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| 0307743683
| 9780307743688
| B0084IQN5G
| 4.35
| 802,506
| Oct 03, 1978
| 2014
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it was amazing
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A top priority of my 2015 reading challenge was to take The Stand, Stephen King's epic apocalyptic fantasy published in 1978 and reissued by the autho
A top priority of my 2015 reading challenge was to take The Stand, Stephen King's epic apocalyptic fantasy published in 1978 and reissued by the author in an unabridged version in 1990. When finished, another challenge would be to contribute something new to the discussion of a novel which many of you were handed on your first day of junior high or high school. When Bilbo Baggins glances in the rearview mirror, he sees Randall Flagg gunning down the highway and gaining on him in popularity. If you've read the novel, please skip the following twenty-nine paragraphs. This plot summary is for purposes of my own dementia only ... On June 16, 1990, Charlie Campion, sentry at an unnamed military installation in California, wakes his wife in a panic. He grabs their infant son and without packing, the family flees the base as it goes into lockdown. Unknown to them, a weaponized strain of the flu known as Project Blue has escaped and each of them has already been exposed. Campion reaches the town of "Arnette" in East Texas before succumbing to the virus and crashing into a Texaco station. Of the good ole boys assembled here for their nightly political and economic discussion, Stuart Redman has the reflexes to shut off the pumps before they can ignite. Stu, a strong and silent type, works in a factory assembling calculators. In Manhattan, singer/songwriter Larry Underwood completes a cross country drive from L.A. to reach his childhood home. After years of struggle, Larry has a hit single with a tune he initially wrote for Neil Diamond called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?". Lost in a 24-hour scene of drugs, booze and parasitic friends, Larry hopes to get his head together and begins patching things up with his estranged mother. In Ogunquit, Maine, college student Frances Goldsmith breaks the news to her quasi-boyfriend that she's pregnant, a pharmaceutical mishap with her birth control pills being responsible. Frannie seems to realize how unhappy she'd be married to this guy and indicates that she plans on keeping the baby. While her father Peter supports her decision, Frannie's mother flies into a fury over her daughter's scandal. In "Shoyo", Arkansas, a young drifter named Nick Andros is attacked by local yokels and after giving them a fight, is almost beaten to death. Nick, a mute who communicates through handwriting, impresses the sheriff with his integrity and is deputized when the lawman needs someone posted at the jail. The sheriff isn't feeling so well. It seems that a bad case of the flu is spreading through town ... The virus that becomes referred to as Captain Trips spreads from Arnette like a killer chain letter. Charlie Campion infects almost every man at the Texaco station. One of these infects his state trooper cousin, who infects a traveling salesman, who infects hundreds who infect thousands. Captain Trips comes on like the flu: chills, fever, loss of appetite, progresses to swelling and finally, respiratory failure that proves fatal for 99.4% of those exposed. The military goes Gestapo, censoring news broadcasts, executing journalists who stumble onto the truth and finally, exporting the virus abroad in order to absolve the U.S. of blame. By month's end, most of the population is wiped out. Stu, the sole survivor of Captain Trips from Arnette, had been interned at a medical facility in Vermont. He escapes execution at the hands of his Army guard and making his way through New Hampshire, crosses paths with a retired sociology professor named Glen Bateman and Glen's dog, Kojak. (The virus proved 99.4% fatal among man's two best friends, the dog and the horse). Parting ways, Stu stumbles across two more survivors, Frannie, and Harold Laudner, the obnoxious teenage brother of one of Frannie's friends. Harold harbors an unrequited love for Frannie and without family or friends to torment him, discovers survival skills he never knew he had. Larry has a nervous breakdown escaping Manhattan, stumbling through a Holland Tunnel stacked with corpses and wandering the country with the conviction that he's no damn good to anyone but himself. Two survivors are watching him: a young schoolteacher named Nadine Cross and her ten-year-old ward, a regressed savage she refers to as "Joe". The boy is as hostile toward Larry as Harold is toward Stu, insecure that the women in their company will leave them for a stronger man. But Larry gains Joe's trust by playing the guitar and singing for him. Meanwhile, Nick bicycles through Oklahoma, where he meets Tom Cullen, a mentally retarded adult who can't read, but knows enough to save his new traveling partner from a tornado baring down on them. All three bands share intense dreams, good and bad. On the light side, they're drawn to the goodness of Abagail Freemantle, a 106-year-old widow in Nebraska. Mother Abagail is convinced she's been chosen by God to lead her people across the country to Boulder. On the dark side, they're terrorized by a supernatural being going by the name Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, the tall man, and the Walkin' Dude. Flagg is able to assume the form of a wolf, a crow or a weasel and has an eye powerful enough to watch all the survivors. In dreams, he lies to them, and menaces any good intentions they have left. Flagg is drawing followers to meet him in Las Vegas. In Boulder, Glen compels Stu to start organizing a civil society before people start forgetting what that was. Stu assumes the role of town marshal, while Frannie and Nick also consult on a committee that begins making Boulder work for the survivors who begin streaming in. Feeling rejected and bitter, Harold and Nadine find themselves drawn into the fold of Randall Flagg, who has unlimited potential for corrupting mortal men and women, but is afraid of what he can't see, which is hope. Both sides sense a great battle coming ... Stephen King began working on The Stand in the mid-1970s after moving his family to Boulder, Colorado. He was inspired in part by the news of the day: industrial accidents, government coverups and secret military projects coming to light, particularly germ warfare programs. King has often said that he'd always wanted to write an epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings but one with an American background. Some of his fans maintain that The Dark Tower series is the author's magnum opus, while others consider The Stand to be his best work. -- King has an extraordinary gift for putting his lens right where I wanted it to be and in The Stand, he gives us a front row seat for the end of the world. A government lab turned into tomb? Check. A research facility with corridors that go on and on, filled with corpses and no apparent exit? Check. Civil society being rebuilt the right way in Boulder? Check. A society of fear being rebuilt the absolutely wrong way in Las Vegas? Check! -- The Stand taps into the fascination and even sense of wonder that might come from surviving an apocalypse and rebuilding the world, as well as your own life, again. Food and supplies are plentiful. Wildlife begins to come back. The open road awaits. This is tempered with what King is really good at, which is plunging the reader into the absolute terror of losing your family, your safety and your state of mind in the aftermath of mass extinction. -- My favorite characters existed on the margins of the story, namely, Tom Cullen, whose childlike innocence and susceptibility to hypnosis qualify him for hazardous duty in Las Vegas as a spy. Tom is in many ways a reader surrogate. The magnitude of Captain Trips is so great and the death toll so catastrophic that the only way to deal with any of it would be to revert into Tom's world of toy cars, Pringle's Potato Chips and his friends. He's limited in his thinking but enormously perceptive. -- In addition to Tom, I loved the character of Dayna Jurgens, a fitness instructor from Ohio and abduction survivor whose mental and physical strength also qualifies her for spycraft on behalf of the Boulder group. Unfortunately, Dayna doesn't have a dry erase board mind like Tom, but her total commitment to her cause and her resolution to die a good death -- preferably taking Flagg with her -- were potent. King makes several allusions between post-plague Vegas and Nazi Germany, and I came to see some similarities between Dayna and Sophie Scholl. -- The major characters -- Stu, Frannie, Larry, Nick -- all seemed like they could shop at the same hardware store in Maine. They're all white and almost exclusively male. I get that diversity is not really where authors were in the '70s and that King was probably writing characters he identified with, but it's disappointing to see the survivors of the apocalypse look so alike. Mother Abagail is guilty of every stereotype that has since been exposed as The Magical Negro. -- I accepted the paranormal elements all right but King abuses deus ex machina to get his characters out of scrapes. Psychic visions reveal the true nature of other characters. Ghosts visit the living in their dreams with vital information. Decisions are based on directives from the Almighty, regardless of their logic. Consider how much King typically relies on divine intervention in his fiction and then consider how many pages he has here to slip this stuff into the story. -- I don't believe that the government coverup material has aged well. Government paranoia was so of this time -- The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were in theaters while the book was being written -- and even King has admitted that if he wrote the book today, the virus would be released by terrorists, not the feds. The lengths the army goes to cover up the superflu stretches believability, maybe not in 1978, but definitely today. -- Five stars and a must-read regardless. The weaknesses I've mentioned are more interesting to me than most of the strengths in a lot of other bestsellers. For example, the lack of color and the obsession with government conspiracy in the novel seem unavoidable considering when it was written. The Stand has been in the works as a motion picture event since it was published. King adapted a screenplay he hoped George A. Romero would direct (they made Creepshow instead). Screenwriters tried whittling the material down to a three-hour movie until a four-part mini-series aired on ABC in 1993. Adapted by King and directed by Mick Garris, the mini-series is currently available for streaming on Netflix, but this production is from a time when television was still quite bad. It's cheaply made schlock for all ages that alters the novel in small ways, scene by scene until the mini-series resembles the book only in token ways. Ed Harris and Kathy Bates, veterans of King novels on the big screen, appear briefly in uncredited roles, teasing a real, A-class version of this novel that might finally be headed for theaters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Dec 27, 2014
not set
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Jan 12, 2015
not set
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Mar 11, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1617758566
| 9781617758560
| 1617758566
| 3.75
| 150
| Feb 02, 2021
| Feb 02, 2021
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liked it
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Akashic Books, which might be running out of cities or regions to cultivate their wonderful noir anthologies, is branching out into the speculative fi
Akashic Books, which might be running out of cities or regions to cultivate their wonderful noir anthologies, is branching out into the speculative fiction genre. Published in 2021, Speculative Los Angeles is based in L.A. Speculative fiction deals with extraterrestrial settings, magic, futurism, alternate history, or characters with unusual powers. The improbable, quixotic, or unreal. I found most of the fourteen stories obtuse or difficult to pry open. My favorites: + "Peak TV," by Ben H. Winters. A wildly successful television writer/ producer in Culver City is pitched what he considers a bad idea for a paranormal TV show, until he begins being haunted in a similar fashion. + "Purple Panic," by Francesca Lia Block. A woman recalls growing up--surviving, actually--her childhood in Studio City/ the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s and her childhood's friend tale of how a visitor from another dimension helped get her through. This is the least science fiction story in the book, more literary fiction, something that always gets my attention in these collections. + "Maintenance," by Aimee Bender. Despite the pedestrian title, this is my favorite story in the collection. In Miracle Mile, two girls note the disappearance of the sculpture woolly mammoths from the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, which start turning up all over L.A. I've had Bender's collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt on my radar for some time and now understand why. + "Jaguar's Breath," by Luis J. Rodriguez. The Big One ushers in totalitarian rule, which a guerilla movement called Jaguar's Breath fights back from their underground bases in the Angeles National Forest. Dystopia is not my favorite sub-genre because there's so much of it, particularly of the ecological disaster or immigration crackdown variety. It's not a matter of how well it's written, I like reading something different, but I could at least follow this one. One of my discoveries in the ten years I've been on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ is Akashic Books. They had a booth at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, so I was happy to give them my business, purchasing this title and Beirut Noir. As a writer, I find it fascinating how a dozen authors interpret the same assignment. For readers, these anthologies are a wonderful way to discover local authors, as well as learn about other parts of the world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 27, 2024
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May 27, 2024
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Jan 25, 2021
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Paperback
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| B07X16MWK9
| 3.79
| 3,205
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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really liked it
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As antidote to a shitty apocalyptic book I'd read, I ran for cover with The Living Dead by Daniel Kraus, based on material by George A. Romero. Publis
As antidote to a shitty apocalyptic book I'd read, I ran for cover with The Living Dead by Daniel Kraus, based on material by George A. Romero. Published in 2020, this is a long novel, inspired by notes that Kraus combed through to complete the book Romero had nibbled around for over 30 years, Romero being the filmmaker who made the original Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and spent intervening years hustling for financing for his next film (Dawn of the Dead in 1979 and Day of the Dead in 1985 are also classics). A novel would be pure unbridled 100% Romero, without budgetary restraints, but he never wrote it. Did I mention this is a long novel? There's no such thing as a surplus of zombie activity, you might say, like there being no such thing as too much cheese, too much wine or too much Halle Berry. I beg to differ (sorry Ms. Berry!). I started flipping through the many character backstories and racing to see where the story would go. Once I realized that Kraus was memorializing Romero by fleshing out and exploring every scrap of paper his idol had left behind after his death in 2017, I decided to reread the book. I made it to the 20% mark, when a new year and new books tantalized more than a reread of this one did. It's really good, though. There are several competing storylines here beginning on October 24 when the dead rise from eternal slumber to stalk after the living. Infected blood or saliva from a ghoul can kill a fresh victim in minutes or hours, after which they too rise from the dead to take up the extermination of the human race. -- Statistician Etta Hoffman, nicknamed The Poet after Emily Dickinson by her co-workers at the U.S. Census Bureau, stays behind in the bunker-like building in D.C. to catalog the fall of civilization for whoever, or whatever, comes along next. Etta's aversion to social activity make her the best adapted to deal with the apocalypse and she cherishes her solitude, quickly tracing Patient Zero back to San Diego. -- San Diego assistant medical examiner Luis Acocella witnesses the shooting death of a homeless man. Certain that the man's bullet wounds were non-fatal and the lead detective's pursuit of a murder case resulted in the vagrant's death, Acocella and his diener Charlene Rutkowski begin an autopsy. -- High school student Greer Morgan watches the residents of Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort (The Last Resort) in a Missouri shithole begin to attack each other in the morning fog. She barricades herself in her trailer and manages to escape with the help of a Syrian immigrant. All alone in the world, Greer encounters a musician who calls himself "Muse King" and becomes deadly with a bow and arrow. Muse King does not have the stomach to kill the living dead. Greer shows no such remorse. -- At Atlanta-based WWN News, a bleeding heart news director named Nathan Baseman bids on video out of Chicago of a massacre in which the dead rise. His colleagues believe it to be gang related, but Baseman senses this is a 9/11 magnitude event. The only other person at the network who agrees is Chuck Corso, aka "The Face," a stoic, old school anchor who pledges to stay on the air, informing the public as long as he can. -- Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Karl Nishimura and a rookie pilot on her first deployment named Jenny Angelys Pagan survive the initial wave of living dead absorbing the crew only to face a cult that rises around the ship's chaplain Father Bill. -- Etta Hoffman's office crush is the senior statistician, an athletic Brit named Annie Teller. Annie flees D.C. when the emergency becomes widespread, hoping to catch a flight to Los Angeles to reunite with her love at the La Brea Tar Pits. Annie makes it to Atlanta, where she's bitten by an infected woman. Rising from the dead, Annie is compelled by hunger and loneliness to pursue the living but also driven by a strange urge to keep heading west, to the La Brea Tar Pits. There's a lot to like in The Living Dead: -- Rather than monsters chasing thinly sketched victims around as we bop from one kill to the next, Kraus and Romero are fascinated by the people, their insecurities, their jobs, their moral dilemmas, how they react under pressure. Each character has a compelling job--working in a morgue, on an aircraft carrier, at a news station--or background. Main characters are women or Black or Asian or gay, so there are diverse points of view expressed here as opposed to the white male perspective only. -- Kraus is also a terrific writer. His prose quite often blew me away. I really felt as if I was trapped living in a shithole trailer park with trashy neighbors and holes in the roof, or stationed on an aircraft carrier. I'm pretty sure I could perform an autopsy based on the many paragraphs devoted to vital organs and tools of the trade. I really appreciated the efforts Kraus took to get inside the "mind" of the living dead, which is an area that zombie movies or TV shows can't delve into beyond some grunting or growling. You are hungry. You wake up. In that order. This hunger is different from any you knew before. This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken away from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones. Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain. Hunger, in all the between places. It is your reason for waking up. It is the reason you move. It is the reason. You look. Your eyesight is poor. There is a body next to yours. You smell it. It smells strong. You have a faint recollection of booze. You recognize the body. It used to be called Jean Cobb. Was Jean Cobb important? You do not know. Jean Cobb called you Scud. You remember this now. Here is the curious thing: Jean Cobb is no longer Jean Cobb. She is you. You are also you. You feel the hunger in both of you. The hunger is a thing that stretches outward. Feels around for more of you. But finds nothing. Only the Scud-you and the Jean-you. Only you you. -- The Living Dead has details that will stay with me awhile. Greer is bitten, like most victims, very early in the outbreak as confusion reigns, but she lucks out that her attacker is an elderly park resident with toothless gums! I'd never seen that before. I also liked how condoms become second in value only to food and water as Greer wants to have a lot of sex with her traveling partner Muse King but hardly wants to end up with an STD or pregnant with all the hospitals closed. A subtle Planned Parenthood PSA. I approve. -- On a personal note, it was invigorating to discover that even a talent like George A. Romero struggled for 30 years to write a novel and couldn't get more than a couple of chapters on paper. It makes my writing process look like Le Mans. In the afterword, Kraus dives into the legend surrounding Romero's unpublished novel and how in 2000, he experimented with publishing a chapter at a time on the web, but quickly ran out of resolve to see that through. I wasn't rooting for the man to fail but it was validating to see how difficult it is for any novelist to take the ideas or aspirations racing through them and fashion them into a coherent narrative on paper. I'm docking The Living Dead one star because Kraus never truly brings his characters together to have them face anything as compelling as their mere survival did up to that point. There's a fifteen year time jump, which disrupts the narrative and I tend to dislike. I started ripping through the last 25% of the book, needing it to be over. Sometimes, less is best. It seemed to me that the Etta Hoffman character, maybe the Greer Morgan character and possibly the undead Annie Teller deserved their own novels. The Stand was a doorstopper but The Living Dead is hoarded stuff piled all the way to the ceiling. Trivia: The original distributor of Night of the Living Dead, the Walter Reade Organization, was so bush league that when they changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, they forgot to copyright the new title. This immediately entered the movie into public domain! Romero lost millions of dollars over the years. That was the bad news. The good news is that it costs nothing for other filmmakers to license his film. Thus, when another movie or TV series needs to have something playing on a screen, there's a good chance it'll be Night of the Living Dead. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 21, 2020
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Dec 31, 2020
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Nov 15, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| B0DLT1ZR1S
| 3.96
| 35,866
| Jul 03, 2018
| Jul 03, 2018
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liked it
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My introduction to Mary Robinette Kowal is The Calculating Stars, whose keywords rang up like a jackpot: 1950s. Doomsday event. Social injustice. Spac
My introduction to Mary Robinette Kowal is The Calculating Stars, whose keywords rang up like a jackpot: 1950s. Doomsday event. Social injustice. Space flight. Judaism. Female protagonist. That had me on board. Published in 2018, I found the book at my nearest library and opened it sight unseen. I found a lot to give Kowal credit for, the least of which is building an imaginative alternate history and dealing with civil rights. But I grew awful bored with her story and started flipping pages. This is another example of a novel with terrific table dressing but little on the plate. The story begins March 3, 1952 with a rousing start as Elma York (née Wexler) recounts where she was when the Meteor hit. A veteran of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, with combat experience flying supply missions over Europe, Elma is a computer (mathematician) in addition to being a pilot. She now works with the launch of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Her husband Nathaniel is a rocket scientist. Thomas Dewey is president. Interrupted from sexual recreation at a cabin in the Poconos at 9:52 a.m., a flash outside has Nathaniel thinking A-bomb, except radio is broadcasting. Elma theorizes it might've been a meteor. An earthquake levels the cabin. The couple survive and Edward R. Murrow comes on the air to state that a meteorite has struck off the coast of Maryland. D.C. and Baltimore have been vaporized, along with Elma's parents. Running calculations, Elma gives them 15 minutes before the airwave hits. The couple are unable to reach the airfield where Elma parked her Cessna in time, but ultimately get into the air with only cuts and bruises. Elma glides to a landing at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio after ejecta destroys her propeller. On the ground, they find Col. Stetson Parker, an ambitious and condescending "schmuck" who Elma knew from the war, certain the Soviet Union has attacked. Parker took the chair behind the desk, and only now did I notice his nameplate set front and center. I was surprised he had twins. I wonder who'd married him. He steepled his fingers together fingers together and sighed again. "An explosion--" "A meteorite." "That's what the news reported. But given that Washington was wiped out? I place my money on the Russians." Nathaniel cocked his head. "Is there radioactivity?" "We haven't gotten anyone close enough to the blast area to check." Idiot. I spelled things out for him. "There's ejecta falling all around, which, first of all, you could just test for radioactivity. Second, that's not something that happens with an A-bomb. It occurs when a meteorite punches a hole in the atmosphere and the blast material is sucked into space, then falls back to Earth." His eyes narrowed. "Then know this. The United States Congress was in session, both the House and the Senate. Our federal government was nearly entirely wiped out. The Pentagon, Langley ... So even if this was an act of God, do you honestly think the Russians won't try to take advantage of it?" That ... was a terrifyingly good point. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest to ward off the chill in the air. Rather than take up space on base that will soon be needed for an influx of refugees, Elma and Nathaniel are taken in by Major Eugene Lindholm, an African American pilot who escorted their plane to Ohio, and his wife. General Dwight Eisenhower has recalled troops and returned from Europe, a ceasefire has been declared in the Korean Peninsula and Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan has been found in Kansas and sworn in as president. While Nathaniel attends a marathon of meetings and uses data crunched by his wife to calm fears that Russia directed the meteorite, Elma is relegated to duties as a volunteer nurse. Her studies of the impact lead Elma to a bigger concern than World War III. Running her calculations by her brother Hershel, a meteorologist in California, she calculates that "nuclear winter" conditions will ultimately be followed by a greenhouse effect which will bake the planet and make Earth uninhabitable. Her presentation to President Brannan is not embraced by everyone, but preparations are made to reduce greenhouse emissions as well as prepare mankind for life elsewhere in the solar system. Of the "Artemis Seven" astronauts chosen to lead America into the stars, all are men, all are white, and the first in space, in 1956, is Stetson Parker. Relocating to the nation's capitol in Kansas City, the Yorks work in Sunflower Mission Control. Dr. York is a flight engineer and Mrs. York a computer. She concludes that if the goal is to colonize the stars, women astronauts are a must. Her flight director explains that he'll never risk a female pilot's life and jeopardize funding, while America's hero Stetson Parker tells Elma that he'll never allow lady astronauts. To demonstrate their capabilities, Elma organizes an all-women's air show, striking a bargain with the Kansas City Negro Aeronautics Club to loan them their best pilots and six Mustangs for the show. Her goal is simple: women in space flight. "When sewing machines were first introduced, people were frightened because they were new and moved with an unprecedented speed. There was concern that you could go blind from watching the machine. So the manufacturers made them beautiful: they added gilding and floral motifs." Parker snorted, "So you want to send some Lady Astronauts up as decoration?" "As we explained to the congressional hearing, our goal is to expand humanity to other worlds. You will need women on those worlds or they will never be self-sustaining colonies." I glared at Parker. "I trust you don't need me to explain the biology of babies?" "Babies or no, it's not safe." Parker shook his head and smiled. "I appreciate your ambition, I really do, but surely the Orion 27 accident demonstrates that we can't put women in the line of fire." "No. That is the wrong tactic to take. If you point to the explosion as a sign that rocketry is not safe, the space program will fail." I looked back at Director Clemons, but with the cigar in his mouth, it was hard to read his expression. "You know it will. If you want to demonstrate that the program is safe, then you need to demonstrate that these rockets are safe enough even for ladies." Parker shrugged, as if none of that mattered. "And we will ... after the moon base has been established." I pressed my hands flat against my skirt to keep me from balling them into fists. "If you refer to page six of my report ... After World War II, there is no shortage of women who flew as WASPs and have the right skills. But if you wait too long, those women will be too old, which will raise the barrier of creating the colonies." "She has a point." Wernher von Braun, of all people, stepped into Clemons' smoke cloud to support me. "The Russians used their Night Witches in the war to devastating effect." Parker tilted his head at the mention of the Russian women's air squadron. "I always thought they were propaganda." "Propaganda, perhaps to begin with. But real and effective." Von Braun shrugged. "And even propaganda has its uses. We want the space program to continue, yes?" Propaganda. Yes. I was well aware of what propaganda could do. There are details in this alternate history science fiction civil rights novel that I found compelling. Elma and Nathaniel are part of a diaspora who lost family back east. Jewish observations are a part of the book. Sexism is confronted and so is racism, with the skin color of the refugees alarmingly white until Major Lindholm and his wife, with help from Elma, change that. The Meteor and mankind's response raises questions whether those in charge value a diverse human race or would be content with it looking all white and mostly male. Global warming is pooh-poohed by deniers. "A couple of years of bad weather, and they're telling us we have to go into space?" He shrugged, the flesh of his neck bunching over his collar with the movement. "Even if I believed this nonsense, why not spend the money making things better here on Earth?" "They are." I rested my hand on Nathaniel's knee to let him know that I would take this one. "That's why we have rationing--they're trying to eliminate anything that will add to the greenhouse effect. The space program is just one aspect of it." "Eternal winter. Please." Luther waved his hand toward the front window, where we starting to draw level with the top of the lock. "You heard the captain." "I think you've misunderstood. The winter was temporary. The problem is that the temperature is going to start rising soon." 'Eternal summer' is what we're actually concerned about." Being in Kansas City, at the IAC, we were surrounded by people who understood that, and were all striving for the same goal. "Besides, it's not a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket, right? All the space program is doing is making another basket for eggs." "Ma'am, I appreciate your thoughts, but there are economic forces at work here that I don't expect you to understand. This is all about big business seeing an opportunity to make a buck off the government. It's conspiracies and shadows all the way down." There are moments when this 1950s story is written with too much of a 2018 sensibility for me. It detours from an apocalyptic tale toward a second-rate version of The Right Stuff. There's already a first-rate version of The Right Stuff. It's The Right Stuff. Kowal imaginatively conjures a doomsday event, then puts her focus on Elma's obsession with social anxiety. The stakes remain low and I grew bored with the book, which concludes like the first installment of a series rather than a standalone novel. I appreciated the STEM material as well as the acknowledgment that the heroine has a sex life, but the story let go of me. It's a nice novel that I cautiously recommend. Length: 100,870 words ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2019
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Jun 08, 2019
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Jun 05, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0553418874
| 9780553418873
| 0553418874
| 3.60
| 2,793
| Mar 24, 2016
| Jul 19, 2016
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Scottish author Jenni Fagan is The Sunlight Pilgrims. Published in 2016, this is a novel I moved up my reading docke
My introduction to the fiction of Scottish author Jenni Fagan is The Sunlight Pilgrims. Published in 2016, this is a novel I moved up my reading docket based on positive reviews, its apocalyptic trappings and my winter theme to read fiction set in freezing environments. While I'm usually avid for new takes on doomsday and a new Ice Age grabbed my attention, I was not compelled by anything Fagan attempted to do or how she went about it. Had this novel been a door stopper, I would've abandoned and pinned a one-star rating on it, but then again, if it had been a door stopper, it would've forced Fagan to put more meat on the burger. In November 2020, the melting of the polar ice caps has dumped freshwater into the salinity of the oceans, wrecking havoc with the North Atlantic Drift and ushering in a new Ice Age. Temperatures in London have dropped to -6 degrees and are expected to plummet further in the winter. Economic collapse has killed off commerce, with Dylan MacRae forced to surrender his family owned movie theater the Babylon to the bank. With both his grandmother Gunn and mother Vivienne dying recently and Dylan no longer able to live in the theater, he discovers that his mum purchased a caravan off the books and left it for him. With Britons fleeing south, Dylan takes the bus north, to a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Fells. Among his possessions are the ashes of his beloved grandmother and mother and his gin-making equipment. Trading freezing weather in London for arctic conditions in the caravan park, he befriends a survivalist single mother named Constance Fairbairn and her twelve-year-old Goth daughter Stella, who is one year into her transition from male to female. Dylan finds difficulty adapting to life without his family, while Stella comes to terms with her sexual identity and being treated as a pariah by the community. Outside there is a blue, blue sky and frost has dusted the Clachan Fells mountains silver. Stells Fairbairn feels like she is going to cry, and nobody is even up yet. She is a swan wrapped in cellophane and everyone can see through her skin. Lewis will never kiss her again. She might as well forget it. She isn't pretty, and she's angular, and she has a penis. As tick boxes go for the most popular boy in school, those attributes are probably not high on his list. He did kiss her, though, and the only two people that know about it are her and him. He won't kiss her again in case any of his friends find out and think he's weird--that is why he won't do it again. Or because he already knows he'd like it. He wants to, though. He wants to even more than she does. That feeling. A light flutter in her chest. It squeezes in. Her ribs are embracing each other. The light outside is so bright now it almost feels sinister. Clenching her teeth. Hoping someone will want her one day. If Lewis tries to kiss her again she'll shoot him down, because he's too ashamed to do it in public. Lately, fear is following her. It is two tiny pit-a-pat feet always skittering behind her. When she turns there is nothing there, just the faintest footprints in the snow. Buyer beware: The Sunlight Pilgrims takes a strong turn toward literary fiction and away from science fiction. A major shortcoming of the novel is its failure to explore its conceit. How would Britons prepare for an Ice Age? How would a city dweller survive? How would a caravan park come together, or not come together? Fagan isn't interested and could've easily set her story in a rugged environment, like The Shipping News, without dressing her story in science fiction clothes that don't fit. As if Cormac McCarthy were a major influence in her MFA study, Fagan also refuses to use quotation marks, and her dialogue is very precocious. The light outside grows brighter. Stella passes down the muted YouTube clip to her mum on the bunk below and Constance watches it for a minute. --Gender is closer than anyone likes to think. Men won't buy it because most of them are dickheads, she says. --Is that the technical term. Mum? --It is. We all share twenty-two identical chromosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyone starts out female and they stay like that for months. --What, even Dad? --Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick. --Mum! Can't you say penis? --It sounds so sterile. --Why don't they teach this stuff in Sex Ed? --Gender indoctrination. It's state imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it--the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and a vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line. --So, it's like a vagina line? --It's totally a vagina line. --Fucking hell! --Swear jar, Stella. There's plenty male-and-females in one: snails, echinoderms; a cushion sea star spends its first three years female, then three years male. There's twenty-one species of fish on the spectrum: angel fish, sea bass, snook, clown fish, wrasse--a female wrasse turns into a male if the dominant male dies. The prettiest is a butterfly, where the male side has big black wings and the female side has smaller purple wings. It's a bilateral gynandromorph, male and female in one. --You should go back to teaching, Mum. --Fuck that! Kids are annoying little bastards, present company excluded. --Swear jar! Good hell. In addition to dialogue, I don't think Fagan writes men believably, with Dylan spending less time adapting and overcoming the numerous challenges of his environment and more time dwelling on the loss of his grandmother and mother. There's room in apocalyptic fiction to explore the inner world of a survivor; few apocalyptic novels do this as well as The Dog Stars and it's even touched on in the Mad Max pictures. The Sunlight Pilgrims doesn't meet the minimum expectations of its genre, doesn't introduce characters who are relatable and doesn't provide readable dialogue. It's a major disappointment. Length: 78,138 words ...more |
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Jan 13, 2019
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Jan 16, 2019
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Aug 21, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1611092795
| 9781611092790
| B0095VLIME
| 3.64
| 8,521
| Mar 01, 2012
| Feb 19, 2013
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it was ok
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Whenever I’m in the mood for a snack and go to the fridge, I rarely select anything healthy. In the mood for science fiction, I threw Extinction Point
Whenever I’m in the mood for a snack and go to the fridge, I rarely select anything healthy. In the mood for science fiction, I threw Extinction Point by an author named Paul Antony Jones in my Kindle cart. Published in 2013, I liked that this book hit two of my favorite keywordsâ€�Female Protagonist and End of the World—and appreciated that it was free to borrow on Kindle Unlimited. I can’t say that I had zero expectations because Justin Cronin’s vampire apocalypse novels certainly set the bar for what’s possible in the genre, not to mention a good old British doomsday like War of the Worlds or Day of the Triffids. What I got here was amateur hour by comparison with one of my least favorite keywords: Ends In Cliffhanger.Ìý The story is true blue â€�50s science fiction. Emily Baxter, reporter for the “New York Tribune,â€� is ordering a cappuccino one fine day when reports of strange weather in Russia hit the Internet. Soon, the reported red rain begins to seep upon New York, killing birds immediately. By the time Emily makes it back to the office, the news out of Eastern Europe is that there is no news—no one can be reached. CNN provides footage out of France of dead bodies and reports of many sick people before their on-the-scene eyewitness vomits blood and collapses. Emily returns to her fab skyrise apartment where her cop boyfriend joins her. Pretty soon, he’s drowning in his own blood but rather than join him, Emily survives, one of roughly 8 million in New York to win the doomsday survival lottery.Ìý Everything in this book feels like the first thing that popped into the author's head, which is a problem when none of it’s original. The protagonist is a reporter from Iowa, because, why not. Lois Lane is pretty bitchinâ€�. Her boyfriend is a cop, because, why not, it's a reliably male profession. The setting is Manhattan because, why not, based on almost every end of the world movie, TV series or book, New York dies first. The first survivor Emily encounters is a dog, because, if you're alone at the end of the world, you need a dog. This is story development along the lines ofFamily Feud, where “Surveys Says!â€� is what the author went with.ÌýFirst place here is you lose me as a reader. The story is mostly about how everyone in New York dies at the same moment except our bland heroine, which is pretty heavy stuff, but the writing isn’t up to telling that story. Emily tells us what she’s thinking, which is often some variation of, “This is very, very bad.â€� Yeah, totally. I can get that. It felt more like the author was watching Mystery Science Theater and commenting on this silly movie he was watching as opposed to something that was happening.Ìý [image] I love a good apocalypse story centered on women who go shopping, meaning, they gear up for the journey ahead. The movie Night of the Comet put an â€�80s twist on that. My favorite aspect of Extinction Point was Emily gearing up at the local bike shop and Whole Foods as she prepared to pedal off Manhattan Island. Because if you want to survive doomsday, your calf muscles better be in shape and bicycle repair knowledge wouldn’t hurt.  I found it a particulrly lazy effort how at least three times, Emily closes her eyes and waits to die with all the survival instinct of a crash test dummy, only to be saved by the author. I think this is referred to as “deus ex machina.â€� My biggest complaint with the novel is that instead of providing the reader an ending, we get a set-up for the next novel. A lot of this was going on in the self-publishing world a few years ago with novels being sublet into four or five smaller novels in order to move more product. In other words, you’d have to spend $100 to get the whole story. This makes it impossible for me to recommend this, even if the writing was high quality, which it is not. ...more |
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Dec 20, 2020
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Dec 20, 2020
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Aug 02, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| B0DWVHJ23M
| 4.07
| 573,192
| Aug 26, 2014
| Sep 09, 2014
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it was amazing
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I knew Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 apocalyptic bestseller Station Eleven well when I raced through it over three days in February 2015. My thoughts w
I knew Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 apocalyptic bestseller Station Eleven well when I raced through it over three days in February 2015. My thoughts were ripe and I'm convinced my insights were brilliant. Then came judgment day, in October appropriately, when Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ tricked me into deleting my review because the book was still marked "to read" in my reading docket. Now I find myself struggling to pick up the pieces and recreate what was the best I can, without cannibals chasing me. The story begins at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, where a fading film star named Arthur Leander holds stage as the lead in King Lear. The actor collapses and in spite of efforts by a fast thinking paramedic trainee seated near the footlights named Jeevan Chaudhary, the actor dies. Shaken by the tragedy is one of Leander's co-stars, an adolescent named Kirsten Raymonde. Jeevan leaves the theater more elated than saddened, convinced that after years of unfulfilling work as a paparzzo, he's found his true calling. Jeevan receives a phone call from a friend, a doctor at Toronto General Hospital. He reports that what the news media has labelled the Georgia Flu looks like a real epidemic and has come to North America, courtesy a flight from Moscow and a sixteen year old girl now in critical condition with flu-like symptoms. 200 patients have since presented at the hospital with the same symptoms, fifteen dead. Jeevan's friend calls back to tell Jeevan to get out of the city. Jeevan instead heads to a supermarket and fills two shopping carts with provisions. He hunkers down in the high rise apartment of his wheelchair bound brother Frank. Meanwhile, Arthur Leander's attorney calls the actor's oldest friend, a corporate consultant named Clark Thompson, with news of the actor's death. It falls on Clark to phone each of Arthur's ex-wives, beginning with Miranda Carroll, a shipping company executive currently working in Malaysia. Mandel slips back from the edge of the apocalypse to introduce us to Arthur as a young man in New York. Notified by family that someone who grew up with him in the same British Columbia town has moved to the city, Arthur has dinner with her. Miranda is introduced working a clerical position and trapped in a bad relationship with a painter. Miranda holds artistic aspirations of her own, spending every moment of her time working on a graphic novel about a physicist named Dr. Eleven orbiting the earth in a space platform consisting of small islands. It's a world Miranda calls Station Eleven. Mranda's marriage to Arthur and their life in L.A. end badly, culminating in a night when Jeevan sneaks a photo of Miranda walking in the nocturne. Before the world can embrace Miranda's magnum opus, the Georgia Flu wipes out 99% of the world's population. One of the survivors is Kirsten, who falls in with a troupe of actors and musicians calling themselves the Traveling Symphony. Circling the Great Lakes region and singing for their supper one settlement at a time, Kirsten's skills with Shakespearean tragedy have been eclipsed only by her skill with a knife, and one of her most prized possessions are two issues of a comic book an old co-star gave her called Station Eleven. The novel Station Eleven is one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I've read. I'd place it shoulder to shoulder with The Dog Stars by Peter Heller; The Stand by Stephen King towers above them both like Mount Doom by virtue of its imagination and size alone. I'm always a prospective customer when it comes to apocalyptic novels or tales of survivors, but Station Eleven moved some fresh air through the corridors. Mandel puts the word "fiction" in the "science fiction" category. The "science" or action isn't skipped out on here. I have a two-step plan for surviving a zombie apocalypse, a call for action I've developed after reading a lot of apocalyptic novels, and step one of my plan is lifted directly from this novel. I learned more about how to survive the end of the world than I did reading I Am Legend or watching Will Smith hunt deer from a Ford Mustang for sure. Better still is Mandel's facility with language, which really elevates the book: AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while util the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. More more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but not, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runaways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were fled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plessetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars. Mandel's strength lies in "character" first and foremost, which Stephen King would probably endorse and I always value. It's a testament to her ability to create red blooded women and men, documenting their passions, their vulnerabilities and their will to live, that I didn't go to fidgeting during the chapters set before the Georgia Flu. I would've been fine with a novel about these characters without the end of the world at all. The decision to use an unpubished graphic novel, nothing more to the characters than paper and ink by an unknown artist, to tie both of Mandel's eras together and say something about the things worth living and dying for, was something I don't usually find in these sorts of books where survivors are being chased by mutants. Maybe it's a testament to my love of Spaceman Spiff and Bill Watterson, but I found myself agreeing with Mandel and a bittersweet when the novel ended. ...more |
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Feb 24, 2015
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Feb 27, 2015
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Oct 18, 2015
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ebook
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| 0385503857
| 9780385503853
| 0385503857
| 4.01
| 278,626
| Apr 22, 2003
| May 06, 2003
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it was amazing
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My introduction to Margaret Atwood is Oryx and Crake, her 2003 science fiction novel that leaps from the post-apocalypse back to the months leading up
My introduction to Margaret Atwood is Oryx and Crake, her 2003 science fiction novel that leaps from the post-apocalypse back to the months leading up to it. This is a future that owes its legacy to Philip K. Dick, where ecological disaster and civil unrest are kept outside the compound walls of the biotech industry, whose engineers toil on some troubling new creations. The novel is lesiurely paced and droll but kept me engrossed via the sharpness of its wit and a creeping dread that builds under the immorality of its concepts. Once I warmed to Atwood's protagonist--a middling Mad Max named Snowman--the novel took off. After teasing quotes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Atwood drops us in a lagoon of some unnamed part of what was once the world. A survivor who calls himself Snowman spends his time foraging about in self-pity. He's a shaman of sorts to a genetically engineered tribe of humans with 30-year life spans, naked and green-eyed perfections who speak, but harbor a child's understanding of the world based on the mythology Snowman is making up as he goes, myth built on deities he refers to as Oryx and Crake. The story jumps back in time to introduce these characters and how Snowman got himself here. Snowman was once known as Jimmy. His father was a gifted genographer responsible for the pigoon, a genetically adapted pig bred to grow human-tissue organs. Jimmy's mother was a microbiologist whose job had been to study the proteins unhealthy to the pigoon. She suffers a nervous breakdown over her work and quits. Her marriage begins to dissolve after Jimmy's father is recruited by HelthWyzer, a company which fortifies its people and their families inside a sterilized compound. Outside the walls are the pleeblands, the inner cities, where bioterrorists and criminals apparently run riot and Jimmy--a class clown--has never set foot. The HelthWyzer Compound was not only newer than the OrganInc layout, it was bigger. It had two shopping malls instead of one, a better hospital, three dance clubs, even its own golf course. Jimmy went to the HelthWyzer Public School, where at first he didn't know anyone. Despite his initial loneliness, that wasn't too bad. Actually it was good, because he could recycle his old routines and jokes: the kids at OrganInc had become used to his antics. He'd moved on from the chimpanzee act and was into fake vomiting and choking to death--both popular--and a thing where he drew a bare-baked girl on his stomach with her crotch right where his navel was, and made her wiggle. Jimmy's mother ultimately runs away, subverting the CorpSeCorps security force which policies the HelthWyzer compound. She liberates Killer, Jimmy's pet rakunk, a pet that is part racoon, part skunk. Jimmy is devastated, unsure who he misses more: his mother or his genetically altered skunk. A few months before this loss, Jimmy meets Glenn, a transfer student with a calm aloofness and maturity beyond his years. Eager to make a dent, Jimmy befriends him. The boys play strategy games like Kwiktime Osama or Barbarian Stomp. Glenn's favorite is Extinctathon, where the object is to name that dead species. The game is monitored by a network of biofreaks calling themselves MaddAddam. Glenn's codename is Crake, as in the doomed red-billed waterbird from Australia. Jimmy and Crake browse the web, which offers newscasts in the nude, live coverage of executions in Asia, a game show where contestants eat live animals, and global sex sites. It's on a porno show where Jimmy becomes smitten with a girl who looks no older than eight, small-boned and exquisite who stares into the camera with a substance that captivates him. Years later, Crake will introduce this girl to Jimmy as Oryx. In the post-apocalypse, Snowman has based the mythology he shares with the genetic perfections in his charge around the idea that they are Children of Crake and all animals are Children of Oryx, which Jimmy realizes too late bans him from killing a rabbit for food. Snowman has decreed that the tribe bring him a fish per week, which also occurs to him too late as being short-sighted. He makes the decision to trek to a place he once knew as the RejoovenEsense Compound, whose inhabitants dropped dead or fled, leaving behind canned goods, sprayguns and booze. On his journey, Snowman contends with wild pigoons, which travel in packs and possess strategic skills. Crake and Jimmy parted ways when they are accepted into the Watson-Crick Institute and Martha Graham Academy, respectively, but stay in touch until the day Crake, a VIP at RejoovenEsense, offers his friend a job marketing the revolutionary BlyssPluss Pill. The aim was to produce a single pill, that, at one and the same time: a) would protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases, fatal, inconvenient, or merely unsightly; b) would provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a generalized sense of energy and well-being, thus reducing the frustration and blocked testosterone that led to jealousy and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth; c) would prolong youth These three capabilities would be the selling points, said Crake, but there would be a fourth, which would not be advertised. The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level. This effect could be made reversible, though not in individual subjects, by altering the components of the pill as needed, i.e., if the populations of any one area got too low. "So basically you're going to sterilize people without them knowing it under the guise of giving them the ultra in orgies?" "That's a crude way of putting it," said Crake. Rather than trade on space travel, rayguns or aliens, Oryx and Crake is in the comedy horror vein of the science fiction genre. Much of it is subtle yet exhilarating. Atwood takes the most toxic elements of consumer culture and industry and pushes them to their most logical extremes. The satiric effect is both humoring and chilling. English has been bastardized to make words out of SoYummie Ice Cream or Noodie News. One of the first successful genetic splices was the spoat/gider, a goat crossed with a spider to produce high-tensile silk in the milk. An animal snuff site called Felicia's Frog Squash is popular with the children. Atwood's tongue-in-cheek vision throbs with a doomsday pulse. Oryx and Crake was an acquired taste. I wasn't blown away by the post-apocalyptic world Atwood teases the reader with in the early going. Snowman could be considered an inert blob as a character and nothing particularly exciting happens in regards to the end of the world setting. But the novel is anything but boring. Atwood's vision, her sense of humor and her language--often plain in manner and style but sometimes as fantastic as skywriting--that kept me turning the pages. Flashbacks into Oryx's childhood or Jimmy's collegiate ennui are imaginative and infused with wit and tragedy. The novel closes well and concludes with a final chapter that is close to perfect. ...more |
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Nov 04, 2016
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Nov 15, 2016
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Sep 20, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1593083629
| 9781593083625
| 1593083629
| 3.83
| 334,421
| 1898
| May 01, 2008
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really liked it
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The War of the Worlds, the classic of alien invasion and interplanetary paranoia by H.G. Wel
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The War of the Worlds, the classic of alien invasion and interplanetary paranoia by H.G. Wells. Published in serial format by Pearson's Magazine from April 1897 to December of that year, the story originated after the author's relocation to the town of Woking in Surrey County. It was here that Wells also wrote his comic novel The Wheels of Chance, as well as The Invisible Man, which has now been replaced as my favorite Wells invention with this one. The novel begins on a warm summer's night in June and unfolds from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, an academic in the field of philosophy who lives with his wife in Woking, southwest of London County and bordered on the north by the River Thames. A celestial alignment of Mars, Earth and the sun has generated much interest by members of the Astronomical Exchange, among them Ogilvy, a well-known astronomer and friend of the narrator's. Ogilvy believes the possibility of life on Mars to be absurd. The narrator isn't so sure about that. Early in the morning, a "falling star" is reported in the skies over Berkshire, Surrey and Middlesex. Ogilvy tracks the descent of what is assumed to be a meteorite to a "common", or public land, near the town of Horsell. Climbing into the sand pit where the object has been buried, Ogilvy discovers a huge cylinder, which he determines to be hollow. He runs to get help and news quickly spreads of "the dead men from Mars". While Ogilvy and a few other men from the Astronomical Exchange begin to excavate the cylinder, the narrator clings to rational thought, doubting there might actually be any intelligent life inside. He's dispatched to secure fencing needed to hold back the crowds that have begun to converge on the site. The narrator returns at dusk in time to witness the cylinder open. Expecting to see a man, onlookers are aghast at their first glimpse of a Martian in the flesh: Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon group of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. A deputation including Ogilvy approaches the pit with a white flag in an attempt to communicate with the Martians. The party is met with what the narrator refers to as a "heat-ray", a flash of light which leaves the men charred and distorted beyond recognition. The narrator manages to flee the massacre and returns home to his wife. He's confident that the episode may all be a big misunderstanding and trusts that a company of soldiers heading to the site will sort everything out. Meanwhile, a second shooting star lights up the sky. By afternoon of the next day, guns are heard firing and the narrator observes damage to the spires and chimneys about town. Concluding their home is now in range of the Martian heat-rays, the narrator procures a horse and dog cart from the local pub owner, quickly fills it with valuables and spirits his wife to the town of Leatherhead, where her cousins live. He insists on returning the horse and cart as promised, but upon his return to Woking that night, encounters a pair of giant Martian tripods stepping through the pine trees. Higher than many houses and dangling steel tentacles, the tripods use their heat-ray to destroy the horse and cart. Through the hail and lightning of the dark, the narrator makes out the shapes of tripods on the march through the English countryside. Seeking shelter at home, he briefly takes in a soldier who initially can only mutter "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out." In the morning, the narrator sets out in search of his wife in the middle of, not a war, but the extermination of mankind. The War of the Worlds is one of those classic tales that through more than a century of radio, television and film I was sure that I knew. Initially, Wells' typically British stoicism and reserve -- the narrator witnesses his mates microwaved by a Martian death ray and returns home, composes himself and tells the little lady it'll be quite all right in the morning -- kept me removed from the story. It was headed toward two stars and a box checked next to "War of the Worlds, Wells, H.G." I caught up to the novel at the end of Book One, when the Narrator fishes himself out of the Thames and takes on a companion, a parish priest convinced divine retribution is at hand. The men become unwilling partners, plundering houses for food until a Martian cylinder crashes nearby and traps them. The story became much more thrilling through here, with the danger up close and personal. Instead of running, the narrator is able to study the Martians for the first time, uncovering unpleasant facts of the invader's diet. Wells' "man on the street" reporting -- adapted by Orson Welles for his infamous 1938 Halloween radio broadcast -- has a unique way of putting the reader right in the middle of an invasion with a remarkable amount of verisimilitude. The heroics exhibited by his narrator are thankfully limited to his ability to stay alive and observe the enemy up close, as well as use his knowledge of the humanities to give what he's experiencing context. -- Wells cites the names of so many towns and villages that a tourist could probably find their way around London by reading this book. -- Next to New York, London has been destroyed by more science fiction writers than any other city. Panic takes the heaviest toll in The War of the Worlds. The scenes where the narrator wanders the empty city, certain he's the last survivor, were chilling. -- The biology and technology of the Martians are ingeniously drawn and truly menacing. I haven't seen an alien in film or television in quite some time that were as designed as well as the Martians. -- Wells does take an unnecessary detour, shifting focus to the narrator's brother as he flees the siege of London by poisonous black smoke, but even here, Wells' impeccable writing style kept me hooked: In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. I found the depictions of how rustic the England of Wells' day truly was to be captivating. Most of the country is connected by rail, but once you left the train stations, you were in the 19th century, with horse cart, carriage or bicycle the best options for travel. Without telephone, television, radio or aircraft to provide news, the reader's imagination is allowed to run amok between pages and fill in the details of the invasion. ...more |
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Mar 09, 2015
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Mar 12, 2015
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Mar 08, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0544340116
| 9780544340114
| 0544340116
| 3.72
| 5,351
| Aug 05, 2013
| Jan 06, 2015
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really liked it
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Vivian Apple at the End of the World is a breezy apocalyptic read that I appreciated, but came up short of loving. Published in 2014, the novel focuse
Vivian Apple at the End of the World is a breezy apocalyptic read that I appreciated, but came up short of loving. Published in 2014, the novel focuses on a model seventeen-year-old who not only watches freakish weather and economic recession rampage across the U.S., but witnesses the rise of the Church of America, whose half-baked gospels instruct an alarming number of Believers how to be raptured into heaven on Judgment Day, while all others will be set on the road to damnation. When her parents appear to be taken up by God and the apocalypse is at hand, she's left to fend for herself. The author succeeds at hitting all the right notes, but the tune itself never grabbed me. Opening in Pittsburgh (in a refreshing change of pace from cities glamorized on TV), honors student Vivian Apple is introduced at a party thrown by her best friend of late, the wild Harpreet Janda. The girls have been become inseparable Non-Believers as one calamity after another--an earthquake in Chicago, a terrorist bombing at a Yankees game, the extinction of the U.S. bee population--have led to the rise of Beaton Frick, a wingnut from (where else?) Florida who claims to have spoken to Jesus at Starbuck's. Frick's business scheme, the Church of America, has grown massively popular as national crisis deepens, hopelessness surges and its forecast for Rapture Day grows nigh. While Vivian and Harp have rejected the Book of Frick and the Believer parents who've attempted to convert them, the party host implores her friend to live like the world is ending and chat up a cute boy. Quiet and intense, Peter Ivey is in the mood for a conversation, which Vivian is sure she's failed at when he excuses himself. Vivian's social ineptitude is nothing compared to her shock the next morning to find that her parents have disappeared, leaving behind two holes in the ceiling. She's joined by Harp and her brother Raj, Raj's boyfriend Dylan and Dylan's seven-year-old sister Molly, all apparently orphaned after roughly three thousand Believers in the U.S. vanish at once. I help make Molly a fort out of couch cushions and pillows; I throw open the kitchen cabinets and laugh when my friends' mouths fall open at my hoard. The food is all Church of America brand; in addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multi-million dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these--bottles of Holy Spring Water, a bland SpaghettiOs knockoff called Christ Loops. For a long time I took a moral stand by not consuming them but now the Rapture has come and I'm starving. We eat cold Christ Loops out of the can, even though the electricity still works, for now. Though her high school has been mostly empty her junior year (public education derided by the Church of America as "harbingers of secular terrorism"), Vivian walks to class on Monday with a sledgehammer over her shoulder for self-defense. Remaining students have filled the classroom of her history teacher Ms. Wambaugh, but the last adult in Vivian's world and her peers offer little more than progressive platitudes for rebuilding society with no plan of action. Harp always has a plan but before the girls can formulate one, Vivian's sophisticated maternal grandparents arrive to take custody and return with her to New York. In the Big Apple, Vivian is quarantined in her grandparents' apartment in Central Park West. Electricity is out, the university where her grandfather teaches has been closed and on the streets, a youth movement calling itself the New Orphans rails against Frick. Her grandparents remain in denial but as a massive hurricane heads for the Eastern Seaboard, Vivian decides to steal their car and return to Pittsburgh. Before she initiates her first act of rebellion, the house phone rings in from a caller in San Francisco. No one speaks when Vivian answers, but she is left with the feeling that her mother was on the other end of the line. Vivian ventures to Lawrenceville where Raj and Dylan lived to find Harp, drunk. She reports that a mob of young men lured Raj and Dylan to a football field, shot Raj and returned his body for them to bury. Dylan took Molly to New Jersey while Harp remained to be scorned by a second wave of Believers who feel their entrance to heaven hinges on punishing the sinners. Harp has contacts in the New Orphans and takes Vivian to meet their communications director, Peter Ivey, the boy who Vivian embarrassed herself with at the Rapture Eve party. Vivian shares her California phone call and Peter reveals that Frick might have a secret compound there, where the "Raptured" could be hiding. Vivian, Harp and Peter hit the road to find out. Their first stop is the holy site of Mount Rushmore. The Book of Frick claims that in the late 1970s Jesus personally appeared to Frick in a powder-blue Chrysler convertible that had the power to travel instantly through space and time. Jesus used the vehicle to usher Frick to seven different spots in the United States that were personally blessed by God for one reason or another and at which Believers and Non-Believers alike could expect to find redemption. The list includes everywhere you'd think it would: the Grand Canyon, the Pentagon, Wall Street ("For God saw that Americans were industrious and made money in His name, and he saw that it was good.") It's one of the many parts of the Book of Frick that make you wonder whether or not Frick was just straight-up on 'shrooms when he was writing it; make that accusation to a Believer, however, as I did to my parents in their mission to convert me, and they will whine that "it's only a metaphor!" and imply that your inability to grasp nuance is a large part of what ensures your eternal damnation. Katie Coyle strikes a clinically precise balance between lighter and darker elements in Vivian Apple at the End of the World. Her frequent references to the Book of Frick are droll, but her exploration of how religious gospels interpreted at their most literal extreme are the antithesis of humanity are potent. There is violence and terror in the story, but they remain mostly in the background rather than imperiling the characters. The same could be said of the novel's sex, drug and alcohol content, which Coyle suggests that Harp partakes in and does exist in the world of her teenagers without being described graphically. Coyle recognizes that readers of Young Adult fiction tend to be open to the truth and the author takes advantage of it. Her running satire on the cult-like aspects of a religion are admirable, as well as very creative. She even creates new vocabulary words: "Magadalene" being parlance for the indoctrination of a Non-Believer female by a wholesome Believer male, with Harp considered vulnerable to considering her fetish for clean-cut boys. The writing is creative and the characters endearing, but it never grabbed me by the collar and threw me across the room the way a great apocalyptic novel would. It hits all the right notes as a satire, but I didn't believe it. What kept me from being engaged with the doomsday scenario Coyle conjures up are the pages that lapse into melodrama. Vivian has at least one heart to heart meltdown with each character and each of those characters has an emotional breakdown with Vivian or someone else, grinding the story to a halt while people talk it out. There's too much talking about the end rather than showing how the characters plan to survive it. Theatrics are a recurring feature of this genre but it's one that holds the novel between three or four stars rather than between four or five. It's a very well written novel, but one I thought more about that felt. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 27, 2017
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Dec 03, 2017
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Jan 03, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0671741039
| 9780671741037
| 0671741039
| 4.30
| 72,634
| Jun 01, 1987
| Jun 01, 1987
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it was amazing
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Robert McCammon's post-apocalyptic epic Swan Song. Published in 1987, nine years after Steph
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Robert McCammon's post-apocalyptic epic Swan Song. Published in 1987, nine years after Stephen King's The Stand, the story follows two bands of survivors -- one representing good, the other evil -- as they make their way across what used to be America while a supernatural being no less than Old Scratch himself seeks to undermine the good souls and shift the battle onto the side of evil. Yes, kids, eeriely similar to The Stand. More on that later. The tale begins on July 16 with the President of the United States, a former astronaut, facing a world in crisis. Eight months ago, the Soviet Union unleashed nuclear and chemical strikes on Afghanistan. A twelve-and-a-half kiloton nuclear device has leveled half of Beirut, with dozens of terrorist groups claiming responsibility. India and Pakistan have exchanged nuclear and chemical strikes, and Iraq and Iran follow suit. American and Soviet naval and air forces shadow each other over the Persian Gulf, while off Key West, a trigger happy U.S. fighter jet sends a missile into a crippled Russian sub. The U.S.S.R. responds by blinding American satellites. The President is adamant that he will not start World War III but his advisers remark that the world is already at war. In a game of brinkmanship, he reluctantly gives the A-OK to intercept Soviet submarines on the seas ... Meanwhile, several Americans go about the last day of their rest of their lives: -- In Manhattan, bag lady Sister Creep, whose regular life ended with drunk driving and its aftermath, opens up a razorblade on two men who assault her. Sister uses her last bit of change to enter the subway, where she seeks shelter in a tunnel, plagued by bad memories of what sent her here in the first place. -- In Concordia, Kansas, professional wrestler "Black Frankenstein", alias Josh Hutchins, resorts to some stagecraft when his opponent injures himself and risks allowing the bad guy to win the bout. Unlike his character, Josh is one of the good guys, with a wife and two sons in Mobile and a love for donuts. -- In Wichita, Sue Wanda Prescott tends to a garden she's planted outside the mobile home she shares with her stripper mom Darleen and "uncle". Swan, who has a gift for growing things and seeing into people, unnerves her mom's latest boyfriend, and after he slaps Darleen, mother and daughter hit the road. -- In Idaho, the Croninger family wind their RV up Blue Dome Mountain, where they're bought a two-week time share in Earth House, an underground compound managed by Vietnam veteran Colonel James Macklin. The young Roland Croninger, a geek for computers and strategy games, is not impressed with the middle-aged war hero, while his mother observes numerous drainage problems in the mountain fortress. These are the unlucky ones who survive the global thermonuclear war that begins at 10:16 a.m. EST. Sister Creep emerges from the subway to find her favorite spot in the city -- a glassworks shop -- destroyed along with all the other buildings. Amid the ruins, she discovers a ring of glass forged by the nuclear fire into a priceless jewel which seems to enable the bearer to "dreamwalk" great distances and see fantastic things. The ring gives hope to each of the shellshocked survivors Sister reluctantly gathers up to lead through the flooding Holland Tunnel to safety. Josh meets Swan & Doreen at a gas station near a cornfield in Kansas where the locusts seem to sense something headed their way. Swan feels it next but is unable to alert the grownups before missile silos in the cornfield open and fire ICBMs into the atmosphere. In the retaliatory strike that follows, Josh, Swan & Doreen are buried in a fallout shelter under the gas station. Colonel Macklin and the staff of Earth House track World War III in real time and seal the mountain as they've drilled for countless times. Located far from any likely targets, they watch in disbelief as a U.S. missile headed for Russia malfunctions and explodes close enough to hit the compound with a shockwave. The faulty drainage system turns the mountain in a tomb, separating Roland from his parents. The boy loses his mind but finds a new patron in Colonel Macklin, whom he rescues from the rubble and helps escape to the surface. In New Jersey, Sister Creep encounters a survivor who gives the name of Doyle Halland and claims to be a priest. Something about the man and the way he appeared suddenly makes Sister uneasy. He becomes fixated on the ring she's carrying after seeing the effect it has on other survivors. Halland reveals himself to be something less than human and far worse, a creature of many different faces and names (The Man With the Scarlet Eye among them) who's taken a front row seat to every genocide in history. Sister manages to escape and using the ring, begins to experience visions of a special girl in Kansas. This takes us through page 267 of 956 or roughly one third of the book. By the conclusion, I kept hoping it would never end. In Stephen King's anthology Four Past Midnight, the story The Library Policeman features an exchange between librarian Mrs. Lortz and a realtor named Sam Peebles, who feels the librarian's borrowing instructions to the kids seem harsh. She replies, "Their favorite novel was a paperback original called Swan Song. It's a horror novel by a man named Robert McCammon. We can't keep it in stock, Sam. They read each new copy to rags in weeks. I had a copy put in Vinabind, but of course, it was stolen. By one of the bad children." If that's not an endorsement from Uncle Stevie, I don't know what is. I first read Swan Song in high school and revisiting this 25 years later, am happy to say that I was even more enthralled the second time around. Once I quit comparing it to The Stand, which I read recently for the first time and still had very fresh on my mind, and simply submitted to McCammon's fits of imagination and gift of majestic storytelling, I never looked back. With The Stand, King's characters all seemed to me like they could be found in the same hardware store in Maine, and while King knows those characters, their pasts and their personalities extremely well, McCammon jets the reader out of the hardware store and scatters us to four corners of the country, introducing characters I found much more diverse and almost as compelling. The Man with the Scarlet Eye, alias Doyle Halland, alias Friend, is as close as I've seen an author get to using "Sympathy For the Devil" by The Rolling Stones to bring a character to life. He's introduced in a sleazy theater in Times Square watching Faces of Death III, laughing at the carnage, looking for himself on screen and giving the employees the creeps. Strangely, none of the staff members can agree on what the man looks like, and are reminded of painful memories while in proximity to him. Spook Central. One aspect of Swan Song I found wonderfully novel was the introduction of a skin condition among some of the survivors that becomes known as Job's Mask, which starts off as facial warts that begin to connect through tendrils and eventually wrap the sufferer's entire face in a thick mask. Those afflicted suffer great pain over many months and years as their facial structure itself begins to be altered ... altered into what becomes one of the great questions in the book. My only complaint about Swan Song is one that I reserve for every paperback I've picked up with McCammon's name on the cover and that's how awful the art is. Granted, McCammon's output in the '80s and '90s trafficked in demons, aliens and werewolves, but these covers look like something a demon, alien or werewolf coughed up. Any illustrator with a love for these novels could do a certifiably better job of capturing the majesty and scope of the storytelling. When reading a McCammon book in public, I actually turn the cover over so nobody will see what I'm reading. That's how bad this artwork is. Swan Song is not for the faint of heart, but what I found most remarkable about it is the lengths McCammon goes to render the country barren and why. The United States is cloaked in nuclear winter. The earth and bodies of water have been polluted. Rats are a good meal and for water, melted snow, which often makes those forced to sip it ill. At night, wolves come out of the woods to feed and later, things that no carnival freakshow could conjure up. Sunlight has vanished and along with it, hope. What happens when the characters finally come together in Missouri and begin to build a community -- where previously there were only survivors waiting for neighbors to die so they could steal clothes or food -- is I was watching them like a kid would some string beans he'd planted. I was invested emotionally in the transformation of the wasteland into something resembling a home and when it comes under attack, I was hooked into seeing it protected. I haven't come this close to talking to a book in some time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 19, 2015
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Feb 03, 2015
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Dec 12, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B0DVLQSCTV
| 4.09
| 485,238
| 1968
| 2017
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liked it
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Living in a college dorm, subsisting on a diet heavy in beer and mood altering drugs, and not having seen the film Blade Runner or its excellent seque
Living in a college dorm, subsisting on a diet heavy in beer and mood altering drugs, and not having seen the film Blade Runner or its excellent sequel aren't necessarily requirements for enjoying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the celebrated science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, but they would help. So would a time machine. Published in 1968, this novel, like much of the late author's work, has become a victim of its own success, farmed out to film and television and also picked clean by other authors, that like a tree in Dick's post-apocalyptic story, there's not very much fruit left on it. Set in the year 2021, what's referred to as World War Terminus has littered the earth with radioactive dust and covered it in perpetual clouds. Much of the world's animal and plant life have become extinct and pet ownership is a status symbol. Most human beings with basic physical, mental and financial means have emigrated to off-world colonies such as those on Mars, while Earth is inherited by the weak, slow and poor. The United Nations has provided each settler with their own free personal android, which outperform humans in labor tasks and increasingly in reflexes as well, making them very difficult to spot and illegal on Earth. Androids that go fugitive are tracked by bounty hunters like Rick Deckard, who works for the San Francisco Police Department "retiring" rogue andys. Deckard's wife Iran is despondent over their domestic situation. The couple finds no solace in Mercerism, a pop religion that advocates empathy and allows those low in it to tap into a virtual reality where guru Wilbur Mercer is pelted with stones while trying to climb a hill. To make matters worse, their electric sheep has broken down. Deckard sees an opportunity to get ahead when bounty hunter Dave Holden is critically wounded in pursuit of several new model androids on the loose in Northern California. Deckard's supervisor Inspector Harry Bryant dispatches him to Seattle, where the Rosen Corporation designs these new androids, known as Nexus-6, so lifelike that other than a bone marrow analysis, the only way to tell them from humans is a new and improved test, the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test. Eldon Rosen resists cooperating with Deckard, and insists that the bounty hunter administer the test to his daughter, Rachael, so he can see what a negative looks like before he provides a Nexus-6 to test negative. The empathy test measures capillary dilation generated when the subject is presented with social situations. "You're sitting watching TV," he continued, "and suddenly you discover a wasp crawling on your wrist." Rachael said, "I'd kill it." The gauges, this time, registered almost nothing: only a feeble and momentary tremor. He noted that and hunted cautiously for the next question. "In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl." He paused. "Is this testing whether I'm an android," Rachael asked tartly, "or whether I'm a homosexual?" The gauges did not register. He continued, "Your husband likes the picture." Still the gauges failed to indicate a reaction. "The girl," he added, "is lying facedown on a large and beautiful bearskin rug." The gauges remained inert, and he said to himself, An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her--its--mind is concentrating on other factors. "Your husband hangs the picture up on the wall of his study," he finished, and this time the needles moved. "I certainly wouldn't let him," Rachael said. "Okay," he said, nodding. "Now consider this. You're reading a novel written in the old days before the war. The characters are visiting Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They become hungry and enter a seafood restaurant. One of them orders lobster, and the chef drops the lobster into a tub of boiling water while the characters watch." "Oh god," Rachael said. "That's awful! Did they really do that? It's depraved! You mean a live lobster?" The gauges, however, did not respond. Formally, a correct response. But simulated. By testing negative, Rachael nearly undermines the effectiveness of the Voigt-Kampff test, but when she refers to the owl in the lobby as "it," Deckard asks a follow-up question which convinces him that the test is sound and that Rachael is indeed an android. Eldon Rosen confirms this and Rachael takes the news well, considering she is two years into her four-year life span as a Nexus-6 android. Working off a list of six androids to be retired--three males and three females--Deckard anticipates getting rich off the reward money, $1,000 per kill. Meanwhile, a truck driver named J.R. Isidore discovers that he is no longer alone in his apartment building in the suburbs of San Francisco. He follows the sounds of a television broadcasting the universe's 24-hour-a-day talk show personality Buster Friendly and discovers a young girl squatting in one of the empty units. Offering the name Rachael Rosen, she quickly admits it is really Pris Stratton. J.R. can tell that she needs help and it may have fallen on him to do so. Classified as biologically unacceptable for emigration, J.R. ekes out a living picking up malfunctioned electronic pets to a repair shop. Pris helps him sharpen his social skills and grow more confident. Deckard's hit list begins with Polokov, the male android which lasered Dave Holden and wastes no time being hunted, coming after Deckard. The bounty hunter survives and moves on to Luba Luft, a female android hiding in plain sight as an opera singer. Confronted in her dressing room, she calls the police on Deckard. The officer who responds has no record of Deckard and arrests him. Taken to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, Deckard is interrogated by a supervisor named Garland, who discovers he's the next name on the bounty list. Pris is soon joined by the remaining fugitive androids, a couple named Roy and Irmgard Baty, who debate whether to let J.R. help them or not. At the open door to the hall Irmgard Baty had been standing; they noticed her as she spoke up. "I don't think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore," she said, earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. "They don't treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn't interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that--it's everything to him. It's hard for us to grasp that, but it's true." To Isidore she said, standing very close to him once again and peering up at him, "You could get a lot of money by turning us in; do you realize that?" Twisting, she said to her husband, "See, he realizes that but still he wouldn't say anything." "You're a great man, Isidore," Pris said. "You're a credit to your race." "If he was an android," Roy said heartily, "he'd turn is in about ten tomorrow morning. He'd take off for his job and that would be it. I'm overwhelmed with admiration." His tone could not be deciphered; at least Isidore could not crack it. "And we imagined this would be a friendless world, a planet of hostile faces, all turned against us." He barked out a laugh. "I'm not at all worried," Irmgard said. "You ought to be scared to the soles of your feet," Roy said. As much as I dislike Philip K. Dick's writing--which is tin--there are an abundance of ideas in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, enough to fill a lively book club discussion or dorm room rap session. There's Dick's vision of a world in collapse that's so overwhelming that empathy is manufactured, with androids now capable of producing at least as much compassion as their human creators and replacing us. There's the question of whether androids with advanced programming would even know they were androids. Dick really digs into how the collapse of animal life would impact humanity, with real animals a commodity and a bustling trade. "I've got three thou cash." The department, at the end of the day, had paid him his bounty. "How much," he asked, "is that family of rabbits over there?" "Sir, if you have a down payment of three thou, I can make you owner of something a lot better than a pair of rabbits. What about a goat?" "I haven't thought much about goats," Rick said. "May I ask if this represents a new price bracket for you?" "Well, I don't usually carry around three thou," Rick conceded. "I thought as much, sir, when you mentioned rabbits. The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I'd like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me." "What are the advantages to goats?" The animal salesman said, "The distinct advantage of a goat is that it can be taught to butt anyone who tries to steal it." "Not if they shoot it with a hypno-dart and descend by rope ladder from a hovering hovercar," Rick said. The salesman, undaunted, continued. "A goat is loyal. And it has a free, natural soul which no cage can chain up. And there is one exceptional additional feature about goats, one which you may not be aware of. Often times when you invest in an animal and take it home, you find, some morning, that it's eaten something radioactive and died. A goat isn't bothered by contaminated quasi-foodstuffs; it can eat eclectically; even items that would fell a cow or a horse or most especially a cat. As a long-term investment we feel that the goat--especially the female--offers unbeatable advantages to the serious animal owner." "Is this goat female?" He had noticed a big black goat standing squarely in the center of its cage; he moved that way and the salesman accompanied him. The goat, it seemed to Rick, was beautiful. "Yes, this goat is a female. A black Nubian goat, very large, as you can see. This is a superb contender in this year's market, sir. And we're offering her at an attractive, unusually low, low price." Like the two Philip K. Dick novels I've read and a lot of the science fiction of his peers, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is loaded with material waiting for another writer to structure scenes out of, develop the characters, punch up the dialogue and cut the bits that are obtuse or that just don't make compelling fiction. In other words, everything that director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples achieved with Blade Runner (1982) or director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green added with Blade Runner 2049 (2017), better movies than this is a novel. It's a close call but I do recommend this for its concepts and ideas, if not the story and characters. [image] [image] Length: 82,856 words ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 15, 2018
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Sep 20, 2018
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Nov 26, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0684852586
| 9780684852584
| 0684852586
| 3.90
| 24,265
| 1955
| Apr 06, 1998
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really liked it
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers landed in the bi-weekly fiction magazine Collier's, which published Jack Finney's story as a three-part serial over con
Invasion of the Body Snatchers landed in the bi-weekly fiction magazine Collier's, which published Jack Finney's story as a three-part serial over consecutive issues beginning in November 1954. Finney had already seen thirty of his short stories run in Good Housekeeping or Collier's, but the response to what was at that time titled The Body Snatchers was huge. At no point since has the "pod person" not been a part of our vernacular, with four feature films and countless spoofs and homages to remind each generation. Finney's source material bears passing resemblance to the classic B-movie directed by Don Siegel and distributed by the Allied Artists Picture Corporation in 1956. In a small Northern Californian town, twenty-eight year old general practitioner Dr. Miles Bennell is reunited with a close friend, Becky Driscoll, who's returned to town following her divorce. Though mutually attracted to each other, Becky's visit to Miles is not purely social. She's come to ask him to see her cousin Wilma Lentz, who's suffering a delusion that her Uncle Ira is an imposter who only looks like her uncle. Says Wilma, "Miles, he looks, sounds, acts, and remembers exactly like Ira. On the outside. But inside he's different. His responses"--she stopped, hunting for the word--"aren't emotionally right, if I can explain that. He remembers the past, in detail, and he'll smile and say, 'You were sure a cute youngster, Willy. Bright one, too,' just the way Uncle Ira did. But there's something missing, and the same thing is true of Aunt Aleda, lately." Miles refers Wilma to his colleague, psychiatrist Manfred Kaufman. Mannie confides that nine patients have come to him with fears of loved ones who are imposters; his opinion is that none of these patients are suffering from neuroses but dealing with something external and real. Miles' friend Jack Belicec, a writer, pulls Miles out of a movie theater during a date with Becky to bring him to his house, where his wife Theodora keeps watch on something Jack discovered under the basement stairs. The strange corpse, which the Belicecs have laid out on a billiard table, shows no wounds or signs of death. It has no scar tissue and Miles notes the face looks ... vague. He also determines the corpse has no fingerprints. Connecting the corpse with the imposter stories spreading through town, Miles suggests that Theodora keep watch on the body while her husband sleeps, waking him if she notices any changes in the corpse. Miles returns home, falls asleep and is wakened by Jack & Theodora, who fled their home in terror with the answer Miles was afraid of. Realizing that Becky might be in danger, Miles dashes to her home, where she lives with her father. Breaking into their basement and poking around with a pen light, he sees nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Then Miles opens a pair of cupboards. There it lay, on that unpainted pine shelf, flat on its back, eyes wide open, arms motionless at its sides; and I got down on my knees beside it. I think it must actually be possible to lose your mind in an instant, and that perhaps I came very close to it. And now I knew why Theodora Belicec lay on a bed in my house in a state of drugged shock, and I closed my eyes tight, fighting to hold on to control myself. Then I opened them again and looked, holding my mind, by sheer force, in a state of cold and artificial calm. Miles runs upstairs, grabs Becky and before she even wakes up, has carried her halfway to his house. Miles phones Mannie, but when he returns to the Belicec's basement with Jack, the corpse has disappeared. The psychiatrist launches into a measured thesis of what the men might be experiencing: mass delusion, latching onto the story circulating through town about "imposters" and seeing exactly what their imaginations expected to see in those basements. Later, Miles realizes that mass delusion doesn't account for the blank fingerprints, or the fact that the Mannie he knows never used to make his mind up so quickly. Miles and his friends determine that the seed pods popping up in basements first appeared near a farm outside of town, visitors from outer space, of course. Confronted by one of the imposters, they learn that the pods are a desperate form of parasite, traveling across the universe on light energy. They seek new worlds to thrive in, absorbing the atomic particles of their hosts and their memories while they're most vulnerable, during sleep, reducing the hosts to dust with a perfect imitation, perfect except for emotion or free will. Finney retooled his three-part magazine serial twice, first as a novel published in 1955 (as The Body Snatchers) and again in 1978, to take advantage of a major motion picture being released by United Artists. The version I read was the '78. Finney made changes here, altering the title to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to exploit the popularity of the movies, setting the story in 1976 and updating references he felt were antiquated. He changed the name of the town from "Santa Mira" to Mill Valley, where Finney lived. The author also drops a reference to his 1970 novel Time and Again, though only fans will spot it. I have to rate Invasion of the Body Snatchers on two scales, the legacy of the material and the material itself. As legacy, this is five stars. Finney always maintained he wanted to write a good read and nothing more, but like a magic mirror, his story has the power to morph into a commentary on whatever cultural or social conformity is in the air. In the '50s, it was the threat of Communism, or Red hysteria running rampant the United States. In the '70s, there was urban malaise and Me Decade pop psychiatry to be wary of. Today, political correctness or technology might indicate pod activity. As a story, this is three stars at best. Even Finney's retooled 1978 version is exactly what it always was: a magazine serial published in 1954. Becky Driscoll is little more than a doll and frequently appraised by the well-intentioned and gentlemanly Miles by her physical attributes only. She's an accessory to the protagonist and almost seems like a pod person herself. There is a mildly eerie vibe throughout, but Finney lets off the gas too often when it comes to suspense. The plot lists, and much about the biology of the seed pods and their dispersal doesn't make a lot of sense. Without giving much away, Finney's source material lacks the doomsday pulse of the 1956 and 1978 film versions. As such, the writing feels far more disposable. I'm enamored by Finney's wild imagination and how his tale has spread like ivy over the last sixty years, but would mostly recommend the novel to the author's fans. The 1978 film version directed by Philip Kaufman that relocated the action to San Francisco with Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and Leonard Nimoy is the definite version of this material: offbeat, intensely creepy and monumentally tragic. ...more |
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1
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Jan 04, 2015
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Jan 06, 2015
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Nov 20, 2014
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Paperback
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| 4.05
| 202,019
| Mar 27, 2014
| May 13, 2014
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it was ok
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The last stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Bird Box, the 2014 debut novel by Josh Malerman, an author/ musician based in Michigan. This
The last stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Bird Box, the 2014 debut novel by Josh Malerman, an author/ musician based in Michigan. This is a book that tears right down the middle for me, with a fantastic hook and a cellar chock full of horrors on the odd numbered pages, wretched writing on the even numbered pages. I won't have my mind made up how many stars this deserves until I finish writing here. The novel begins in a house in suburban Detroit where Malorie lives with her young children, Boy and Girl. For four years, none of them have ventured outside except briefly, and always wearing blindfolds. The windows are covered with cardboard and wood. Dark stains Malorie has been unable to clean away soak the carpet in various spots of the house, which she once shared with six roommates. There is no electricity, no running water. And no visitors. Protected by a fog that rolls in one October morning, Malorie makes the decision to flee with the children. Donning their blindfolds, they make their way along a path to a well, which opens into a clearing and within eighty yards, a dock on a river. Having trained the children to use their hearing and little else, Malorie warns them that there are things out here that will hurt them and to listen. Climbing into a rowboat, they head into the unknown. Moving back in time four years and nine months, Malorie moves in to a rental home in Westcourt she finds with her sister, Shannon. Malorie is late for her period and while examining her belly in the bathroom, is alerted by her sister of a news update on what in recent days has become known as "the Russia Report"; three unrelated cases of normal people brutally attacking each other before taking their own lives. It's believed the victims saw something before turning deranged. And now, there's a case in Alaska. A pregnancy test confirms that Malorie is five weeks along by a guy she doesn't seem to know well. The neighborhood has begun acting strange. People stay indoors and when they have to go outside, shield their eyes. Within three months, the girls have covered the windows with blankets. What is now known as "the Problem" has been reported as far east as Maine and south to Florida. A national curfew has been installed. Malorie asks her sister what it is that people could be seeing. The sisters ask each other this question constantly. It'd be impossible to count the number of theories that have been birthed online. All of them scare the hell out of Malorie. Mental illness as a result of the radio waves in wireless technology is one. An erroneous evolutionary leap in humankind is another. New Agers say it's a matter of humanity being in touch with a planet that is close to exploding, or a sun that is dying. Some people believe there are creatures out there. Hearing something upstairs, Malorie discovers (view spoiler)[Shannon has pried loose a corner of blanket covering her bedroom window and stabbed herself in the chest with a pair of scissors (hide spoiler)]. She climbs in her car and barely watching the road, is able to make her way to Riverbridge, where she's read in the classifieds about a "safe house" opening its doors to strangers. After being pulled inside the door and searched, she opens her eyes. Malorie's roommates at Riverbridge are Tom, a widowed schoolteacher who lost his 8-year-old daughter. Don, who grows more despondent the longer they stay cooped up. Cheryl, a reactionary. Jules and Felix, not as strong as Tom or Don. They came under the invitation of George, who believed that there were creatures out there, driving people mad at the mere sight of them. His theory that the creatures might be safe to view through the lens of a video recording turned out to be dead wrong. Bird Box unfolds with two hooks that peeled me to the page and shot me on a rocket to the final page: What happened to Malorie's roommates? What are people seeing outside that's driving them to lose their minds? It would take a rare kind of horror fan to bail out before Malerman answers both questions. This is a quick read, which terse chapters bouncing between the house in Riverbridge and Malorie's journey along the river to sanctuary. Malerman also does a good job conjuring horror. In one scene, Felix gathers water at the well blindfolded and begins to fear something is not only there with him in the woods, but actually inside the well. Cheryl has a similar freak out on the front porch with something -- a leaf or a creature -- touching her shoulder. Malorie's expedition to a local bar for supplies with her dog Victor taut with suspense as well. What makes Bird Box difficult to recommend is that strong as Malerman's ideas are, his writing is just as bad. Not much thought seems to have gone in to character. I wanted to know who Malorie was, what she was doing before doomsday and how she survived after the fall. There's not much in the book to indicate how she managed to stay alive. Malerman's prose and dialogue are wretched. For starters, he makes the amateur's mistake of making characters use each others names in their dialogue. Constantly. "Malorie," he said, as Jules called that he was ready to go, "the house needs all of us." "Tom." "Don't let the nerves get to you like they did the last time. Instead, lean on the fact that we came back last time. We'll do it again. And this time, Malorie, act as a leader. Help them when they get scared." "Tom." "You need the medicine, Malorie. Sterilization. You're close." Bird Box contains the worst writing of any book I've read since joining Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ fifteen months ago. The details I savor in a good novel are simply missing here. The political conflict inherit in a group at the end of the world are only broadly sketched, never fully explored. Characters form vague relationships, not quite positive or negative, just occupying the same space together. There's a dog named "Victor" I'm convinced is the blandest, least characteristic name I'd ever heard for a dog. "Dog" would have had more personality. My friend Carmen rates romance novels on the basis of "romance stars", the idea being that three stars for Wild Holiday Nights is not the same as three stars for Margaret Atwood. Employing her system, I'd grant Bird Box four "horror stars". My gut tells me it simply isn't that good. As a novel that wades into the same waters as The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, the lack of quality in the writing is a real disappointment. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2015
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Mar 24, 2015
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Nov 04, 2014
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Hardcover
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| B00J69Y5GQ
| 3.42
| 36,939
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 13, 2015
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it was ok
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The Deep by Nick Cutter. This is a well-executed thriller by an author whose previous novel
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The Deep by Nick Cutter. This is a well-executed thriller by an author whose previous novel The Troop was terrific. Cutter, pseudonym of Canadian author Craig Davidson, returns to gothic horror with style straight out of the Stephen King playbook, with the spectacular body horror of movies like The Thing or The Fly thrown in. But what was terrible and exciting in his previous novel is done to death here. The novel opens in Guam, where veterinarian Dr. Lucas Nelson has been flown five thousand miles from his home in Iowa City on the dime of the U.S. government. The world has been ravaged by a virus dubbed The 'Gets; beginning with an outbreak of dark specks, the condition spreads (like the bruises on a banana as it turns overripe) until the patient starts to forget things, like where the car keys are. Ultimately, they forget what hot and cold feel like and eventually, why they need to breathe. Luke is ferried to research station Hesperus which floats atop the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, six miles below. Two miles under that in the Challenger Deep is the Trieste, a tube-like station constructed by robots. This is where Luke's brother, the prodigious molecular biologist Clayton Nelson, is working. A primitive gelatinous substance which Clayton has dubbed "Ambrosia" has been discovered on the ocean floor and promises a cure for every human disease, including the 'Gets, as well as immortality. The Hesperus has received a transmission from Clayton asking for Luke to come home. An animal doctor who is estranged from his gifted brother, Luke's presence on the Hesperus is nevertheless seen as critical. His escort is Lt. Commander Alice Sykes, a jocular servicewoman who asks Luke to call her "Al". Before they submerge, Luke is briefed on an unsettling development. One of the three scientists in the Trieste, or what's left of him, has surfaced. Madness and a high tolerance for pain are the only explanations for what might have happened, along with a message written in the submersible in blood. THE AG MEN ARE HERE COME HOME WE NEED YOU COME HOME Luke has agreed to venture to the deepest point on earth because he has nothing left to lose. His son Zachary disappeared seven years ago during a game of hide and seek with his father in the park. Luke's wife left him and then the 'Gets set upon the globe. Luke has a closet full of skeletons. In addition to his missing and presumed dead son, there's emotional abuse he endured from his mother, "Battle Axe" Beth, a prison trustee who went on disability, grew obese and set out to torment her youngest son. Then there are memories of a boogeyman that plagued Luke and later his son, which Zach called the "Fig Men" off his father's assurance it was just a "figment". The Deep follows a trend in science fiction that I find annoying: bloat. Davidson introduces a worldwide pandemic and abandons it. He switches gears from the apocalypse into gothic horror, with the claustrophobia of the Challenger Deep. The novel steps all over the intellectual property of at least two first contact novels turned film -- Solaris and Sphere -- with scientists encountering an alien entity that manifests their nightmares. Even if Davidson had forgotten about the 'Gets, at best, the novel would've been highly derivative. Davidson isn't done borrowing from other material, some of it beneath a writer of his talent. The setting has what could be called "Camp Crystal Lake Echo", where a character finds themselves alone in a remote setting and feels the urge to call out to a friend, thereby alerting the killer exactly where they are. I lost count how many times Luke called out, and this is a character who's seen horror movies like Alien. That annoyed me. My biggest problem with the novel is how much woe and misfortune Davidson dumps on his main character. The battle of wills that take place between a young Luke and his cruel, obese mother might've been the backbone of a much better book. There's a sinister "tickle box" or toy box that Battle Axe Beth buys for her son, with the faces of clowns painted on the side. Creepy box and creepy clowns are scary, but piling a missing child, a failed marriage, an estranged brother and a global pandemic on top of that is overkill. The Deep is executed with precision. It's spooky in spots, even when Davidson channels Uncle Stevie by relating observations by the main character to some event in his past; this gets repetitive, but isn't what sinks the novel. There were too many ideas, too few characters and something else that bothered me: abuse to animals. I'm not squeamish when it comes to fictional violence, but what was noticable in The Troop (lab chimps and a sea turtle do not fare well) is really made obvious here, with dogs, guinea pigs, mice and ... bees? Like everything else here, it it's too much. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Mar 03, 2015
Jul 30, 2022
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Mar 06, 2015
not set
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Jul 31, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 1936383195
| 9781936383191
| 1936383195
| 4.15
| 836
| Oct 17, 2010
| Oct 17, 2010
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** In spite of the cover, which is a bit misleading and completely Unsafe For Work, Zombies and Shit by Carlton Mellick III is not a gr
**spoiler alert** In spite of the cover, which is a bit misleading and completely Unsafe For Work, Zombies and Shit by Carlton Mellick III is not a graphic novel. This is indeed a novel, with prose and shit. The action is set in a decaying city abandoned to the zombie hordes that swept across the country from a U.S. military project run amok. Americans have fortified themselves safely in Neo New York, but society is divided into zones based on socioeconomic status. The punks, prostitutes and criminals are cannon fodder for Zombie Apocalypse, a game show in which 20 combatants are gassed, transported to the city, assigned weapons specific to their talents and given directions to an evacuation site. The first combatant to reach the chopper gets out alive. Contestants include: Charlie, a struggling writer, and Rainbow Cat, his duplicitous wife. Street punks Scavy and Brick and punkettes Popcorn and Gogo. Mercenaries Xiu and her partners Zippo and Vine. Laurence, a hulk with an affinity for '80s TV shows. And a Junko, an Asian model who once hosted Zombie Apocalypse until she crossed the show's producer Wayne "Wiz" Rizla and trained herself in survival techniques in lieu of being condemned to die on the show. Gratuitous amounts of sex and violence and shit ensue. Zombies and Shit is slapdash, derivative, loaded with every vice you can imagine and a few I couldn't. It's got a couple of formatting flubs and as many grammatical errors -- not enough to spoil the product, but enough to note this $7.49 e-book was not edited professionally. That actually works in the favor of the book, which is in the spirit of something Melnick wrote in his Trapper Keeper in English class and illustrated while in the back of the school bus. I was about a quarter of the way through when I realized that Melnick's inspiration was not Return of the Living Dead or Battle Royale. That would be aiming too high. Melnick instead turned to Troma Films, VHS kings of the '80s with low budget splatter classics like The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High, most of which had a certain retro wit and even innocence hidden behind the exploding heads and toxic puke. This is not a book for everybody. This is not The Walking Dead. Melnick steps over the line of good taste a couple of times, but cranked out an e-book with boundless energy and craziness I appreciated. Spanish speaking zombies? Check. An infected character who reanimated as a good zombie? Check. Undead cars? Check. Mr. T? Check. Yes, one of the characters is not who he seems to be and pities the fool who doesn't remember his name! I'm not a fan of joke based books, but Melnick didn't write down to the supposed intelligence of his reader here. He never gets satisfied with himself and manages to avoid the smarminess of a jokester laughing at his own supposed wit. Much of the writing is deplorable, as much of the writing and a good deal of the acting in Toxic Avenger was deplorable. Amid all this dreck, Melnick sneaks in the qualities of friendship, loyalty and love. He stays ahead of the reader, willing to kill any character in the gnarliest manner possible. And he cranks up the post-apocalyptic action and zombie carnage to 9. I'd be curious to see what he can do with an editor and decent cover designer. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 07, 2014
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Mar 08, 2014
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Mar 07, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0374710775
| 9780374710774
| B00EGJ32A6
| 3.79
| 268,574
| Feb 04, 2014
| Feb 04, 2014
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it was ok
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Annihilation, the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. While the novel d
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Annihilation, the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. While the novel doesn't introduce a doomsday scenario or send the population of a major city fleeing in terror, an apocalyptic vibe permeates the story, which is elliptical, imaginative, removed, occasionally creepy and mostly lifeless. The heavily concept oriented novel deals with an expedition into Area X, an ecological dead zone that has appeared in an unnamed region (the black pine forests, swamp and ocean suggest Florida) of an unnamed country (the United States, most likely) apparently being studied by an agency known as the Southern Reach, which has previously sent in eleven teams to study the area. Death, suicide and madness visited those teams. Apparently. The twelfth expedition is an all-female team which include an unnamed Biologist, Surveyor, Anthropologist and the team leader, a Psychologist. After six months of training, a Linguist attached to the team suddenly bowed out. The women are hypnotized in order to walk through the border of Area X and once there, begin to investigate a mysterious tunnel that appears on no map. Death, suicide and madness ensue. This is the shortest plot summary I've ever had to submit for a novel I read all the way through. I don't feel that I'm leaving a lot out. I'm a huge fan of mysteries of the unknown like the Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness or The Zone of Silence and didn't mind the tight, minimalist approach to the mystery. VanderMeer generates a fair amount of unease with this slow motion nightmare. His descriptions are vivid yet controlled. The novel is controlled from start to finish by something I dislike the more I encounter it in fiction: the unreliable narrator, or, the Choose Your Own Adventure approach. VanderMeer spins a colorful wheel of fortune and challenges the contestant, I mean the reader, to test their luck at figuring out the puzzle. Is Southern Reach a lie or a figment of the imagination? Is Area X? Are the characters real? What is "real"? That's not a story! That's a parlor game. Annihilation has all the excitement of a viewing at a funeral parlor.. At all times I felt like a reader reading a science fiction story. It's "interesting", which means I didn't much like it. I'm giving the book two stars for keeping me on as a reader until the end, but have deleted the two sequels from my reading docket and will move on to science fiction with characters, dialogue and a pulse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Mar 02, 2015
Jul 30, 2022
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Mar 03, 2015
not set
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Feb 24, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 0449208133
| 9780449208137
| 0449208133
| 4.00
| 44,800
| Jul 01, 1977
| Jun 1983
|
really liked it
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Lucifier's Hammer, the 1977 disaster epic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Niven was an e
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Lucifier's Hammer, the 1977 disaster epic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Niven was an established, Nebula Award winning author in Los Angeles when in the early 1970s, he was approached by Pournelle, an engineer with a military background who lived in the area. Pournelle was looking for a partner to teach him how to write and inexplicably, the pair went on to co-author nine novels together. After a dedication to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ("the first men to walk on another world") and the astronauts who died trying, the novel begins with a 47-character dramatis personae. Several of those listed begin assembling at a party in Los Angeles: Tim Hamner is heir to the Kalva Soap Company and an amateur astronomer who announces he's just discovered a comet, a dim smear not far from Neptune now known as the Hamner-Brown Comet. "Brown" is a kid in Iowa who reported the smear at the same time Hamner did. A producer of television documentaries named Harvey Randall sees an opportunity for a series of prime time specials about the comet, with Kalva Soap as sponsor. Senator Arthur Jellison, the VIP of the party, sits on the Finance Subcommittee for Science and Aeronautics. His daughter Maureen Jellison has inherited a passion for the sciences from her father but struggles to forge an identity of her own. Maureen's lover is Air Force Colonel Johnny Baker, an astronaut who laments the end of the Apollo program and holds out hope that Maureen and her father can pass funding for a manned mission to study the comet as it passes near Earth. Also hoping for a space race is Dr. Charles Sharps, a planetary scientist for JPL who along with JPL technician Dr. Dan Forrester, become the stars of Harvey Randall's comet specials. Sharps alleges that the Soviets are planning a comet mission and Jellison is able to scare up funding for a U.S. flight, with Johnny Baker and Lt. Col Rick Delanty, a black astronaut, docking in Spacelab with two Soviet kosmonauts, Pieter Jakov and Leonilla Malik, M.D. Dr. Sharps has this to say to the viewers: "The points to remember are these. First, the odds against any solid part of the Hamner-Brown hitting us are literally astronomical. Over these distances even the Devil himself couldn't hit a target as small as Earth. Second, if it did hit, it would probably be as several large misses. Some of those would hit ocean. Others would hit land, where the damage would be local. But if Hamner-Brown did strike Earth, it would be as if the Devil had struck with an enormous hammer, repeatedly." If you can't trust a scientist who in a science fiction thriller assures you that there's no danger, who can you trust? As the comet approaches Earth, L.A. catches "Hammer Fever", with citizens preparing for the worst. Harvey sends his teenaged son Andy into Sequoia National Park with a Boy Scout troop led by his neighbor, bank president Gordie Vance. Harvey makes a few doomsday preparations -- packaging beef jerky, stockpiling pepper and liquor for trade, filling the swimming pool with fresh water -- while reassuring his nervous wife Loretta and promising Gordie that he'll look after his wife, civic booster Marie Vance, whose son is also in the mountains with Harvey's boy. The authors supply regular updates on the Hamner-Brown Comet as it crosses interstellar space. Other comets have survived many such passages through the maelstorm. Much mass has been lost, poured into the tail; but much of the coma could freeze again, and the rocky chunks could merge; and crystals of strange ices could plate themselves across a growing comet, out there in the dark and the cold, over the millions of years ... if only Hamner-Brown could return to the cometary halo. But there appears to be something in its path. The second act of the novel finds several characters meeting their doom amid chaos, flood and panic once the comet hits. Survivors make their way to the foothills of the Sierra Madre, where Senator Jellison has a ranch. Jellison was unable to be seen making doomsday preparations, but once he realizes that the comet has hit begins organizing the ranching community for the coming disaster -- torrential rain, food shortages, refugees and worse. In the third act, "worse" arrives as the remnants of a rogue Army unit, who've linked up with a Black nationalist outfit from Watts and discovered a taste for human stew. It's a credit to Niven and Pourelle that they introduce so many compelling characters and put them into fascinating situations -- a nuclear power plant in the San Joaquin Valley that survives the flood and whose engineers sacrifice themselves to protect it, a plumbing supply store manager who discovers that logistics will be highly sought after commodity post-apocalypse, a troop of teenaged Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who hook up in the mountains to form their own community -- but more so than the 1978 version of The Stand, there seems to have been an edict here from the publisher to make massive cuts. At 629 pages, the novel ends up feeling anti-climactic, almost abridged. I also had a problem with the fact that no one at NASA or JPL seems able to determine the trajectory of the comet until it's almost too late. Blame this on 1970s, Atari technology? I'd like to think mankind would've had a better estimate and more time to prepare for a strike, but I'm no scientist. Despite the abridged feeling I got toward the end of the book, there were many more aspects of Lucifer's Hammer that I loved: -- Reading an epic devoted to the end of times for Los Angeles was a welcome change of pace after reading about the fall of New York and the devastation of the Midwest in both The Stand and Swan Song. Niven and Pourelle are Angelenos and as such, know exactly where to put their lens as the disaster ensues. My favorite were the surfers who celebrate the comet off Santa Monica and get a front row seat for the 500-foot tsunami that wipes out the town. -- The middle section of the novel explores the dynamics inside a post-apocalyptic stronghold and in addition to the logistical challenges, which the authors document with precision, raises fascinating moral challenges as well. Should refugees be given shelter? How many? Is it better to sacrifice the unessential so that others may survive the winter? The decision is made to turn out refugees in order to save the people who were here first. Exceptions are made for those who can offer essential skills: engineers, doctors, brewers. The local mailman is invited to stay to pass messages along his former route and bring Jellison information. A CBS executive who knows the senator is turned away to certain death. -- One of the characters anticipates gatekeepers. When the comet hits, he goes home and begins sorting his library, spraying selected books with insecticide and wrapping them in plastic. The cache is buried in his septic tank, far from the reaches of looters. His ticket to Jellison Ranch becomes books: books on how to make soap, brew beer, build gardens. Army field manuals, maintenance manuals for cars and trucks, medical texts. The knowledge to rebuild civilization. He passes right on through. In conclusion, if you're in the mood for a doomsday thriller with some compelling characters, strong dialogue, hard science and action that you don't have to wear a tinfoil hat to enjoy or turn your brain off to plow through, Lucifer's Hammer is highly recommended. My enjoyment was necessary here as I realize that I have no essential skills to be useful after an apocalypse. Book reviews do not seem like they'd be a high priority. I can't even tell jokes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 09, 2015
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Feb 18, 2015
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Feb 16, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0446606278
| 9780446606271
| 0446606278
| 3.84
| 7,145
| Jul 01, 1998
| Sep 01, 2003
|
it was ok
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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Brown Girl in the Ring, the 1998 debut novel by Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican born and Canadian
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Brown Girl in the Ring, the 1998 debut novel by Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican born and Canadian bred author. The book doesn't fit in among the doomsday thrillers I've been reading and to even call this "science fiction" would be false advertising on my part. I was in the mood for something different, a blast of fresh air among the abandoned post-apocalyptic streets, but even by its own standards, the novel really disappointed me. The story takes place in Toronto, where a lawsuit by the Temagami Indian tribe and an international ban on imports of the temagami pine have led to economic collapse in the city. Government has fled to the suburbs, leaving the poor, the weak or the willful to fend for themselves, along with criminal elements preying on them. The situation is like a civil version of the movie Escape From New York and with a little imagination, could almost apply to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Like Escape From New York and so many science fiction tales, the plot is triggered by a presidential crisis. The infirm Canadian premier is desperate for a heart transplant. Trailing in a bid for re-election, her staff see an opportunity to use public distaste of animal organ farming by declining a pig's heart and resorting to a human one. Complications arise finding a suitable donor in time, so they reach out to Rudy Sheldon, criminal overlord of Toronto, to get them a human heart, stat. Ti-Jeanne is a young, unwed mother who's left her baby's father, a sweet-talking deadbeat named Tony whose addiction to a narcotic called buff cost him his hospital job and pushed him into the employ of Rudy Sheldon. Ti-Jeanne now lives with her surviving family, her grandmother Mami Gros-Jeanne, a medicine woman and practitioner of Afro-Caribbean magic. With Ti-Jeanne's unnamed infant son "Baby", they live in the ruins of Riverdale Farm, formerly a civic recreation space made to resemble a working farm. Young Ti-Jeanne has begun to experience terrifying visions of supernatural creatures of Afro-Caribbean myth: a tall, red creature with a mask for a face known as a Jab-Jab, and a dried up old woman with blue flame leaping from her body called a Soucouyant. Ti-Jeanne finally confides her visions to her grandmother, who reveals that her mother was afflicted with similar visions and was eventually driven mad by them. The women receive an uninvited guest in Tony, who'd been dispatched with one of Rudy's men to kill an organ donor, but fled when he couldn't go through with the deed. Mami agrees to help, taking the couple to the Toronto Crematorium Chapel where she performs religious rites. She summons Papa Osain, a healing spirit, who makes both Ti-Jeanne and Tony invisible through dawn, so long as a rose which Tony offered his lover is kept on Ti-Jeanne's person. The two seek to flee Toronto. The novel I've just described is much more adventure oriented than what we ultimately get with Brown Girl in the Ring. There's a dystopian, ticking clock thriller with supernatural elements and a young couple on the run that lurks between the pages, as well as some very imaginative table setting, but the novel unravels into a lukewarm mess, with flimsy characters, stylistic elements that fail to mesh together, ridiculous hocus pocus and chapter breaks that stops the story cold. Flaws, flaws and more flaws: -- Flaky characters. Ti-Jeanne is one of the most useless heroines I've encountered in fiction in some time. A baby who's birthed a baby, she's living in an abandoned city with no discernible skills and turns into a doormat when her baby's drug addict hoodlum father talks sweet to her. Contrast that with a character like Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone, who's much younger and grows up with much less parental supervision. Ti-Jeanne breathes through her mouth clear through to the end of the book. As Mami says continually, "Stupidness!" If Ti-Jeanne acts like she's got no brain and no spine, Tony is an even bigger fool, messing with criminals and refusing to follow the instructions the women give to help him escape. -- I would've preferred a novel that explored Afro-Caribbean magic in Toronto, or one that rampaged across a dystopian Toronto, but not both at the same time. At 247 pages, this book seems too dense to deal with both fantasy and science fiction in a satisfying way. Science fiction is given to bloat and to throwing too many ingredients into the pot, but in this case, the story just didn't come together for me. -- I have an extreme dislike for deus ex machina and for authors who bail their characters out with divine intervention. Hopkinson steps in a mess with this. There are spirits taking possession of bodies, spirits guiding characters, spirits crossing over to wipe out the bad guys. Again, it seemed as if Ti-Jeanne was the least active character in the story. Sending in a spirit to lead characters out of danger rather than the characters overcoming obstacles is weak writing at best, laziness at worst. -- Another thing that bothered me was the overuse of nursery rhymes, chants, call and responses, song lyrics and so forth as scene breaks. Two or three in a novel of this size would've been enough, but it seems like Hopkinson throws one in every ten pages. Like like blurbs and dedications, my eyes skip right over speed bumps like this and got in the way of what I read books for: the story. I always hope to discover something different when I read genre fiction. Stories with a diversity of character, in this case, black women at the controls, was something I was really looking forward to. Hopkinson demonstrates vision when it comes to imagining the ruins of Toronto. Some of the magic is interesting too, but it's table dressing. The characters and story never materialized for me. I was intrigued enough to finish the book, but would not recommend it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Feb 19, 2015
Jul 29, 2022
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Feb 22, 2015
not set
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Feb 09, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0385533853
| 9780385533850
| 0385533853
| 3.71
| 40,633
| Jun 07, 2011
| Jun 07, 2011
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it was ok
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If you've ever pondered whether technology would unite or divide us, or if artificial intelligence would assist or resist us, or dig stories of mankin
If you've ever pondered whether technology would unite or divide us, or if artificial intelligence would assist or resist us, or dig stories of mankind going into the breach against overwhelming odds and revealing what makes humanity worth fighting for, then Robopocalpyse is not the book for you. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Daniel Wilson studied the game tape on Max Brooks and studied it well. Brooks spun off his droll little The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) into a serious minded, global stakes oriented, science fiction epic in World War Z (2006). Wilson, who earned a PH.d in robotics and wrote the droll little How To Survive A Robot Uprising (2005) clearly had people suggesting what he publish next, substituting zombies with robots and bingo bango, generating the next publishing blockbuster, which he did in 2011. Both books begin with mankind turning the tide in a catastrophic global war and looking "back" in an effort to document how they got here. Both books lack a central character or set of characters and skip around the globe in a series of action packed vignettes. This is where the comparisons end. World War Z was pitched at ground level, taking place in the here and now, and by virtue of Brooks' imagination and exhaustive appetite for logistical research, very plausible. And scary. And impossible to put down. Robopocalpyse is completely ridiculous, divorced from any time or place remotely recognizable, deadly unimaginative, flatly plotted and unable to offer a single character or line of dialogue that rises above cliche. It is impossible that I actually finished this book. The conceit that in the near future, humanoid robots will be doing our cooking and cleaning, running errands and fighting our wars is bogus. Consumers have seen way too many science fiction movies to ever pay $1,000,000 for their own personal RoboCop. Science fiction authors have speculated about domestic robots who would walk, talk and think but over the last 50 years we have not seen our tech actually evolve in this way. I don't know if Wilson is really that daft or thinks readers are that daft. I understand this is just a work of speculative fiction, but as a core conceit, I never bought the one in Robopocalyse. Everything from here is essentially rotten. I can't recall one character I responded to emotionally, one scene that disturbed or thrilled me or one line of dialogue I found interesting. In terms of reader satisfaction, it failed in every category I could name. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 2011
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Jun 2011
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Jan 30, 2014
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.35
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it was amazing
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Jan 12, 2015
not set
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Mar 11, 2025
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| 3.75
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liked it
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May 27, 2024
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Jan 25, 2021
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| 3.79
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really liked it
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Dec 31, 2020
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Nov 15, 2020
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| 3.96
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liked it
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Jun 08, 2019
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Jun 05, 2019
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| 3.60
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it was ok
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Jan 16, 2019
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Aug 21, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.64
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it was ok
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Dec 20, 2020
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Aug 02, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Feb 27, 2015
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Oct 18, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
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Nov 15, 2016
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Sep 20, 2015
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Mar 12, 2015
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Mar 08, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.72
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really liked it
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Dec 03, 2017
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Jan 03, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Feb 03, 2015
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Dec 12, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.09
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liked it
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Sep 20, 2018
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Nov 26, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Jan 06, 2015
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Nov 20, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.05
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it was ok
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Mar 24, 2015
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Nov 04, 2014
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| 3.42
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it was ok
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Mar 06, 2015
not set
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Jul 31, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.15
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liked it
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Mar 08, 2014
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Mar 07, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.79
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it was ok
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Mar 03, 2015
not set
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Feb 24, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Feb 18, 2015
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Feb 16, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.84
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it was ok
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Feb 22, 2015
not set
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Feb 09, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.71
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it was ok
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Jun 2011
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Jan 30, 2014
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