I first read this a few years ago and, for no apparent reason, never continued with the trilogy.
Also, bizarrely, I only awarded it four stars out or fI first read this a few years ago and, for no apparent reason, never continued with the trilogy.
Also, bizarrely, I only awarded it four stars out or five. On a second listen, this is a genuinely great book, Profound, humane, prophetic, funny - in short, everything you'd expect from Margaret Atwood.
The story, told by perhaps the only "human" survivor of a plague, in a world filled with genetically created hybrids (including the "Crakers" - a simple tribe of bioengineered humanoids over whom he watches.
Jimmy - or Snowman, to give him his adopted moniker - fills in how the this world came to be, and his close relationship with those who caused it.
Published in 2003, Atwood shows a world descended into shortages and conflict, where the US is divided amongst corporate enclaves and the Plebelands who are kept disenfranchised, prevented from owning weapons, and deliberately infected by lab-created diseases so the pharmaceutical companies can continue to profit.
It could be the blueprint for an Alex Jones conspiracy theory.
It also completely puts to rest any argument about Atwood as someone who writes science fiction; she is clearly both conversant with the scifi canon, but also thinks like a science fiction writer. I can see this book written by Neal Stephenson (as good as he is, Atwood is a far better writer, and at least as good a thinker).
I am very much looking forward to the rest of the trilogy....more
For whatever reason I was a bit leary about reading the Ancillary novels, so I read the stand alone Provenance and it was... fine. Well enough writtenFor whatever reason I was a bit leary about reading the Ancillary novels, so I read the stand alone Provenance and it was... fine. Well enough written but the story didn't particularly grab me.
However, I heard very good things about Translation State, particularly from the Incomparable podcast so when I saw it in the 2-for-1 Audible sale I thought I'd give it a try.
My first pleasant surprise was to find it is read by Adjoa Andoh, who has long been one of my favourite actors - particularly her voice acting, as she has done a lot of drama on BBC Radio (including a fair bit of science fiction) - and is one of the very finest readers around.
And, at least partly due to the reading, I was gripped this time. We start with three narrative threads, two of which come together with the third, odder one, staying separate but hints of why it is connected becoming apparent.
The mystery is brilliantly executed, the setting unique, the politics and culture clashes well-drawn without being over done, and the characterisation (brought to life by Andoh's reading) exceptional. This is the second or third example I've come across of different cultures being voiced in distinct accents (Ben Allen also does it brilliantly in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series). Here Andoh gives Reet's family West Indian accents, the Siblings (I think) Ghanaian accents and the Presger translators are Welsh (view spoiler)[(as is Reet himself) (hide spoiler)], with various other accents given to other cultures and aliens. I especially thought the Russian accent given to the alien who said "My people don't do small talk" very fitting. And, within each accent grouping, each character is distinct, to the extent you forget it is all from the same reader. My guess is that the US audiobook has a different reader; I suspect many Americans would struggle with the Welsh accent - though for me, it brings to mind Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen.
There is a also a good level of low-key humour throughout, such as the Presger translator young being taught how to pass as human by basically playing at children's tea parties contrasted with their cannibalism - which, of course, isn't just cannibalism, as they absorb the "essence" of what they eat, not unlike the Alzabo in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.
There are clear references to events that I suspect occur in the Ancillary trilogy, and enjoying this book so much encourages me to go and explore them - especially if the audio is read by Adjoa Andoh,...more
It took my some time to get around to this second part of the Earthseed duology. As good as Parable of Content warning: discussion of sexual violence.
It took my some time to get around to this second part of the Earthseed duology. As good as Parable of the Sower was, it was bleak as hell - I'm talking The Road levels of bleak - and I hadn't been feeling emotionally strong enough for that.
Fortunately, Talents isn't nearly as bad, although there is a great deal of bleakness and violence therein, which I'll come to. I also think it's more realistic look at societal breakdown than its predecessor: I don't think representations such as the Road, or Lord of the Flies, are actually accurate representations of how people behave when society breaks down. While there are some that will take advantage humans tend to group together and seek and provide mutual help. This isn't my rose-tinted view of humanity, it can be seen wherever there are disasters, and in fact when a bunch of schoolkids were stranded in a very Lord of the Flies scenario, they survived incredibly well until rescued.
What does happen - both in the real world and in Parable of the Talents - is that most violence is caused either deliberately by those in power seeking to divide and rule, or as a side-effect of the usual societal safeguards being corrupted: think Putin's Russia, or the Colombian drug wars.
While in Parable of the Sower, we saw the USA collapsing and fragmenting under the combined pressures of pandemic, economic and environmental collapse, and degenerating into wealthy walled communities surrounded by chaos and violence, in this sequel this disorder is taken advantage of by the Christian America party, who sweep to power with handsome, charismatic president Jarrett (by the way, ever noticed that dictators and autocrats in fiction are always handsome and charismatic, but in the real world they look like Mussolini or Trump?) and immediately start to enforce an extreme Christian Nationalist agenda.
Oh. Their slogan is "Make America Great Again", and this was published in 1998.
I read this in ebook and I don't think I've ever highlighted so many passages in a book, so many jumped out to me as relevant to the current political state of the US.
Butler was a superb writer, and can be quite shocking. She writes incredibly powerfully and vividly, and never more so with the matter-of-fact way she writes about the violence done to people, especially sexual violence, both to men and boys but especially, of course, to girls and women. She doesn't go into detail, not needing to, merely stating things like "I was raped for the first time that week. Twice."
Unlike Sower, however, here there is hope. It continues Lauren's story but each chapter of her journal is prefaced by some notes from her grown daughter - so we don't need to wait for a The Handmaid’s Tale-style coda to let us know that the wheel turned and all was well - and this hope is realised.
As I suggested, this is a book about the abuse of power - specifically, like Atwood's novel, a warning about religious extremism - but also about hope and the idea of a secular humanist "religion" focusing on unifying our species on greater things.
I'm not sure about that latter. I don't think my rose-tinted spectacles are enough to see it working....more
Whenever I read a book that has received almost uniformly glowing reviews and I just don’t connect, I do have to wonder “Is it me?� Oddly, the reverseWhenever I read a book that has received almost uniformly glowing reviews and I just don’t connect, I do have to wonder “Is it me?� Oddly, the reverse position doesn’t occur; on appreciating something otherwise unpopular it’s extremely easy to dismiss others� opinion.
Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past has been very highly praised indeed. GR reviews are almost all 5 stars.
And I just don’t get it. Yes, there are some extremely interesting ideas contained therein but, while I can forgive a lot if the ideas are interesting enough, I found the writing just poor. Ideas expressed in the worst sort of exposition and info-dump by characters with no noticeable characterisation, who don’t talk, behave or react in any way remotely like real people.
It is possible that some of this is cultural, or an issue of translation, as I’ve heard others suggest. I don’t think the former is the case � it isn’t a problem I’ve had before, reading literature from many nations and all continents � and without further knowledge the translation has to be taken as accurate.
I especially struggled with the final book, perhaps as it as long as the other two put together, but there were certainly other factors. One was a weird sexism that crept in, which I found a surprise given the prominent roles played by women in the earlier parts, but the author seems to lean into a strange gender essentialism that I found jarring, especially a section where the whole male population of Earth is painted as being feminised � this specifically being equated with being weak and ineffective � in a process that is pinpointed as started several hundred years before “in the 1980s�. If this was meant to be satire, it missed the mark.
A note on the audio. I’d originally read the Three Body Problem but, such was the praise heaped upon it, I decided to try again, and picked up the audio books. This may have been a mistake, as the reader did not do a good job. I use that phrasing advisedly, as I think even a good reader would have struggled, but this one seemed to lean into the clunkiness of the writing and especially the dialogue to a level that was frankly painful.
So, it clearly is “just me�. I won’t be persuaded that these are in any way good books, but I wouldn’t entirely dismiss them. There is some value here. For whatever reason, I didn’t connect and doubt I’ll be reading him again. ...more
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