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| 098455050X
| 9780984550500
| B0039PT4BO
| 3.74
| 6,321
| Feb 22, 2010
| Feb 22, 2010
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it was ok
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Living in space is hard. Like, really hard. Like, super almost-impossibly-crazy-stupid hard. Leviathan Wakes has some great moments that illustrate th
Living in space is hard. Like, really hard. Like, super almost-impossibly-crazy-stupid hard. Leviathan Wakes has some great moments that illustrate the various hazards of living in space, and it underscores the importance of Earth’s continued existence to the otherwise estranged colonies and stations. Yet even it has a fairly optimistic outlook on our ability to harness the solar system for our needs. Containment, on the other hand, makes even starting up a colony on Venus an issue. Christian Cantrell goes for brutal realism when it comes to some of the challenges facing the Venusian colonists, even if he is somewhat less realistic in the technology and plot of this story. I found the technology in Containment somewhat paradoxical. They have quantum computers and nuclear fusion, but they still can’t communicate reliably with Earth? (There are other reasons for this, of course, but I won’t get into that.) And why does it take until someone like Arik comes along to develop artificial photosynthesis by using evolutionary algorithms? We already do that in robotics; why wouldn’t someone think to do that in biology? I can set those nits aside, though. It’s clear Cantrell has done the research regarding trying to survive in an environment like that present on the surface of Venus. He has plenty of cool science-fictional ideas, ranging from genetic engineering to robotics and cybernetics. In many respects, Gen V reminds me of the Supers from Nancy Kress’ Beggars and Choosers —so advanced they leave their progenitors in the dust. But Containment isn’t a book about the complications surrounding genetic engineering, or even a book about the challenges facing our society in the future. The society of Earth in Containment is practically non-existent. As Arik works on solving the mystery he discovers after recovering from a near-fatal accident, he stumbles across a secret bigger than he would ever have imagined. Cantrell pulls an M. Night Shyamalan (literally) and turns our frame of reference on its head. This twist should have been just another OMG moment in an already compelling story—except it wasn’t. As much as Containment is a clever vision that mixes environmental catastrophes with solar system colonization, Cantrell’s writing drags the story back down into mediocrity. His offense is one of the most mundane: telling rather than showing. In between chapters set in the present and flashbacks to the past, there are chapters consisting solely of infodumps about the colony and its history. Infodumps have their place in any story, and especially in science fiction, but there are classy infodumps with their own rooms and curtains that cover the window, and then there are the cheap, trashy infodumps that proposition you on a street corner while you drive by. Containment’s infodumps are, sadly, of the latter variety: very plain, by the book, and with all-too-little sex appeal. They read like something straight out of the backgrounder wiki or bible that writers often prepare for themselves prior to writing a story. Thus, while the infodumps unquestionably contain cool ideas and tantalizing visions of the future, they quench any momentum the story has developed and bring the plot to a grinding halt. Showing cedes the floor to telling elsewhere in the book too. Rather than demonstrate Arik’s feelings towards others, the narrator often resorts to explaining, in detail, Arik’s thought process. As with exposition, a little of this is fine and probably even necessary. However, Containment spends more time in Arik’s head or in the exposi-space in between than it does in action sequences or intense exchanges of dialogue. The conflict between characters here is watered-down and B-movie in its delivery: the minor characters like Cadie and Cam are either wooden or one-note in their stock reactions to everything. I loved the twist around which Containment pivots, and the mystery leading up to the reveal. It’s dramatic and believable, changing the direction of Cantrell’s plot and themes entirely will preserving a great deal of ground he has already laid. Arik’s solution is innovative and exciting, so there’s little reason for this book to be unsatisfying—except, alas, the writing. I just had a hard time enjoying the book, enjoying reading it. The ideas here are assembled nicely, but the work as a whole lacks the polish to make it truly shine. Containment is science fiction where that fusion between science and fiction hasn’t quite taken hold—plenty of both, but not quite in the right proportions. [image] Merged review: Living in space is hard. Like, really hard. Like, super almost-impossibly-crazy-stupid hard. Leviathan Wakes has some great moments that illustrate the various hazards of living in space, and it underscores the importance of Earth’s continued existence to the otherwise estranged colonies and stations. Yet even it has a fairly optimistic outlook on our ability to harness the solar system for our needs. Containment, on the other hand, makes even starting up a colony on Venus an issue. Christian Cantrell goes for brutal realism when it comes to some of the challenges facing the Venusian colonists, even if he is somewhat less realistic in the technology and plot of this story. I found the technology in Containment somewhat paradoxical. They have quantum computers and nuclear fusion, but they still can’t communicate reliably with Earth? (There are other reasons for this, of course, but I won’t get into that.) And why does it take until someone like Arik comes along to develop artificial photosynthesis by using evolutionary algorithms? We already do that in robotics; why wouldn’t someone think to do that in biology? I can set those nits aside, though. It’s clear Cantrell has done the research regarding trying to survive in an environment like that present on the surface of Venus. He has plenty of cool science-fictional ideas, ranging from genetic engineering to robotics and cybernetics. In many respects, Gen V reminds me of the Supers from Nancy Kress’ Beggars and Choosers —so advanced they leave their progenitors in the dust. But Containment isn’t a book about the complications surrounding genetic engineering, or even a book about the challenges facing our society in the future. The society of Earth in Containment is practically non-existent. As Arik works on solving the mystery he discovers after recovering from a near-fatal accident, he stumbles across a secret bigger than he would ever have imagined. Cantrell pulls an M. Night Shyamalan (literally) and turns our frame of reference on its head. This twist should have been just another OMG moment in an already compelling story—except it wasn’t. As much as Containment is a clever vision that mixes environmental catastrophes with solar system colonization, Cantrell’s writing drags the story back down into mediocrity. His offense is one of the most mundane: telling rather than showing. In between chapters set in the present and flashbacks to the past, there are chapters consisting solely of infodumps about the colony and its history. Infodumps have their place in any story, and especially in science fiction, but there are classy infodumps with their own rooms and curtains that cover the window, and then there are the cheap, trashy infodumps that proposition you on a street corner while you drive by. Containment’s infodumps are, sadly, of the latter variety: very plain, by the book, and with all-too-little sex appeal. They read like something straight out of the backgrounder wiki or bible that writers often prepare for themselves prior to writing a story. Thus, while the infodumps unquestionably contain cool ideas and tantalizing visions of the future, they quench any momentum the story has developed and bring the plot to a grinding halt. Showing cedes the floor to telling elsewhere in the book too. Rather than demonstrate Arik’s feelings towards others, the narrator often resorts to explaining, in detail, Arik’s thought process. As with exposition, a little of this is fine and probably even necessary. However, Containment spends more time in Arik’s head or in the exposi-space in between than it does in action sequences or intense exchanges of dialogue. The conflict between characters here is watered-down and B-movie in its delivery: the minor characters like Cadie and Cam are either wooden or one-note in their stock reactions to everything. I loved the twist around which Containment pivots, and the mystery leading up to the reveal. It’s dramatic and believable, changing the direction of Cantrell’s plot and themes entirely will preserving a great deal of ground he has already laid. Arik’s solution is innovative and exciting, so there’s little reason for this book to be unsatisfying—except, alas, the writing. I just had a hard time enjoying the book, enjoying reading it. The ideas here are assembled nicely, but the work as a whole lacks the polish to make it truly shine. Containment is science fiction where that fusion between science and fiction hasn’t quite taken hold—plenty of both, but not quite in the right proportions. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jul 11, 2012
not set
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Jul 12, 2012
not set
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Sep 27, 2024
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0099529734
| 9780099529736
| 0099529734
| 4.09
| 881,128
| Dec 17, 1843
| 2009
|
really liked it
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Some stories are so popular they have permeated culture to the point where almost everyone knows them, even if they haven’t so much as glanced at the
Some stories are so popular they have permeated culture to the point where almost everyone knows them, even if they haven’t so much as glanced at the source material. Such is the case with A Christmas Carol, which has inspired numerous adaptations in every medium imaginable. As a result, Ebeneezer Scrooge is a household name, and the basic plot of A Christmas Carol is a familiar one. The source material, however, is well worth the read. Charles Dickens tells the story with his usual skill for setting and characterization. In his hands, the redemption of Scrooge really does become a Christmas miracle. I confess I find the idea of dedicating the end of the year to a binge on good cheer somewhat hypocritical. Shouldn’t we just be good to people all year long? Scrooge, however, makes any twinges of misanthropy on my part look statistically insignificant. As the fact that his surname has become synonymous with his catchphrase, “Bah! Humbug!” attests, Scrooge is the ultimate antidote to Christmas cheer. For Dickens, he is also a caricature of the cold-hearted, supercilious Victorian businessman who is unwilling to give succour to the poor. Yes—you didn’t think Dickens would write a book without championing the downtrodden working, did you? I love this line uttered by Marley’s ghost: I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. I don’t believe in the afterlife. There is no promise, for me, of an eternity in heaven or hell. Some might suggest this leaves me less motivated to do good works—after all, I labour under no fear of eternal damnation, no hope of eternal paradise. I choose to look at it differently: this is all I get, so I better make the most of it. Nevertheless, I still find Dickens’ imagery compelling, and the message behind it equally so: Scrooge has forged the chains himself; they are of his own making. It is our actions by which we are judged (if not by a higher power, then certainly by other people), not our wealth or acumen or even, sad to say, our intentions. And for Scrooge, Dickens, and his contemporary audience, the idea of Scrooge’s glimpse at his afterlife—and the ghostly visitations that follow—certainly have an impact. A Christmas Carol is not religious in any strict sense. Dickens doesn’t name-check God, Jesus, or the angels. This isn’t about honouring the birth of the Saviour so much as instilling in Scrooge the value of Christmas spirit and, consequently, of being nice to people. While Dickens doesn’t overtly involve the Christian mythos, however, spiritualism and mysticism play a large role. Scrooge is, quite literally, scared into being nicer. As a narrative device, the visitations of the three spirits works extremely well. They split this novella into three clear episodes, each of which show Scrooge’s progression from curmudgeon to reformed man. The first ghost, of Christmas Past, provides context, showing how Scrooge grew from a lonely boy into a man who chooses money and business over the love of his life. Here, Dickens criticizes the Victorian “sensibilities” that have supplanted to the Romantic idealism of the previous century. He challenges the reader to entertain, for a moment, what Scrooge’s life might have been like had Scrooge chosen Belle, teasing us (and Scrooge) with a vision of her life with another man. The spirit shows Scrooge how the choices he made have brought him to this point. The second ghost takes over from there, showing Scrooge how people regard him currently. Two major scenes dominate this section: the house of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s clerk; and the house of Scrooge’s nephew, who is entertaining some friends. In both cases, Scrooge observes examples of Christmas merriment, the type of unbelievable joy and warmth that can only come from family and friends celebrating together. Dickens works tirelessly to humanize the lower class, to show that even the poorest families can have noble spirits and celebrate in the same manner as the wealthiest of families. Despite their poverty and the ailment of Tiny Tim, the Cratchits seem to have an abundance of joy. Both parties also mention Scrooge at one point—unfavourably, of course—just to hammer home the point that he is not well-liked and is the antithesis of the happy moments they are now enjoying. Scrooge’s reconsideration of his attitude is most evident when he begs the spirit for a glimpse of Tiny Tim’s fate. Suddenly the child he would have consigned to death as “surplus population” seems so important to him! The final ghost is supposed to be the most terrifying. Whereas the other two spirits were communicative, this ghost is a glorified tour guide. Oppressively silent and cowled, this ghost leads Scrooge into the future—or, at least, a possible future—one where he has died and no one is bothered. The final tally is taken, and Scrooge’s life—all that he has striven for—is worth, what? Some sheets? Some bad memories? Once again, Dickens’ message sneaks through: money isn’t worth it unless you have people to share it with, people who will benefit from you while you are alive and when you are gone. Scrooge’s redemption in so short a period of time, given how much of a curmudgeon Dickens portrays him as at first, is truly miraculous. I like to think it’s because, deep down, there is a tiny part of Scrooge that knows he should be nicer, should be more humane. All the spirits are doing is talking to this part, giving it voice. And is there really any doubt what the outcome of this book will be? A Christmas Carol isn’t compelling because of suspense; it’s compelling because of the way in which Dickens illustrates Scrooge’s arc. Moreover, in terms of its status as a perennial classic, there seems to be something about this book that makes it easy to adapt (the same can be said for Shakespeare’s plays). Scrooge’s story can be transposed into virtually any setting, from ancient times to the present day, and retold to the delight of any audience. This is what makes it endure, despite the gulf between Dickens’ contemporary Victorian audience and the audience of today. Dickens has never been afraid to pontificate in his other books, and A Christmas Carol is no exception. In this case, however, he can wrap it in the seasonal setting of spreading the Christmas spirit. The result is something rather beautiful. On one hand, this yet another treatise from Dickens on the inequities of the Victorian class system. On the other hand, it’s a cautionary tale of how our choices and our actions determine how we will be judged—in this life, and in the next. The caution comes with a potent reminder, one of hope: it’s not too late to make amends. N.B.: This edition also contains The Chimes and The Haunted Man, so I will probably read and review those sometime soon. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 30, 2012
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Dec 31, 2012
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Dec 30, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0356500896
| 9780356500898
| 0356500896
| 4.47
| 102,795
| Nov 27, 2012
| Nov 29, 2012
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** Harry Dresden is back, baby! Seriously, I’m going to drop major spoilers about halfway through this review. I’m not kidding around he **spoiler alert** Harry Dresden is back, baby! Seriously, I’m going to drop major spoilers about halfway through this review. I’m not kidding around here. After dying (or nearly dying) and solving his own murder as a ghost, Harry has returned to find his body in the care of Mab. Harry has not escaped his obligations as her new Winter Knight, and so Cold Days opens with a montage of his physical therapy—Mab trying to kill him in creative ways—and a party at the Winter Court in his honour. Harry refers to this as his “first day in the prison yard” and, to continue the metaphor, he smacks down one of the biggest and baddest fae he can find to show that he means business. Harry Dresden is most definitely back. The Winter Knight is the Winter Queen’s hitman for mortal targets. But Mab’s first assignment for Harry is to kill the Winter Lady, Maeve, who is most certainly not a mortal. Not only does this make it difficult for Harry to carry out his assignment, but he has to wonder why Mab wants Maeve dead—and whether it is in his and humanity’s best interests to comply. Of course, the truth turns out to be a good deal more twisted and complex than it appears on the surface. As Harry leaves Faerieland and returns to Chicago to sort this out, Jim Butcher delivers us another fast-paced and fascinating story with stakes reminiscent of Small Favor and Changes. Whereas Ghost Story forces Harry to confront how he has shaped other people’s lives, by seeing how his death and absence has affected them, Cold Days is about Harry confronting his new role as the Winter Knight. Suddenly, he is suspect, tainted by the touch of Winter. The mantle of Winter Knight changes its wearer, and numerous people warn Harry that he is going to turn into a sex-hungry, domineering, violent man who only exists to kill and fulfill Mab’s cruel designs. It’s just a matter of time, they say. Power corrupts. And Harry is scared, because he fears they’re right. He wants to resist, hopes he can resist, but with each passing hour he notices changes in himself—and others, like Murphy, notice it too. And Cold Days takes place on Halloween—barely a day and a half. How much will Harry have changed after a month? A year? Two years? This has long been a problem for Harry, though. Throughout the Dresden Files, forces have tempted him and tried to corrupt him. Perhaps the most potent example is the shadow of Lasciel, Lash, that lived in his mind for several years, trying to persuade him to use Lasciel’s denarius. So far Harry has resisted all of these attempts, something he chalks up to a strength of will and a knowledge that there is always an alternative: There’s always a choice…. That’s the thing, man. There’s always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice. Much has been made of the fact that humans have souls and free will, while other creatures—like Mab and Maeve and their Summer counterparts—do not. As recently as Ghost Story, Uriel stepped in to remind Harry that whatever else Mab might try—blackmailing him, cajoling him, coercing him—she cannot change who he is, cannot affect that essential core that makes Harry himself. Only Harry can do that. What started as a series following Chicago’s only professional wizard has turned into a much more epic exploration of optimism and the power of free will. This is all the more important after what happens at the very end of Cold Days. The last 25 pages of this book are off the chain and are entirely the reason I’m giving this five stars instead of four. This review has a spoiler warning for a reason, people. Mab, answering Harry’s eleventh hour summons, shows up to the battle on Demonreach. We’ve learned that Demonreach is a maximum security prison, built by the original Merlin, for dangerous immortal creatures. And Maeve and Lily have been working to undermine that prison’s security and trigger its destructive failsafe. Lily thinks she’s working against a contagion caused by the Outsiders, one that infects people and co-opts them. But Maeve has already been infected, and Demonreach’s destruction will only further the Outsiders’ plans. At this point, Butcher has already significantly expanded our knowledge of the Outsiders and how the Fae relate to the eternal struggle against them. And then Mab, through Murphy, kills Maeve. And Molly becomes the new Winter Lady. Oh. Em. Gee. Up until that point, I had been enjoying Cold Days. As much as I liked Ghost Story, my principle complaint with it had been that its actual plot was quite lacklustre; the book itself was only good because of how it advanced the overall series arc. This book doesn’t suffer from that problem: it both advances the series arc and has its own compelling story to tell. But in those last 25 pages, and in turning Molly into the Winter Lady, this book achieved another whole level of epic awesomeness, because the ramifications of these developments are stunning. Leaving aside the upheaval caused in the Winter and Summer Courts by Maeve and Lily’s deaths and the two new Ladies, let’s look at where this leaves Harry, Molly, and Murphy. Murphy has already expressed reluctance at getting involved with Harry because she will age but he—and Molly, as a fellow wizard—won’t. Harry is definitely attracted to Molly, but he doesn’t want to get involved with her. He feels that it would be a breach of trust, having known her since she was a child, despite Molly making it clear that such a change to their relationship would be OK with her—and that’s the other problem, because Molly is in love with him, but he doesn’t return the feeling. Now Molly is the Winter Lady, making her kind of Harry’s boss. And as we saw with Lily earlier in the book, it’s only a matter of time before Molly turns into a Maeve-like clone, with all the same urges and predilections. Much like Harry, she is doomed by the mask she wears—or is she? Butcher has suddenly made the stakes so much more interesting, something the series needed. He can only spin out Harry dealing with the challenges of being the Winter Knight for so long. Adding Molly’s struggle to the mix adds a new dimension. On one hand, it might make Harry’s job slightly more bearable, at least in the short term. On the other hand, it further amplifies the conflict between fate and free will and adds a new urgency to the ongoing theme of how one’s masks and roles change one. Masks and identity, much like the motif of free will, have always been huge in this series. Identifying things, naming things, has been half the battle in many cases. From true names that bind to the human-like forms adopted by gods and Dragons alike, the Dresdenverse takes nomenclature and identity very seriously. And this is another area in which humans differ so much from supernatural creatures. Humans change. Fae, demons, vampires, etc., do not. Oh, their forms and functions might change, as Kringle remarks to Harry at the opening of this book, as the stories about those creatures change. But Butcher takes the trouble of reminding us, time and again, that for immortals the flow of time has much less meaning. This is a result of their own stasis. Harry and his mortal friends have changed so much over the course of this series, whereas the immortals have remained relatively the same. It’s this distinction, in addition to that pesky free will, that makes humans so interesting and disruptive to immortals’ designs. Humans might not be the most powerful players, but they are the least predictable and the most mutable with time. At the beginning of this series, Harry Dresden was just a private investigator who happened to be a wizard. He saved Chicago, even the world a few times. That got him noticed, and gradually he began tangling with bigger foes and messier conundrums. He has had the Sword of Damocles over his head, been chased by Wardens of the White Council, been a Warden himself, and become the guardian of a semi-sentient island. Eventually he became the one who was feared, the big, badass Harry Dresden—though, for some reason, the bad guys continued to underestimate him. Now he’s the Winter Knight, the Winter Faerie Court’s mortal hitman, and his onetime apprentice has become the Winter Lady. They are on the forefront of a war against the Outsiders, who will stop at nothing to undermine reality itself. Cold Days marks yet another turning point in this series. The previous five books, beginning with White Night, have had Harry move from stumbling around in the big leagues to become a player in his own right. He is facing the consequences now, but more importantly, he is beginning to move from the big leagues to the bigger leagues, as he learns more about the purpose of the Fae and his own role to play in larger things to come. I’m quite looking forward to the next books—in particular, as much as I enjoyed this one, it was extremely Harry-centric, without much time devoted to the secondary characters. But I am looking forward to the next book, because Butcher just keeps delivering fantastic new twists and developments that advance the story and keep things fresh. After fourteen books, that’s saying a lot about a series, and it’s one reason I love the Dresden Files so much. My reviews of the Dresden Files: ← Ghost Story | Skin Game → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 23, 2012
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Dec 23, 2012
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Dec 24, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 3.91
| 115,667
| 1995
| 1998
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it was ok
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Since I moved to England this fall, I haven’t done too much travelling around the country. I’ve been to London a couple of times, neither of which I d
Since I moved to England this fall, I haven’t done too much travelling around the country. I’ve been to London a couple of times, neither of which I did much that could be described as a touristy; the same applies to my trips to Cambridge. I went up to Scotland during the half-term and had a good time there, but I’m looking forward to visiting a few other places around the UK. Until I do, travel writing like Notes from a Small Island will have to serve to whet my appetite. Bill Bryson is a brilliant writer. A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of my favourite books. Bryson has a deft touch to description that makes him an apt writer of non-fiction; he manages to make something that could be dull and make it come alive through anecdotes and humour. I knew he had done some travel writing, a genre that’s been on my mind while teaching AS Literature. So I picked this up during a trip to Waterstones and settled into what I hoped would be a very unique perspective on Great Britain. Bryson didn’t grow up here but has lived here for decades. Preparing to move back to the United States with his family, he tours the island one last time. The result is certainly unique, but not in the way I wanted. The prologue chapter is every bit as brilliant and entertaining as I had hoped it would be. Bryson relates his first days in England, in 1973. He describes butting heads with the formidable Mrs Smegma, the proprietor of a boarding house and perpetually disapproving of whatever Bryson does. He reminisces about his youthful awe over the differences between Britain and the United States, and it’s a delightful prelude to the beginning of his tour of the country twenty years later. I’d be exaggerating if I said that the book goes drastically downhill after that strong start, but it would not be wild hyperbole. Notes from a Small Island suffers from two chief defects. Firstly, as I noted above, Bryson is a brilliant writer—and, unfortunately, he knows this. Secondly, it turns out that his reactions to various places in Britain are very similar and often involve a lot of unfavourable comparisons to how things used to be. Bryson’s wit often seems to get the better of him here. Of course, there are plenty of moments when that humour works well and livens up what might otherwise be a mundane description of his travels through Brighton or Yorkshire. Unfortunately, it often seems like his humour is there to distract us from the fact that he isn’t actually talking about the particular place in question. There are segues into sexist ruminations on the differences between men and women (and he himself labels at least one such episode as sexist, as if that somehow excuses it). At least twice during visits to Chinese restaurants he makes comments that are, if not racist, then culturally insensitive. Such moments were enough to make me feel uncomfortable, particularly because I had so wanted to find this book funny. And throughout the book, he manages to portray himself as a short-tempered, intolerant, rude person who would probably make a terrible travelling companion. To be fair, he seems to be aware of these shortcomings and occasionally even apologizes for them. But he also seems to labour under the delusion that this makes him even more interesting rather than less. The second defect concerns how Bryson describes the way the places he visits have changed over the decades. In almost every case, he manages to point out how development and change has ruined a city. He laments the arrival of indoor shopping malls and the slow destruction of Britain’s hedges. He complains about the motorways, about the rail system, about the distribution and diversity of restaurants. It wouldn’t be so bad if each successive chapter weren’t just more of the same. It’s as if he set out not just to tour Britain but to find as much fault with it as possible in order to justify his relocation to the United States. For someone who claims to love the country—and he does make several keen observations in favour of Britain and its people—he spends a lot of time sounding like someone who doesn’t want kids on his lawn. It’s not all bad news. There is charm to be had in Notes from a Small Island. Bryson shares in common with certain humour writers that talent to transform what are assuredly mild incidents in their lives into wild, slightly absurd anecdotes that nevertheless have the ring of truth. These otherwise excellent moments are spoiled by how repetitive Bryson manages to make the book feel. After the first few chapters, the novelty has worn off. As I approached the end of the book, I was paying very little attention to what he was actually saying, because it felt like more of the same. Notes from a Small Island doesn’t replicate the sense of wonder and enjoyment I derived from A Short History of Nearly Everything. It doesn’t quite give me a sense of the country in which I’m living either. Instead, it’s more like a catalogue of Bill Bryson’s unfavourable experiences across Great Britain. It’s occasionally funny and occasionally charming but not the encomium of travelling through Britain that I want or need. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 08, 2012
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Dec 13, 2012
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Dec 08, 2012
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0140274219
| 9780140274219
| 0140274219
| 3.59
| 98,380
| Oct 1966
| Sep 03, 1998
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liked it
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As I mentioned in my recent review of Jane Eyre, I have the pleasure of teaching an AS Level English Literature course (with a grand total of two stud
As I mentioned in my recent review of Jane Eyre, I have the pleasure of teaching an AS Level English Literature course (with a grand total of two students). For the prose study section, we are studying Jane Eyre paired with Wide Sargasso Sea, a combination selected by the teacher with whom I share the course. I had read Jane Eyre a long time ago and was happy to revisit it. I had never heard of Jean Rhys or Wide Sargasso Sea, but the description along the lines of, “Postcolonial take on Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester from Bertha Mason’s point of view” meant I was looking forward to it. Spoiler alert not for this novel but definitely for Jane Eyre. Let’s unpack that description, starting with the character of Bertha Mason (or, really, Bertha Rochester). She is the bogeyman of Jane Eyre even before we become aware of her identity. In that grand Gothic tradition that Charlotte Brontë emulates, Bertha is the mystery at the centre of the house that will bring Rochester’s careful facade of normalcy crashing down around him. She, not Grace Poole, is the owner of that haunting, diabolical laugh. That she is mad Brontë establishes beyond much doubt—the notorious attempt to burn down the house is but one example. But the backstory to that madness is more pithy than it is palatable—she is mad because she has to be mad, to make the plot work. Could there be more to it though? I suspect that I would not have been as disposed towards Wide Sargasso Sea if I hadn’t recently re-read Jane Eyre. In part it’s because this book is probably easier to understand within the context of its connection to Jane Eyre. However, it’s mostly because my recent re-read highlighted the flaws of Rochester’s personality—how his passion and vanity makes him selfish and somewhat controlling. Rhys saw these qualities as well, replicating them in the unnamed man who marries Antoinette Cosway and calls her Bertha. Then she adds additional cultural baggage to make the relationship and the romance all her own. This is where the postcolonial part of that description enters the picture. As in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason hails from the Caribbean Islands. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she is not Richard Mason’s brother but instead the daughter of his wife by a previous marriage. And Bertha’s real name is “Antoinette.” Her late father was a slave-owner, and at the time of the book, Britain had only recently freed all slaves. As a result, the local Black community views Antoinette and her mother with suspicion and disgust, compounded by the family’s obvious fall from grace. Her mother exists in a state of withdrawn depression. These factors conspire to cause Antoinette to grow up in isolation, first with her mother, then at a convent school. Antoinette is a woman grown before she re-enters society and is almost immediately thrust into marriage by her stepfather. Antoinette belongs nowhere, a situation summed up by the label that the island’s Black community gives her and her family—white N-word. The colour of her skin, not to mention her heritage, means she is forever an outsider. Yet to the English who visit (and marry) her, she is just as much a foreigner. She has no concept of England as they do, very little concept of anything, really, aside from her limited vista and, perhaps, God. It’s this naivety, I think, that eventually pushes her husband’s feelings for her from apathy to outright loathing. Rhys provides a much more intense and sustained exposure to his feelings of betrayal and dissatisifaction with his marriage-for-means scheme than Brontë ever gives us with Rochester. In the sections of the novel told from his perspective, he wastes no time reminding us that Richard Mason deceived him, that he’s a nice guy who doesn’t deserve to be burdened by a woman who is apparently on some kind of countdown to madness. What really seems to trigger him, however, is Antoinette’s refusal to confront or even interact much with the real world. This reluctance to change on her part means that he views her as a child and treats her as such. He negates her as much as possible. In the middle of the novel, after she discovers that a relative has been sending him letters warning him of her impending insanity, he refuses to discuss the matter rationally with her because he claims she is too emotional, too volatile for such deliberation. His anger at the situation in which he finds himself blinds him to any reconciliation with Antoinette; she is not a person but a symbol of his discontent. During my recent re-reading of Jane Eyre, I paid a lot of attention to how Rochester treated Jane and the extent to which he attempted to impose his own worldview upon hers. This is a man who locked his mad wife in the attic and then agreed to marry someone else! Whereas Brontë focuses on Bertha’s state when she is at Thornfield, and how her actions (and very existence) affect Jane, Rhys is more concerned with Antoinette’s transformation and descent into madness. Though Bertha is an intriguing character, she is essentially a plot device. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is a living, breathing, changing human being. As a companion to Jane Eyre, this is a thought-provoking work that highlights several important themes for careful consideration. Literature isn’t a vacuum; books can be conversations. On its own (i.e., if you have not read Jane Eyre—and why not?) Wide Sargasso Sea still works quite well. That being said, Rhys’ style can make this book feel a little inaccessible at times—in this respect, it reminded me of The Woman on the Edge of Time . This is a strong novel, but had it not hitched its star to a literary classic, I’m not sure if it would have had enough of an impact to stand on its own. Surely this is a moot point, though. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call Wide Sargasso Sea an essential follow-up to your Jane Eyre experience, I suspect it is a far superior option to any possible sequels floating around out there à la Pride and Prejudice. [image] ...more |
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| 0099514079
| 9780099514077
| 0099514079
| 4.14
| 2,547
| Jul 24, 1958
| Aug 07, 2008
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really liked it
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Many people have recommended P.G. Wodehouse to me many times, and now I have finally read one of his books. I had no particular reason for choosing Co
Many people have recommended P.G. Wodehouse to me many times, and now I have finally read one of his books. I had no particular reason for choosing Cocktail Time as my first Wodehouse experience. I went to a used bookstore for the first time here in my new town, and at the back of the shop was a small bookcase full of very new-looking Wodehouse books. With no idea where to begin, I looked to the proprietor for some advice. He was the very idea of a used bookstore proprietor: older, with a somewhat detached air that made it seem like he was always slightly surprised I was still around—and, of course, he only accepted cash. My plea fell on deaf ears, though. He rebuked me, “I never give recommendations,” and proceeded to give a semi-helpful lecture on the different strands of Wodehouse’s oeuvre. So I shrugged and took Cocktail Time and Carry On, Jeeves. At least in the case of the former, this decision proved fruitful. Wodehouse might not have jumped to the top of my list of favourite humorous authors, but I can definitely appreciate his sharp satire and keen enthusiasm for creating zany characters and silly situations. Fred, Lord Ickenham, has a youth that belies his older appearance. He’s the kind of person who looks at a situation and then asks, “How can I possibly make this more interesting?” Never content to leave things simply to develop on their own, Lord Ickenham always has to stir the pot a little more. The plot gets going when Ickenham’s influence causes his brother-in-law, Raymond “Beefy” Bastable, to write a novel—also called Cocktail Time. Beefy has a beef with today’s youth, because one of them knocked off his top hat with a catapulted Brazil nut. The real culprit, of course, is Ickenham, who at the time had no idea it would turn Beefy into the secret author of a bestseller. Events continue to spiral out of control as more of Ickenham’s social circle becomes involved—and that’s just how he likes it. The action culminates in Dovetail Hammer with a tense auction for a fake walnut cabinet, an incriminating letter, and Ickenham’s hand in matchmaking several couples. It’s all masterfully executed in such a way that I never felt like I need to look behind the curtain and spoil my disbelief. The happy ending is almost assured by the novel’s light tone, but I enjoyed watching Wodehouse pull all the threads neatly into place. And the characters themselves are wonderfully uncomplicated—there are villains and rogues and schemers and senile old men. They’re all types, allowing Wodehouse to explore the variations within British society (and particularly within the wealthy and well-to-do). But as circumstances shift, the characters have to change too—Cosimo goes from wanting to reveal the real author to wanting to keep the charade of his authorship alive after Cocktail Time lands a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar movie deal. Several times, Ickenham’s own schemes go awry, and he is forced to improvise swiftly and skilfully. Wodehouse’s style is twofold. First, he is a master of what I would call whimisical description. He always knows the perfect thing to say—often a simile or, if no such simple beast is available, he springs for a metaphor—to elevate any description from mundane to amusing. And then there are paragraphs like this, which opens Chapter 12: OLd Howard Saxby was seated at his desk in his room at the Edgar Saxby literary agency when Cosmo arrived there. He was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting. The paragraph goes on to invoke comparisons to Stilton cheese and ghostly ectoplasm. Wodehouse’s vocabulary and diction are both dazzling, aided by the relative simplicity of the plot, which allows one to sink into the story and just enjoy the writing. Wodehouse’s second element of style is the snappy dialogue he writes for his characters. It reads like a comedy sketch, with short sentences and plenty of interruption as one character plays off another’s words. The omniscient narrator reveals what everyone is thinking, contributing even further to the sense of irony that practically saturates this thin volume. I don’t have much else to say about Wodehouse or Cocktail Time. It was a nice novel to spend a couple of days reading, and now I have a firmer idea of what Wodehouse has to offer. I’ll read the next one sometime in the next few months, and we’ll see how the relationship goes from there—I don’t like to take things too fast, after all. Beefy certainly waited a long time, and it worked out all right for him. [image] ...more |
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| Nov 2012
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Full disclosure: I received a copy of this story free from its author. Loves me the free short stories. At the time I write this, I have 196 followers Full disclosure: I received a copy of this story free from its author. Loves me the free short stories. At the time I write this, I have 196 followers on Twitter. I’m pretty sure most of them are bots of one kind or another, because that number seems rather inflated. I have 147 Facebook friends. I have 97 followers on Goodreads, though again, many of those may be automated people attempting to profile me or lie in wait to sell me things. I’d be interested in seeing a social graph of my Goodreads connections, in seeing how my various friends and followers are connected. As a mathematician, I’ve studied graph theory and love how its applications become more and more important as the Internet’s social layer deepens. Who talks to whom? And for how long? When it comes to the identities behind the entitites following my online activites, though, does it matter if they be human or machine? The latter might seem less real, less important, but perhaps the converse is true. After all, machines—or shall we say, algorithms—are often what make the difference in the online give-and-take. Algorithmic trading happens faster than humans could ever hope to follow. Similarly, algorithms following a human’s activities and reacting to those changes in reputation might have more of an impact than the slower, organic followers. “Snow Falling” taps into the recent trends of gamification and reptutation-tracking. It’s a world where the metrics of the online persona are everything, and all actions are worth watching, rating, reviewing. The more someone does something worthy of applause, the more their reputation rises, and the more they receive gifts and sponsorship that could make the difference between making rent or moving out. Though Robert Harken doesn’t go into much detail about the state of the world in this near-future, it feels very much like the general, somewhat bleak and dour atmosphere that permeates the post-cyberpunk pages of Moxyland or Virtual Light . Civilization hasn’t collapsed so much as let itself go, and the gap between the rich and the poor has become a wall guarded by wilful blindness. Harken splits the narrative into two streams. In the first, two newscasters follow the ascension in reputation of someone working under the alias “Snow”. In the second, an impoverished young woman named Kate labours as Snow to collect and sell as many gifts as possible to keep her and her mother alive while staying anonymous online. Apparently, that’s a terrible breach of etiquette, because the government pulls out an entire SWAT team just to find out Snow’s real identity. As Snow’s reputation swells and the SWAT teams close in on Kate, the story becomes a race to see who will fall first—and faster. It’s cool that we get to see the story from these two competing angles, and it is an efficient way for Harken to show how this world is subtly different without resorting to too much exposition. As the hysterical reaction to Snow’s anonymity demonstrates, this is a post-privacy world, where everything and everyone is watched at all times; in fact, their reputation depends on it. But this has its drawbacks, because there is no way to ditch one’s old identity and start anew. Or at least, if one manages to do that, one has to be careful not to garner too much attention, lest the SWAT team come a knockin’…. As a science-fiction story, “Snow Falling” does what good science fiction should: it speculates about our society and about the people in it and how all that might change in the future. However, the trappings that Harken uses to do this could stand some scrutiny. For example, we regularly see Kate enter her login details to assume her Snow persona, and her password is “deprecated”. Even in this era of computing that password—a dictionary word!—would not pass the sniff test. This, for an account that has attracted global attention for its skyrocket ascent to fame? Any such account would necessarily be the target of numerous hacking attempts. Kate seriously needs to rethink her security strategy. In many ways this story is a little over the top. There’s the bubbly, very false atmosphere of the newscasters, which reminds me a lot of the decadent and loud personalities of the hosts in The Hunger Games movie. Then there are the characters like the Deputy Vice Minister of External Affairs, and the antiphonal motto, “Disclosure begets honesty. Honesty begets accuracy. Accuracy begets order. Order is peace.” The whole story has a “Harrison Bergeron”, Kurt Vonnegut-like quality to it. That being said, I don’t see “Snow Falling” as a satire of post-privacy so much as an honest attempt to explore what some of the implications of a culture of post-privacy reputation munging might entail. In that respect, I finished this story feeling almost certain it would have worked better as a novel (or at least a novella). There are just so many little ideas packed in here, from Kate’s mother’s unjust arrest and wildly ironic rehab addiction to the system by which online personae receive gifts from sponsors (in return for doing … what … exactly?). As far as the world and its characters go, there’s enough for a novel here. The plot would need some thickening (so that it could then be stretched like taffy); as it is, the short length lends itself well to the atmosphere of tension that Harken creates, and I don’t think the same kind of “race against time” conflict would work as well if this became a novel—not without a few more twists and turns. But there is plenty here that hints at the deeper ideas Harken wants to highlight, questions about the nature of truth and the best way to use technology to facilitate democracy, and in a short story, highlighting is all that is possible. Although I might have issues with the length, I’m still satisfied by the story, and in particular the ending. It’s a tragic but poetic ending with just the right hint of hope. Kate might be beaten, but only temporarily, only set back rather than defeated. She has risen before, and she’ll do it again. Such are the vagaries of living by online reputation. Whereas much of the story highlights a news broadcast or Kate’s online actions, the ending is firmly grounded in the real world, with plenty of emphasis on the physical, even visceral nature of Kate’s life. It’s a reminder of the fragile and ephemeral nature of the online personae we create: Snow fades away because, for all her dazzling notoriety, none of the relationships she forged were meaningful or genuine (as we see in the tragic case of Amy_207). That’s not to say that online relationships are always shallower or less real than offline ones, just that they require the same type of commitments. The Web is still relatively young, and this is something we are just starting to figure out. It will be interesting to see how our online and offline interactions continue to intersect and overlap in the next few decades. “Snow Falling” provides a stimulating glimpse at one possible equilibrium, and one person’s struggle to game the system. [image] ...more |
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Nov 25, 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
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Kindle Edition
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| 9780007263073
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| 3.70
| 164,983
| Jun 12, 2007
| Jul 01, 2008
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liked it
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Supernatural creatures capture our imaginations for all sorts of reasons. Vampires are really very individualistic, singular monsters: they are an out
Supernatural creatures capture our imaginations for all sorts of reasons. Vampires are really very individualistic, singular monsters: they are an outward manifestation of our obsessions with mortality, sexuality, and appetite. Zombies, too, prey upon our fear of a loss of self and self-determination. Faeries, though, are a little different. Thanks to their firm grounding in folklore across Europe, with plenty of hints as to a larger society and hierarchy, faeries offer a reach source of material when one needs supernatural creatures with a little class. In Wicked Lovely, Aislinn is a teenage girl like many other teenage girls—except she can see faeries. They’re everywhere but ordinarily invisible. She can’t let on that she can see them, because that would attract their attention, which is the last thing she wants. So, naturally, the story kicks off when a faery manifests himself in human form to try to pick Aislinn up. Good going, Aislinn. Way to keep a low profile. The plot is fairly simple and easy to articulate: Keenan is the Summer King, but the majority of his power lays dormant until he can find a human to become his Summer Queen. To do this, she must pass a test by grasping the staff of the Winter Queen. But if she fails the test, she instead takes on “Winter’s chill” and becomes the “Winter Girl”, which is kind of like a runner-up position that involves serving the Winter Queen for eternity. And the Winter Queen, who happens to be Keenan’s mother, is definitely icy. Yes, it’s rather like a soap opera in its details, but Wicked Lovely managed to grow on me. Marr drives Aislinn’s internal conflict through an ersatz love triangle: Keenan finds himself drawn to Aislinn, convinced that she is the one who will finally pass the test and become his queen; Aislinn loves a slightly older boy named Seth, whom she has, until now, been keeping in the friend zone lest she risk a relationship-collapsing one-night stand. After drinking some faery wine on a (probably ill-advised) date with Keenan, Aislinn’s fate is sealed: she’s turning into a faery one way or the other; the question now is only whether she will accept the mantle of Summer Queen. But if she goes along with it and becomes Keenan’s queen, where does that leave her with Seth? Is there any doubt that Aislinn will end up as the Summer Queen? Marr tries her best to sow a few seeds, but it’s rather obviously the only fulfilling end to the story. The only question is whether Seth will figure in it at all. For what it’s worth, though, that question alone manages to keep the suspense ticking for the majority of the book. That’s fortunate, because there is little else going on here. Aislinn’s eventual investiture as the Summer Queen is supposed to be a big deal because it will release the rest of Keenan’s power. With it, he can beat back his mother’s Winter and restore the power of the Summer Court. Without it, no more summer, and the world freezes. It’s a neat idea, and I wish Marr had taken it further. It gets mentioned once or twice, but nothing significant really happens to establish it as a real threat. Instead, Marr focuses more on how Aislinn’s accession would affect her personally. Unfortunately, this can make Aislinn seem rather whiny at times. Her own personal comfort appears to take precedence of the survival of the entire world. Similarly, Marr doesn’t always show us the big picture in as much fidelity as I would like. There are four faery courts: Winter, Summer, High, and Dark. The latter are more aloof from the human world, so they don’t figure very prominently. Beira presides over the Winter Court, and Keenan is the Summer King, albeit less potently, ever since she killed his father. Beira’s motivations are somewhat sketchy—she just seems to be inherently cold and otherworldly, as one might expect a Winter faery. When it comes to portraying faeries, there is a fine line to be walked: on one hand, they are indeed of another world, and their motivations are not like human motivations; on the other hand, if they are central characters to the story, they have to feel like more than plot devices. Perhaps this is why so many other stories keep the faeries at arm’s length as much as possible. Don’t let my criticism dampen anticipation or enthusiasm for Wicked Lovely, though. It’s still lovely, and a little bit wicked, and considering it’s probably made more for the young adult crowd, it probably works quite well for its audience. I like that Aislinn takes charge of her problem and decides she will find a solution, and that the solution doesn’t involve giving in to some magical faery king just because he’s hot. She’s a good protagonist (even if she is a little bit self-absorbed). While it has its shares of plot snags and character quibbles, Wicked Lovely is what I’d call above average. Marr’s marriage of faery lore with contemporary adolescent issues isn’t seamless, but it’s still pretty interesting. [image] ...more |
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Nov 23, 2012
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Nov 24, 2012
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Nov 24, 2012
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| 0099518473
| 9780099518471
| 0099518473
| 3.99
| 1,947,890
| 1932
| Dec 06, 2007
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really liked it
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One of science fiction’s most enduring traits is its ability to ruminate upon the ways in which science and technology allow us to manipulate and re-e
One of science fiction’s most enduring traits is its ability to ruminate upon the ways in which science and technology allow us to manipulate and re-engineer society. In this sense, the distinction between soft and hard science fiction disappears—all science fiction is inherently social, for no matter how much detail goes into describing the technological advances that populate possible futures, the meat of the story is always the effect these technologies have on the people using them. Innovation begets change, and change is often disruptive—our future mirrors the past in this respect. Brave New World is rightfully a classic work of science fiction that demonstrates the potential for technology to help us reshape society. Aldous Huxley leaves us with a potent question: what kind of society do we want to make? Brave New World is deceptively simplistic in its structure. Top-heavy in exposition, the novel begins with a walking tour through the Central London Hatchery. Women no longer give birth. Instead, babies are grown and then decanted, an ultimate triumph of genetic engineering. Even before birth, each potential person’s life has been mapped out and determined by gene sequences and other processes. Some are destined to be Alphas, the intellectual elite. More will be Betas or Gammas, who provide the specialized labour that keeps places like the Hatchery in operation. More still will make up the bottom of the social pyramid, the Deltas and Epsilons with their restricted worldviews and even more restricted intellects. Huxley makes it very clear that this vision of the future is one based on the mass production, mass consumption ideals of twentieth century America and, in particular, Henry Ford. Everyone has his or her place, a cog in the great machine of civilization as it grinds onward in stability for all eternity. This is the nightmare of Huxley’s utopia, at least for me. It’s that inexorable predestination of one’s life and potential: you are a Beta, and that will never change. You will be trained, in your sleep and while you are awake, for a single job. You will consume the basest forms of arts and entertainment—high art having gone the way of history. Such weighty endeavours are too emotionally complex for these new humans. Tragedy and suffering have been sacrificed in the name of stability, and what few passions are allowed to citizens are carefully monitored and controlled through very specific outlets. While the World State is not the overtly totalitarian presence made manifest in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is still a covertly authoritarian government in which people are happy only because they have been manufactured that way. Huxley then proceeds to show some of the cracks in the otherwise perfect society. Bernard Marx is an Alpha-Minus who has somehow developed a little too much individuality. In a society predicated upon sameness, this is undesirable. While visiting a Savage Reservation, where specimens of the old style of humanity continue to live their squalid, imperfect lives, Bernard makes a discovery that changes everything for him. John Savage (as he comes to be called) is the child of a modern woman who became trapped in the Savage Reservation after she was separated from her party and given up for dead. Bernard takes John back to England with him and proceeds to show him off to society (and show society off to him). Huxley sets up Bernard as the protagonist of Brave New World, but this proves to be a smokescreen. Earlier on, Huxley hints at Bernard’s vanity. Indeed, Bernard becomes caught up in the celebrity that he shares with John. It alienates him from those few people he numbered friends before bringing John to England. And when John’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and disruptive, Bernard is the first to seek to distance himself from the Savage in a bid to save his own skin. As the climax unfolds, any prospect of Bernard rising to the occasion and assuming the mantle of hero fades away with a whimper. Bernard is a diversion, a stepping stone towards the piece’s principal protagonist, John Savage himself. He is Huxley’s reminder that merely possessing individuality does not itself make one brave or honourable or heroic. John’s heroism is passive; he does not actually take down the World State or even offer serious opposition. Rather, he exists as the embodiment of what the World State does not offer: passion, a penchant for peril, and a spirituality that is practically profane in the face of a society that has conflated Henry Ford and God. Long before John’s final conversation with the World Controller, we see this in his dealings with Lenina Crowne. He falls for her but is not sure how to make his feelings apparent. Raised on Shakespeare and community ideas about marriage and proving one’s devotion, John is not prepared for Lenina’s extremely casual approach to sex—nor can he handle her commitment to promiscuity, any more than she could conceive of dedicating herself exclusively to him. For me, the most emotionally-charged and harrowing scene in the entire novel occurs when Lenina visits John’s apartment, strips, and throws herself at her. He freaks out and flies into a fit of rage that, in turn, causes Lenina to become more terrified than she has ever been in her entire life. After living entirely on-script, Lenina finds herself in an entirely new situation, and she can’t handle it. John’s reaction channels the darker aspects of humanity that the World State has worked so carefully to repress through its redaction of art, history, and literature (there is a reason these are called the “humanities”, after all). He calls her a strumpet and a whore, and then his verbal abuse escalates to physical violence: The Savage pushed her away with such force that she staggered and fell. “Go,” he shouted, standing over her menacingly, “get out of my sight or I’ll kill you.” He clenched his fists. This scene crystallizes the complexity of Brave New World. It’s a genuinely frightening moment, because John’s behaviour endangers the empathy I, as closer to him in many ways than to Lenina, felt for him up until that point. Huxley reminds us that there is nothing saintly about individuality or non-conformity. Similarly, while I continue to feel sorry for Lenina as a victim of her conditioning, the sinister subtext of her beliefs is laid bear here. As Bernard is fond of repeating, she sees herself as meat. The World State offers casual sex on a platter, but it’s still a patriarchal, heteronormative approach to casual sex. And it’s one where consent is valued less than conformity—Lenina and Fanny’s conversation prior to the former’s confrontation with John demonstrates this, and Lenina’s persistence in offering herself to John despite his hesitation reaffirms it. The idea that one might reject an offer of sex is so alien that it smacks of illness. The World State is a utopia. It is stable, free from war or strife. Even natural causes of distress, such as disease or disaster, are mitigated by propaganda, enforced hormone supplements, and of course, the ubiquitous and subliminally-reinforced use of soma. But if the World State is utopia, then I don’t want to live in utopia. It’s bland and boring—for those same passions that drive John to violence and to self-flagellation are the same passions that make life worth living. It’s stable but also stagnant, for even science is seen as an enemy, a potential source of innovation and thus disruption. It feels … like a dead end. Our society is far from perfect, but one of its best attributes is its constant state of flux. Everything is changing all the time, and we can try to predict what our world will be like in twenty or fifty years, but the truth is, we don’t know. The World State doesn’t have that luxury. Aside from the minor advancements and tweaks the World Controllers allow through the decades, it will keep grinding on in the same fashion for as long as possible. With no potential for dramatic paradigm shifts, for revolution or evolution, for the comforts of chaos, we can’t really call it living any more. Humanity is alive, but in the big picture, it has been reduced to little more than cellular automata. Brave New World is nothing short of a horror story. And it works because Huxley writes with such earnestness. He doesn’t try too hard. On paper, it’s terrifying, although if you think about it long enough and start poking enough holes, it starts to become almost as unrealistic as the post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games. Huxley’s World State has figured out what the Capitol has not: to avoid rebellion, make your subjects feel like they don’t need to rebel. Even when John manages to incite brief moments of passion in a group of identical Deltas, a little bit of soma and some riot police contain the situation quite easily. Rebellion has been bred out of people. Some people don’t drink the koolaid, and then the oligarchs who maintain the utopia have to deal with them. There are basically three choices: death, co-option, or exile (also known as the Omelas outcome). Bernard and his friend Heimholz end up exiled to an island where they will join fellow Alphas who have drifted too much towards individuality. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, was like them once, but he chose co-option over exile and is now one of the ten wizards behind the curtain. I’d be on the island. Brave New World pits individuality against social stability and asks if happiness is more important than the freedom to be unhappy. Other books have asked this question before, and others have asked it since. Yet Brave New World endures long since we have left behind the pre-war climate of the 1930s. It endures because, as Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited , our society still seems to be on this trajectory. Mass consumption and mass production remain the rule. And, as much as Orwellian surveillance haunts us after September 11, 2001, corporations that want the public to consume still attempt to persuade us that the latest and greatest technology, fashion, or food will make us happier. That’s not to say that a Brave New World-esque future is inevitable. Like most utopian authors, Huxley glosses over a lot of the process involved in forming the World State (though, to his credit, he gives us a lot more than some authors do). As much as globalization and telecommunications have brought us together, I feel like it would still be very difficult to establish the level of control and uniformity that the World State has at the beginning of this story. I like my postapocalyptic menu as varied as the next reader, but tales of fractured societies and isolated governments seem a little more realistic these days than a fraternity of World Controllers. And I’m not just saying that because they’re reading this. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 16, 2012
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Nov 22, 2012
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Nov 21, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0552152595
| 9780552152594
| 0552152595
| 4.00
| 159,375
| 1986
| Jan 01, 2004
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liked it
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It’s been a long time since I read The Colour Magic. I’ve read a few other Discworld novels but am now kind of trying to read them in order. Terry Pra
It’s been a long time since I read The Colour Magic. I’ve read a few other Discworld novels but am now kind of trying to read them in order. Terry Pratchett is a writer whose sense of humour aligns exactly with the type of humourous fiction I want to read: dry and absurd. From Discworld to
Good Omens
, Pratchett always delivers, and The Light Fantastic is no exception. I read the first half of this book with a sense of dragging anticipation. I was waiting for the book to begin. It took me a while to realize what The Light Fantastic reminds me of and, in so doing, allow me to change my mindset and enjoy it more. This book is very much like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is a core group of characters—Rincewind, Twoflower, Cohen, Bethan, and of course, the Luggage—with occasional scenes featuring the antagonist or supporting cast. And this core group doesn’t so much do things as react to the various things that happen to them. Much like how Arthur Dent goes from lying in front of a bulldozer in his housecoat to tromping about the galaxy in a ship powered by an infinite improbability drive, Rincewind isn’t so much following a plan as trying to cope with the latest set of unfortunate circumstances in which he finds himself. Once I came to terms with this, The Light Fantastic became a lot more fun. I mean, that’s the point of Discworld: everything is just totally bonkers, from the elephants perched on the turtle’s back to the immense forces of magic. I think the word “romp” might have been invented solely to describe Discworld adventures. If I had to express any kind of disappointment about this book, it would simply be that there isn’t enough of it. It’s a slim volume. And there were segments where I wished Pratchett had delved more deeply into what was happening. For example, Death is present in this book, but in a more tangential capacity. Rincewind and Twoflower pay a visit to his hall but don’t stay very long, quickly showing themselves out. That’s understandable—I wouldn’t overstay my welcome at Death’s place either. But The Light Fantastic is very much a road comedy, and while that gives Pratchett plenty of opportunities for funny sequences, it also makes some of those sequences very fast, drive-by affairs. The calculus here is rather simple. Reading Discworld? Read it. If you haven’t read any Discworld novel, I probably wouldn’t start with this one. It’s a loose sequel to The Colour Magic, which I think was probably a stronger book (not that I remember all that much about it). So I would start there—or with another book later in the series, since this is one of those things where order doesn’t necessarily matter (combinations, not permutations!). [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 08, 2012
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Nov 12, 2012
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Nov 08, 2012
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Paperback
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| 3.74
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it was ok
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Jul 12, 2012
not set
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Sep 27, 2024
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| 4.09
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really liked it
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Dec 31, 2012
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Dec 30, 2012
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| 4.47
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it was amazing
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Dec 23, 2012
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Dec 24, 2012
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| 3.91
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it was ok
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Dec 13, 2012
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Dec 08, 2012
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| 3.59
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liked it
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Dec 09, 2012
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Dec 07, 2012
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| 4.14
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really liked it
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Dec 05, 2012
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Dec 04, 2012
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| 2.86
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liked it
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Nov 25, 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
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| 3.70
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liked it
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Nov 24, 2012
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Nov 24, 2012
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Nov 22, 2012
not set
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Nov 21, 2012
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| 4.00
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liked it
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Nov 12, 2012
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Nov 08, 2012
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