getting a low score, simply from the huge disappointment the reality of this book was compared to the expectations of its premise. Out of 10: 6.9(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 20, 2013
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Oct 13, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1582436444
| 9781582436449
| 3.34
| 194
| 2011
| Apr 01, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It may sound at first to be the height of cheesy cross-genre gimmickry -- a modern-style crime drama set within a James Howard Kunstleresque post-apocalyptic, neo-Luddite America -- but in Ashes of the Earth, mystery veteran Eliot Pattison takes what could've been an extremely eye-rolling experience and actually makes it taut and fascinating, a thriller that I admit I found more engaging than most other crime novels set within much more workaday surroundings. And that's because Pattison chooses to take a sober, toned-down approach to his world-building here, concocting a crime that fits in very naturally with the quasi-Victorian, surrounded-by-ruins milieu of these kinds of novels, making the story much less about radioactive mutants and hidden caches of Barbie dolls (although both these things are there as well), and much more about how the human capacity for both compassion and greed will long survive whatever circumstances we humans find ourselves in, not a utopia or a wasteland like so many post-apocalyptic thrillers are but simply a new way of life and new ways for people to act both honorably and horribly. The twist-filled plot is best left a surprise, which is why I won't mention anything about what actually "happens" here; but let's just say that fans of both Scott Turow and dystopian sci-fi are likely to be highly satisfied with this quickly paced, always fascinating book, a story that manages to be not only inventive in its plot but even introduces lots of original elements to its details, something becoming harder and harder to do in our post-Road times, when an ever-expanding glut of post-apocalyptic novels seems sometimes to be in danger of cannibalizing itself to death. A pleasant surprise and a much better novel than I was expecting, it comes strongly recommended. Out of 10: 9.3(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 07, 2011
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Mar 04, 2011
| Hardcover
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| 0765321505
| 9780765321503
| 3.78
| 2,066
| Apr 13, 2010
| Apr 13, 2010
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The reason I put this older (2010) urban-fantasy alt-history novel on reserve at my local library is because its sequel The Coldest War just came out, and the premise sounded interesting enough to warrant going back to the first book and catching up; set within a Johnathan Strange like alt-reality where magic is real (via evil, ephemeral cosmic aliens who we barely understand but who some can take advantage of), it tells the story of a World War Two where the Nazis have literally invented supermen and crusty upper-class "magic scholars" in the UK are made MI6 operatives to stop them. But alas, although the idea itself is just really quite amazing, the execution of the idea is only subpar; the plot itself is quite clunky at times, the level of characterization uneven, the dialogue sometimes flat, and perhaps worst of all (or at least a big personal pet peeve of mine), a paper-thin wife is invented for one of the main characters exclusively to serve as a flimsy deux-ex-machina for the story's climax, otherwise servicing as a disposable distraction for the other couple of hundred pages we have to deal with her. I can see why the book's gotten so much attention, because it really is a captivating story idea, unique and historical and yet another great modern take on the Nazi's real-life obsession with the occult; and while it's sure to satisfy hardcore urban-fantasy fans, I doubt that I myself will be reading volume two of the series, and do not recommend it except to the most diehard Joss Whedon fans out there. Out of 10: 8.4(less) | Notes are private!
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May 18, 2010
| Hardcover
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| 0765318415
| 9780765318411
| 3.54
| 14,029
| Sep 29, 2009
| Sep 29, 2009
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Ah, steampunk! The very definition of a literary subgenre, steampunk tales fit not only within the general category of science-fiction (in that the storylines usually hinge on technology that has not yet been invented), but then bury this uninvented technology within a past that never was, usually the Victorian Age to be specific, imagining various scientific breakthroughs that never actually happened and then imagining what life would've been like if those breakthroughs had been real (for example, the idea of computers actually being invented in the 1860s instead of 1960s, the concept behind one of the first steampunk novels to really define the genre, 1990's The Difference Engine by famed "cyberpunk" authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, resulting in a room-sized monstrosity covered in gleaming brass and powered by steam, thus explaining the origins of the term itself). And thus just like serial-killer crime thrillers or Georgian romance tales, so too does steampunk have a very specific audience in mind, and so too does its success mostly depend on its ability to offer up a series of specifically fetishized details that its small, fiercely loyal audience is specifically looking for. And thus do we come to Cherie Priest's mindblowing new Boneshaker, which as industry fans know has been causing quite a stir over the last few months, seemingly coming out of nowhere to make both Publishers Weekly and Amazon's "Best of 2009" lists, and with such genre veterans as Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow tripping over their own feet in their attempt to gush more and more about how marvelous it is. And there's a very good reason for this; because this novel is perfect, or at least "perfect" as it's defined within the narrow confines of what makes a genre project truly great. And in fact, this book is so great that I thought I would use my write-up of it today as an excuse to rather wonkily go through step by step and explain where exactly Priest gets things so right; that's how good it is, that it's not just entertaining but can serve as a useful tutorial as well to fellow genre authors who are facing problems with their own projects. So let's start with what's the most obvious strength of Boneshaker, and what's been getting it so much attention in such a short period -- it's a book with not only a fascinating grand hook behind its plot, but filled with enough fascinating incidental details as well to easily propel a 400-page manuscript. And this of course is where so many genre authors get things wrong, as seen again just last week for example in my review of Peter Crowther's "Forever Twilight" series -- that in their zeal to come up with a great concept to propel their book in general, they forget that an entire three-act storyline needs to be constructed out of that great concept too, leading to stories that often have huge gaping holes in their middles, giant hundred-page sections where literally nothing happens, as the characters essentially sit around having frivolous conversations as they wait for the next lever in that storyline's Grand Concept to kick into gear. So in Priest's case, she starts with a doozy of a concept, which like I said is basically step one in writing a great genre novel -- she imagines an alternative-history late-1800s, in which the Russians have hired an American mad scientist named Leviticus Blue to construct a giant drilling machine he calls the "Boneshaker," so that they can go prospecting under the ice in Alaska and jump-start the Klondike Gold Rush a good half-century before it happened in real life. But something goes terribly wrong in the Seattle basement where Blue is constructing the machine (an accident? sabotage? the mystery behind the incident is yet another part of the complex storyline), creating a giant sinkhole that essentially collapses the entire downtown district; and that's where the real trouble starts, in that the subterranean rift ends up releasing a poisonous underground gas, which just happens to turn anyone who comes into contact with it into a flesh-eating zombie. And since Washington is still a territory instead of a state, the US government wants nothing to do with this accident's complicated and expensive clean-up; and so as a sloppy stop-gap measure, the residents of Seattle basically build a giant 200-foot wall around downtown, turning the entire district into a yellow-haze-filled wasteland of wrecked Victorian parlors and the rotting undead, along with a small community of gas-mask-wielding smugglers, criminals and other libertarians, who have carved out a hardscrabble existence for themselves through an ingenious series of underground tunnels and basement living spaces, filled with clean air from impossibly long tubes snaking over the walls and industrial-strength bellows run by sweaty Chinese laborers. Yeah, an astonishing concept, like I said, but then Priest backs this up with a whole series of smaller developments, all of them related to the main Grand Concept but pedestrian enough to fuel the page-to-page action that keeps the manuscript moving forward: a gang war within this underground community; a diluted version of this poisonous fog called "yellow sap" that those on the outside use as a recreational drug, basically Priest's version of opium; the owners of the weaponized zeppelins who transport this yellow sap in and out of the contaminated zone; the steel-helmeted Hessian criminal warlord who may or may not be the surviving, horribly disfigured Dr. Blue. And that leads us to the second big thing that Priest gets right in Boneshaker, which is that all the truly great genre novels in history are ones filled with startlingly unique visions; and here Priest is just overflowing with such visions, delivering mental image after mental image that most of us never even thought possible until she came up with them, deftly combining steampunk with a post-apocalyptic zombie tale, a first-person-shooter videogame, and the John Carpenter classics Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China (which let's not forget, was originally meant to be a steampunk tale itself, until the producers fired the first screenwriters and updated the story from the 1880s to 1980s). After all, this is the particular fetishistic detail that fuels both steampunk and science-fiction in general, the delivering of stunning visions of technology that never was; and here Priest does a superlative job, not only with the grand scheme of things but all the way down to its gritty details. And that leads us to the third big thing Priest gets right here; that like so many of the best genre projects in history, she comes up with a grand mythology that informs the entire book and more, while still not getting lost in telling this one specific story. Because for those who don't know, Boneshaker is actually only the first volume of a coming trilogy Priest calls the "Clockwork Century," a sweeping look at an entire alternative 1800s, one in which the Civil War has turned into a twenty-year Vietnam-like bloody stalemate, and where the Republic of Texas discovers oil a good 50 years before they do in real life, funding a this-time successful revolution which leads to them now being their own sovereign nation. All of these things inform this first novel of the trilogy, and especially when it comes to the dueling airships which make up an entire beguiling subplot on their own (one of the many things that has led to the Civil War lasting so long in the first place, the invention of a modern-style Air Force out of armored balloons, a technology that is perfected much more quickly by the Confederacy); yet Priest doesn't allow this mythology to spin out of control either, but rather doles it out in these delicious little scoops, making you constantly wanting a little more just like the best genre projects do. And that leads us to the fourth thing Priest does right with Boneshaker, the crucial yet subtle element that eludes so many mediocre genre projects that could've been great; she takes the time and attention to populate this fantastical environment with very real-feeling, highly complex characters, thus corralling this insane plotline and grand mythology and bringing it down to a human level that we can intimately relate to. For example, the entire story itself is told through the eyes of Dr. Blue's widow, the proud yet frazzled single mother Briar Wilkes, who only gets involved in this mess in the first place in an attempt to rescue her smart yet naive teenage son Zeke, who one day sneaks into the contaminated zone in an attempt to gather proof that the father he never knew was in fact not guilty of deliberately causing the sinkhole for material gain, as the 15-year-old popular rumor that has ruined his reputation has it. This essentially boils the entire book down into a family drama, which is nice enough on its own; but now add all the morally dubious yet sympathetic people the two meet along their separate journeys, from the massive yet kindhearted airship captain Jeremiah to the mechanical-armed tough-talking saloon owner Lucy, not to mention the dozens of fully realized incidental characters along the way. Add all of these things together, and you get what you see here in Boneshaker, a book that literally could not be written better than it currently is, which is why today it receives a perfect score of 10 among those who are already genre fans; but of course, keep in mind that this definitely is a genre project when all is said and done, which is why its general score is a bit lower, because don't forget that in order for a book to score in the high 9s here at CCLaP, it must be able to transcend its intended audience and appeal to a large general crowd as well, which this book definitely does not. It is for sure the book to try if you've always been curious about steampunk, and want to pick the absolute best of the genre so to not waste your time; but if you simply have no interest in steampunk at all, you will be unable to see this book as anything other than ridiculously silly no matter how well it's written, a fact which should be tempered against all my glowing praise of it today. That said, I'm confident in proclaiming that it will appeal to most people out there, and of course for existing genre fans it should immediately be moved to the top of your reading queue; needless to say that it'll be making CCLaP's own "Best of 2009" list coming next month, and that I'm now eagerly awaiting the release of volume two in the series (Clementine, coming from Subterranean Press next summer, which is apparently about Civil War spies and is partly set in Chicago -- hmm!). Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for steampunk fans (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 16, 2009
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Sep 23, 2009
| Paperback
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| 0061474096
| 9780061474095
| 4.16
| 22,438
| Sep 09, 2008
| Sep 09, 2008
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Is Neal Stephenson the most brilliant living author currently in the United States of America? Oh, wait, I can answer that for you right away: Yes. Yes he is. And that's because Stephenson can do something almost no other American writer currently putting out work can; he can take a healthy dose of the popular zeitgeist at any given moment, mine it to understand the underlying fears and hopes these trendy obsessions actually express, twist it using some of the most inventive speculative fictional tropes that have ever been created, infuse it with the kind of heady, complex "pure science" usually only understood by nuclear physicists and NOVA hosts, then spit it out in these breathtakingly dense thousand-page tomes every couple of years. Of all the thousands of published writers of our generation, I'm convinced that Stephenson will be one of the mere handful still being read and studied a century from now, and there's a very good reason that so many people call him "the heir of Thomas Pynchon," the creator of his own one-man literary genre that can't be called anything else but "Stephensonian." And thus have I eagerly followed along in real time with nearly all of Stephenson's backbreakers over the decades, all the way back from the 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash (the direct inspiration for the very real Second Life); then to his stunning redefinition of steampunk, 1995's The Diamond Age; then to his masterful examination of the real history of 20th-century code-breaking, 1999's Cryptonomicon; and then to his massive three-book, three-thousand-page overview of the entire beginning of both science and finance as we know them, the career-defining "Baroque Cycle" (2003's Quicksilver, 2004's The Confusion, and 2005's The System of the World). And now, after ten days in a row of reading at least four hours each and every day, I have finally finished Stephenson's latest, the epoch-defining yet often headscratching Anathem; and in fact I found it so dense, so generation-defining, I've come to realize that I simply will not be able to make all my points in the usual thousand-word essay I normally do here regarding any given book. So instead I'm doing two essays on two days, one spoiler-free and the other spoiler-heavy (today's the spoiler-free one), the first essay devoted to nothing else but the superlatively complicated backstory, and not even touching the book's actual plot until the second essay. (GoodReads readers, this is one of the rare times when you will literally have to go to the CCLaP website for the second half, because of there literally not being room here for both.) Because it's important right away to understand what Stephenson is trying to do with this novel, and will make your reading of it (a part-time job, I warn you now, that will take most people four to six weeks) go a lot more smoothly; he is no less than redefining the very relationship between religion and science, and methodically explaining how there's actually a lot less differences between the two than most of us think, if people would simply choose to embrace both subjects in this interrelated way. And really, this grand a goal is not actually as big a stretch as it might seem at first; after all, according to how recent history has played out, we're hovering right around a time these days where we as a society will be creating a big giant new way for us to even think about such basic subjects as faith, reason, the meaning of life, and more. There was the Enlightenment of the 1700s, for example, which pushed atheistic rationality to the forefront of society; then the Romanticism of the 1800s, in which emotions and spirituality were brought back into style; then the Modernism (and Postmodernism) of the 1900s, where science and religion were first presented as an "either/or" proposition, where rationality and faith were first cemented in the mind as eternally struggling enemies. And now here it is, the early 2000s; so what kind of "ism" will define this age? Well, if you study the subject like I do, the pretty obvious answer is that we're set to go through a century where we profoundly redefine what the relationship is in the first place between religion and science, which is why it's not really such a surprise that Stephenson would latch onto the subject himself, a good ten or fifteen years before it becomes the dominant subject of the popular culture at large, just like all his other novels have done too. And the way Stephenson does this is of course unexpected and magnificent, which is by creating an entire different planet called Arbre which is almost just like Earth, but different in several basic important ways. For example, the first three thousand years of Arbre's written history are almost exactly like the last three thousand years of our own (from ancient Greece to now); except that in the oldest surviving myth they have, their version of our "Remus and Romulus" tale, theirs supposedly involves a father who near the end of his life professes to having a vision of what he calls a "perfect other world," then dies before he can explain what exactly he meant. So one daughter, Deat, interprets this how the religious of Earth usually would, into terms of a "heaven" and a "god" and "angels" and the like; but the other daughter, Hylaea, takes it to mean that he glimpsed a realm of pure perfect science and reason, not so much a physical place like a "heaven" but more like a Taoist-style existence of pure energy, where instead of a deity running things who takes the form of a person, there is instead only the pure clocklike perfection of a completely rational universe. And so all the way back to the beginning of Arbrean society, there have actually been two major ways to think of religion, not only the "deist" way which is the only one we have on Earth (known as "deolatist" in their world, after the daughter Deat), but also this "religion of science" known as Hylaeanism, later in history generalized to the more inclusive term "Mathism." And the Mathists have their own monks and their own monasteries, essentially mirroring how the study of science got its actual start in ancient Earth as well; and anytime one of these monk scientists has a sudden breakthrough, like Newton discovering gravity or Einstein discovering relativity or Pythagorus inventing his theory about triangles, this is considered the Mathic version of a miracle, or perhaps more like speaking in tongues, a sort of short, profound connection that monk suddenly has with this so-called semi-mystical world of pure rational perfection, known in their language as the "Hylaean Theoric World" (with "theorism" being their word for our "science"). And this is just inspired of Stephenson to do, I think, because this hearkens all the way back to what real Earth's first scientists actually were trying to do too, the so-called "natural philosophers" and "alchemists" of the 1600s; to them, "science" wasn't a standalone subject unto itself but rather a simple subset of religion, a way of understanding God better by intensely studying the things that God creates, and understanding how we should live our own lives by studying how such creatures as trees and animals do it out in the "natural world," a.k.a. "the world that works the way God wants the world to work, when we humans aren't using our big giant brains to screw it all up." And again, for anyone who's ever studied Eastern religions, you can see a lot of similarities between this and some of the basic tenets behind Taoism and Buddhism -- the idea that God is too infinitely complex a creature for us to ever understand, so all we can do instead is study the things that God creates, and get our cues on how to live our own lives by metaphorically interpreting God in its most purely rational form, what we now know as "scientific concepts," things like gravity and photosynthesis and DNA. Newton and the other proto-scientists of the Baroque "Royal Society" always saw their pursuits as an offshoot of religion; it's only been in the last 150 years that science has taken on a reputation as being an abomination to God, as the insane efficiency of the scientific process (theorize, test, observe, record without bias) has meant a profoundly fast increase in scientific sophistication, to the point where scientists must now spend their entire lives studying the specific pursuit they mean to make their career just to get caught up, and now not just observe nature in action but actively manipulate it, thus "playing God" in the eyes of many instead of merely worshipping God through natural observation. All Stephenson does is merely formalize this process, on a planet much like Earth's but where he can take certain artistic liberties; on Arbre, scientists literally are monks, universities literally monasteries, where specialists literally devote their entire lives to the pursuit of specific knowledge, literally do wear robes and shave their heads and live in cloisters and everything else. Except unlike Deolatism/deism/traditional religion, commandment number one among Mathics tends to be, "It's a sin to presume that you will eventually understand everything there is to know about the world," with commandment number two being, "And it's an even bigger sin to make up stories about the things you don't understand." When all is said and done, Stephenson argues that this is really the only big difference between science and deism, with all the other conflicts playing off it in one way or another: that science is all about trying to discover what makes the world work the way it does, without tainting your observations with fictional stories regarding the way you really, really wish the world worked, while the entire point of deism is precisely to make up such comforting and easily understood fictional stories, as a way of easing the fear and threat so many feel in the face of the unknown. And like I said, thus does the first three thousand years of Arbrean written history pass remarkably like Earth's, with their version of a Roman Empire (the "Bazian Empire") which eventually adopts Catholicism ("The Ark of Baz") as its official religion, which eventually leads to a Protestant Reformation (the "Anti-Bazians") which turns into their version of the Renaissance ("The Rebirth"), which on Arbre is when the gates of the ancient Mathic monasteries were first flung open, so that most of the science-worshipping monks could disperse themselves among the public at large, ushering in their version of our "Modern Age" or "Scientific Age" or whatever you want to call it (basically, the last 500 years of history, from the Renaissance to now), which the Arbreans call "The Praxic Age" on their world, "Praxism" being their word for "technology." And in fact Stephenson does something else really smart when laying out this alternative ancient history, which is to wisely separate what we humans know as "science" into three distinct pursuits on Arbre -- not just the scientific process (logic, rationality, etc), which is technically the only pursuit the Mathics embrace, but also the study of numbers (Earth's "mathematics") and the study of just technology, which are the pursuits the "Saecular" (non-Mathic) parts of Arbrean society mostly concentrate on, and especially when it comes to the subject of "syntactic devices" (things like computers, for example, which can be taught to "read" and "write," but don't even begin to understand the context of what they're parsing, of how to enjoy a joke or be emotionally moved by a poem). Mathic monks instead concentrate on so-called "semantic thought," or the idea that understanding things in context is the most important pursuit in life; and thus is it that only a portion of Arbre's society understands the reasons why technology works, but doesn't actually use any of the technology their theories spawn, while a much larger portion of the population invents and uses all the technology of Arbrean society, but doesn't understand how any of it works. And also thus is it that what might seem to be very scientific people to us are actually considered blindly religious to the Arbreans, the so-called "number-worshippers" who idolize the specifics of math without understanding any of the underlying theories that make the equations work. (This would be roughly translated to Earth's technology worshippers; think of the socially-retarded Comic Book Guys of the world, who can program a computer application but don't know how to even start having a rational, polite discussion with another human being. And in fact Stephenson very cleverly uses as the ultimate example the so-called "Secret Brotherhood of the Ita" associated with each Mathic monastery, a bastardization of the old corporate "I.T. administrators," the number-worshippers who actually ensure that the monasteries and their giant central worship-clocks keep functioning, but who are physically separated from the monks so that their "tech worship" won't "poison" the Mathics' purely theoretic minds. Freaking brilliant, Stephenson.) But see, all this is only half the backstory of Anathem; because in their timeline, right around our early 2000s is the actual Year Zero of their current calendar, because of a series of apocalyptic occurrences on Arbre in those years known simply as "The Terrible Events" (with us knowing for certain that these events take place right around their early 2000s, despite the new calendar, because of Arbre even having their version of what they call "The Three Harbingers," roughly corresponding to our World War Two, World War One, and Europe-wide political revolutions of 1848, all of them supposedly minor omens of the apocalyptic events that were to come). And for what it's worth, Stephenson leaves the details of the Terrible Events purposely murky, but highly implies that the mess started with the exact kind of accidental molecular disaster that conspiracy theorists have been crowing about this year regarding the very real Large Hadron Collider just built at CERN, the idea that we may just accidentally create a miniature black hole with the thing because of messing around with stuff we don't nearly understand yet, with Stephenson implying that this kicked off a blind panic and a series of voluntary nuclear weapon discharges in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the rapidly expanding artificial black hole, leading to all the other nuclear-armed nations of the world discharging their own weapons in their own blind panics, resulting in all the mass death and chaos and ecological disaster such events would cause. Whatever the case, we do definitely know that what was blamed for the Events, among both the Mathics and the Saeculars, was the commingling between the two groups that defined the Praxic Age; and thus did the monk scientists retreat back into their monasteries and once again close the gates, an event known as "The Reconstitution" and that marks year one of their "modern" calendar. And thus does yet another entire three thousand years pass, three thousand years of "future history" that haven't actually happened on Earth yet, where humanity ends up progressing in two distinctly different ways; how the Saecular world essentially becomes a neverending chaos of revolutions and superstitions, a Second Dark Age ruled by an alliance of brain-dead tech worshippers and traditional Evangelicals, where skyscrapers and post-apocalyptic wars come and go faster than people can even keep track, while the Mathic monasteries become timeless closed citadels of pure theoretical thought, where monks master such impossibly dense subjects as quantum mechanics and genetic manipulation using nothing more than chalk marks on slate, stick drawings in the dirt. And thus is an uneasy truce developed between the two societies, with both pretty much agreeing to leave the other alone except when absolutely necessary; well, except for the three times in the last three thousand years when the monks got a little too full of themselves, when they started taking on scientific progressions again deemed a little too much like "playing God," at which points the now almost exclusively superstitious Saecular world rose up against what they considered the "witches" of the Mathic world and slaughtered almost all of them, known historically by the remaining Mathics as the three "Great Sacks," the last of which occurred nearly 800 years before the beginning of our current story. Okay, got all that? Good; now we're ready for page one of the actual book. And like I said, another fifteen hundred words concerning just that subject will be coming tomorrow. I hope you'll have a chance to come by again then. (UPDATE: Part two now online.)(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 2009
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Aug 09, 2008
| Hardcover
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