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Staring Down The Demons
Sep. 18th, 2005 08:40 pmBook update.
Sheri S. Tepper: The Visitor. A middling effort from Tepper. Being set in a sort of post-holocaust society, it's not as strident as some of her modern novels, like Gibbon's Decline And Fall, or parts of The Fresco and The Family Tree. All of the bad characters were not male, and all of the good characters were not female. The story was reminiscent of the True Game series in a few ways, and of Shadow's End in others. In other words, it felt almost redundant compared to other Tepper novels--like if you've read all of her others, you could skip this one. It wasn't actively bad, but ( one scene near the end left me with a bad taste in my mouth. )
The Berkley Showcase Vol. 5. In many ways this is just another one of those anthology series that were so popular 20-30 decades ago; this one is from 1982, and it's defined by the publisher instead of the editor(in this case, Victoria Schochet and Melissa Singer, whoever they are). Of course, an anthology needs to be evaluated story-by-story, ( so here's my take on the stories, if you're curious. )All in all, an interesting and thoughtful assortment, without a true dud in the bunch, though some are more rewarding than others.
Robert J. Sawyer: Mindscan. One of Sawyer's better efforts, I think, though heavier on ideas than on plot. What if you could copy your brain into a mechanical body before your real body died? From there, what happens to the original copy if it doesn't die right away--and what happens to the mechanical copy if it does? Combines legal thriller and philosophical debate. Quite frankly, I think they should've tried to iron out the legalities earlier, but then the book would've had a less interesting plot...
Roger Elwood & Sam Moskowitz: Strange Signposts. Another anthology, this one from the early sixties. If I recall correctly, I bought it when one of the U. of Alberta libraries was having a "quarter an inch" booksale, when you stack up your books and pay a quarter for every inch of thickness. I never really took a good look at it, once I was satisfied that it was SF. But the thing is, it's mostly early SF. As in, it starts with Mary Shelley and ends with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch. The editors are also infatuated with the idea of SF-as-predictor, which I think has mostly been discredited these days, and if not, it should. (SF works fine as a medium for thought experiments on the effects of future science, from which the confusion arises.) ( Once again, I'll hide my story-by-story evaluation. ) All in all, I'd say that if you took the Burroughs story and stuck it before the Lovecraft, you could start at the Lovecraft and skip all the crap at the beginning.
Right now I'm reading a few books. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan is my fiction read. It's an interesting enough read, though in some ways it seems just like an extended version of one of the four stories that made up The Joy Luck Club. You know, Chinese-American woman thinks her mother is a bit annoying, but then you find out the mother's story and it turns out she managed to triumph over incredible difficulties and make her way to America. I'm almost done, and after that I've got China Miéville's The Iron Council, but I'll probably try to sneak in a shorter one in between.
It's been suffering in comparison to my other two reads, because they're both library books--Collapse by Jared Diamond, and The Muggle's Guide To The Wizarding World by Fionna Boyle. The latter is another Harry Potter guide, of course. It's interesting, and tries to be comprehensive(up to Order of The Phoenix), but it can't seem to make up its mind about spoilers. Whenever it's referring to some specific event in the books, it always goes coy and doesn't tell you straight out what happened. For instance, under Lupin's description, it says, "Lupin suffered a stigmatising trauma during childhood, the consequences of which would be felt for the rest of his life." But it doesn't specify what that trauma is. (Neither will I, because, you know, spoilers.) Nonetheless, it tries to be encyclopedic on absolutely every other topic. I had to make this decision on my own wiki, and I decided to err on the side of completeness, so there's spoilers galore there if you go looking in the wrong places.
Collapse also suffers by comparison to Guns, Germs And Steel. It's an examination of why some societies and civilizations collapse(like Easter Island, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse), but others(like New Guinea, Australia, and Iceland)survive and succeed. Unfortunately, it's divided up into lengthy case studies, which examine the specifics of the particular civilizations, and has yet to draw much in the way of conclusions. While I appreciate that actual evidence and facts are useful in providing firm support for a theory, for the most part I'd rather skip them once I get the idea. In general, he seems to be saying that there's often more than one reason for a collapse, despite what the ultimate cause might be, but often it's the lack of flexibility(like the Norse not even trying to learn from the Inuit how to survive in Greenland)that seals their fate. So it's slow going, but I've only got the book out for another week...
Sheri S. Tepper: The Visitor. A middling effort from Tepper. Being set in a sort of post-holocaust society, it's not as strident as some of her modern novels, like Gibbon's Decline And Fall, or parts of The Fresco and The Family Tree. All of the bad characters were not male, and all of the good characters were not female. The story was reminiscent of the True Game series in a few ways, and of Shadow's End in others. In other words, it felt almost redundant compared to other Tepper novels--like if you've read all of her others, you could skip this one. It wasn't actively bad, but ( one scene near the end left me with a bad taste in my mouth. )
The Berkley Showcase Vol. 5. In many ways this is just another one of those anthology series that were so popular 20-30 decades ago; this one is from 1982, and it's defined by the publisher instead of the editor(in this case, Victoria Schochet and Melissa Singer, whoever they are). Of course, an anthology needs to be evaluated story-by-story, ( so here's my take on the stories, if you're curious. )All in all, an interesting and thoughtful assortment, without a true dud in the bunch, though some are more rewarding than others.
Robert J. Sawyer: Mindscan. One of Sawyer's better efforts, I think, though heavier on ideas than on plot. What if you could copy your brain into a mechanical body before your real body died? From there, what happens to the original copy if it doesn't die right away--and what happens to the mechanical copy if it does? Combines legal thriller and philosophical debate. Quite frankly, I think they should've tried to iron out the legalities earlier, but then the book would've had a less interesting plot...
Roger Elwood & Sam Moskowitz: Strange Signposts. Another anthology, this one from the early sixties. If I recall correctly, I bought it when one of the U. of Alberta libraries was having a "quarter an inch" booksale, when you stack up your books and pay a quarter for every inch of thickness. I never really took a good look at it, once I was satisfied that it was SF. But the thing is, it's mostly early SF. As in, it starts with Mary Shelley and ends with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch. The editors are also infatuated with the idea of SF-as-predictor, which I think has mostly been discredited these days, and if not, it should. (SF works fine as a medium for thought experiments on the effects of future science, from which the confusion arises.) ( Once again, I'll hide my story-by-story evaluation. ) All in all, I'd say that if you took the Burroughs story and stuck it before the Lovecraft, you could start at the Lovecraft and skip all the crap at the beginning.
Right now I'm reading a few books. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan is my fiction read. It's an interesting enough read, though in some ways it seems just like an extended version of one of the four stories that made up The Joy Luck Club. You know, Chinese-American woman thinks her mother is a bit annoying, but then you find out the mother's story and it turns out she managed to triumph over incredible difficulties and make her way to America. I'm almost done, and after that I've got China Miéville's The Iron Council, but I'll probably try to sneak in a shorter one in between.
It's been suffering in comparison to my other two reads, because they're both library books--Collapse by Jared Diamond, and The Muggle's Guide To The Wizarding World by Fionna Boyle. The latter is another Harry Potter guide, of course. It's interesting, and tries to be comprehensive(up to Order of The Phoenix), but it can't seem to make up its mind about spoilers. Whenever it's referring to some specific event in the books, it always goes coy and doesn't tell you straight out what happened. For instance, under Lupin's description, it says, "Lupin suffered a stigmatising trauma during childhood, the consequences of which would be felt for the rest of his life." But it doesn't specify what that trauma is. (Neither will I, because, you know, spoilers.) Nonetheless, it tries to be encyclopedic on absolutely every other topic. I had to make this decision on my own wiki, and I decided to err on the side of completeness, so there's spoilers galore there if you go looking in the wrong places.
Collapse also suffers by comparison to Guns, Germs And Steel. It's an examination of why some societies and civilizations collapse(like Easter Island, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse), but others(like New Guinea, Australia, and Iceland)survive and succeed. Unfortunately, it's divided up into lengthy case studies, which examine the specifics of the particular civilizations, and has yet to draw much in the way of conclusions. While I appreciate that actual evidence and facts are useful in providing firm support for a theory, for the most part I'd rather skip them once I get the idea. In general, he seems to be saying that there's often more than one reason for a collapse, despite what the ultimate cause might be, but often it's the lack of flexibility(like the Norse not even trying to learn from the Inuit how to survive in Greenland)that seals their fate. So it's slow going, but I've only got the book out for another week...
