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| 1419143956
| 9781419143953
| 1419143956
| 3.90
| 7,590
| Dec 1844
| Jun 17, 2004
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it was amazing
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Normally, I read short stories as part of collections, so don't typically review them separately. This one is part of Hawthorne's 1844 collection Moss
Normally, I read short stories as part of collections, so don't typically review them separately. This one is part of Hawthorne's 1844 collection Mosses from an Old Manse, which was a favorite book of my teens, and the story was one of my favorites in the book; but my review of the collection says little more than that about it, except to classify it as science fiction and to recommend the 1980 American Short Story series adaptation starring Kristoffer Tabori () as faithful to the original. It basically is, though there a few differences; but though I've seen the film several times and like it, watching it for the most recent time this past summer with one of my older grandsons and discussing it with him afterwards gave me a desire to reread the original and dig into its meaning more deeply. That was rewarding (I hadn't read the story itself for over 50 years, probably well over!); and since this was a new and focused read of the single story itself, I felt that it deserves a focused review of its own. With that new perspective, it has to be said that this is actually a very difficult story to adapt in film format; there's a degree of ambiguity in the tale itself, but it's much more ambiguous without Hawthorne's many narrative comments and revelations of the viewpoint character's thoughts, which of course don't come through in a dramatized form. Even more than most short fiction, it's also very difficult to review without resorting to plot spoilers, though I'll attempt it. Before my reread, I'd also totally forgotten that Hawthorne, in a short prologue to this tale, presents it (tongue-in-cheek, of course!) as his translation of a story by an imaginary French writer, "M. de l'Aubepine." Hawthorne's comments about this fictional personage's work(s) make it clear that l'Aubepine is really a surrogate for himself, so that he's providing clues there about his approach to fiction in general, and to this story in particular. Our setting is the real-life city of Padua in northern Italy, "very long ago." (The filmmakers took that to mean the early 1700s; when I read the book as a teen, I pictured the Renaissance era for this story.) We see events through the eyes of Giovanni, a young student from southern Italy who's come to attend the city's famous university. As the story proper opens, he takes a room that overlooks the private garden of the aged physician and botanical researcher (pre-modern medicine relied on plant-based pharmacopia), Dr. Rappaccini. Giovanni will soon learn that the doctor's researches and gardening activities revolve exclusively around very poisonous plants --most of which he's unnaturally cross-bred or grafted with each other to render them more toxic; and will also learn that the plants which are too dangerous for the doctor himself to handle or approach are given over to the care of his beautiful daughter Beatrice. She has no problem with them; but Giovanni sees evidence that her own touch or breath can kill living things. That doesn't stop him from developing an obsessive crush on her. Hawthorne typically has conscious messages in his fiction, and though they may be complex and ambiguous, he wants them understood. But that understanding may be attained more through feelings than through the intellect. M. l'Aubepine, we're told, has an "inveterate love of allegory," and the trappings of real life in his tales tend to be just a veneer for a concern that really lies elsewhere than with the mundane. So the fact that the presentation of Beatrice's acquired attributes in the story is illogical, even within the internal logic of the story (though explaining how would involve spoilers) needn't concern us; Hawthorne is more interested in setting up a situation than in explaining how it could work. He's a Romantic, not a Realist, writer; and one of his messages here is very characteristic of Romantic SF: that the unnatural pursuit of forbidden knowledge is dangerous and destructive. As a Christian writer, he's also warning that humans can't usurp the place of God; the explicit references to Eden are instructive. (Like God, Rappaccini has made a garden; but it's not going to be paradisical.) The story also has something to say about the difference between love and selfish infatuation, about judging others, about the fact that love trusts, and about whether science can be trusted to clean up the messes caused by its own misuse. After this reread, I feel like I have much more of a handle on what Hawthorne was seeking to do with this story, and can appreciate it even more! It still has unplumbed depths (for instance, I think there's a connection to Dante through Beatrice's name, but not having read Dante's poetry, I can't comment on that aspect); but I'm very glad to have interacted with the tale more deeply. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 04, 2024
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Dec 06, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1927882958
| 9781927882955
| 1927882958
| 4.31
| 13
| unknown
| Sep 15, 2024
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really liked it
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Full disclosure at the outset: the author, my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friend Shane Joseph, sent me an e-ARC (to be deleted after reading and reviewing) of this nove
Full disclosure at the outset: the author, my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friend Shane Joseph, sent me an e-ARC (to be deleted after reading and reviewing) of this novel, which is scheduled for publication on Sept. 15 of this year, in exchange for an honest review. This isn't his first foray into science fiction, but it's the first work of his that I've read in the genre. He's better known for his masterful general fiction, much of which is set in his adopted country of Canada. We have a Canadian locale here too; most of the novel takes place in Toronto (if I recall correctly, the city isn't named until relatively late in the book, but there are numerous references to street names, neighborhoods, etc. that Canadian readers would probably pick up on much sooner) or in the countryside near it, with a couple of side trips to the Niagra area. (A reference to "Northumberland" in the first chapter initially confused me --it's a county in England, but it's apparently also the name of a county in Canada.) Chronologically, our setting is the very, very near future. When SF genre pioneer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, as she stated herself in the preface to the 1818 edition, she didn't actually believe humans could create a sentient being. For her, the premise was a solid example of "soft" science fiction, a make-believe technology with no basis in real science, just used as a literary conceit to allow the exploration of certain themes. But with the passage of a bit over two centuries, the ability of humanity to play God has sadly increased exponentially. Shane's writing of this novel was directly inspired, as he tells us in the Author's Note, by the creation of ChatGTP in 2023, which of course was in the context of other significant extensions of AI capabilities. Shelley's premise is now the stuff of "hard" SF, sober extrapolation from existing technology to reasonably plausible future applications. And like Victor Frankenstein's Creature, title character Victoria here isn't blessed with a kind and loving creator. As we know from his general fiction, the author has a lively awareness of the dark side of human nature; and here, much as the late Michael Crichton did in some of his hard SF, he explores what's apt to happen when technological development is funded by deep-pocketed business interests motivated solely by greed, hunger for power, hubris gratification, craving for novelty and fame, and sexual lust. (Hint: the results aren't apt to be pretty.) As a part of this mix, Shane (an independent author and small press publisher himself) also considers the impact of both AI and broader computer technology in general on the whole culture of reading and publishing which we as readers deeply love. So there's a lot of serious thought content here. As is characteristic of this author's work, ideas are brought to life vividly through their impacts on a group of inter-connected characters, all of them three dimensional, nuanced, and able to evoke strong reactions (favorable or unfavorable) in the reader. They may change and grow in the course of the tale. The plotting is perfectly crafted. My only quibble here was the fairly high amount of bad language (especially the f-word), which is used by most of the major characters and is often so grating that it's wince-worthy, and several instances of explicit unmarried sex. The latter are at times described graphically; and there are references to many more non-explicit acts. IMO, most of this material added nothing positive to the storyline or the characterizations, and it impacted my reading enjoyment negatively enough that I had to deduct a star. But that said, the author's overall moral messages are actually positive. Caring treatment of others, responsible behavior, and healthy and committed relationships are promoted, and exploitative behavior (sexual and otherwise) is ultimately shown in a negative light. Readers should also be warned that there is some graphic violence here, though there's no "pornography of violence." With these content warnings, I'd still recommend it to adult readers, both SF fans and readers in general, as impactful and thought-provoking reading that deals seriously with important issues that are very much part of our real world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 11, 2024
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Jun 22, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0441783589
| 9780441783588
| B00A2MSVXY
| 4.01
| 238,714
| Dec 1959
| Feb 2010
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really liked it
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Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was part of the generation of American science fiction writers whose interest in the genre was shaped within the insula
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was part of the generation of American science fiction writers whose interest in the genre was shaped within the insular little world of U.S. SF fandom in the years between the World Wars, centered around a handful of pulp magazines, with John W. Campbell's Astounding Stories ultimately the foremost of them. Making his first SF short story sale to Astounding in 1939, in time to become, like his slightly younger colleague Isaac Asimov, one of Campbell's proteges and leading contributors to the magazine in pulp SF's “Golden Age,� he would go on to be one of the genre's biggest 20th-century names, winning the Hugo Award four times (the first time for this novel). Despite a liking for science fiction that goes back to my childhood, though, I've never sought Heinlein out as a writer. Overall, my taste in the genre runs more to its “soft� branch, or to sociological SF, sword-and-planet scenarios, post-apocalyptic and alternate history works –not so much to the “hard� school, closely aligned with strict extrapolation from (and often devoted to expounding a lot of) actual science, which characterized the pulp tradition. (Heinlein fit into the latter very well; in the late 1930s he was a postgraduate student in physics and math at the Univ. of California.) Then too, with a few exceptions, military-oriented SF isn't generally my thing. There are also significant differences between my worldview and his. So my prior experience with his work was limited to a handful of his short stories in anthologies (which for me have been a mixed bag). But when my oldest grandson was thoughtful enough to gift me with a copy of this book last Christmas, I was resolved to read it ASAP; and it turned out that I appreciated it more than I'd expected to. Our setting here is the far future (I don't recall the exact century being specified), and our protagonist and narrator is a soldier whom we meet in medias res as he's about to “drop� down, along with other troopers, from an orbiting starship onto the surface of a hostile planet, for a raid in the course of a high-tech interstellar war. We don't learn his full name until chapter 11 of a 14-chapter book (that's actually done for a purpose, which I won't divulge, but for which I give Heinlein high marks on a couple of counts!); until then he's just “Johnnie.� In the following chapter, we drop back to the time when he's finishing up high school on Earth and about to turn 18, when his best friend convinces him that after graduation, they should sign up for military service together. (The war breaks out while he's still in basic training.) Beginning with chapter 2, the plot proceeds in linear fashion, though there's a longer than usual chronological gap before the final chapter. You might suppose, then, that this will be primarily a space opera action-adventure potboiler with primary emphasis on battles and military hardware. But that supposition would be wrong. The book opens with a battle scene, and there's a grand total of one other such scene in the entire novel. Both of these are described in an exciting and suspenseful fashion, with plenty of action, though none of it grisly-gory. But these are hardly the meat of a 335-page novel. Likewise, there's some attention paid to describing the trooper's formidable armored combat suits and their weaponry, communications capabilities, etc., just sufficiently so that you can understand the action taking place. But this isn't heavy-handed nor lengthy, and there's no hard science for its own sake. (No effort is made to explain faster-than-light space travel, for instance; just that it's made possible by the “Cherenkov drive.�) Most of Johnnie's narration describes his training (at one level or another), and the conditions of starship life in a combat unit. Heinlein served in the Navy from 1929-1934 (after graduating from Annapolis –he had to return to civilian life on a medical discharge), and allowing for the mostly cosmetic differences of setting, futuristic technology and some specific future customs and practices, a lot of the lifestyle and ethos he describes clearly derives directly from this real-life experience. According to one SF website, �...Troopers was the first SF novel in which military life was depicted in a manner believable to readers who had actually served.� Readers looking for a constant high level of slam-bang action won't appreciate this, but for readers who value verisimilitude, this is actually a plus. Plausibly realistic description of what training and life in a space navy might be like for a mobile-infantry trooper, however, though important to the author, still wasn't his main reading for writing. His real reason is to make the novel a vehicle for expressing certain social messages relevant not only to American society in 1959, but to Western society in general in succeeding generations down to the present. This is very much a novel about ideas, and about the consequences of ideas. As Johnnie learns in school, 20th-century Earth societies collapsed, at least partly because of an epidemic of teenage crime produced by the ideologically driven abandonment, at the societal and legal level, of not only corporal child discipline, but pretty much any punitive child discipline at all. Teens grew up with no sense of moral duty to others in their society in general; the resulting aggressive violence made the cities increasingly unlivable. A third World War hastened the collapse. In its immediate aftermath, order was gradually restored by vigilante groups of veterans, who had that kind of sense of duty; and as a federated world state took shape under their tutelage, they created a polity in which full citizenship with voting rights was restricted to veterans. (It was also a state where crimes were punished primarily by the whipping post rather than by prison terms.) By Johnnie's time, this had produced a stable, widely prosperous society with low crime and maximum personal freedom for most of the populace. All those who applied for military service were accepted, and if they stuck out at least one two-year term (not necessarily in combat service), they became voting citizens. But frivolous applicants were discouraged, training was rigorous enough to weed out those who couldn't hack it, and the service itself was no cakewalk. In the service, there was a strong emphasis on discipline and on self-sacrifice for the good of the civilian society which military services exist to protect. The implications for American society in the author's present, facing a then unprecedented rise in “juvenile delinquency� as well as what many perceived an an existential external threat from the Soviet Union, were fairly obvious. They remain obvious, as the decline of law and order has become even more noticeable than it was in 1959, and as existential threats multiply in the post 9/11 world. Heinlein's own general socio-political attitudes were broadly right-of-center (more so than mine, in some respects), though he doesn't go into those much here, and he later supported the Vietnam War, a stance that in hindsight was recognizably misguided. By the late 1960s, this led the rising younger generation of intelligentsia and college-educated SF fans to hate and demonize him. This novel was grist for their anger. One reviewer has described his viewpoint here as “hyper right-wing nationalism,� which is ironic, considering that he happily depicts all nationalities as absorbed under a benevolent world government, a goal which was really popular with SF writers in the Campbell school, but not so much so with those of us who actually are (peaceful) nationalists. Another reader (and probably more than one!) has characterized it as “Fascist,� though Heinlein was actually a very strong libertarian. For my own part, I have significant disagreements with him at the philosophical level. I don't, for instance, deny that humans have a moral instinct and reduce all valid ethical principles to whatever aids individual or group survival, nor explain all wars as caused by population pressure (his Darwinism, IMO, misled him in these respects), and I think there are serious problems with restricting suffrage to veterans, and doubt that it would work as well in practice as he imagined. Yet in his basic thesis that children and teens need constructive moral discipline, and that a willingness to defend your community against aggressors with your life if necessary is a laudable thing, I would contend that he wasn't wrong. Also on the plus side, this is a very clean novel, with no bad language and no sexual content. It also has a positive view of women in combat –none serve as infantry troopers (probably because the weight of the armored suits would be too heavy for most), but we're told that they make better combat pilots than males do, and they generally captain the starships. (For 1959, that's a pretty feminist stance!). Personally, I really enjoyed the book overall, and would recommend it to SF and military fiction fans. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 12, 2024
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Mar 22, 2024
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Dec 26, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B09WL7RTNK
| 3.83
| 12
| unknown
| Mar 26, 2022
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really liked it
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Joe Vasicek is an independent author of speculative fiction, whose work I originally stumbled on back in 2020 through one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. Sin
Joe Vasicek is an independent author of speculative fiction, whose work I originally stumbled on back in 2020 through one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. Since then, I've read a couple of his other short stories (like this one, as freebies). A devout Mormon, his faith, as he notes in the Foreword here, informs all of his life including his writing; but in the SF he writes under his real name, he eschews explicit religious references. When he wants to incorporate the latter, as he does here, he writes under the pen name of J. M. Wight. This short e-story, which I ran across earlier this year, was my first introduction to his work in that incarnation, and to his series character Zedekiah Wight. (The identical last names suggest to me that the character might be something of an imagined "ideal self" for the author.) "Bloody Justice" is undoubtedly a teaser for the rest of the Zedekiah Wight corpus. Zedekiah Wight is a fanatically religious vigilante with lethal combat skills, a penchant for quoting Scripture (his favorite book is Isaiah), and a particular zeal for stamping out sex trafficking and slaughtering sex traffickers, for which he sees himself as an instrument in God's hand. His character has some similarities to Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane (who's my favorite REH hero). But whereas Solomon is a Puritan scion of Elizabethan England, Zed lives in a far future in which the Earth has long since become uninhabitable, and humanity has spread across the stars. Since fallen human nature remains unchanged, this gives sex traffickers a much vaster scale on which to operate. Then as well as now, their "sordid business" remains illegal. But as captain of the well-armed spaceship Voidbringer, Zed and his loyal crew aren't interested in making citizen's arrests. Nominally, their primary mission is to rescue captives. But Zed takes a bloody-minded delight in inflicting lethal divine vengeance. When, early in this story, the Voidbringer intercepts what they know to be a slave ship, it becomes possible that the latter agenda might in this case preclude the former ...so the question is, which agenda trumps the other? Our primary viewpoint character here is Eve, a super-intelligent A.I. whose holographic avatar (which "she" has internalized as a self-image) is a beautiful human woman in her 20s. She's a key part of Zed's crew, though here we're not told how she joined it; there are hints that her presence may not be wholly legal, especially since Zed's freed her from her "AI safeguards." Be that as it may, she's very committed to the partnership; she finds Zed quite interesting to work for, though even with the "emotional assessment algorithm" she's created for her own reading of his moods and character, she's not able to read him perfectly. (Since we see him through her eyes, that's an excellent narrative strategy on the author's part, preserving his protagonist's enigmatic quality.) Eve's actually a very well-drawn, and even likable character (I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of AI, but if all of its manifestations were as engaging as she is, I could be more reconciled to the technology :-) ). Except for faster-than-light space travel (which was tacitly tolerated as legitimate even by "hard" SF purists from the very beginning of the genre's pulp magazine era in the U.S.), all of the technology here could be credibly imagined as an extrapolation from existing knowledge. This is basically straightforward action-oriented space opera, with danger, suspense, excitement and (very) bloody combat, such as might have appeared in the SF magazines of the 1920s and 30s; but here there's much more focus on character, and on human moral and spiritual issues. The tale is a quick, one-sitting read. Despite the author's Mormonism, there's nothing necessarily to indicate that Zed or his human crew are supposed to be Mormons as such. There's some mild bad language here, mostly of the d- and h-word sort, from the head villain and sometimes from Eve (we can assume that her speaking style was programmed into her by the secular-humanist programmers who created her), but none of that posed any issue for me in this context. Despite the premise, there's no sexual content. Our villains here happen to be (or, at least, to think of themselves as) Moslems, and to be ethnic Arabs, judging from their names. This extrapolates from the fact that in the contemporary world, the only countries where slavery remains legal, and that still support a slave trade, are those where Sharia law (which regulates slavery, but doesn't forbid it) remains in force. However, that isn't to deny that in the contemporary world a great many of the traffickers who trade illegally in sex slaves are European-descended or of other ethnicities than Arab; that probably the great majority of these are of no religion rather than Moslems (and some undoubtedly profess other faiths); and that many Moslems would deprecate slave trading and trafficking as much as any other decent persons do. I would assume the author knows this, and presumes that it would be no different in the far future. Given that assumption, I didn't take the story as Islamophobic propaganda. (If I would discover that I was wrong, it would definitely affect my rating very adversely!) A more serious issue arises from the fact that Biblical faith and ethics sees God as preferring the repentance of the wicked rather than the death of the wicked; supports the legitimate authority of the State to establish and enforce justice (provided that it actually does so) rather than encouraging lethal vigilantism in the name of God; and has as its focus the proclamation of a message of forgiveness and redemption. Viewed from that perspective, Zedekiah Wight is not genuinely a very sterling poster boy for Christian values (though he may reflect contemporary stereotypes of what Christians are like). Nonetheless, I was prepared to view him as "a work in progress," whose spiritual journey and character arc in the subsequent works of the series remains to be seen. So I was able to accept him as he is for now, and appreciate the story on those terms. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 09, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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Jul 17, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B0DM1PF2YZ
| 4.14
| 87
| 1957
| Dec 1957
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it was amazing
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My first reading of this well-written, pithy short story was as a kid in the early 60s. It had been published in 1957 in one of the SF pulp magazines
My first reading of this well-written, pithy short story was as a kid in the early 60s. It had been published in 1957 in one of the SF pulp magazines of that day, and a friend had passed that back issue on to me. (Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ uses that magazine's cover as its image for the story --but the cover art was for a completely different selection, so has absolutely nothing to do with this one!) As with many of my reads in those years, I forgot the author/title information; but the story itself stayed with me very well, a testament to the quality of the writing. Recently, I downloaded a different story from the same era as a free e-story (and hope to review it as well soon), based on a review by a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friend, in the belief that it might be this one. Instead, it proved to be a later thin and inferior rip-off of this one; but by then my interest in Memory Lane was piqued enough to search seriously for the real one. Here's the link where it can be read online for free: . Last night, I read it for the second time, now from an adult's perspective, and appreciated it even more. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), of course, was one of the leading luminaries of American SF's "Golden Age," a friend and protege' of legendary pulp editor John W. Campbell Jr., whose long career was loaded with the genre's honors. Despite my long-standing interest in SF, though, my own tastes lie mostly outside the technophilic optimism and secular humanism of the genre's "hard" school that dominated the ghetto of magazine-based fandom in Asimov's youth (he started writing while still quite young) and shaped his style and vision. His acclaimed Foundation trilogy never interested me, and I couldn't get into his robot fiction; so what I've read of his corpus is a handful of short stories (and I find those a mixed bag). But this one is, IMO, the best work I've read from his pen, and one of the 20th century's master works of speculative fiction. Like much SF written in the late 40s and the 50s-60s, it's strongly influenced by the fear of possible nuclear war, which occupied the minds, not only of the literary community, but of many people in the general population (me included, at that age). Here, though, he takes that theme and writes a serious tale that grapples with ideas, not an arid tract. Our primary setting is Earth's moon, about 15 years after World War II, where protagonist Devi-en heads the Hurrian colony. An uncritical evolutionist as always, Asimov here imagines that our galaxy has developed life on many planets, and evolution has always culminated in intelligent primates --almost always large, tailless, omnivorous primates with strong competitive instincts. Normally, once they develop nuclear technology, they proceed to largely destroy themselves and their world in a nuclear war. Only Hurria produced a dominant race of shorter, tailed and vegetarian primates whose dominant social instinct was cooperation. Never having had a nuclear war, they survived to develop space travel. For a very long time, they've waited for the galaxy's various other primate species to have their nuclear war, then moved in to rehabilitate and colonize the planet, dominate the survivors and collect tribute. But on Earth's moon, they've been waiting an unprecedented 15 years. Now, an Archadministrator has been sent to investigate the question of why the Earthlings aren't getting with the program. In keeping with the hard SF tradition, Asimov doesn't depict anything here that's scientifically impossible (except for the basic implication of faster-than-light interplanetary travel, which was such an ingrained staple trope in the genre that even hard Sf purists wink at it). But his focus isn't on presenting a science lecture or extrapolating, from present knowledge, speculations on what technology might plausibly do in the future. Rather, his interest is social and moral/philosophical (as has been the interest of the best writers since the dawn of literature). He's primarily telling a meaningful, plotted story with high stakes (the fate of a world, and perhaps the galaxy), about characters you can relate to --even if they mostly happen to be three feet tall and furry, with tails. His Hurrians (they call themselves Humans) are intelligently and coherently drawn in a realistic way, and though their psychology is alien to ours, the author brings it to life and makes it totally understandable. That's a significant achievement of world-building in the scope of a short story; and this is one of the more thought-provoking works of fiction (of any length) that I've ever read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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Paperback
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| B004TQW3JM
| 3.39
| 96
| Sep 30, 1961
| unknown
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it was ok
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Donald Westlake (1933-2008) eventually became very successful as a writer of mysteries and crime fiction; but he occasionally wrote in the SF genre as
Donald Westlake (1933-2008) eventually became very successful as a writer of mysteries and crime fiction; but he occasionally wrote in the SF genre as well, especially early in his career. Originally published in a pulp magazine in 1961, this mediocre and shallow story was one of those journeyman efforts. I recently downloaded it as a Kindle freebie, in the mistaken belief that it might be a story I'd read and liked in the early 60s. The latter story was actually "The Gentle Vultures" (1957) by Isaac Asimov. (That one can be read online for free at , and my five-star review is here: /review/show... .) What initially mislead me was the great similarity in premise: both tales are set mainly on the Moon, roughly in the author's present, with an alien species (who do this routinely, on a lot of worlds) impatiently waiting there for the Earthlings to hurry up and have their nuclear war, so the aliens can take over the planet. That, plus the vulture reference here which otherwise lacks a context, "Why should people hate vultures. After all a vulture never kills anyone" leads me to conclude that Westlake's story is a deliberate rip-off of Asimov's. It is, however, a much shorter and very inferior rip-off, lacking the texture, sociological and psychological insight and philosophical depth that gives Asimov's work its emotional impact and thought-provoking quality. Where Asimov's aliens are primates with some affinity to us, Westlake's are apparently wholly alien (they have tentacles, for instance --and in this story, they just thrive in a highly radioactive environment, unlike Asimov's Hurrians); there's no meditation on competitive vs. cooperative instinct here, and very little in the way of culture-building or emotional engagement of the reader with the characters. I actually debated whether it was worth reviewing; but I usually review everything I read, negative reviews can be as useful to readers as positive ones (and it did inspire me to actually track down the Asimov story!), so I've gone ahead and written this review. :-) ...more |
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Jan 04, 2022
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Jan 04, 2022
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Dec 08, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 052562080X
| 9780525620808
| 052562080X
| 3.67
| 404,998
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 15, 2021
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it was amazing
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Most readers know that Mexico has substantial mineral resources, including deposits of gold and silver, already known to the Aztecs. In colonial times
Most readers know that Mexico has substantial mineral resources, including deposits of gold and silver, already known to the Aztecs. In colonial times, these were worked on an industrial scale; but the capital and technical know-how came from Spain, and were withdrawn after the coming of independence. During the Porfiriato, the long dictatorship (1876-1911) of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, the relative political stability and Diaz' cozy attitude towards foreign investors encouraged English and French entrepreneurs to reopen the mines. (Some of this information was new to me.) The author's fictional Doyles, silver mine owners who stayed on after the 1910 revolution, were part of the latter trend. But the Doyle clan are definitely NOT your typical family of expatriate Brits.... However, when our story opens in Mexico City in 1950, we first meet a very different family, the Taboadas. Never poor, they were raised to wealth by protagonist Noemi's father, owner of a very successful chemical dye business. Besides Noemi and her brother, he also raised her slightly older cousin Catalina after she was orphaned young; so the two girls grew up more like sisters. Now, at 22, Noemi's still single, and a student at the Feminine University. But Catalina was married about a year ago, after a whirlwind courtship, to Virgil Doyle, and went to live with his family in the mountains of Hidalgo, the state just northeast of the capital. In the first chapter, Noemi learns that her dad has been corresponding, for a few weeks, with Virgil (whom he never especially liked or trusted) trying to get some answers to questions about Catalina's well-being. The trigger for these questions was a weird letter that Senor Taboada received from Catalina, containing accusations that her husband is trying to poison her, strange and incoherent statements that sound demented, and a hysterical plea for Noemi to come and save her. Now, after much stonewalling, a telegram has come from Virgil, inviting Noemi to come for a visit. Since Noemi's our viewpoint character, we're very much inside her head for this tale and get to know her well; and a well-developed, complex and nuanced character she is! Yes, she's got her faults. She can be a bit vain and entitled; she's hot tempered at times, flirtatious and fickle in her dating life, and unsettled in her studies (she's changed her major twice –right now it's anthropology). Part of the reason for this, I think, is that she's caught between her own half-understood desire to be her own person, vs. the role expectations of her traditional-minded family and patriarchal culture, which already has her life script mapped out for her. Mentally extending her adolescence into her 20s means she doesn't have to fully embrace the latter role, but doesn't have to commit to charting a different course, either. But as her dad knows, she's got her good qualities too, including smarts and discretion (and he could have added courage, emotional strength, and a basically kind heart). He wants to send her to determine the true situation, see if Catalina needs psychiatric care (and if so, convince Virgil to provide it), and to do this without causing a scandal that will embarrass the Taboada family. Even after reading the letter, she's absorbed enough in her own social whirl to want to postpone the visit for a few weeks –but if she'll go immediately, he'll give her his hitherto unlikely permission to go for her master's degree at the national university after graduation. That's an offer she can't refuse. In short order, then, she finds herself at the Doyle's austere, shabby-genteel estate, High Place, near their now long-closed silver mine. (Readers familiar with the Old Testament might pick up an echo of the “high places,� scenes of idolatrous and depraved pagan rites....) It's run-down, gloomy and cold (American readers tend to think of Mexico as a hot country, but this far up in the mountains, the altitude makes it anything but), with no phone and no electricity but what an over 40-year-old generator can produce. Here, she finds Virgil, whom she barely got to know a year before, suave and handsome but sinister, and meets his inbred family --his aged and decrepit father Howard, who's fascinated by eugenics and racist/racial theories, Virgil's sour and unfriendly cousin Florence, and her enigmatic son Francis, who's a Doyle only on his mother's side-- and their trio of silent, stand-offish servants. She also reconnects with Catalina; the older girl's a shadow of herself, recovering from illness but still weak and listless. Though she dismisses her letter as “nonsense� that she barely remembers and shouldn't have written, Noemi's not so sure. As she slowly begins to plumb the strange and potentially lethal secrets of High Place, mysteries mount. This challenge may prove to be a profound coming-of-age experience for our heroine ...provided that she survives it. (And there's no guarantee that she will.) Silvia Moreno-Garcia (b. 1981) was born and raised in Mexico, though she immigrated to Canada in 2004, and received her master's degree in science and technology studies from the Univ. of British Columbia in 2016. She evokes her Mexican setting with the inside knowledge of the country's history, geography and culture that comes with her background. But knowing some other aspects of her background are also helpful to the reader in knowing what to expect here. For one thing, she's quite a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, and has edited at least two anthologies of Lovecraft-inspired stories; the name of her own small press (specializing in weird fiction) is Innsmouth Free Press, an obvious allusion to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." It's also worth noting that another anthology she co-edited, Fungi, is described as "fungal fiction.� This novel is not a Cthulhu Mythos spin-off, and Moreno-Garcia's English style (at least here, she writes in English, not Spanish) doesn't resemble HPL's “purple prose.� But this is fiction of the basic type that he wrote: horrific “soft� science fiction, with naturally-explained terrors that resemble the stuff of older supernatural fiction, a Gothic ambiance, and some of his characteristic themes. This author, though, is her own person, and the work is stamped with her own individuality. A fundamental difference between her work here and Lovecraft's is the distaff protagonist and perspective (protagonist status in HPL's canon is very much a boys-only club, and he includes few female characters at all, though he has a couple of female villains). The writing in this book is also grittier than it typically is in the “classic horror� tradition. We do have some directly described grisly violence. While there's no explicit or implied sex, there is what a movie censor would refer to as “some sensuality� or “some nudity� (although here it's definitely not alluring). Bad language is almost nonexistent in Lovecraft's corpus, but more in evidence here. It's mostly limited to an occasional h- or d-word, but it spikes a bit more in the climactic chapters, where Noemi's own language gets more profane at times and she even drops a few f-bombs (the Doyle's are English-speaking, and she's also fluent in that language), though in one case she doesn't say it out loud. (Given the trauma and stress of her situation, even though I disapprove of that vocabulary, I was willing to cut her some slack.) Here there's more of a recognition that each human being has a dark side to his/her nature, so that the struggle against external malevolence/evil is also an inner struggle, than is typical of Lovecraft; and while neither writer presents the conflict in their fiction in Christian terms (Noemi's a nominal Catholic by upbringing, but we don't get the feel that the affiliation is more than nominal), there is the sense of a different worldview than HPL's. Moreno-Garcia poses some of the same existential questions that he does. Is biology destiny? Do our free will and choices matter? Is the universe ultimately a place for hopelessness or hopefulness? But the answers to which she points may not be the same as his. With this work, Moreno-Garcia brings us a highly original premise, superb characterization, and an unsurpassed evocation of atmospheric setting. Her plotting is excellently crafted, and the pacing perfect, brisk and steady with a gradual disclosure of crucial information, and a rising tide of tension and fear for characters you've come to care about very much. My interest (and even fascination) with the tale was hooked early on, and only deepened the more I read. This wouldn't be a read for everybody; but if the features that I've described aren't deal-breakers, and if this general type of fiction is your thing (it's definitely mine!), I'd absolutely give it a high recommendation! "Open your eyes...." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 02, 2023
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May 11, 2023
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Sep 06, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0684852586
| 9780684852584
| 0684852586
| 3.90
| 24,266
| 1955
| Apr 06, 1998
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liked it
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Although I read and liked one of Jack Finney's short stories, "The Third Level," some years ago, in the collection Science Fiction: A Historical Antho
Although I read and liked one of Jack Finney's short stories, "The Third Level," some years ago, in the collection Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology, he's never been a genre author who's particularly on my radar. I read this one only because it was chosen as a common read in one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ groups (and I'd voted for a different choice). Nevertheless, I did turn out to like it moderately well as entertainment, though I don't think most readers would confuse it with great literature. Our geographical setting here is Mill Valley, California, a real-life small town in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, across the strait that separates San Francisco Bay from the Pacific. Mill Valley itself is in the hilly interior of the county, away from the sea; Finney was living there when he wrote the novel, and he creates a very realistic sense of place which is one of the book's strengths. While the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ book description gives 1955 as the original publication date of the novel in book format, it was actually published serially (as novels in that day still often were) in Colliers magazine in the prior year. This copy, however, is a 1998 reprint (by Scribner) of the 1978 "revised" edition, which gives the date of the story as the fall of 1976. Nonetheless, though I haven't done a textual comparison, I don't believe Finney made any significant changes in this revision except the date and a passing reference to his later novel Time and Again, both for commercial purposes. For all practical purposes, the entire flavor and texture of the tale suggests that it's set in 1954, and that was the way I took it. The Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ description reproduces the cover copy, and the title essentially telegraphs the premise even without the cover. So readers will be aware of the latter going in; it's that "alien life-forms" are "taking over the bodies and minds" of humans. This was a fairly early exploration of that idea in the SF genre, so relatively original for its time, though it subsequently inspired various imitations. Genre readers today may have, as I did, previously encountered the theme in Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel The Host and/or its movie adaptation; if so, comparisons between the two are inevitable. A significant difference is that Finney's invaders are replicants who reproduce the images of particular humans' bodies, not the parasites in the actual human bodies of Meyer's more plausible treatment. Another is that Finney depicts a phenomena that's supposedly just in its beginning stage, whereas Meyer's book starts with the earth already taken over and the human race surviving only in tiny hidden enclaves. But the most significant divergence, IMO, is in the basic visions of the two authors and their relative seriousness of literary purpose. Finney simply crafts a basic "Us against Them" thriller, with aliens who are incapable of emotion, to be read as a diversion. Meyer makes her alien invaders three-dimensional and treats their possible interactions with humans as multi-dimensional, making for a novel that's much more emotionally complex and thought-provoking, engaging the mind and the emotions in ways that Finney's treatment can not. The latter necessarily suffers from the comparison. While both authors are offering us "soft" science fiction, in which the "science" is purely in the writer's imagination rather than seriously extrapolated from currently known science, another difference is that while Meyer's invented "science" doesn't actually out-and-out contradict known scientific principles in implausible ways, Finney's really does, and that's another serious defect --"soft" SF is one thing, but asking readers to entertain the patently impossible is another! To be sure, Finney appeals to the theory that a dust-speck sized spore could escape a planet's atmosphere, survive absolute-zero cold, and be propelled by light waves across the void of space for eons to another planet and then germinate --though there are problems with that idea, and not many scientists accept it-- but applying that concept to large numbers of three-foot-long seed pods contradicts the laws of physics; and so, as far as I understand physics, does Finney's explanation for how the replication here operates. (Some of these criticisms were made by reviewers and critics of this novel when it was first published.) Nevertheless, this tale succeeds as well as it does because the author creates a believable small American community and evokes a growing sense of danger and dead, which grips the reader and draws you into the story. While it's much more plot-driven than character driven, Finney also gives us characters who are real enough that we care about them, and are afraid on their behalf. (The scary-thriller element is much more pronounced here than it is in most parts of The Host, since Meyer isn't really trying for it and Finney definitely is.) Like Meyer, Finney is also a writer with standards of taste where language and sexual content is concerned. Bad language here is limited to an occasional h- or d-word, and there's no explicit sex. (There's an instance of implied premarital --though not casual/loose-- sex at one point; but in the context, I wasn't morally outraged.) Overall, I thought that the romantic strand of the plot was well handled, based on something other than purely physical attraction, enhancing the plot rather than overwhelming or dominating it, and bringing together two people I liked and felt would be good for each other. There are movie adaptations of this title, but I've never seen any of them and so can't critique their fidelity to the book. It is worth noting, though, that this 1998 printing has an accidentally displaced page: p. 142 appears both in its proper place and where p. 135 is supposed to be, and the real p. 135 never appears at all. This was initially confusing, took me out of the story, and left a gap in the narrative; though since it was only one page, it was a small gap, and not too crucial! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 08, 2021
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Aug 16, 2021
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Aug 08, 2021
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Paperback
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| B0DLT51CQ5
| 4.31
| 248,560
| Jun 1979
| 2006
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it was amazing
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The first black American woman to be a published writer of science fiction, Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was twice a winner of both the prestigious Hugo
The first black American woman to be a published writer of science fiction, Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was twice a winner of both the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards, and remains well known today among all genre fans, and most general readers of serious literature as well. First published in 1979, Kindred is her best-selling novel, and continues to be frequently studied in academic literature courses. It owes its genesis, as she would write later, to an incident in her college days, when a fellow black student spoke very disparagingly of the supposed cowardice and servility of every previous generation of African Americans. The basic idea of the book came to her as a way of vividly depicting the actual reality of the historical situation of enslaved blacks, the kinds of constraints they operated with, the moral and psychological struggles that were their regular lot, and the very real integrity and dignity which so many of them displayed in the face of this. So Butler's aim in writing this was not only to educate white readers about the horrors of slavery --although this book definitely does that!-- but to provide enlightening perspective for modern black readers as well. Protagonist Edana "Dana" Franklin (b. 1950) is a black woman with many similarities to Butler herself. They're close in age, both natives and residents of the Los Angeles area, both writers passionate about writing, who supported themselves by working menial temporary jobs and getting up in the wee hours of the morning to write while waiting to make a success of their creations; and they both lost their fathers at a very young age. (Dana was fully orphaned.) They also were both raised in a strict Baptist milieu; Dana as an adult "shrugged off" the faith of her family, and Butler apparently did as well. Their main difference is that Dana has a husband (who plays a key role in the plot), while Butler never married; but the degree of similarity makes it likely that the author consciously put a lot of herself into her character, and identified with her to a high degree. Dana's "present" is 1976, very close to the author's --but also deliberately chosen for its symbolism. It's America's bicentennial year, the 200th anniversary of our founding Declaration that all people are created equal and endowed with God-given rights. In the book, it functions both as a reminder of past failures in living up to that truth, and as a challenge to continually strive to do better. But the past bulks larger in this book than Dana's present. On her 26th birthday, at home with her hubby Kevin, she experiences a nauseous blackout and comes to by a riverbank, where she saves a drowning child of about five years old. Minutes later, with a rifle pointed at her, she blacks out again to find herself back home. This is the first of several such episodes, which last longer as they go along. As she learns on the second trip, she's being physically transported to and from the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early 1800s, a time travel that's accomplished by the subconscious psi powers of the boy she saved, plantation owner's son and heir Rufus Weylin, and tied to his need to be rescued from mortal perils. Obviously, we're in the realm of "soft" SF here; devotees of "hard" SF disdain the whole idea of psychic phenomena. And, realistically, not being scientists or parapsychologists, Dana and Kevin don't try to spin scientific theories of how it works. But if psi powers do exist in some humans, the ability would be genetically transmitted --and as Dana soon learns, there's a genetic bond between her and Rufus, since he's her ancestor. This is a powerful, complex and immersive novel, with a historical setting that benefitted from copious primary-source research by the author, which is seamlessly incorporated into the first-person narrative with no info dumps. Obviously, it's an uncompromising indictment of the whole system of American slavery and the racism that undergirded it, which pulls no punches in its depiction of savage beatings of both black men and women, sexual exploitation of the latter (though we thankfully don't have any direct description of rapes), exploitative labor and material inequality, marriages and families torn asunder by the sale of spouses, siblings or children to parts unknown, and the whole institutionalized fabric of demeaning rudeness and humiliation designed to make blacks feel themselves to be inferior and rub their noses in the supposed inferiority. All of that said, it also drives home the point that the fundamental wrongness of slavery is inherent in its essential character, not just in those grosser outer expressions of it --just putting fellow humans under your absolute power is a mistreatment in itself, no matter how you handle your power. But for all that, this is not a simplistic anti-slavery tract cast as fiction. Rather, it's a serious, realistic story (okay, the premise is speculative; but the reaction of the characters to the premise is what we'd realistically expect if it happened) about nuanced characters of both races, caught up in a web of social circumstances and constraining interrelationships that often involve shades of gray, and that are profoundly emotionally evocative --and sometimes complicated-- for both characters and reader. It's not anti-white hate literature; Dana's much-loved (and loving) husband is white, and Rufus' genes are a part of who she is. Rufus himself, though he's capable of awful behavior, isn't a cartoon villain; he has a conscience and a certain amount of good qualities (Dana even likes him --to a degree), and even his father isn't totally devoid of the latter. We can see that slavery, in a very real sense, is as harmful to whites as to blacks, albeit in a different way. From the book's very first sentences, "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."-- we know that Dana's experience of slavery has left her mutilated; and we can't help feeling that our history of slavery and racism has in a real way left all of us, white and black, mutilated. The message I took from the book, especially from the scene near the end, where Dana speaks of "...schools with black kids and white kids together and older people who looked at Kevin and me, then looked again," is that the way forward into healing is through racial reconciliation. And a non-negotiable feature of that reconciliation is a recognition that the Other is our full equal as a fellow human, not a subordinate. This particular "25th anniversary" edition has a 15-page (plus a page of end notes) Critical Essay by Robert Crossley of the Univ. of Massachusetts at Boston, placed at the end of the book because it contains spoilers galore. My main quibbles with it are that it wastes ink arguing about whether or not Kindred is SF --Crossley (and evidently Butler herself, too, at least at one point) thinks it isn't, because it's not hard SF, but then talks a lot about it in an SF context-- and that he hides any reference to his own race in his discussion, and I think that's an important factor here. (I don't argue that literature is inherently race-specific, and incapable of intelligibility across racial lines; but I do believe that white and black readers inevitably bring different perspectives to a book like this.) It also has a bibliography of Butler's works, a two and a half page list of books and articles about Butler mixed with sources she read in her research for this book, and 20 discussion questions, which I read and which I considered perceptive and helpful for individual readers or for book clubs. (IMO, this would make an outstanding selection for the latter.) Although both of them are descriptive rather than speculative fiction (and Butler's diction is much more modern than Stowe's), I believe the closest literary "kindred" of this novel are Uncle Tom's Cabin and Alex Haley's Roots; the three books are far from clones of each other, but there's significant commonality in their message and moral vision, and in the clarity with which they deliver it. (And though the earlier books are more well known, I consider this one at least equal to both of them in its literary quality.) This is far from a feel-good read; it has quite a few very grim scenes, a lot of use of the n-word and some profanity and other bad language, though no obscenity (and no explicit sex). But I see it as a major work of modern world literature, with a message that's universal in scope; and I would highly recommend it to all adult readers, whether or not they're usually fans of SF or time travel tales. ...more |
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1
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Jan 18, 2023
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Feb 02, 2023
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Jan 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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| B0865YCJLS
| 3.90
| 80
| unknown
| Mar 28, 2020
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really liked it
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One of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends recently gave this short e-story a very favorable review. Since it's free for Kindle, even though I wasn't familiar with t
One of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends recently gave this short e-story a very favorable review. Since it's free for Kindle, even though I wasn't familiar with the author, I thought I'd give it a try. It proved to be a worthwhile read, and would have been read in one sitting if I could have (my opportunities for reading on the Kindle app are sometimes erratic and scanty); its suspense factor is quite high. I've recommended this for readers of dystopian fiction; it's set in the U.S. (the exact geographical area isn't specified any more particularly) about 40 years into our future, and I've classified it as science fiction. However, the science fiction element, as such, is not very marked, and what there is involves strictly speculation in social science, not technology or natural science. What Vasicek has done, for the most part, is simply to project the continuation of already marked socio-economic and political trends into the near future to see where they might take us. So his dystopia, seen through the eyes of a normal couple with an elementary-school-age son, is characterized by sharp division between a small minority of the very wealthy and the large majority of the very poor; rampant urban crime, and a lot of use of drones in policing; runaway inflation; a bureaucratic government that's inclined to spy on its citizens and criminalize dissent; and U.S. troops put in harm's way in the Third World to bolster an imperialistic foreign policy. None of these are novel phenomena in 2020 (and the same could be said of fortified schools that are more like prisons, and shoddy infrastructure); even drones as described here already exist, though they're not as routinely used. All that's new in these respects is the more extreme fruits of 40 years of the same, continuing unchecked; but though the United States isn't currently this dystopian, there are, and have been, real-world countries in the same boat. The one feature that's arguably an element of social science fiction here is UBI ("universal basic income"), which at present has been proposed by many on the Left but never enacted as such, even though all modern welfare states have tried to apply the concept to the "have-nots" --just not to the entire general population. However, beyond the fact that in the story it simply constantly chases rising prices rather than keeping up with them (and in fact triggers the rises whenever it rises --but this is already true of most attempts to unilaterally increase the money supply), its effects aren't analyzed in any detail and it doesn't serve as an obvious cause for the dystopian trends, which as noted above already preceded it. UBI, ironically, played much more of a role in the genesis of the story than it does in the story itself. Vasicek originally wrote it, according to his Author's Note, for a writing contest sponsored by two pro-UBI organizations, which invited authors to write stories imagining its effects if enacted. That a story which is skeptical of the idea's utility didn't win that contest isn't surprising. The fact that over a two-year period, it was rejected by every genre magazine it was submitted to --not because the SF element is on the SF-lite side, but because it treats a hard-Left ideological sacred cow with something less than a genuflecting reverence-- is, IMO, scarier than any of the fictional social dysfunctions the story posits. Overall, this is a gripping story, with characters that I came to care about, even though they're not very sharply drawn or developed in great detail. Like all dystopian fiction, it's intended to be a cautionary tale, inspiring readers to work towards a different future. It doesn't give any detailed program for how to do that, nor preach any particular ideological message (beyond the favorable treatment of family ties and loyalty), but that's not necessarily the function of fiction. It works more by encouraging an attitudinal recognition that, if the society depicted here isn't one we want, then what we do want is one that's more equitable, more democratic, more peaceful, more respectful of other human beings and more encouraging of their aspirations. In my estimation, that's a pretty good recognition to encourage! ...more |
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1
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Sep 20, 2020
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Sep 27, 2020
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Aug 22, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0671670727
| 9780671670726
| 0671670727
| 3.37
| 1,020
| Dec 1981
| Sep 01, 1988
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 14, 1992
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Apr 14, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1089758944
| 9781089758945
| 1089758944
| 4.67
| 6
| unknown
| Oct 11, 2019
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it was amazing
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Note, April 7, 2020: I've just edited this review again to make a factual correction. NOW, it should be in final form! :-) Note, April 6, 2020: I've ju Note, April 7, 2020: I've just edited this review again to make a factual correction. NOW, it should be in final form! :-) Note, April 6, 2020: I've just edited out the reference to "faster-than-light" travel here, which was my layman's way of expressing the idea of traversing distances between stars in less time than a ray of light would. However, Andrew explained his concept this way: "There is really no FTL travel. My idea of hyperspace is that in higher dimensions real space is crumpled up, like a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, so that it brings parts that in normal space are far apart to be close together (in a random fashion) in hyperspace. The ships travel at sub-luminal speeds, but have vastly shorter distances to travel. The “transition waves� are the ripples in normal space caused by ships entering and exiting hyperspace. Since the dimensional crumpling is unpredictable, routes in hyperspace have to be discovered and mapped before ships can traverse them." Hope this clarification is helpful to SF fans more knowledgeable about physics than I am! :-) While the author and I have been Internet friends for about 16 years, his status as one of my favorite authors isn't due to the friendship, but to the consistently high quality of his writing. Much of his output of both long and short fiction is in the SF genre; and while this body of his work isn't a series as such, all of it falls into an overarching conception of far-future fictional history. (The dating is a bit hazy in my memory, because it's been a while since I read the older books and I don't have them in front of me.) Red Planet Rising (1995) is set early in the history of human expansion beyond Earth, when a small settlement exists on Mars. Some time after this, in the 23rd century, the discovery of "hyperspace waves" and the technology to exploit them led to a subsequent surge of human settlement through much of the galaxy. Most of the colonies planted by these original settlers, though, lacked the human and physical resources to maintain high technology or contact with Earth, and so "regressed" to various degrees, materially and culturally. By the 25th century, Earth had fallen under the sway of a totalitarian world government, the Hegemony, which had ambitions to become a galactic government. Under its auspices, the second wave of (better-financed and supported) expansion began, with the goal of re-discovering the previously settled worlds and bringing them under the Hegemony heel --and, in the case of those considered too "regressed," subjecting their populations to ethnocide or genocide. Iron Scepter (2000) tells of the beginning of the decades-long war waged between the Hegemony and the only alien space-faring race it encountered, the Gara'nesh. The story collections The Deathcats of Asa'ican and Other Tales of a Space Vet and Ring of Time: Tales of a Time Traveling Historian in the Roman Empire are set some centuries later, after the Hegemony has fallen and been flushed down the drain of history. The novel that introduced fictional heroine Jade Lafrey, Wreaths of Empire (2015), is set in the 26th century, when the Hegemony is still gripping human-colonized space and the Gara'nesh war is still dragging bloodily on. Farhope, named for a recently re-discovered star handily located astride hyperspace waves leading to Gara'nesh space, is a prequel novel to that one. The only habitable planet (Pharann, a corruption of "Far Run") in the system was settled some 300 years earlier by Roman Catholic refugees seeking religious freedom. Now, their planet is the site of a Hegemony (space) Naval base; and while they aren't classified as regressed enough for immediate extermination, they're without any rights and slated for ethnocide and exploitation. Some of that exploitation can be particularly nasty, since (like any system with no ethics and no accountability) the Hegemony has plenty of officials prone to self-serving corruption. But, while the Hegemony has its cadres of fanatics (especially in the feared Political and Ideological Sector, its version of the KGB or Gestapo), not all of its military personnel, or even all of its higher functionaries, are necessarily mindless True Believers. Newly fledged Lt. Commander Jade Lafrey of Naval Intelligence, a decorated hero of the Battle of Felton 114 (which was described at the beginning of Wreaths of Empire) five years previous, has been posted to Pharann at the request of the sector's governor --although his role in the decision, and her private channel to report to him, isn't for public disclosure. Jade's a smart, decent lady with linguistic and intelligence analysis skills that serve her well, who serves capably as a military officer in wartime and packs a pistol, but who's committed to the cause of ultimate peace. She's also a sincere Catholic herself, raised in that faith (as are several of Andrew's fictional protagonists; he was himself an adult convert from Anglicanism), part of a small religious minority grudgingly tolerated by the Hegemony because it's small, and distrusted by the Political sector even though the Navy needs and values her abilities for its war effort. Though she's sympathetic to the Pharanni, she's not sure she can help them in any way. But as it turns out, her predecessor was murdered, knifed in a dark alley by assailants assumed to be local (but were they?), and there may be some things going on which are untoward and illegal even by the Hegemony's lax standards.... This is a thoroughly gripping novel with a strong heroine, which exhibits many of the strengths of the author's work: excellent, life-like characterizations, well-crafted prose, capable world building, and a solid moral and spiritual vision. As Political officer Capt. Sholto realizes, we have a conflict of worldviews going on here: human freedom vs. totalitarianism; traditional ethics centered in the intrinsic value of other human beings vs. moral nihilism and denial of intrinsic human worth; Christian faith vs. aggressive and intolerant secularism and atheistic materialism. On Pharann, these play out especially in the area of medical ethics, with the traditional concept of "do no harm" pitted against the "eliminate the weak and unfit" school of thought. (It's not coincidental that Andrew is a medical doctor, who faces this conflict in real life as all modern health-care workers do.) All of these are conflicts taken directly from the real world. But the conflict plays out in the action of the story itself, not in long-winded ideological disputations. And not every loose end is going to be resolved (though I won't engage in any spoilers!); that's not a structural flaw in the novel, but a recognition that in real life, conflicts and challenges are always ongoing. While this could be called military SF and has some space combat content (IMO, it might appeal to fans of David Weber's On Basilisk Station --both novels got five stars from me!-- though it's without Weber's bad language and info-dumps; if they ever met, I suspect Jade and Honor Harrington would like and respect each other from the get-go :-) ), it's centered around the human element, not around military technology and long expositions of how it works. By way of full disclosure, I beta read the first draft of this novel about three years ago (and Andrew kindly mentions me in the front matter), and he gave me a free copy of the published version, with no pressure for a favorable review. I'd have given the first draft five stars; and if anything, I'd say this one is better! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 19, 2020
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Mar 31, 2020
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Nov 09, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0785834206
| 9780785834205
| 0785834206
| 4.34
| 35,853
| unknown
| Jul 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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Finally, Chartwell Books has brought together, in one handsome hardcover volume, the entire corpus of H. P. Lovecraft's fictional writings: the novel/
Finally, Chartwell Books has brought together, in one handsome hardcover volume, the entire corpus of H. P. Lovecraft's fictional writings: the novel/novella length works The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and At the Mountains of Madness, plus 55 short stories. The arrangement is chronological by writing (not publication) date, though the dates aren't given; and there's also a good, jargon-free 8 1/2 page Introduction by Dr. Eric Carl Link of the Univ. of Memphis, which provided some biographical information I didn't previously know, though I've read several other accounts. (A chronology of "The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft" is also provided, which starts with the 1837 publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe, who greatly influenced Lovecraft, and continues with publication history of HPL works down to 1959.) Having discovered the author's work back in 1989, I'd already read the three longer works, and many of the stories in anthologies and partial collections (and have already reviewed or commented on most of these). But I seized the opportunity to read the 25 remaining stories I'd never read; and these are the ones I'm reviewing here. Most of these works are short, no more than eight pages, and some as short as a page of two; but "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is an exception, with over 30. (This is a sequel to "The Silver Key," and is best appreciated with the latter story read first.) A few of these are quite different from Lovecraft's usual work. "Old Bugs," written ca. 1920 (the title is a character's nickname, not a reference to aged insects), has no real speculative fiction element at all, save for being set in 1950 --but a 1950 with no apparent difference from 1920, including Prohibition still being in effect, and still illegally flouted. (It would have worked as well or better set in the author's present.) Basically a morality tale about the harmful results of alcohol/drug addiction, it's reasonably effective though a bit melodramatic (though I guessed the surprise ending well before the denouement). A few pieces are actually humorous, the best of them being "Sweet Ermengarde," a send-up parody of the stereotypical and unrealistic popular stage dramas, with cardboard characters and a formulaic plot, that proliferated in that era. It's a hoot, and as cynical as the junk being parodied was typically cloyingly sentimental. All but eight of the stories were written before "the Call of Cthulhu" in 1927, but a number of these earlier ones written in typical Lovecraft fashion contain marked foreshadowings of the Cthulhu Mythos in both themes and details. The tie-ins with stories like "Nyarlathotep" and "The Nameless City" are particularly obvious, as are references to the Necronomican, etc. ("History of the Necronomican" was written post-1927; it's simply a pseudo-nonfiction account of the imaginary author and origins of the sinister book, and its translation/printing "history," but adds enjoyable texture to the Mythos for committed fans.) As I've commented before, Lovecraft's own perception of his main fictional corpus was probably much more unified than that of later critics who carve it up into "Mythos" vs. "non-Mythos," and he never coined the term "Cthulhu Mythos" himself; there's a great degree of similarity of conception in many stories on both sides of the supposed divide. One can definitely say, though, that "The Very Old Folk" is certainly a Mythos tale (and as eerie and chilling as any I'd read before), as well as one which reflects HPL's fascination with ancient Rome. Having read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath earlier this year, I could recognize several of the other stories as part of the (marginally) more optimistic and less grim strand of Lovecraft writing that I would characterize as fantasy, rather than as horrific SF. In those written before the latter work, such as "The Cats of Ulthar" (which cat-loving readers should be warned has some animal cruelty, albeit offstage --though cats would definitely approve of the ending!) and "Celephais," readers will actually find back-story that relates directly to the novel. This is a strand of Lovecraft writing that, before this year, I'd read virtually nothing of, except for "The White Ship" (and I'd also include "The Doom That Came to Sarnath"); but it's a significant one and includes some of his best work. (I would class "The Strange High House in the Mist," which was my favorite story in this read, with this group.) Lovecraft's writing here can actually be lyrical and prose-poetic (according to Link, he wrote a good bit of poetry --I've never read any of it, but I'd like to!) and it's in these writings that he voices a message of longing for beauty and graciousness that the modern world of urbanization, commercialization, and pragmatism was stomping into the dirt. (Some pundits class the Silver Key stories in this group, but I'd consider them more SF.) If readers don't like Lovecraft's usual style from examples they've previously read, this collection isn't apt to convert them. He usually writes "purple prose," in long sentences with often complicated structure, much use of big words (many of them of Latin derivation), and liberal use of adjectives, adverbs, and atmospheric description, the atmosphere conjured usually being one of sinister antiquity and ominous menace. 18th and 19th century Gothic tales (August Derleth called HPL's writing "Gothic") and the work of Poe were big stylistic influences for him. Personally, I greatly admire both writers as stylists, and think this type of writing is ideally suited to the subject matter and the intended effect; but your mileage may vary. :-) Some stories here, notably "Polaris" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," contain especially wince-worthy examples of the racism and prejudice against Appalachian mountain dwellers that mars some of his other work as well; and his existential pessimism and hostility to traditional religion are on display in places ("Ex Oblivione" prompts one to think that he had a death wish, at least at times.) But despite these caveats, this definitive collection is a must for Lovecraft fans, and I'd recommend it for genre fans in general. ...more |
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Mar 31, 2020
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Apr 11, 2020
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Oct 07, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0671752936
| 9780671752934
| 0671752936
| 3.95
| 23,849
| 1933
| Feb 1968
|
liked it
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Note, July 25, 2022: I've just edited this to correct a single typo. Like some other books, this is one that I read only because it was picked as a com Note, July 25, 2022: I've just edited this to correct a single typo. Like some other books, this is one that I read only because it was picked as a common read in one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ groups. While I'd heard of it before, it had never struck me as something I wanted to read. In some cases, books I read this way proved to be five-star reads. This one didn't impress me to that extent; but I did ultimately like it well enough to give it three stars, and found it thought-provoking on various levels. It's a somewhat challenging book to review, and even to classify. With regard to the latter point, I finally settled on "science fiction" for its genre, though it's very unlike most American SF from that era. (Nor does it fit into the "lost race" tradition popular on both sides of the Atlantic before and between the World Wars.) But it does have a central speculative element to its plot: the idea of long extension of human life (though not actual immortality, nor anything like it) by purely natural means. This element is squarely in the "soft" SF tradition (more characteristic of the British than the American genre), a literary conceit employed to set up and serve the human social and philosophical questions the author wants to explore. (It isn't based on any serious study of the actual causes of aging, nor on extrapolation from any known technique or effect.) Apart from two framing sections that filter the main narrative through an effect of, in Washington Irving's term for the technique, "resonance," the premise of the latter is fairly simple. Four people --viewpoint character Conway, a WWI veteran now a British consul; his younger vice-consul Mallinson; a missionary lady; and a rather mysterious American-- being evacuated by air from a local uprising apparently on the northwest frontier of what was then British India, find their plane hijacked by a mystery pilot taking them to an unknown destination far to the East. Any more direct information would reveal plot elements that the author preferred to disclose gradually; and the genuine suspense of reading it with no more knowledge of the plot than is inevitable with normal cultural literacy about a 1933 classic is actually an integral part of the reading experience. For the same reason, I don't recommend reading the cover copy of this edition, nor the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ description; where they aren't inaccurate and misleading, they can be "spoilerish" to a degree. Basically, however, this is a novel of ideas; the plot exists strictly to serve the author's message(s). These are the messages of a pessimistic, primarily secular humanist British intellectual whose view of the world was deeply shadowed and scarred by the Great War. (The reference to Conway's wartime experience was convincing enough to make me suspect Hilton was himself a veteran. He wasn't, having turned 18 just a couple of months before the Armistice; but he was still part of the rising bourgeois liberal "Lost Generation" that was epochally disillusioned by the scope of the carnage.) He was also clearly hag-ridden by the prospect of a second world war, which he expected to be apocalyptic. (He often gets credit for being brilliantly prescient, but his expectation was more probably the fruit of dogmatic pessimism more than of astute observation of world politics; though the book was published in 1933, I'm guessing it was probably actually written before Hitler became Chancellor. And the actual World War II, though bad enough, was far less apocalyptic than Hilton imagined it would be.) The book is basically a call to preserve the human race's cultural, artistic and philosophical patrimony in the face of its anticipated near total annihilation in the coming war. Another philosophical undercurrent here is Platonism, which is clearly discernible in the glorification of the supposedly benevolent rule of what are in effect "philosopher kings," morally and intellectually far superior to the docile subject population that they rule for its own good; in the disparaging of emotion and passion as a juvenile enemy of exalted Reason; and in the upholding of "moderation" between two extremes as the all-purpose ideal for human conduct. (Hilton's prep school and Cambridge Univ. education, of course, in his day, would have steeped him in classical thought.) He also has no more real understanding of the religious mindset than a tone deaf person has of music (with the difference that those of us who are tone deaf usually understand that we can't perceive something, whereas that's not an awareness that troubles Hilton). Despite the setting of much of the story in Tibet, actual Eastern philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism doesn't furnish any real contribution to the ideology behind Shangri-La. None of Hilton's basic premises are very similar to mine. But a real value of the novel, for me, was the way it encouraged me to compare and contrast my ideas with his, and to gain insights from that process along the way. Some reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the ending; and, without resorting to spoilers, I can say that I understand why. However, I don't share that dissatisfaction. IMO, the ending was perfectly crafted, both to preserve the element of mystery and ambiguity that's often seen as essential in the speculative fiction tradition, and more importantly to make a human element central to the story arc, rather than reducing it exclusively to a message-driven essay just dressed up as fiction about human beings. That's something the author deserves credit for as a writer. ...more |
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1
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Aug 24, 2018
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Aug 31, 2018
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Aug 16, 2018
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B00GL5Q1XS
| 4.50
| 8
| Nov 09, 2013
| Nov 09, 2013
|
it was amazing
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I first encountered the author's wonderful speculative fiction in another short e-story, Harvest of War; I took a chance on it, since he and I are Goo
I first encountered the author's wonderful speculative fiction in another short e-story, Harvest of War; I took a chance on it, since he and I are Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends, and I like to support the work of friends who are writers when I honestly can. This time, there was no element of chance; I knew the kind of literary artistry he brings to his tales, and I had no doubt he would have as deft a touch with science fiction as with fantasy. He didn't disappoint me! This fast-paced, action-packed story is "sword-and-planet" SF, set on a far-future, terra-formed and human-colonized Mars. It's quite openly a homage to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs (an author's note at the end explains how it came to be written), and very much in the tradition of the small-r "planetary romances" in that sub-genre's heyday. But where smooth, easy-flowing prose style, plausibility of premise and coherent, credible world-building are concerned, IMO, at least here, the pupil has outstripped the master (and I've read quite a few Burroughs novels, in various genres). Gramlich is as good a story-teller, and definitely the more disciplined writer of the two. His plotting here is taut and well-constructed, and employs a surprise denouement, with a masterful ending. If action-oriented adventure with a science-fiction flavor is your thing, this tale will be right up your alley! It's also whetted my appetite to experience the author's long fiction as well, which I hope to do sooner rather than later. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 13, 2017
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Dec 15, 2017
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Dec 04, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 0451531949
| 9780451531940
| 0451531949
| 3.54
| 184
| Sep 01, 2011
| Sep 06, 2011
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liked it
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Note, Aug. 21, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, whil
Note, Aug. 21, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, while they're fresh in my mind. That gives the reviews a choppy, and often repetitive, quality. Recently, I had to condense and rearrange one of these into a unified whole because of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ' length limit; and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to give every one of these a similar edit! Accordingly, I've now edited this one. Editors Solomon and Panetta are English faculty at Iona College in upstate New York; but they provide a 17+-page introduction to the English-language tradition of scary fiction (and film/TV, which inter-relates with the printed medium) and some of the psychological forces behind it, structured around their titular four categories, that's informative, often insightful, and free of academic jargon. They use the term "supernatural" in the title loosely, in the sense of "uncanny" or outside of conventional explanation; for instance, they note that the (relatively late-blooming, compared to the other three) zombie category is most often explained today by science-fictional premises. (Stories representing the other categories may also fit into the SF genre.) "Classic" is a word they also use loosely; the works here, by a mix of British and American authors, range chronologically from 1836-2009. Nine of the 25 contributors are women. Arrangement is alphabetical by author; the publication date of each selection is provided (a helpful feature), and each is preceded by a short paragraph with information about the author. Most of the authors are well-known, though there are a couple I'd never heard of before. All but three of the inclusions are short stories; the rest are novel excerpts, which I didn't read or reread (I've read Dracula before). Not all of them fit neatly into any of the four categories; as the editors note, some "horror figures" here "won't lie still in any precise classification." Before opening this anthology, I'd previously read eight of the stories, several of which I commented on already in reviews of other collections: Doyle's "Lot No. 249," in Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse; "Cool Air" by Lovecraft, in The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness; Anne Rice's "The Master of Rampling Gate" (which I liked much better than Interview with the Vampire), in The Vampire Hunters' Casebook; Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost," in Classic Ghost Stories; Fritz Leiber's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories; and "Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, in Young Monsters. (The protagonist of the last-named one is a ghoul, not a zombie.) E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower" appears in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, and is a worthy read, but not one I actually commented on in my review of that book. Henry James is represented here by his excellent "The Ghostly Rental," which I assigned as reading for American Literature when Barb and I were home-schooling our girls. (IMO, some of his best short-fictional work was done in the ghost story sub-genre.) I deliberately passed up two selections, Joyce Carroll Oates' longish "short" story "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" (which is a spin-off of The Turn of the Screw) and Woody Allen's "Count Dracula." Although all authors are imperfect people, and don't have to be candidates for sainthood for me to like their work, some behaviors are so creepy and beyond the pale I can't feel comfortable reading things by those who do them, and for me some of Allen's admitted behaviors (let alone the allegations he denies) fall into that category. And Oates is an author whom I resolved not to read any further, having disliked or detested every one of several stories by her that I've read. Two other stories here that I did read, I wish I hadn't: Angela Carter's "In the Company of Wolves," which is an ugly and disgusting perversion of the folktale of Little Red Riding Hood, and "For the Good of All" by Yvonne Navarro, which uses the "zombie apocalypse" trope (something I don't care much for anyway) to portray Christians as dangerous lunatics and Christian beliefs as ineffectual. (Both of these tales are also as predictable as clockwork, though you read them in the futile hope that they won't be.) Ramsey Campbell's "The Brood" was another of the least satisfactory selections; it's effective in creating the mood of impending doom the author wanted and conjuring his desired image of unexplained, loathsomely repellent uncleanness destroying and consuming the living, but it fails to convey a sense of any purpose or constructive vision beyond conjuring doom and repulsion for their own sake. Two stories are also "zombie apocalypse" yarns, but they're told reasonably well and have enough "heart" to be worth telling. Irish writer Derek Gunn's "The Third Option" is set in an alternate post-Civil War Texas, and creatively re-interprets some aspects of the trope. His apocalypse is supernatural, brought about by an Indian shaman's curse; Stephen King's apocalypse in "Home Delivery" is engineered by aliens from outer space, presumably as a prelude to the invasion and colonization of Earth. This premise actually isn't very plausible (and is left hanging in the denouement); but the story succeeds as well as it does because of strong character development on the part of its heroine. Both tales, though, are marred by gratuitous bad language; King's also suffers from unnecessary sexual references and obvious attempts to gross out the readers, and Gunn's ignorance of some aspects of American state/local government shows. (Of course, most Americans don't know much about Irish local government, either.) It's tempting to see Anne Sexton's "The Ghost," published posthumously in 1978, four years after her suicide, primarily as a reflection or meditation on her own "haunted" psychological troubles. (The title character of the story, from internal chronological clues, would have died in 1928, the year Sexton was born; the ghost's haunted granddaughter, who like Sexton is hospitalized for mental disturbance, might well be the poet's alter ego.) The "science" behind Jane Yolen's science-fictional reinterpretation of the werewolf mythos in "Green Messiah" is ludicrous (and not really meant to be taken seriously --we're very much in the "soft" SF realm here); but Lupe is a compelling character, and the imagery of the tale is emotionally suggestive and haunting. Turning to the stories I liked the best, Charles Dickens' "The Lawyer and the Ghost" is (like many short stories) difficult to comment on without a spoiler, but suffice it to say that it's an absolute gem in less than three pages. A visit to Ray Bradbury's Green Town (modeled on his boyhood hometown of Waukeegan, Illinois in the 1920s) is always a pleasure, and "The Man Upstairs" (featuring his own alter ego, Douglas Spaulding from Dandelion Wine) is no exception. Rudyard Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast," set like much of his fiction in the 19th-century India of the Raj, is a masterpiece of supernatural horror which (like Edward Lucas White's "Lukundoo") evokes the idea that non-Western cultures may possess genuine magic arts that Western medicine or science can't really cope with. (Some modern readers will dismiss that conceit as "racist," but I don't believe that it necessarily is.) Ellen Glasgow's "The Shadowy Third" (1916) is an excellent example of a ghostly tale in the classic tradition. Finally, "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill (who is Stephen King's son --his real full name is Joseph Hillstrom King), centering around a haunted movie theater, is an outstanding work that would get six stars from me if that were possible. (I can't say more without a spoiler!) This was my first real introduction to both of the latter two writers, and it was definitely a happy one. So for me, this anthology was a mixed bag, with selections running the gamut from superlatively good to excruciatingly bad. (My star rating is an overall average.) Of course, eight stories I'd already read (although that's no demerit for the collection!) and five selections --a fifth of the total-- I didn't read. That only left 12, or slightly less than half, that I did. I still consider it a worthwhile purchase; but I personally think it would have been improved by better selection on the part of the editors. Lovecraft's "Cool Air," for instance, does not really feature a zombie, and it's a far-fetched stretch to see it as fitting in here. Richard Gilliam's "Storyville, Tennessee," an outstanding zombie story (and one that employs the traditional, supernatural concept of the zombie, not the cannibalistic hordes out of the 60s movie!), which appears in Grails: Quests of the Dawn, would have been a much better choice. Novels are meant to be read as whole units, not in partial excerpts; omitting the latter, and omitting some of the trash stories, would have allowed for the inclusion of some really good tales that are absent here, such as Jerome Bixby's "The Young One," Tanith Lee's "Red as Blood," and Clemence Houseman's "The Were-wolf." But I can't afford to pay copyright holders for rights, so as to edit my own anthologies; so, I read the work of better-financed editors, and appreciate it as much as I can! :-) ...more |
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1
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not set
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Mar 22, 2019
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Dec 02, 2017
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1942450621
| 9781942450627
| B072BTW4W1
| 4.50
| 2
| May 19, 2017
| May 19, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
This anthology of 17 science fiction stories, each by a different author, is another of the quality short fiction collections, mostly in the speculati
This anthology of 17 science fiction stories, each by a different author, is another of the quality short fiction collections, mostly in the speculative genres, that have been produced by WolfSinger Publications in recent years, and another one of which I received a copy of as a gift from my friend Andrew M. Seddon, who has a story included. Besides Andrew, editor Carol Hightshoe and Rebecca McFarland Kyle are also familiar names from earlier WolfSinger titles, as editors and/or contributors. (A check of previous anthologies that I've read from this publisher shows that Lyn Godfrey and S. D. Matley have also been represented before, though I didn't specifically remember their work.) The present collection is so new it has no other reviews on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ as yet, so it's particularly satisfying to be able to give it a favorable one! In this case, though, "favorable" doesn't imply pleasant reading and feel-good stories. The organizing theme of the book is a look at some kind of imprisonment, almost always in the context of the correctional system (Hightshoe and her husband, who contributes 1-2 sentence introductions to each story, have both worked in corrections as deputy sheriffs, which prompted the idea), seen through the lens of science fiction, usually extrapolating from present trends in society to paint a picture of how these might shape the "justice" systems of the future. (And the quotation marks are well advised.) These tend to be dark, grim stories, generally utterly bleak and devoid of any note of hope (the title of Godfrey's flash fiction "Here Lies Hope" is indicative). Often the protagonists (who may not be genuinely guilty of any criminal behavior at all) are thrust into situations that could be described as starkly horrific. But the stories are mostly extremely well-crafted for emotional effect, and so gripping that once you begin one, you have to finish it. As in much dystopian fiction (which is definitely what this is), the utterly pessimistic depiction of the triumph of tyranny and injustice provides a galvanizing motivating force for the reader to want to oppose, with every fiber of his/her being, the forces driving us towards the kinds of futures depicted here. The typical canard thrown at speculative fiction by its detractors is that it's "escapist," but nothing of that sort applies here. On the contrary, readers who want to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches and ignore (assuming they even know about, because the media won't tell them!) the ongoing gradual transformation of the U.S. and the rest of the West into brutal police states run for the benefit of an elitist oligarchy, in which constitutional rights and the rule of law are relics of the past, can find plenty of distractions in the real world's "news;" but this collection will rub their noses in it. And it rightly points to dangers that cloak themselves both in the rhetoric of the Right (with its obsession with profit, "privatization," and cost-cutting, in tales like Kyle's "Research Project" and Cheryl Toner's "The Sponsor Trials") and of the Left, with its run-amok "political correctness" and goal of a drug-stoned citizenry, as seen in Dean Anthony Brink's "The San Francisco Fun House" and Melodie Bolt's nauseating "Green Matter," respectively. My favorite story here was Andrew's "Malicide," which is one that doesn't deal directly with imprisonment in a literal sense (but there's more than one kind!), and which, though dark, is characteristically one that manages a note of hope. (I beta read an earlier version of this a couple of years ago; but he's transformed it here into something that's exponentially more powerful and meaningful; I think it's one of the best stories he's ever written!) "As Bad as It Gets" by A. L. Sirois is another standout story, particularly reminiscent of Philip K. Dick in some respects. R. Joseph Maas' "The Truth" is especially evocative and gut-wrenching. There are so many layers of deception in David Boop's far-future "A Taste of Freedom" that it's actually hard for the reader, by the story's end, to be definitely sure how much of what went before was a lie and how much wasn't, which takes away something of the impact (though it's still very ugly and disturbing); "The Sponsor Trials" leaves, IMO, too many unanswered questions about key elements of the plot, and I still don't understand the last sentence of Matley's "The Auditor." But these are minor criticisms overall. Some stories have a certain amount of bad language, and a few contain uses of the f-word. Given the milieu, this isn't necessarily gratuitous. There's no explicit sex, and not a lot of reference to sex at all, though it's alluded to in a couple of stories. Bottom line: I would highly recommend this, both to science fiction short story fans who like SF that's more about social science than technology (technological advances are depicted, but this is soft SF, where the technology simply exists to serve a premise and isn't explained or extrapolated from real technology.) and to those who have a concern about the real-life justice system and a conviction that it needs serious reform. For the latter, this could be profoundly thought-provoking. The authors don't set forth a program for change, and it isn't the obligation of fiction writers to do so. But they might well prompt readers to think about programs for change on their own. ...more |
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1
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May 30, 2017
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Jun 07, 2017
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May 30, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 1532002246
| 9781532002243
| 1532002246
| 3.80
| 5
| unknown
| Jul 15, 2016
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it was ok
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This self-published novel was recently donated by the author to the library where I work, a kindness that we appreciate. It's fairly new, so while it
This self-published novel was recently donated by the author to the library where I work, a kindness that we appreciate. It's fairly new, so while it has a few ratings on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ so far, this will be the first text review here (though there is a posted link to one that's off-site). The author and I are both members of the Action Heroine Fans group here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and I was intrigued by his posts there about the book. Understanding (from experience!) the frustrations of waiting for reviews in today's glutted book market, and being a fan of kick-butt female protagonists myself, I'd hoped to help him out with a good review, though he didn't donate the book with any such expectation. As my rating indicates, my reaction wasn't as positive as I'd hoped, so I would have refrained from writing a review at all; but Tom graciously indicated that he didn't have a problem with a two-star rating and review. I'll say at the outset that if you like to discover the plot of a novel (as opposed to the basic premise) for yourself as you read it, I would NOT advise reading the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ description, which summarizes about half of the book. (The cover copy gives away a fair bit of the plot, too.) Suffice it to say that our chronological setting is the year 3177. Chapter 2 begins --and Chapter 1 is just a one-page set-up; chapters here tend to be quite short, which helps the plot flow quickly-- with our title character, a cook from Idaho in the Galactic Federation army (who's recently been discovered to have extremely good natural marksmanship skills with a rifle) being acquitted by a court-martial of murder charges in the killing of her commanding officer, General Bloodworthy. The physical evidence overwhelmingly proved that General Bloodworthy had been raping her at the time. But the late General was the head of the Guardian Council, a semi-secret cabal of "right-wing" army officers who are suspected of self-serving and illegal behavior aimed at advancing and protecting their own members; and their power within the military makes them "virtually unstoppable." Since it's pretty plain that the Council will murder Belinda in retaliation for Bloodworthy's death, Intelligence officer Lt. Col. Andrew Jackson Jones conceives the idea of spiriting her off-world for her own protection. (Why an Intelligence officer is serving on the Judge Advocate's staff in the first place is only one of several unexplained problems here.) So these two characters take off for the stars, and the plot takes off along with them. Holzel's fictional universe has similarities to that of many other writers in the SF tradition: FTL space travel, a galaxy-spanning Federation, etc. But he puts his own original spin on this. Here, the Federation extends into several different galaxies, reachable by navigating through wormholes associated with black holes. There are, however, not very many habitable planets out there, and the few there are are populated by alien species that are all pretty much humanoid (this is explained by convergent Darwinian evolution adapting them all to similar conditions). Earth turned out to be the most technologically advanced of the lot (that, and the distances involved, might serve as a plausible explanation for the old chestnut about why, if there are alien civilizations out there, we've never picked up their radio waves, though Holzel doesn't mention this). Jones and Belinda's destination is the far-off, Jupiter-sized planet Magnus, a major source of a mineral that's critical to FTL travel. The planet's ultra-rapid rotation reduces its gravity around the equator to Earth-like levels, and its extremely strong magnetic field prevents electricity from being transmitted on the planet's surface. As this discussion indicates, this novel is very much in the "hard" SF tradition. The effects of the planetary conditions on local technology are worked out in some detail, which will please fans who like that sort of thing. (Personally, I'm much more of a "soft" SF fan.) I'm not scientifically knowledgeable enough to understand or evaluate much of Holzel's above use of actual science, though I would say that it comes across as plausible. My interest in fiction, in this or any genre, is more in the human and literary elements of the stories. On that level, the plot is predictable, has serious logical gaps (beginning with the fact that the military even tolerates the Guardian Council to begin with, or that they would let a serving soldier simply go off planet with no orders), and IMO makes excessive use of coincidence. Some readers have found Belinda too passive; I'm not sure that criticism is entirely fair, since she grows here from a fairly naive and passive young woman to a greater maturity. But the characterizations are not well-developed, and I particularly don't feel the romance as believable. (Jones treats Belinda with a degree of duplicity and manipulation that's more or less treated here as just an example of how boys will be boys, but which I don't think most women would or should accept.) No serious Intelligence officer would confide his mission to total strangers the way Jones does twice here; and I seriously question whether it's physically possible for one crucial plot point to have happened the way it did. The Galactic Federation's policy of paternalistically controlling interstellar trade (to "protect" other species from the "bad" competition) and Exporting Democracy strikes me as a naive extension of the worst aspects of globalist American foreign policy extrapolated onto an inter-galactic scale, and the cavalier attitude of the characters towards mass destruction of innocent life with a tactical nuke was a really serious negative for me. There are also repeated editing issues, numerous plot points that are inadequately explained, and not much world building outside of the technological area. (A minor quibble is the unexplained variation in Belinda's name, which seems to be random; I could understand "Bea" as a plausible nickname, but she's also sometimes "Linda" rather than Belinda.) On the positive side, I was interested enough in the story to finish it. There's a certain amount of bad language (though I don't recall any obscenity --there might be some I've forgotten) including religious profanity, but it's probably within the bounds of realism for the milieu. Although there's no explicit sex, there are sexual situations, and Belinda tends to be a frequent target of sexual harassment and rape attempts. However, this isn't condoned, and it's dealt with forcefully. I don't think the "moral tendency" of the novel would be to encourage that sort of thing in any sense. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 03, 2017
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May 12, 2017
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Oct 18, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1463895038
| 9781463895037
| 1463895038
| 3.67
| 389
| Mar 1951
| Sep 01, 2011
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it was amazing
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Normally, I like to start a series at the beginning. But I chose to read this second novella of Brackett's Eric John Stark series, as my long-awaited
Normally, I like to start a series at the beginning. But I chose to read this second novella of Brackett's Eric John Stark series, as my long-awaited first introduction to her work, because Amazon offered me the chance to read it for free on my Kindle app. (And yes, I'll definitely be buying a paper copy!) Genre giant Brackett stands in the Romantic tradition, and represents SF's "soft" school; she's known for her "swords-and-planet" tales of adventure and derring-do on mostly low-tech worlds, and her style was shaped in the hey-day of the pulp magazines. Stark himself has affinities to the typical Burroughs hero, or to some of Robert E. Howatd's protagonists; the appeal of "primitivism" (which I've discussed elsewhere) is clearly present here, though in Stark's case, he's not a refugee or escapee from civilization. (Of Earth stock, he was born on Mercury, and apparently grew up in a rough setting and circumstances, with trauma that left him carrying a lot of psychological damage.) He's a bit more rough-edged than , say, John Carter, and indeed can at times seem almost feral. But he's clearly a person of principle, with a strong sense of loyalty and duty, and a willingness to put his life on the line for what's right when it really matters. Like many SF authors who wrote before the advent of space exploration by unmanned probes, Brackett imagined the other inner planets of our solar system to be much more hospitable to human life than they actually are. Her Mars is a cold, arid world whose fragile ecology depends on the annual summer melting of much of the polar ice cap; but it's a world with a human-like native race (if they differ from Earth humans in any way, it's not stated here), with a civilization originating a million years earlier, in the time of a culture hero called Ban Cruach. Much of his story is forgotten and mysterious; but at the end of his life, he passed through the Gates of Death, the high pass that is the only way through the mountains enclosing the uninhabited, permanently frozen region around the North Pole itself, after leaving behind an enigmatic talisman in the northern city of Kushat (which controls access to the pass). Now, at the behest of a dying friend, who stole the talisman years before, Stark is journeying through the bitterly cold Martian winter and across the wild, mountainous North (a region much less civilized than southern Mars) to return the object to Kushat. Brackett's world-building is much more plausible than that of Burrough's Barsoom novels, and (allowing for the basic premise) the science isn't, to a lay reader like myself, glaringly off-beam. (How the high technology --yes, there is some here, but I'm not writing any spoilers-- works isn't explained, and it's not extrapolated from any existing technology, but that's because we're in the realm of soft SF; the author's purpose isn't to speculate about what high technology might someday do, but to use it to tell and enable a story about people in a particular dramatic situation.) Brackett's imagination is genuinely original, in a type of story that often wasn't handled with great originality in the time period when she wrote. The plot covers just a few days, and incorporates a lot of action, usually violent action (corpses at one point are lying in "windrows"), but there's no graphic wallowing in violence for its own sake. (There's also no bad language, and while consensual illicit sex is implied a couple of times, it's handled tastefully --if I'd read this as a kid, I'd have had no clue that it happened.) Our main characters here aren't plaster saints, and we might disapprove (big time, in some cases!) of some of their actions; but they're each vibrantly alive, understandable men and women whose fate we come to care deeply about. They'll face conflicts and challenges here that involve extremely high stakes, and that will tax physical, mental and moral strength to overcome (IF they're overcome....); and the personal interrelationships are complex and emotionally evocative. For a reader with my tastes, there's not much more one could ask of a work of fiction! Two quick closing comments: first, there are unanswered questions here about Stark's origins and background, and about the Martian world --what kind of "beasts" are used as mounts here, for instance, as another reviewer mentioned, or what the economic base of a city-state like Kushat is. But these are questions that probably have answers in the first book, which I skipped over for now. Second, Brackett incorporates one plot element here, at a crucial moment, that's meant to come as a major surprise. It does to Stark, but it probably won't to the reader. Not to share any spoilers, but there are a couple of dead giveaways here; had they been avoided, the "surprise" might actually have been a more effective surprise. But these are minor criticisms of a very good read of its type. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 19, 2016
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Dec 19, 2016
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Oct 14, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1942450370
| 9781942450375
| 1942450370
| 4.40
| 10
| Jul 08, 2016
| Jul 08, 2016
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My friend and prolific Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ author Andrew Seddon, who has a short story included in this newly-published anthology from WolfSinger Publications,
My friend and prolific Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ author Andrew Seddon, who has a short story included in this newly-published anthology from WolfSinger Publications, kindly gifted me with a free copy. The book is a quick read, as evidenced by the fact that I finished it in eight days; the 20 stories are all written in an easily-flowing style, and many are quite short, approaching flash fiction territory. All but two of the stories are published here for the first time. Some of the authors are relatively new to their craft, while others are veterans (a few sentences of biographical information are provided for each one at the end of each selection, as well as a one or two sentence introduction to each piece). A few have been represented in other Wolfsinger anthologies, Misunderstood and Tails From the Front Lines (which happen to be the only two that I've read, though the pages at the end of this book provide blurbs for 11 more, all of which sound interesting). Editor Hightshoe has stories in both of those collections, for instance, and Andrew's work appears in all three. Lyn Godfrey and Edward Ahern were also names I'd encountered before (in Misunderstood). With the exception of "In the Water" by J. G. Formato, which is a... reinterpretation... of a fantasy trope (or of two or three of them), all of these tales happen to be science fiction. The organizing principle, though, is just that they all deal with some action or decision that has unintended consequences. These may be for good or ill, but since the intended consequences of most actions/decisions are meant to be good, there's a certain ratchet towards the negative in their unintended results. So a hefty majority of these stories are rather dark, tragic and/or dystopian or even apocalyptic. That isn't usually my preferred tone in fiction. But there are also tales that are triumphant in their own way, though characters' triumphs may come at a cost; and many of them are designed (successfully) to be thought-provoking and cautionary. The inherent danger of scientific hubris, of trying to use technology to cut corners in defiance of what's natural, of a lemming-like herd mentality, of basing decisions on greed and vanity, and of acting ignorantly and without due consideration, are all recurrent themes. (The only relatively comic tale is "Ernie the Spacebug Loves Korngeld Beer," by Jean Martin.) I'd previously beta read Andrew's "Thomas J. Rosenbud's Lifetime Retirement Cruise;" it's well-written, but like many of those here, it's difficult to discuss without serious spoilers. My favorite selection here is the lead story, "Amy" by Lyn McConchie, which uses an android title character/protagonist to explore the basic philosophical question, what does it mean to be human? Other writers, including some of the major names in the SF genre, have plowed this ground before, but never to more powerful effect than here. (This story will be best appreciated by those who experience and get into music fully and deeply; but it spoke to me strongly even despite the fact that I'm tone deaf.) Set in the near-future, Chris Dean's "Vigilance" is a literary punch to the gut, a wake-up call for Americans of all political persuasions in 2016, that gives us a grim depiction of just exactly where our developing lawless, security-obsessed police state is taking us in real life --and it's not a pretty destination, nor one we're going to like. "Cornucopia" by Edward Ahern is thematically similar to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" --and a lot more technologically feasible, in 2016, than Forster's story was in 1908. Most of the material here is free of bad language, and none of the selections have explicit sex. A few stories here do contain some foul language, including the f-word, and some crude references to sex by characters with a coarse, warped attitude to that whole area of life. This is particularly true of "Cornucopia," Holly Riordan's "Mismatched Marks," and Vaughan Stanger's "Dark They Were and Strange Inside." But the authors' intent there, IMO, isn't to promote that kind of speaking or thinking, but to show it as a part of an unhealthy milieu that we don't (or at least shouldn't) want to let ourselves be caught up in. The only story with really grisly content (and that's not really a spoiler, given the amount of foreshadowing there) is "Passengers" by Glen Damien Campbell; the conclusion there is not for the squeamish. (That's also one of the weaker stories, along with D. J. Tyrer's "Technically.") "Amy," Natasha Cage's "A Cuter You," and V. Hartman's DiSanto's "Time to Remember," (along with some of the other stories mentioned above) pack the strongest emotional impact and bond the reader the most tightly with the characters. In many cases, often perhaps because of the short length, this area tends to be underdeveloped; even the tragic denouements sometimes left me affected more intellectually than emotionally. That's why I didn't rate the book, overall, with a full five stars, but I felt that it fairly earned four! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 18, 2016
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Aug 26, 2016
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Aug 16, 2016
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Dec 04, 2024
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Dec 06, 2024
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| 4.31
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really liked it
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Jun 22, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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| 4.01
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really liked it
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Mar 22, 2024
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Dec 26, 2023
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Dec 09, 2023
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Jul 17, 2023
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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| 3.39
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it was ok
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Jan 04, 2022
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Dec 08, 2021
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| 3.67
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it was amazing
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May 11, 2023
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Sep 06, 2021
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Aug 16, 2021
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Aug 08, 2021
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| 4.31
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it was amazing
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Feb 02, 2023
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Jan 29, 2021
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Sep 27, 2020
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Aug 22, 2020
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| 3.37
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Feb 14, 1992
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Apr 14, 2020
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| 4.67
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it was amazing
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Mar 31, 2020
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Nov 09, 2019
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| 4.34
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it was amazing
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Apr 11, 2020
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Oct 07, 2019
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| 3.95
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liked it
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Aug 31, 2018
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Aug 16, 2018
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| 4.50
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it was amazing
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Dec 15, 2017
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Dec 04, 2017
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| 3.54
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liked it
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Mar 22, 2019
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Dec 02, 2017
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| 4.50
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it was amazing
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Jun 07, 2017
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May 30, 2017
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| 3.80
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it was ok
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May 12, 2017
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Oct 18, 2016
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| 3.67
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it was amazing
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Dec 19, 2016
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Oct 14, 2016
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| 4.40
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Aug 26, 2016
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Aug 16, 2016
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