|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
182
| 
| 0552163333
| 9780552163330
| 0552163333
| 4.04
| 6,491
| 2012
| Aug 05, 2014
|
liked it
|
Anyone who avers that Terry Pratchett was not one of the great fantasy writers the world has known has not read that opening to the first Discworld no
Anyone who avers that Terry Pratchett was not one of the great fantasy writers the world has known has not read that opening to the first Discworld novel, nor the rest of it, nor its successor, nor the following 39 Discworld novels, nor one of the five significant Discworld short stories published here, the best (and longest, including the deleted scene in appendix) being The Sea And Little Fishes. Pratchett's imagination was matched by his wit, affectionate humour, use of language, plotting, pacing, character creation, that humour again, and a handle on the quintessential oddness yet lovability of humanity - even if it must inevitably include the likes of Cpl. Nobby Nobbs. Even having to read some of the lesser offerings in this collection of miscellany would not put the inveterate Discworld fan off. Yet, if it were not for the delicious feeling that the collectable Discworld short stories included here give to the completist fan, I would conclude that this collection of disparate and often weak little comedy skits served more the god of Mammon than that of Omnia, and would bristle at the purchase price (now shockingly £12!). But that's just cynical. One or two of the short shorts, like 'FTB', which was one idea while Hogfather (1995) was born, are neat, but most not. However, the longer short stories are of greatly improved quality, and marry more with the experience of the writer of 41 wonderful Discworld novels (mostly) and a couple of entertaining early sci-fi ones. Even while the longer of the 11 Discworld tales included are available online or in fantasy compendiums like Wizards Of Odd: Comic Tales Of Fantasy (1996, ed. Peter Haining) and are worth both having and reading - The Sea And Little Fishes, a tale about Granny Weatherwax, makes the purchase almost worthwhile by itself - many of the 3-4 page little numbers in this collection are regrettably not of the same quality. But a writer has to start somewhere, write? Thus, as an insight into the genesis of a born writer - and the opening paragraphs of the opening story here, written when Pratchett was 13, is a perfect piece of writing, proving this point very early - this collection has pointers of the origins of some later works, like Truckers (1989), of the Truckers, Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990) children's trilogy, and Rincewind's appearance in the opening sally of the Discworld series (1983), while another might be the origin story of (or a deleted scene from) Men At Arms (1993), and 'The High Meggas' is the genesis of The Long (Etc.) Earth (2012) - and is excellent. 'Once And Future' also is a gem. All the pieces have a brief introduction by the author, and collectively they provide a potted biography of the writer's early days as a journalist, while adding more colour to the stray octarine clutch of Discworld miscellany such as the companions, diaries and maps, allowing that completist fan the immense pleasure of saying: 'I've (nearly) read ALL of Terry Pratchett's Discworld writings!' Nearly. Nearly will have to do. Nearly is what many of this collection almost are, while many are little worthwhile, and some are superb. It is, after all, a collection for the completist fan. And yet, that 'nearly', which hung silently over the end of The Sea And Little Fishes, was made up for by the appendix of the deleted scene when it was first published in 1998, the perfectly apt ending to this collection. I felt that that short story ended untypically - knowing Granny Weatherwax. Esme Weatherwax is clearly Terry Pratchett's most beloved character: her epitaph and ending in, and the subject of the story of his last Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown (2015) just a few months before his own, proved that. It would be wholly out of character to leave Esme Weatherwax standing under such circumstances with such outrage hanging over her. This deleted scene finished that tale off properly, and more, it was written with a love of that character, and her ever-present friend, that ran deep through such a seeming afterthought of a placement, in an appendix - yet it summed up everything fine about his world and his most beloved characters, as well as the sentiment that struck true, even amidst his most riotous humour and character. It was a fitting ending from a wonderful fantasist, and made this varied collection utterly worthwhile. Mind how you go. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 13, 2024
|
Feb 17, 2024
|
Apr 12, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
174
| 
| 1841492299
| 9781841492292
| 1841492299
| 4.03
| 23,187
| Oct 2004
| Jul 04, 2005
|
liked it
|
'Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.' (Orbit, 2005, p.279). Banks's third non-Culture s 'Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.' (Orbit, 2005, p.279). Banks's third non-Culture science fiction novel establishes an entirely different galaxy to the one we have become used to in that series. The Mercatoria, that meta-civilisation run by the dominant Culmina, rule the galaxy, the victors after a series of wars, one of which was against AI. Policed by the Voehn, an all-environments-capable über-soldier species, they hunt down and destroy any remaining AI in their galactic expanse. Hm. So, virtually the antithesis of the AI-led Culture, whose Ships, Hubs, Drones and their Minds generally running the show, are now (or their equivalents) the victims of a galaxy-wide pogrom. The central storyline is largely concerned with some mystery at the heart of the very long-lived, slow-moving, gargantuan gas-dwelling behemoths of Nasqueron, the gas giant local to Fassin Taak's moon-planet homeworld, which he is studying over long time-relative periods of his promising career. Nasqueron is a huge gas giant, though, twice the diameter of Jupiter, equivalent to a thousand Earth masses, whereas Jupiter only 320 or so. This nods to the growing realism that many of the recently discovered planets in the habitable zones of star systems observed are the 'near-ubiquitous' (p.382) massive gas giants hundreds and thousands of times the mass of Earth, and that other solar systems seemed to lack the Earth-like rocky planets expected. Metaphorically, it feels as though, with the delve into the lower layers of the planet's gas clouds, we are being immersed in a world that equates to the lower strata of consciousness. That's the impression, anyway. It's all a bit of a floating dream. And very outlandish. It gets more so. There is some continuity, though, in certain themes, with Banks's Culture series. The Dwellers, like the Affront we met in Excession (1996), hunt their young. While this might put them in the same bracket as the Affront, the Dwellers, though, because of their billions-of-years presence throughout the galaxy, are not the foolish upstart species the Affront proved to be. Nevertheless, the combination of a sort of removed, benign, pervasive, intelligent, and otherwise peaceful presence of the Dweller species throughout the galaxy doesn't quite sit with their penchant for their filicidal Neanderthalism. So we approach their narrative with a certain bemused misgiving, no doubt the right amount of respectful temerity and sensible mistrust, our moral barometers slightly awry. They are, of course, mediated through Fassin, the young Seer whose credentials of honesty and integrity are set out in an opening sally some years before. Banks does the young smart, supercilious arrogance of elite collegiate types and the elect in a rigidly hierarchical world well, delivering credible dialogue that establishes character quickly. We like Ilen from a single initial sentence, and Banks's ability with the mot juste and the quirky always-trying-to-seem-cool repartee of the young bright things that invariably bespangle his works (list them: Ulver Seich in Excession [1996], Diziet Sma in Use Of Weapons [2002], Prentice McHoan in The Crow Road [1992], Ken Nott [ay: get it?] in Dead Air [2002], Sophie in The Steep Approach To Garbadale [2007], and so on) pitches these future stars and starlets at just the right level of confidence and foolhardiness to set the stage. Quite where, though, in the entire scheme of the novel, this little episode - which is the most memorable of the book, alongside the awful cruelty of the Archimandrite Luseferous - actually fits the overall narrative, is yet to be determined. It feels like it migrated in from some other germinal mainstream novel, one which, based on Banks's ability to convince you of his typically smart youthful set and their repertoire of badinage, would have been one I would have liked, I'm sure. However, 'you have [...] to work with what you were presented with' (p.232), and as such, The Algebraist is something of a strange blend of narratives and sub-plots, albeit the main one of Fassin Taak's delve into Nasqueron on ostensibly secret Mercatorial business to find important information held deep within the enormous protected libraries of the Dwellers all but a rather tenuous ploy to investigate a science fiction fantasy environment Banks had as yet not turned his fecund imagination to. He had covered waterworlds in Excession [1996]; he'd done dirigible entities, the behemothaurs, in Look To Windward [2000]; he had not yet done an indigenous species in gas giants. There is still an overriding impression, though, having read this book in 2010, that the first third of it is memorable, while the remaining two thirds - within the cloud layers of the gas giants - becomes as nebulous in memory as its environment. However, hats off for venturing there, and creating a long story out of it. My second reading is therefore not only a critical revision of these initial assumptions, but a due courtesy to one of the best SF writers there has been, and one of the most original mainstream writers: his fiction is always worthwhile, even where, naturally, weaker ones seem to arise - 6 out of 13 (46%) of his SF come in at 8+/10; 5/15 (33%) of his mainstream fiction; 11/28 (40%) in total - and that is a remarkable portfolio, compared to any other writer. For example, while Woolf's To The Lighthouse [1927] is my favourite novel, beyond compare, and I have read 5 of her other novels, I have been unable to finish the other 5. Of Atwood's long list, 5/10 at 8+ (a very good ratio). Of McEwan's wonderful novels, of similar output volume to Banks, only 2/15 were rated 8+. Of Murakami's similarly long list, 3/13. All of this is of course largely subjective, but not wholly: sometimes you rate a work technically high, even if you didn't actually like it. So these figures are weighted by a wide-ranging perspective of style and technical merit (structure, plots, characterisation, themes, etc.) beyond mere emotional response. In fact, apart from all of Shakespeare's works, Banks is the only other author I've read all their works of dramatic fiction of whatever genre. Perhaps not a portfolio match, though. Banks takes a long, leisurely time to set up the internal action of this story; 200 pages of a 500+ page narrative: we enter Nasqueron precisely on page 200. But he does so almost pedantically; never one for stopping at wringing out the maximum possibilities of a sentence's subject's ramifications - which can span almost a paragraph - he tends to regression (usual) and repetition (not so) in this case, and we get rather bored before the delve which Fassin and accompanying army monitor need to make in order to find something which may reduce, turn, or end the war which is upon them. Then we are subsumed in the alien environment of the Dwellers, the billions-of-years old Slow race that has been about since just after galaxies and stars were born. The plot is not so convoluted, but certainly drawn out by Banks; it is no wonder that this book is a tough read first go, and even tougher one second time round. He does spin things out a lot, and I can only imagine one of the reasons for this penchant for etiolation in this particular case is that it has to be of sufficient proportions to the gas-giant environment he is delving into. Apart from that penchant of stringing a sentence out to its optimal clausal possibility, this is a long book. That it lacks the smart repartee of the Culture craft and drones too, as well as a sufficiently interesting principal (no Ulver Seich, no Diziet Sma, no Lededje Y'breq; Fassin could never compete), it makes for at times a staccato series of chores rather than pleasures. There are also times - particularly when Banks is describing Dweller behaviour, customs or clothes - that he devolves to Unwinese, aka gobbledygook, with a series of onomatopoeic phrases intended to further acquaint us with what were inveterate uncarers in the big wide galaxy as a whole, and whose inscrutable customs of hierarchical kudos were meant to invite general headshaking and shoulder-shrugging. You get the picture. Pop, whizz, fizzle. This, of course, is neither meant to win us over to holding this weird species affectionately nor to extend Banks's more obscure apiary of weird alien forms and types, but merely to indulge himself in his own wordplay. As a consequence, interest - not particularly high in the Dweller species anyway - wanes rapidly, evinced as sighs of carbon dioxide gas and tears of saline solution amidst the storm-pockets of ammonia and rainfalls of liquid helium in the generally uninteresting environments of the gas giant Nasqueron. It is this propensity for love of his own sounds and insistence on extending his verbiage of imagination which sometimes makes Banks more of a child in a self-invented dictionary at times than a fascinating novelist - and it shows most in this novel, an overindulgence in a peripheral form and system environment which does not pay off in terms either of entertainment nor regard for his craft. However, since the book was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2005, it must have tickled somebody. I found it sluggish, often a chore, and on the edge of nearly putting the book down thrice. That I finished it the first time was out of respect. That I picked it up a second and - what? - a third time, intent on giving it due notice, was seemingly foolish. Though not quite as foolish as the language and length with which this uninteresting, even laughably (for the wrong reasons) foolish outlandish species was described, which nearly defeated me this time round. However, things do improve. When Banks turns his attention to more general realism - the futility of war and the meaning of existence - he does have something to say, and says it very well (pp.291-2). Such philosophical meandering appears in most of his works, and it's clear he's not only thought things out but expressed them very well, following the general arguments to their inconclusive conclusions. He is also good at staging battle scenes, whether here (pp.310-21) or in any of his sci fi series, especially in Excession, where the ROU Killing Time has a killing time. Here, he builds from the smallest of beginnings to the largest end, and now the Dwellers don't look as much like the fools they behave as. We're now two-thirds through, and the decision to entrench and complete is starting to pay off - but it's taken a long, long time (not even an electron rotation by Dweller standards) and a lot of over-elaborate descriptions of frankly an uninspiring environment to get here. You can see why it took a couple of years to get this one out the door rather than his usual annual offering, and took a further 3 before the next. Perhaps he was just enjoying life. It certainly feels like it: this book froths with over-indulgence and sheer verbal playfulness in the swirling gas giant environment - but it's still over-long. After many digressions - most entertaining, some not, typical - we find ourselves within the wider galactic map - but still only within the galaxy. The galaxy is a BIG THING. Travel between galaxies is incomprehensible to we who are slowing plodding our way to Mars, only 0.5 AU (4 light minutes) away. If the next nearest star (system) in our galaxy is Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C), at 4.25 lightyears away, and Earth is ~27,000 ly from our central black hole, Sagittarius-A*, and 1 ly = ~63,240 AU (so ~1.7 million AU away), that gives us some benchmarks. Even so, the figures are only comparable by factors of a million. So Banks plays within our own back yard in this novel (as does his Culture series [generally]) - but the ultimate consequence of his narrative is inter-galactic and universe spanning. Since, however, to most of us, those figures are at the lower end of astronomical distances and measures, the wider context is really only about as far as our minds can hold discrete and separate maps: the Solar System, the galactic arm (the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius-Carina Arm), the galaxy (a pretty swirl, pretty big), our local galactic group (of about 35 galaxies, most dwarf, 2 big ones, the Milky Way and Andromeda), perhaps the Laniakea galactic (super-)supercluster we belong to (like a large hydra swimming through the vast 'emptiness' of space; but probably not), and the CMBR WMAP of the universe. Our minds, therefore, can only really cope with discrete segregated maps, while the escalating exponential scales are impossible for most of us to equate visually. So talking about the discrete maps and scales at any length is usually pretty pointless, when trying to compare the distances. Fortunately, even Banks's smart mind doesn't force this kind of thinking on us. So we play in our own back yard, here, in three or four systems, centred around the Ulubis system/narrative. But the implications of that peek into the wider galaxy is all that is needed to provide us with the scale of wonder. Whether or not Banks's central concept - of a system of wormholes throughout the galaxy (a stock trope within the canon for a century), and the further dream, a network of 'cannula' throughout the universe - actually engages the brain into an even greater scale of wonder, is moot. We have been raised on Star Wars, and this accounts for why we cannot equate the different scales of relative distance: we now jump regularly through wormholes or into FTL flight, without having to traverse through months and years of space-flight, plodding from star to star; we just press the hyperdrive jump button on the Millennium Falcon, and, whoosh, we are almost there (given enough time to play a game of chess, have a natter about tactics, and start a fuzzy romance, or so). So our brains have been conditioned in the last 50 years to dealing with discrete and separate maps. We think of the galaxy, the universe, envisage them, therefore, as concentric circles - with vast invisible no-relative-sized spaces between the rings. Banks's narrative attempts to join up the rings. This is attractive. As attractive as the blue/bronze cover of this book. So, yes, The Algebraist has a lot to offer. It does get better in the penultimate section, and you do finally see the Dweller's (through Y'sul) as comic in their self-inflated uncaringness - but this is largely due to Banks's humorous dialogue, rather than the portraiture of his species. But on balance, it takes far too long to get there, has one-too-many digressions, is at times too etiolated in its verbosity, despite some clever wordplay, some typically inventive (and awkward) naming, and a general sense of fun. But, apart from only a couple of memorable scenes years later, it doesn't have the impact of say, Excession (1996), or Transition (2009), but it does come from an enormously inventive imagination, an ability to spin a story out of a big idea, an apposite articulate generalisation out of a universal moral, and an ever-watchful eye on the weird, macabre, and sheer tangential fucked-up-ness of life in all its wilder flavours. Do we end up liking Fassin, the Dwellers, or the narrative overall? Not quite. Why? Because his 'better' books have really, really interesting female leads - like Ulver Seich, Diziet Sma, and Lededje Y'breq. He doesn't allow Taince Yarabokin to come close (she barely features), and Fassin (whom we are usually with) could never compete. Perhaps it's just me. Banks always invites you to come and play. Perhaps, in a naturally sexist proclivity according to my own, I really only wants to play with girls, still - like I always did, but usually had to play only with the boys. It could never really be as interesting, despite a shared vocabulary. However, there comes a time, in the closing chapter of his novels - invariably - when the tone of the piece slows down in all its plot dénouements to a sort of tristesse, and Banks always manages to capture you in that sad mood of something of moment ending. The emotion shifts, and the mind does too, and you suddenly appreciate that here is a born writer rounding up a work of his craft of which I would certainly be very proud, and knew that he was (met at a book signing; this copy signed by him; but not at that, later, book signing). There is suddenly an awareness of this achievement, of how he brings all the strands together, slips in little clues that unwrap earlier secrets then unknown, which tie in with his overall themes, and yet makes of it something very human, something like the ending of a treasured relationship, in a final summing up something universal to us all, with that tristesse of it having all ended, and just a resonant hint of the utter futility of it all, in the wider perspective of an uncaring universe with all of us in it trying to make some meaning of it all, or give some meaning to it all. And how he has so consummately woven this tale with its main and sub-plots, its principal and secondary, and often more important tertiary characters through all this, and arrived in an epilogue that ties up a prologue through something substantial, if but just story, but that story is part of the fun of this thing we call life. For that expert craft alone, this book gets an extra point. However, I still suspect that in 12 years' time, should I slip it out of the bookshelf once again, once again curious, and try to remember, and wonder that I only partially do, I will almost certainly not re-read it again. There are, in the meantime, a dozen more of his mainstream novels, and one Culture novel, I would like to re-read. He's just that good. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 22, 2022
|
Jul 07, 2022
|
Jun 23, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
172
| 
| B007JQNCPI
| 4.00
| 10,391
| 1988
| Mar 13, 2012
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 04, 2022
|
not set
|
Mar 04, 2022
|
Audiobook
| ||||||||||||||||
169
| 
| 0575076372
| 9780575076372
| 0575076372
| 4.27
| 267,495
| May 26, 1989
| Dec 2005
|
really liked it
|
The Hyperion Cantos is variously clarioned as a successor to Asimov's Foundation and Empire series and Herbert's Dune, as ceaselessly inventive and pe
The Hyperion Cantos is variously clarioned as a successor to Asimov's Foundation and Empire series and Herbert's Dune, as ceaselessly inventive and perhaps even surpassing those paradigms of science fiction. And then there's sales blurb. Space opera doesn't come bigger than Asimov's Foundation and Empire series or Herbert's Dune series or Banks's Culture series - or Cherryh's Arianne Emory pairing. Hyperion may involve 150 worlds of the human Hegemony, the All Thing and a mutated humaniform baddie, but does it hold a candle to these sci-fi paradigms? Firstly, Hyperion itself is both deeply satisfying and disappointing as a book. It is satisfying because it has that essential requisite of all great science fiction and fantasy, sociological verisimilitude, or put another way, good world building. The 'space opera' framework provides the scaffolding for what are a series of vignettes serving as biographical anthropology, structurally a space-age Canterbury Tales. We have the Priest's Tale, the Soldier's Tale, the Poet's Tale, the Scholar's Tale, the Detective's Tale, and the Consul's Tale, bedded in a mission to the eponymous planet, somewhere in the Tau Zeti system, of the seven-strong pilgrimage to the Time Tombs of The Shrike, the alien metallic humaniform religious icon existing on Hyperion who has been terrorising the planet, on the eve of the great showdown between the rival Hegemony and the Ousters. We do not get the tale from the seventh pilgrim, the Captain of the treeship upon which they approach, which is one of the causes for disappointment, but adds to the cliff-hanger effect. The main disappointment is that the book is not integral to itself, not self-contained as a story: it finishes before the anticipated climaxes, the showdown between the two rival human diasporas, and the showdown between the pilgrims and the Time alien. You have to read its successor for the resolution. This is a shame, because the build up to this combined nexus is well managed, well written, highly inventive, and effectively delayed - yet not ultimately delivered. The characters are interesting, their stories even more so, how they all link up their individual perspectives on their common mission cleverly presented, and their combined narratives provide a comprehensive picture of the world order, many of its worlds, and the power factions within the main groupings, as well as piecing together a composite picture of the alien they are all, for various reasons, interested in confronting for some resolution of why it should exist on Hyperion in that time. The format is successful, but incomplete. Seeded with a cultural undercurrent (all manner of literary and historical references), we commence with the closest tale to anthropology, the Priest's Tale, which presents the general picture of Hyperion's central role and the Shrike's central mystery, while it does spend three chapters just chugging up river. The Poet's Tale is both seedy and sordid, and you very quickly grow to dislike him, then grow to resent his presence, as do the rest of the pilgrims. The Soldier's Tale is the most powerful and imaginative, offering a dynamic love story amidst various military actions, with a shocking outcome. It has both scope and visual drama, and succeeds where the Poet's Tale repulses, the Scholar's Tale remains linear, and the Detective's Tale deploys fight sequences always difficult to put across in this medium. But all of them offer a different perspective on the Shrike. The Scholar's Tale offers an interesting anomaly, and the Detective's Tale a series of fun chase sequences and an inevitably baffling consideration of advanced AI. The Consul's Tale, potentially offering a classic romance, bowdlerises a key scene from Romeo And Juliet and a couple of famous quotes to good effect, if not of the standard of many of the previous tales, yet is essential to grow the world picture and offers a new perspective on the power struggle. All of them to some extent differently explore the phenomenon of Time, as does the delaying structure. I've read a number of reviews of adulation of this fractured novel, praising its 'Tales' structure, its cake-mixture of genres under the overall icing of sci-fi, its cliff-hanger ending, whilst also complaining about its cliff-hanger ending and its generic mish-mash. Great sci-fi is full of BIG IDEAS, seemingly outlandish yet comprehensible vast new concepts, and - most importantly - a sound sociological structure. Hyperion has all these requisites, while it also has some naiveties. This well-written novel has a plethora of tiny originals (Simmons's naming of flora is particularly natural, and the odd new coinage for the familiar, like the googleped for the millipede, nice touches). It starts with a few classic clichés - the 'Hegemony' for the human diaspora, tachyon FTL comms called 'fatline', FORCE ships powered by the Hawking Drive, farcasters as teleports, a comlog as personal communication device, 'cyberpuke' for cyberpunk, a cybrid for an android/human hybrid, flowfoam as the new plastic, the 'Ousters' as the baddies, listening to Wagner's 'Vakyries' during a thunderstorm - before it quickly introduces the seven-strong jamboree of 'pilgrims' to the Time Tombs, intriguingly (how could it work?) sailing a modified giant tree three kilometres tall to its destination world. Quite how this treeship works is beyond imagining, but it feels exotic, as is The Shrike, and successfully sets the novel tone and an air of mystery. 'Hidden colours rose to the surface of things' (Gollancz, 2005, p.126). Perhaps its greatest success - beyond its plausible originality - is that each of the tales is self-sufficient while serving to widen our knowledge of its organisation and structure and creating living scenarios in a vaster system that brings its chain of worlds alive. Each also both explains a little more about the central mystery - the Shrike and the Time Tombs - and deepens it. I can find no fault here. The central premises - the human diaspora, its dissidents, its layers of authority, dissent and interest, its various worlds; and the central Time anomalies - are cleverly woven, expounded and explored. What I do find fault with is the extent to which some of these core components are imagined. For example, one of the central aspects of Banks's Culture series is the question as to why the superior machine culture - the ships, the Minds, the droids etc. - remain both allied to, serving of and dependent upon the human diaspora. Banks doesn't offer an answer, nor does Simmons, and where Banks serves up dissident groups within his panoply of vastly more intelligent craft - the Interesting Times Gang of Excession (1996) - Simmons doesn't go as far as Banks in ascribing such phenomenal intelligence to ships and so on, but to the controlling/advising AI at the heart of the hegemony. I would have liked to see this possibility explored, of intelligent ships. It is the reason why Banks's Culture series is so witty and such fun. But it also touches on a central science-future quandary: why would infinitely more intelligent machine entities of the future be remotely interested in the limited and limiting association with humankind? Simmons offers a tentative proposition that certain AI factions are interested in creating an Ultimate Intelligence, i.e. God, thus aligning them in some way to the central human epistemological (what we can know) and ontological (the nature of being, and God's purpose in it) quandaries of metaphysics. But where Banks shows us a sexy manifestation of that intelligence in all his machine entities, including ship avatars, Simmons has one experimental AI 'cybrid' and no sexy ships, and limits the relationship to near-current developments in android and robot intelligence, projecting only AI near-futures. It is like discovering intelligent alien life at the end of Drake's equation and finding on meeting them that the epitome of their cultural advancement is Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973), that they had not yet got to his Annie Hall/Interiors/Manhattan (1977-9) trilogy of masterpieces - and wouldn't or couldn't develop that far and further. Somewhat disappointing, knowing the possibilities. However, Hyperion does share certain big achievements along with Asimov, Herbert, Banks and Cherryh: it has a sound sociological cosmos. Asimov had the Empire and the Foundation, Herbert had CHOAM and the Spacing Guild, Banks had the Culture worlds, orbitals and mega-ships, Cherryh has the Alliance-Union expansion, and Simmons has the Hegemony and Ouster diaspora. His world building is as vast, as integral, if not quite as sexy as any of these others. It touches on cloning, but doesn't develop this fascinating issue, as Leckie does in her Imperial Radch trilogy (2013-15); it touches on androids (cybrids), but doesn't go as far as Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn, 1954, 1957, 1983), doesn't hit on something as elegant and concise as the Three Laws of Robotics, nor the smart avatars that populate Banks's Culture books (whose droids are memorable characters in themselves); it uses farcasters, small and large space portals, and FTL travel, but is confined to one spiral arm of the Milky Way; it has factions in its AI community, but doesn't substantiate their existence but for one avatar. It has all the ingredients that the greats of the SF canon have, but is somehow not as great in these respects, perhaps because it fits so many concepts into its scope for them to be separately developed fully enough to impact so greatly. But what it does have beyond these others, is a novel and central investigation into Time - and that fascinates. Its central success is the Shrike - and why the Shrike? Aside from the abrupt cliff-hanger ending, this is the main reason you would wish to read the resolving novel, The Fall Of Hyperion (1990). But there is a masterly line between ending on a cliff-hanger while still rounding up the book's intrinsic plot logic. Simmons's move to end there is bold and generates more than double-take (commercial/tease/novel...?), and from the quality of this novel, I would certainly be inclined both to read more and to find out where he takes the Shrike, as well as tidy up a few ends hanging in the individual pilgrim narratives (what happens to Rachel? for example). So, after Foundation, after Dune, after the Culture, after Ari, does Hyperion stand on the same shelf? Admittedly, it's not far-out-there incomprehensible as are huge tracts of M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy - which is barely comprehensible, very, very weird, but has patches of natural novelistic beauty - and it's not as profoundly sociological as, say, Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land (1961), or Cherryh's superb Arianne couplet of Cyteen (1988) and Regenesis (2009), the first of which is a deep investigation into what it is to be both human and alien, the second pair being a prime exemplar of finely-detailed sociological world-building in a psychological thriller. Herbert's first Dune trilogy is close to genius; Asimov's first Foundation trilogy is. Banks's Culture series is like making love with books: the sex is fun, but the laughter lights up the entire experience. We all know the joys that literary genius brings. I can honestly say these authors have enriched my life. But can I put Simmons in the same class? I guess I just have to read the next one in the series to answer that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 22, 2022
|
Mar 2022
|
Feb 22, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
167
| 
| B015XA832I
| 3.17
| 235
| Jun 22, 2004
| May 02, 2007
|
liked it
|
I didn't come to the Aphrodite series completely new: I'd already read the 11-page intro., Aphrodite IX - 00. But I was still somewhat confused. Princ
I didn't come to the Aphrodite series completely new: I'd already read the 11-page intro., Aphrodite IX - 00. But I was still somewhat confused. Principally because there was no world-building; there was a kind of steampunk/science-future world technologically advanced for aircars and cyborg tech (providing an interesting mix of styles within the graphics), there was some ruling council (which was obviously full of a self-serving corrupt elite), an enhanced police force (who looked low-tech but with hefty weapons), and a couple of characters, whose origins were unknown, who helped Aphrodite before and after her missions, when she was always crashed by the police for summary execution because of previously resisting arrest. And she always woke after her assignments without any memory of who or where she was, or what she'd done. As much in the know as I was, then. In this 4-parter, we discover a little more about her backstory, but the world-building is still not there. Madame Chairman is the head of the council, and prosecuting her agenda through Aphrodite, both while she dispatches her competition, and as the future of humankind: a powerful synthetic that can hardly die. But the second reason why I was confused was because some of the comic tiles just didn’t scan. Okay, they may have been little interstitial ones with cartoon sounds ('KRRKKNK') attached to them, conveying the basics, or they may have been an intercut new perspective on the action, but they sometimes took some working out. Overall, however, I was impressed with the artwork: it was colourful, superbly drawn, and exciting. That excitement, I must admit, was partly lewd, but it was also aesthetic, and the blend of the two kept me reading in a certain admiration. However, while I accept that a certain brevity in story-telling is expected in the comic format, it still has to have strong story and a good flow to be thoroughly engaging, and perhaps the trade-off of fluidity of story and excellent graphics is a certain loss of orientation? But it needn't be. In the end, Aphrodite was a sexy cyborg assassin stumbling along with a germinal kindling of human identity that she couldn't fulfill, and that was her human quest while she obeyed her cyborg duty. But it didn't develop enough over what was essentially 5 comics, and that was partly because there wasn't a secondary character sufficiently developed to balance it all out and form an effective relationship with her. Which made it somewhat repetitive, or static, all the dynamism being in the art. And it also made the sexually explicit graphics open to criticism of appropriateness because of the lack of relational depth. So artistically exciting, but lacking dimension, much like Enki Bilal's comic books: beautiful but somewhat mystifying. Did it stir enough interest to make me want to go and get the next few in the series? Maybe. Because I did enjoy the artwork, its colouration, and its style. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 17, 2022
|
Feb 18, 2022
|
Feb 17, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
168
| 
| B015XB2UJ4
| 3.59
| 37
| unknown
| Apr 19, 2000
|
liked it
|
Opening gambit This brief introduction to Aphrodite in sumptuous graphics is just a taster for its follow-up edition of Vol. 1, which delivers episodes Opening gambit This brief introduction to Aphrodite in sumptuous graphics is just a taster for its follow-up edition of Vol. 1, which delivers episodes 01-04. Finch and Weems paint some gorgeous pictures. Only complaint: some of the speech bubbles are a little too small for the iPad. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Feb 17, 2022
Oct 17, 2012
|
Feb 17, 2022
Oct 17, 2012
|
Feb 17, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
160
| 
| 4.08
| 34,793
| Jan 27, 1956
| Mar 08, 2001
|
really liked it
|
I remembered few specifics of this classic from my first reading 7 years ago, which in part surprised me - though I was reading a lot of SF classics a
I remembered few specifics of this classic from my first reading 7 years ago, which in part surprised me - though I was reading a lot of SF classics around then - but was also a pleasure, because most of it was once again entirely new. However, over those years, the notion fixed in my mind was that Clarke wrote so well, and that the city of Diaspar was so well evoked, it remained a symbol of classic SF. Getting to know it again, the scale of it, its perfection, was a pleasant journey. Cities should be imposing in SF. And yet, while central to the narrative, Alvin himself was almost entirely forgotten. This is in large part because Clarke here is dealing in types, not personalities. Alvin is a Unique, while his friends are largely an amorphous collection, only Alystra having a little more 'go' in her because of her fascination for Alvin's difference. There are other personalities in Diaspar, but again, they are representative types, with clearly defined representative roles; even if also unique, it is because they are representative of the future machine-human symbiosis. Clarke builds the perfect eternal city where mankind has achieved immortality, and then introduces the disruptive patterns which are required to venture beyond it. While the history of Man is a thousand million years old, has grown to star-faring empire and regressed back again, the jewel of Diaspar seems the only remnant of civilisation left on Earth. Even the oceans and the mountains seem to have gone, and all about the city is desert. But this is not the case, and the middle half of the novel links up some of those deeper mysteries through the agency of Alvin's restless curiosity and exploration. Clarke discusses love, intelligence, telepathy, the differing manifestations of utopia, and the impossibility - or undesirability - of suppressing the natural inquisitiveness of humans. What are the ultimate intentions - or instructions - of the Central Computer? Can two very differently evolved societies live in harmony? What happened to mankind in the long evolution of its empire? Is chaos a necessary function of any civilisation? The turn of events occurs rapidly, and takes a direction unexpected - if only I had paused to think, instead of turning pages so readily. And it is an exciting turn. The malaise incipient in the everyday comfort of Diaspar is disrupted within a day, overturned and left behind. Clarke moves us from utopian SF to space opera in a moment, the clue in the title. His ideas are wide-ranging and have seeded kernels of many a science fiction novel since: vast spaceships, telepathic entities, utopian pan-galactic civilisations, pan-galactic internecine wars, identity storage, artificial solar systems, the galactic dragon... His survey of such operatic tropes is almost an essay on the various manifestations of the canon. The vastness of his scale is impressive. And it is written so that you fly through this novel. I will re-read Rendezvous With Rama (1973) now, having forgotten the detail of that, since this revisit has proved so fruitful. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 26, 2021
|
May 27, 2021
|
May 26, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
162
| 
| 0575024097
| 9780575024090
| 0575024097
| 4.11
| 19
| Jan 01, 1978
| Dec 31, 1978
|
liked it
|
The City And The Stars [1956] I remembered few specifics of this classic from my first reading 7 years ago, which in part surprised me - though I was r The City And The Stars [1956] I remembered few specifics of this classic from my first reading 7 years ago, which in part surprised me - though I was reading a lot of SF classics around then - but was also a pleasure, because most of it was once again entirely new. However, over those years, the notion fixed in my mind was that Clarke wrote so well, and that the city of Diaspar was so well evoked, it remained a symbol of classic SF. Getting to know it again, the scale of it, its perfection, was a pleasant journey. Cities should be imposing in SF. And yet, while central to the narrative, Alvin himself was almost entirely forgotten. This is in large part because Clarke here is dealing in types, not personalities. Alvin is a Unique, while his friends are largely an amorphous collection, only Alystra having a little more 'go' in her because of her fascination for Alvin's difference. There are other personalities in Diaspar, but again, they are representative types, with clearly defined representative roles; even if also unique, it is because they are representative of the future machine-human symbiosis. Clarke builds the perfect eternal city where mankind has achieved immortality, and then introduces the disruptive patterns which are required to venture beyond it. While the history of Man is a thousand million years old, has grown to star-faring empire and regressed back again, the jewel of Diaspar seems the only remnant of civilisation left on Earth. Even the oceans and the mountains seem to have gone, and all about the city is desert. But this is not the case, and the middle half of the novel links up some of those deeper mysteries through the agency of Alvin's restless curiosity and exploration. Clarke discusses love, intelligence, telepathy, the differing manifestations of utopia, and the impossibility - or undesirability - of suppressing the natural inquisitiveness of humans. What are the ultimate intentions - or instructions - of the Central Computer? Can two very differently evolved societies live in harmony? What happened to mankind in the long evolution of its empire? Is chaos a necessary function of any civilisation? The turn of events occurs rapidly, and takes a direction unexpected - if only I had paused to think, instead of turning pages so readily. And it is an exciting turn. The malaise incipient in the everyday comfort of Diaspar is disrupted within a day, overturned and left behind. Clarke moves us from utopian SF to space opera in a moment, the clue in the title. His ideas are wide-ranging and have seeded kernels of many a science fiction novel since: vast spaceships, telepathic entities, utopian pan-galactic civilisations, pan-galactic internecine wars, identity storage, artificial solar systems, the galactic dragon... His survey of such operatic tropes is almost an essay on the various manifestations of the canon. The vastness of his scale is impressive. And it is written so that you fly through this novel. I will re-read Rendezvous With Rama (1973) now, having forgotten the detail of that, since this revisit has proved so fruitful. The Deep Range [June 1957] Written in 1957, and set around 2050 with colonies on Mars and planned exploitation of the seas and habitation of Venus, Clarke's pseudo-science fiction foray into Earth's deep oceans contains anomalies similar to those made by Asimov, also writing widely in the '50s, before the Soviet and US exploratory space probes since the Sixties informed of Venus's inhospitable conditions (96% CO2 atmosphere, surface level pressure x100 of Earth and a mean temperature of 460°C), assuming habitable seas on the planet. Another is the underestimate of Earth's population around 2050, of five billion, even accounting for populations on Mars and the Moon. But this is contextual, and not directly pertinent to the story, which is set in a near-future where the seas' plankton and whale meat provide a substantial quotient of the world's food requirements, and the herding and control of the world's cetaceous species is a responsibility of the Bureau of Whales of the World Food Organisation, a branch of the World Secretariat. Our principal is Walter Franklin, ex-space farer and 'astrogator' once responsible for Earth-Mars transits, reassigned to Earth after an accident. Split into three parts, the first deals with the tutelage of Franklin by Don Burley, a First Warden in the bureau, who becomes a friend as Franklin ascends the promotional ladder, first as warden (part two) and then as director (part three). The narrative provides a very creditable development of the activities of the whale bureau, marine biology being one of Clarke's passions from the mid-Fifties in Sri Lanka, which features in part three. Clarke's writing is always convincing and evocative, and the occasional anomaly in prediction is little to his penchant for providing psychological verisimilitude, such as Franklin's space-claustrophobia, something which it is all too easy to understand as he descends miles into the darkness of the oceans' mountainous chasms. But the momentum of the story is slowed through part three, and while there is a discussion of the ethics of animal farming and slaughter, and a touching on the utopian aspects of the advanced civilisation which pertain to this, I have encountered similar deflation at this point in other Clarke works (Childhood's End, 1953, notably). This is a circuitous story of some charm and an easy read, but I consider it peripheral to the science fiction canon, since it confines itself to Earth's oceans within its humanist speculative fiction, and while of interest throughout, lives in a little niche of its own and thus doesn't wow. My copy came in a hardback of Four Great SF Novels, containing The City And The Stars (1956), A Fall Of Moondust (1961) and Rendezvous With Rama (1973), two of which I will re-read, and one anew, and as a collection represents the variety of Clarke's oeuvre. A Fall Of Moondust [1961] Written in 1961 prior to the Moon surveying spacecraft of the Sixties and the Apollo series of moon orbits (8, 1968) and landings (11, 1969 to 17, 1972, -13), Clarke establishes the Lunar landscape early on, on which to set his space thriller, in our own back yard, so to speak, in terms of space exploration of the Solar System or space opera's grand sweep of the universe. As usual, Clarke is interested in bedding his story in verisimilitude of detail. The problem is, this is a very local event which counts on the detective work of known science, of problem solving, not of the imagination and creativity of a new world or environment, like Childhood's End (1953), Rendezvous With Rama (1973) or The City And The Stars (1956), which deal with aliens, their spaceships, and a far-future human city. The breadth of those novels is dependent upon creative imagination. The depth of this offering is dependent upon known (or closely projected) local space. Thus, it hasn't the imaginative breadth to excite as they did, and as a result is somewhat slow through the first three quarters. Despite the initial lack of thrill of the thriller, in what is essentially a mundane story for science fiction, Clarke does manage to make out of it a human story, revealing individuals of a hitherto nebulous community, apart from a few key leaders, trapped together. But he goes too far even here, involving us, although briefly, in the petty antics of a news-hungry reporter eager to break the story of the rescue before his competitors, and this generates too many words amid a host of yawns, while not advancing the plot. But Clarke is punctilious if not pedantic, and the story sags before the rescue operation proper. Yet Clarke has a great sense of pace, and it picks up and up as we move toward the eventual nail-biting rush of the rescue. A false start, a recovery, new problems, new solutions, further, more urgent problems.... The thriller is resumed and the developing pressure built towards the end is a literary match for that of the dust beneath which the twenty-odd tourists are trapped. But this is no similar dust to Earth's; the Moon's dust, billions of years old, is like a liquid talcum powder, with its unique viscous properties and dangers at a certain depth. Clarke adds in further terrors, and the roller-coaster he has designed courses its way frantically to a desperate finish. Despite a very slow start and development, Clarke's simple tale of accident and rescue on the Moon, in the Sea of Thirst, ramps up its tempo to a thrilling finish - much like a long distance runner pacing themselves before a sprint finish. Well constructed, decently peopled science fiction, and while not the space opera of contending civilisations, a credit to humankind's ingenuity, oddness, and the desperate will to live, as well as Clarke's superb reasoning and writing. His ending turned it round for me, where I was quite bored by half way. I'm glad I finished it. Rendezvous With Rama [1973] Rama, god of the Hindu pantheon, designated appellation of the twenty by fifty kilometre cylindrical alien spacecraft en route through the Solar System, 2130. The appellation of the seventh avatar of Vishnu the Preserver registers hopefulness that the alien entity is not on a course of destruction. But its trajectory takes it close to the Sun, and so the exploration party landing on its 'northern' face has only three weeks for investigation before they lose the artefact on its tangential visit. Unless it alters course into an elliptical around the Sun.... Clarke's definition of the population of the Solar System rectifies assumptions of the early '50s that Venus could be habitable, based on contrary information of its hostile environment from the Soviet and US probes of the later Fifties and Sixties, though he does have a colony on Mercury, that inhospitable local Hell, and on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter's Ganymede, Saturn's Titan and Neptune's Triton. He utilizes a host of logical rationalisations to gradually open up the environment of Rama as the exploration team learn incrementally more - and come across some mysteries and surprises. Many more questions are spawned as they do: is Rama on a planned trajectory, with its own propulsion drive? If so, what is that propulsion drive? Is it housed in one of its 'cities'? Clarke uses the Rama Committee, of planetary ambassadors and space experts (exobiologist, anthropologist, historian, and so on) co-ordinated from the Moon to pose and answer these questions, as much as Cmdr. Norton and his team of specialists (space reconnaissance, comms, etc.) on the exploratory missions. One of the problems inherent in having so many experts and specialists is that dialogue is keyed around their specialisms rather than their characters. In fact, very few of them are invested in character as such, and so it often becomes confusing who is actually speaking, despite their monikers. Who's the ambassador of Mars again? Which one is Rodrigo? What was the name of the Endeavour's XO? This is a recurrent 'feature' of Clarke's novels. I've not long finished The City And The Stars (1956) for the second time, and I still can't remember the protagonist's name, even though he is the most deeply charactered of the few who are in the book. This is because Clarke often deals in types or roles, rather than characters, and it shows very much in Rama. Yet despite these shortfalls usually richly found in mainstream novels, Clarke's exploration of Rama, with its gradual reveals and advances of information, from both the Rama Committee and the Endeavour exploration team, is quite exciting. 'What's next?' is a key trope of good sci-fi, and while Clarke's emotional development is limited, his delivery and technical merits are strong and sound. Equivalent sci-fi works are perhaps Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970), or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, also of 1970, which immediately preceded this first Rama work, both flagships of what might be deemed the sci-fi exploration or discovery sub-genre. Clarke's depiction of computer storage in Rama is misguided, since we know how digitised storage of images is held in our own age. But his idea is necessarily 'pictorial', and transmits the idea readily enough in order to give a scale of the tripedal Ramans. Most of sci-fi's predictive terms for near-future technologies also seem rather clumsy to us, such as the 'viddies' Norton sends to his wives and families, termed 'videos' not long after his book - but he was not far off. Apart from these minor anachronisms, Rendezvous With Rama is expertly developed to its final conclusion with an urgent momentum matching Rama's flight past the Sun, and an enjoyably sophisticated jigsaw puzzle of a novel that credibly suggests an alien intelligence far, far in advance of our own, even shifted into the future, where humankind has colonised the Solar system. It is, however, more a demonstration of logical competence than exciting space opera, and 10 years from now, I will most likely have forgotten much of it, as I had of my previous reading. But perhaps that is merely the action of my ageing FIFO brain, like a glass brim-full. Nonetheless, it has an integrity and sureness that is satisfying, even while it doesn't send you to places that great space opera does. It is a tale of our back yard, in terms of space, but a very interesting if not thrilling journey. * A fine array of disparate science fiction stories covering different environments, from the deep oceans of Earth, to the dust of the Moon, to a visiting alien spaceship, and a far-future space opera, Clarke's sci-fi is always well written, very well constructed, and logically sound to a very high degree of scientific competence, even while at times lacking in depth of character, preferring types, and largely adhering to near-future speculation, even here only briefly branching out into space opera. But the combination of these four novels in one compendium made for four good reads. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 24, 2021
|
Jul 07, 2021
|
May 24, 2021
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
163
| 
| 1407230077
| 9781407230078
| 1407230077
| 4.12
| 172,270
| Jun 1973
| 2006
|
really liked it
|
Rama, god of the Hindu pantheon, designated appellation of the twenty by fifty kilometre cylindrical alien spacecraft en route through the Solar Syste
Rama, god of the Hindu pantheon, designated appellation of the twenty by fifty kilometre cylindrical alien spacecraft en route through the Solar System, 2130. The appellation of the seventh avatar of Vishnu the Preserver registers hopefulness that the alien entity is not on a course of destruction. But its trajectory takes it close to the Sun, and so the exploration party landing on its 'northern' face has only three weeks for investigation before they lose the artefact on its tangential visit. Unless it alters course into an elliptical around the Sun.... Clarke's definition of the population of the Solar System rectifies assumptions of the early '50s that Venus could be habitable, based on contrary information of its hostile environment from the Soviet and US probes of the later Fifties and Sixties, though he does have a colony on Mercury, that inhospitable local Hell, and on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter's Ganymede, Saturn's Titan and Neptune's Triton. He utilizes a host of logical rationalisations to gradually open up the environment of Rama as the exploration team learn incrementally more - and come across some mysteries and surprises. Many more questions are spawned as they do: is Rama on a planned trajectory, with its own propulsion drive? If so, what is that propulsion drive? Is it housed in one of its 'cities'? Clarke uses the Rama Committee, of planetary ambassadors and space experts (exobiologist, anthropologist, historian, and so on) co-ordinated from the Moon to pose and answer these questions, as much as Cmdr. Norton and his team of specialists (space reconnaissance, comms, etc.) on the exploratory missions. One of the problems inherent in having so many experts and specialists is that dialogue is keyed around their specialisms rather than their characters. In fact, very few of them are invested in character as such, and so it often becomes confusing who is actually speaking, despite their monikers. Who's the ambassador of Mars again? Which one is Rodrigo? What was the name of the Endeavour's XO? This is a recurrent 'feature' of Clarke's novels. I've not long finished The City And The Stars (1956) for the second time, and I still can't remember the protagonist's name, even though he is the most deeply charactered of the few who are in the book. This is because Clarke often deals in types or roles, rather than characters, and it shows very much in Rama. Yet despite these shortfalls usually richly found in mainstream novels, Clarke's exploration of Rama, with its gradual reveals and advances of information, from both the Rama Committee and the Endeavour exploration team, is quite exciting. 'What's next?' is a key trope of good sci-fi, and while Clarke's emotional development is limited, his delivery and technical merits are strong and sound. Equivalent sci-fi works are perhaps Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970), or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, also of 1970, which immediately preceded this first Rama work, both flagships of what might be deemed the sci-fi exploration or discovery sub-genre. Clarke's depiction of computer storage in Rama is misguided, since we know how digitised storage of images is held in our own age. But his idea is necessarily 'pictorial', and transmits the idea readily enough in order to give a scale of the tripedal Ramans. Most of sci-fi's predictive terms for near-future technologies also seem rather clumsy to us, such as the 'viddies' Norton sends to his wives and families, termed 'videos' not long after his book - but he was not far off. Apart from these minor anachronisms, Rendezvous With Rama is expertly developed to its final conclusion with an urgent momentum matching Rama's flight past the Sun, and an enjoyably sophisticated jigsaw puzzle of a novel that credibly suggests an alien intelligence far, far in advance of our own, even shifted into the future, where humankind has colonised the Solar system. It is, however, more a demonstration of logical competence than exciting space opera, and 10 years from now, I will most likely have forgotten much of it, as I had of my previous reading. But perhaps that is merely the action of my ageing FIFO brain, like a glass brim-full. Nonetheless, it has an integrity and sureness that is satisfying, even while it doesn't send you to places that great space opera does. It is a tale of our back yard, in terms of space, but a very interesting if not thrilling journey. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 28, 2021
|
Jun 21, 2021
|
Apr 13, 2021
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
158
| 
| 057136487X
| 9780571364879
| 057136487X
| 3.74
| 370,612
| Mar 02, 2021
| Mar 02, 2021
|
really liked it
|
Artificial Intelligence is both the new hope and the new fear. It at once embodies the desire to create a human-equivalent robot, thus android, and th
Artificial Intelligence is both the new hope and the new fear. It at once embodies the desire to create a human-equivalent robot, thus android, and the Frankenstein Complex, that phrase coined by Asimov in 'The Robot Chronicles' (1990), reflecting society’s anxieties over uncontrolled technological advance. That AI is with us in our daily lives at the moment - in internet sites' marketing algorithms, in apps and devices such as Siri and Alexa, advertised by MS as a decisive strategic advantage - does not worry us, and often makes us feel warm that even an app can understand your own preferences and suggest similar ones, performing correlated searches in the blink of an eye. While research globally into android-like robots is moving apace, with everything being replicated from friendliness to hand movement, walking motion and facial expression, the current state of development leaves these advanced models - like iCub, a one-metre tall Opensource humanoid robot, and RoboThespian, a robot actor, and Nao, a research and education robot that has great dance moves - very short of any realistic android that can move, walk, talk and respond with human proximity. We might say these 'sixth generation' robots are perhaps at age six in terms of their human simulation. But they are used in health, research and educational institutions globally, and development is ongoing into skin replication and simulation of other biological human properties and functions, and therefore we are already in the age of regular sales of artificial 'friends'. What Ishiguro does is take a few steps into the near future in his speculative sci-fi novel and give us third and fourth generation androids being sold as Artificial Friends to children/young adults. Klara is a fourth series B2 generation AF. (view spoiler)[She is particularly remarkable for her unique perception of behaviour, chosen by Josie, a fourteen year old girl with a debilitating physical condition. What is special is that they fell in love with each other at first sight, as Josie looked through the store's window and saw Klara sitting there smiling at her. (hide spoiler)] Our story is unfolded through the perspective of Klara, who is getting used to human (and android) behaviour generally(view spoiler)[, and Josie's specifically (hide spoiler)]. The Sun is significant in that the robots are self-charging using solar power, and thus considered by the AFs almost as a god. It starts off slow, moving at the pace of Klara's retrospective account, which we assume is roughly that of a ten-year-old. Ishiguro posits the story in America, with his use of 'sidewalk' and 'highway', 'neighbor' and 'movie theater', as well as dropped conjunctions in speech, though he doesn't succumb to 'gotten'. It's omission of any specific place names is permitted through the first person perspective of Klara, who is 'new', and whose visual acuity is represented in matrices and geometric spatial awareness, and may be perceptive of 'personal spaces' or indicative of the need to recalibrate for disorientation. While her referencing of grids and oblongs feels a little clunky at first, its usage effectively gives us the impression of being in Klara's mind, seeing through her eyes, a specifically localised awareness. This allows us to start thinking like her, and, along with her user-friendly responses and behaviours, effectively allows us to become the new alien. It's relatively child-like simplicity of speech and observation also helps create a world of the child/ young adolescent(view spoiler)[, and so sympathise with Josie's world (hide spoiler)]. About a quarter the way through we get the intimation that something is radically different about this society of the future. Odd terms appear amidst the odd behaviour, further emphasising the alien, Klara's perspective is doubly removed and doubly alien, her newness among humans and her new family. Gradually, we come to learn that she is about the height of a child, while her responses are distinctly adult. This is in contrast to the strange emotional behaviours of her new family and their friends and neighbours. It shifts our view. But being amongst these odd human behaviours levels the field: Klara is no more alien than they. Having established the slightly sideways-shifted environment, we spend much of the rest of the time within dysfunctional families, and with needy parents. We are aware partly that this is due to the alienation of people within their new society, reliant on new genetic techniques and programmes and on robots, living with androids in the home, but also losing jobs to them en masse. The social fears inherent in the genre see society becoming more dystopian, causing a little chill. This may be tomorrow's world. Yet Klara's motives and responses are always encouraging and optimistic. The problem is, her entire world view is predicated on her single greatest dependency, the Sun. We wait for the insoluble conflict, yet it doesn't arrive, while we witness further the very unreliability of the human parents because of their neediness. The epilogue is the moment when all the emotion of the piece coalesces. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro succeeded right from the start, through our direct resonance with the school story, to imbue the novel and our hearts with that touch of sensitive love, wrapped in sadness. In Klara And The Sun, this was kept at bay for much of the novel by the third-person manner and speech of Klara, but that very tenor becomes the foundation for the empathy we feel in its closing pages. Without this amazing gift of expression Klara And The Sun would be a common novel. With it, it is uncommonly sensitive, and we respond sympathetically to its final waves of sadness about love, longing and loneliness, reminding us of the love we bore for, perhaps, the first dog in our families, though we would not wish to replicate the remembrance of their passing, glad for the composite memory of happy days with parting. Oh. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 14, 2021
|
May 16, 2021
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
157
| 
| 0450000893
| 9780450000898
| 0450000893
| 4.28
| 1,466,249
| Jun 01, 1965
| 1968
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 1986
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
150
| 
| 3.89
| 338,092
| Jul 01, 1969
| May 1979
|
liked it
|
'For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be' (New English Library, 1979, p.169). One of those is the gr 'For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be' (New English Library, 1979, p.169). One of those is the greatness of this sequel, after its superlative predecessor. One of the salient aspects of the first Dune story (1965), beyond its novelty, its world-building, its characters and its overall plot, was its construction, or rather, what it was founded on. A combination of fantasy and science fiction, it had, through its Fremen culture on Arrakis and its warring Houses which ruled planets under the combined symbionts of CHOAM, the Landsraad, the Spacing Guild and the Emperor Shaddam IV, a thoroughly sound sociological base with the magnitude of space opera. While the advanced technology - translight space travels, huge space freighters - was kept in check locally with glowglobes and hunter-seekers that combined futuristic technologies - AG - with antiquarian presentation - the lethal hunter-seeker was a clumsy large injection needle of alchemical metals that glided silently through the air - it evoked a strange anitquated style with the 'magic' that comes with a sufficiently highly advanced civilisation. Yet still that civilisation relied upon old customs and ritual central to human discord. Yet the most ancient civilisation and customs, that of the Fremen, was required in order to perfect that water-starved world and cause a revolution that spread across a thousand worlds in its religious fervour, oppressed by the genetic accident of Paul Atreides and his Bene Gesserit upbringing and mother, and the generations-long project of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood in search of the Kwisatz Haderach - who should have been a woman, but for the love of Lady Jessica for her Duke Leto. In a paragraph, an entire universe, superbly constructed, defined, developed, and a cracking story of space-operatic proportions. What could follow that, a piece of sci-fi lore almost as early, as old and great as The Lord Of The Rings? Certainly, it would be difficult to re-introduce novelty of that scale, let alone the world-building, the organisation, the impetus of story.... The characters are here, but the novelty is not, and the characters are not developed with that immediacy of its predecessor. Alia is grown now to sixteen, Paul is trapped in the proliferating winds and whispers of his prescience, a god in the universe, with all held in thrall under his Holy Jihad. Along come the Face Dancers, the Tleilaxu, and their gift of the ghola Duncan Idoho, renamed Hayt, a gift from the Ambassador Guild Steersmen Edric, part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Quizarate Jihad, and prevent Paul from having an heir, to wrest control over the Bene Jesserit project of the new kwisatz harderach. But Alia - whose power is second only to Paul - is distracted by the ghola and only a shadow of what she was. Paul is bent upon a personal fate which must overthrow himself - and which we don't learn until all the conspirators have drawn in around him. The only things that might save him are the loyalties of Chani and Stilgar of their seitch days, and the fanatical loyalty of the leader of the Quizarate, Korba. They show no sign of saving themselves. The only other question is, will the ghola become Duncan and show his loyalty to his former House, or will he be Hayt, as he has been renamed? Certainly there's a lot in the mix, but the stuffing has come out, the core is unravelled, it had the impetus not of forward momentum but of imploding demise, it lacks the power and impulsion of its superlative predecessor. Stilgar has become a sideshow sycophant, Alia a shadow of Paul, not a power in herself so skilfully intimated at the end of Dune. The other fundamental difference to its originator is that where that was packed with incident as well as concept, this is packed with doubt and metaphysics, and after a while its repetition becomes very tedious. We have known for the second quarter that Paul has decided on a single path of his multiply-visioned prescience, but his constant wavering and doubt is not the mark of the strong, not even anywhere near a Fremen strength, and with his gifts, the portraiture of the Muad'dib Herbert has invested so much in building, breaks apart and becomes a secondary character, not the 'primus character' developed throughout Dune. Incident is replaced by an abstract metaphysical meaninglessness, making the book hard work. It is not the stuff of drama, never filmic. It becomes mired in its own bureaucratic plot. This is a great shame, because Dune was such a phenomenon. This is ordinary slog. You know that it has wound down to little when you are introduced late to tertiary characters. We should be in a race through urgent action, embroiled in the plot-twists and vital thoughts of Paul and Alia combatting the new threat, Stilgar and Chani flexing at their sides, but it instead boils down to a ghola that talks in riddles and a Face Dancer who is full of his own arrogance. This is not the stuff of legend. The man can write, but the story is weak. A prelude, we presume, to Children Of Dune (1976). ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 16, 2020
|
Aug 17, 2020
|
Aug 16, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
171
| 
| 0756415551
| 9780756415556
| 0756415551
| 4.05
| 1,441
| 2009
| Jan 08, 2019
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 24, 2020
|
not set
|
Apr 25, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
147
| 
| 0316212369
| 9780316212366
| 0316212369
| 4.20
| 24,347
| Oct 04, 2012
| Sep 10, 2013
|
liked it
|
The ship, Lost Grip Of Impetus Of Story To Old Man Muttering Habit, home ship On Occasion, was more of a thought than a craft, more an expression of s
The ship, Lost Grip Of Impetus Of Story To Old Man Muttering Habit, home ship On Occasion, was more of a thought than a craft, more an expression of speed than a physical manifestation. It whirled into the Izenion system with only a moment's backward glance, and unleashed a nova of confusion amidst its plethora of barely-distinctive, weirdly-named, and definitely unrelated - in a plot-wise, relevant-notioned, cognitively-linked series of unconnectedness - characters who were always getting dragged along in the wake of an accretion of smart Minds. Well, they must get bored so easily, so exponentially fast and powerful they are, compared to even virtually-accelerated humanoids. Another Culture book is a sexy idea in itself, and much anticipated by a devout and loyal readership (me). Subliming is the central concept about which this adventure takes place. It's not a new Banks concept, and it's a bit over-cooked in the exposition. Needless to say, Culture ships become aware of a suspicious incident, because it's interesting and morally the right thing to do. Beyond unimaginably intricate dreamscape creation, watching stars' solar flares, and generally altering their own nature, upscaling, downgrading, that sort of trick... what else is there to do? Of course, we have the sections of repartee from the irrepressibly precocious ships - this time with some very stupid names {Washing Instruction Chip; You Call This Clean?; Beats Working}, some very smart/witty names {Caconym (a taxonomic name that is unacceptable for linguistic reasons); Refreshingly Unconcerned With The Vulgar Exigencies Of Veracity} and some forgettable boring names (Empiricist; Warm, Considering; Contents May Differ; Pressure Drop}, but the rat-tat-tat smartness is initially clogged up by a vastly over-complicated exposition and development. Then it takes off. This is my third time of reading, and when I made this last decision, I concurrently asked myself why, even as I was pulling it off the shelf? It wasn't one of my favourite Culture novels, but there was something in it that drew me to it again. It took me a while to discover what. About half way through, after you're acclimated to all the systems, ships, competing factions and humanoid characters - and there's over 50 of all these - you find Banks on one of his 'Let me just explain about this concept a mo' intrusions - and it just falls into place. Smart, amusing, highly articulate, if a little over-done, it becomes fun. And that is what he does best, after great plots, sexy characters, novel concepts, amusing scenarios, smart integrity and wonderful ship names. Then there's the battle scene, more a skirmish, considering the vastness of tech available, but that's fun too. And so I found out why some unconscious part of me wanted to read this last Culture novel for a third time. Especially considering that I didn’t enjoy it much the first two times. (Just spoilt, by then, I guess; relativity, and all that). To get to that point of the book. There is, also - and not unwelcome - the central figure of a female agent, this time a reluctant Gzilt reserve-military musician, and not a wanabee Culture creature (remembering with joy the introduction of the deliciously immature debutante beauty Ulver Seich in Excession), and a later insertion of a new (woken Stored) female SC aide as well. Their respective adventures are worth waiting for - it's just the build-up, and all those characters, that seems a little over-convoluted, a little too complicated, a little restated-let's-move-on-shall-we frustrating. Cossont actually isn't much fun as a character - what's fun is what happens to her. If this last Banks Culture novel has faults, it's these: the complicated plot and series of sub-plots and all of its 50+ characters takes half the novel to come to terms with (but once there, you can start to enjoy it so much more); its main humanoid female character, Cossont, isn't particularly stimulating, not in the way Ulver Seich or Diziet Sma were (and so were very hard to follow); most of the ship names were zestless; and when he accelerates towards the finale, he has a slightly annoying insistence - to make all as credibly detailed and topographic as the ending seems to require - of inserting little paragraphs of descriptive prose between the dialogue, and it's the dialogue that drives the action at this point (else we get mired by adjusting to the changing topography instead of being rushed along the whirlwind of frenzied fighting). The skirmish at the Dataversity is the best piece of action, and even here, angles seem all too relevant; without a map, all those left and right turns just confuse. But while it's not the most inventive portion of this rather complicated construction, it's really the most fun - and fun is what he intended as the primary factor, I'm absolutely sure, whether it be in all those mind games (the castellation of castles within a portion of one of the Minds of the Caconym), or the sheer out-wittery of the Culture ships when in action. The Culture, which will forever seem that one-time-forever inspired creation of plausible-alternative technologically-awesome sociologically-sound civilisational SF unmatched by any contemporary, by many light-years, and that is a world as alive inside me as Narnia or Middle-Earth or Gormenghast - and that is saying something! It brightens up the sky for me, Banks's sci-fi. This may not be his best, but perhaps it's a bit like getting used to a new wine or whisky, after your favourites. Persistence is worth it. I know. This was my third pass. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
Apr 03, 2020
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
149
| 
| 1529111250
| 9781529111255
| 1529111250
| 3.59
| 32,426
| Apr 18, 2019
| 2020
|
liked it
|
'The moment we couldn't tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine' (Vintage, 2020, p
'The moment we couldn't tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine' (Vintage, 2020, p.84). Ian McEwan - probably our pre-eminent writer today, along with Ishiguro - provides his companion to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) of a technologically altered recent British history, here in answer to Nick Bostrom's discussion of Superintelligence (2014) and AI. It is very current, and also prescient. The imminence and immanence of human-like AI cohabiting with us was, of course, first articulated by Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (1920) - who first called these artificial human beings 'robots', which is Czech for 'forced workers', or 'slaves' - brought to prominence in Asimov's, 'I, Robot' (1950), and its relation to the first intimation of seeking immortality in Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) discussed in Asimov's 'Introduction' to The Rest of the Robots (1967), along with all the other interim manifestations: the Clockwork Automatons of the 1700s, Rabbi Loew’s 16th-century Golems, and as far back as the creation myths found in Vedic Scriptures and the Mahabharata, Prometheus plasticator, The Bible's Genesis story, and Adam and Eve and The Fall. And, naturally (in the end), Asmiov's The Bicentennial Man [Feb 1976]. Bodies made of clay have come a long way. There is often an anticipatory relish to opening and starting a new book. Sometimes this excitement is special. These days (since I've read all of Banks's, most of Ishiguro's, Murakami's and Atwood's) I mostly experience it with a new (or old, but new to me) Ian McEwan novel. This is my third in a row. But this time I felt I was entering a world primed specifically for me. I love all these tales of AI, artificial robots, androids, machines like us, as well as sentient ships and science fiction generally. So this experience felt like it was actually 'I' who was unwrapping Adam, plugging him in, charging him up - and setting the personalised preference for no pubic hair (one of God's more offensive creations, surely; a design fault if ever there were one). I was soon to be disabused of my arrogance. Sure, the first models would be called Adam and Eve, just as Charlie's love interest is the fascinating Miranda, she of that Brave New World (that hath such people in it). And Charlie is, well, a bit of a Charlie, a bit of a prat. Charlie is, it transpires, a most improbable protagonist to illumine a Turing, or even an advanced Turing machine. He is just an irritatingly contradictory, irrational and unsympathetic protagonist. Not even a villain, just wishy-washy stupid, while believing in his own intelligence. Someone without enough intelligence to realise how stupid he is. Towards the end, he suddenly has a convenient spate of old friends, for the purpose of allegory. Yet he was to all other intents a loner; you never meet one, except Miranda. It's a thoroughly unconvincing mix. I have my reservations about Miranda, too. While she demonstrates a certain intelligence, and moral righteousness, I'm not sure that her method of retribution in order to correct a wrong and simultaneously absolve her own guilt for not being there for her friend were compatible; she simply should have acted responsibly once she found out, and discussed this with her friend's mother. This is the central human moral conundrum of the piece. The other is how people like us deal with machines like them. Of course, we could offset all this with the levels of perfection and blend of intelligence, speed of thought, resourcefulness, humaneness and strength of Adam, which is partly McEwan's message; but if it is, it's unconvincingly done. So many contradictions in structure: how could a failure like Charlie get one of only 25 first models of Adams/Eves when a large percentage were bought by rich Arabs? It is simply implausible, he wouldn't get a look in. Why, once he has got Adam home does he have him powered down more than active? Fear, we must assume, a theme Asimov draws on in 'I, Robot'. It's a strangely halting, implausible progression. And in the end, how could two such irresponsible people like Charlie and Miranda be deemed suitable to adopt a child from dismal origins, ignoring ignorance and limitations of the system? I mean, in our eyes they would be rejected outright, no matter the child's relative background. And that's my main thrust. Given the irresponsibility and wishy-washy morality of our two human protagonists - their various incompatible stupidities and moral concerns - how can you take seriously the juxtaposition of the essentially moral Adam. Surely you would need mature human equivalents, not the selfish urgencies of two immature and not very smart young adults, for this is what they are, essentially, whatever their ages - compared to Turing, for McEwan does use his intelligence as the equivalent human barometer to and insight into AI intelligence. But there's something more... The first half of the novel doesn't feel like it's been rationally constructed. With its patchwork of recycled bits of cloth, it's a strange hybrid bit of theatrical drapery. I really started to dislike the novel only 50 pages in. But... he has done this before. The problems with this novel are manifold. First, there is the inexplicable alteration of 1980s Britain. Now, if the premise is to create an environment where - Turing still being alive - technological advances come early and machines like us can exist in the home, this is a perfect equation. But to further alter the history of the times does not seem to me to serve any valid purpose, unless for furtherance of plot, or to posit a useful alternate history from which the author might draw useful moral inferences. Which he does not. If we use Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) as the comparator - and it is by all means such - then his alteration of technology(view spoiler)[, the harvesting of donor organs from a 'cloned' underclass, humans by any definition, but servile to the remaining population, (hide spoiler)] is the entire environment needed for the plot. Ishiguro, though, altered no other aspects of society, as McEwan has done; in fact, Ishiguro's detailed referencing creates context. His altered world remained integral to plot, and, most importantly, to the tonal quality of his novel, which is very much the heart of it. What McEwan does, however, is try to create a tonality that depends upon historical changes which create a confused tenor, and which do not directly serve the plot. So the changes beyond the technological serve little purpose of plot or tone, but rather confuse than aid. I would rather all of this political-historical rewrite be omitted, while retaining the premise of early technological breakthroughs, and have the novel 50 pages briefer. This is the major problem of this novel. Read Never Let Me Go and feel how that novel is so tonally resonant, developing and exploring empathy in such subtle as well as grand ways that it leaves a resounding resonance thereafter, one akin to pure lasting love mingled with pain - the very essence of the human condition. Machines Like Me leaves little but irritation and confusion from a series of questions of absurdity. It's tacit purpose is to offset human irrationality and stupidity against the beauty of an advanced AI, that, simply because it is not made of flesh, doesn't mean it should not be treated with just the same reverence for life and selfhood. But doing so not against the private lives of, say, Turing and his companion, but against the immature stupidity of Charlie and Miranda is, well, unconvincing. Another example is the odd random incomprehensible sentence, that makes no sense on its own or in context: 'But secular tradition couldn't provide such familiar verses polished to a gleam by the long-discarded sincerity of previous generations.' (p.54) Sorry? Say that backwards? What does that mean? It's as though he'd given bits of the novel over to some AI algorithm designed to write a novel in sentences that sound like they might be integral and what someone might say (a Whitehall bureaucrat, for example), but which means absolutely nothing to anyone with one foot in reality. And said algorithm might need some heuristics altered towards meaningful sentence construction. 'Transcribing human experience into words, and the words into aesthetic structures isn't possible for a machine' (p.189) doesn't even cover this oddity. It is the very definition of politicese. Too many 'what's? Like being assaulted by scratchy little urchin thoughts and having to wear woollen pyjamas, having nauseous synaesthesia and having to swallow off milk or bile. Just off. But then again, the appositeness of meaning is ineluctably bound by the semantic constraints that eat their own tails, aren't they? And blue too. If you hold them inside out. Buggar, there goes me bloody ruby-on-rails algorithm up its own arse again. Must fix it. Next novel, perhaps. Despite all this - and I take it, it must have been mood setting, setting the scene - the description of the motives for the row which was inevitable was back to form: we are ridiculously self-defeating, yet need to express hurt through anger. How we fight this autonomic tendency, yet submit to its waves at the time! All of us have done it, and those of us, in long term relationships, who have not, must seem strangely inhuman. The knight moves of female argument impress with their very own success; we take them as a deliberate wind-up, justified by their seeming irrationality. There is a stalemate implicit in those arguments, for the one is expressing their feelings efficiently, the other contending with their own via the superior imperative of logic. The old war. Between the sexes. If either were intent on the desired outcome, it would be to listen, try to understand, concede you may not, but conciliate towards that end, without trying to raze each other's pride and integrity. But anger is the easiest emotion, and even easier to capitulate to. But it's not only tonally that the story jars. If it is given that its strong sense of irrationality is a deliberate ploy to form its theme that human beings are essentially irrational, then it alienates the reader from the work. Whatever those intentions may have been, they have been unsuccessful, jarring. Ishiguro's work feels like a seamless whole, with a holistic integrity, thoughtful, beautifully developed, convincing, empathic, tonally gorgeous, and lasting. Largely because his two key protagonists have sensitive, selfless intelligence. Now, some of McEwan's novels start out with this irritating tenor - take Enduring Love - and end well, and therefore are worth the investment of half discomfort, half enjoyment. I'm not sure this one is. This is partly because of the inconsistencies already delineated, but also because of others. These may be minor, but they are salutary. Take the use of 'slow-loris' to explain something moving in slow motion. Surely that should be 'loris-slow'? We guess he means 'slower than a loris going slowly, for it', but, well... Yes, there are interesting issues discussed, such as the fate of literature once we are all permanently connected through brain-implants of machine interfaces to the great web - or the Gaiafield, as Peter F. Hamilton defined it in The Dreaming Void (2008). And the impending phenomenon of stem cell repairs for people otherwise crippled for life. But all these things have been discussed before, less tentatively, and are with us now in germinal or prototypical form. And these passages are brief (relief-giving) inserts in the development of the plot, which is nonetheless still founded on those basic absurdities: how Charlie can come by a very expensive machine which would have been as unaffordable and rarer than the Bugatti Veron; how Charlie is both insightful enough to earn a crust from playing the markets and understanding concepts of quantum mechanics and AI, but stupid enough to give a thug his address and fall in love with an emotionally remote young woman... and so on. All these improbabilities, the confused altered universe, the jarring tone, the lack of a sense of integrity, and the strangely opaque sentences and grammatical oddities create a sense of disorientation from and alienation with the novel. And while this sense has been a deliberate ploy of some of his other novels (the first half of Enduring Love), it has served its purpose there to drive plot and create a definitive tone, both of which lead to the climax. Here, it really does feel like the book was co-authored, one part by McEwan, the other by a not very smart or human-like AI. Much like Charlie. After all, why on earth would a mind like Turing confide in a naïf like Charlie! Charlie was but a fly; Charlie should not have been that fly, on that wall. It wasn't a good match. It just doesn't gel, this novel. Unless...? No. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 14, 2020
|
Apr 17, 2020
|
Jun 27, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
142
| 
| 185798997X
| 9781857989977
| 185798997X
| 3.37
| 1,756
| 1974
| Nov 2017
|
it was ok
|
A jumbled, confused, confusing, excessively overwritten piece in yet another dive port town on the edge of another nowhere, this time laced with drugs
A jumbled, confused, confusing, excessively overwritten piece in yet another dive port town on the edge of another nowhere, this time laced with drugs with vast reams of complex names without any context that after a short while I skipped over as meaningless. Character is suborned to creation of ghoulish atmosphere, energies (of what must be a smart mind) dissipated in favour of cramming in as much clutter as in the imagination of a delirious inmate. We don't really know much about this loser, and after the exposition, we don't really care. You've got to care by a quarter the way in, and you've got to have your bearings, the world revealed around you like newly painted segments unfolding inside a giant globe as wide as the theatre of action. But the jumble of words, striving for way-out-there while penning jagged lines to follow, means you follow in zig-zag drunken steps. I'm still slightly queasy. It's a fair guess that there will be a few who follow, and some willingly. But I got stuck, soon. Far, far too many times places and descriptions veered off into some smack-hazed hinterland of meaningless metaphors and similes that went nowhere I know of. If you're laying down your exposition, keep it less obtuse. Then we can follow, and willingly. Where Truck went, I didn't care, and only had the vaguest idea where, despite the florid, parenthetically-raddled language. Who he kept company with, neither did I care. I read on because I wanted to see what this weapon was for; or for it to be all over. To see what they were saying about him, about his language, his imagination. And realised one thing early on: it wasn't for me. Too much junk: drugs, the detritus of industrial waste and wastelands, back alleys up back alleys, the lost in wretched poverty, heaps of rubbish, contending extremist politics pretending their ideologies rule the galaxy, politicese by the power-mad, more rubbish, another junkyard, junk upon junk, and if he uses the word 'hinterland' one more time I'll scream! He did! Several times! Not a single character was of any interest. There was no relief from the incessant descriptions of muck, dross, detritus and junk. Truck fell from one tedious place and situation to another. Not the slightest relief from his complete imbecility. Not a saving grace of a character, a place, a situation, not a nauseous abstraction. It was like being forced to take drugs I didn't want. A bad acid trip. And did any of it advance plot one iota? Any of it? Not until 60 pages to go, and the dense nauseous description falls away - but does not disappear. Hype is one thing; sheer nonsense is another. This was nonsense. And then, one evening, turning to it with some lingering semblance of hope - I realised it was all one big joke; or an unbearable cyannic dream. He thinks he can keep us happy with Hell. Banks did it with so much more finesse. But at least now I know where he got his ship names from, and where the plot of Consider Phlebus [1987] with its subterranean tunnels came from... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 02, 2019
|
Jun 05, 2019
|
Jun 02, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
144
| 
| 0586049878
| 9780586049877
| 0586049878
| 3.45
| 550
| 1964
| Jun 05, 1984
|
liked it
|
'And we are their random victims.' (p.96, Panther, 1984) Oh dear. Dull, dated, antiquated. Though well written. Apart from the obvious anachronisms - Ve 'And we are their random victims.' (p.96, Panther, 1984) Oh dear. Dull, dated, antiquated. Though well written. Apart from the obvious anachronisms - Venusian asparagus (slightly burnt, I expect); Charon classified as a planet - this is science fiction (non-space opera) of an old school which may have seemed like a second golden age then, but which is rooted in anthropological turgidity that has little to do with space except its wider context and not very far off Wells. It's like a less well developed Cherryh novel about finding a sufficiently inappropriate alien species without the anthropological - or xenopological - detail. Anyway, any Earth-based sf is of far less interest than space opera. Mired in the eternally human context of intellectual bitching, pulling it down to the mundane and pedestrian, we should at least be distracted by the additional layers of Asimovian humourous critique of academia and bureaucracy and snipily vying factions of human intelligentsia, if nothing much else exists of story. But this rather dull biocentric view on aliens and alien life and communication founders in the back yard of both science fiction and its own limited parameters. Stylistically it lacks finesse as well as appeal, and some of the names of futurism are plain silly ('antivom', 'synthash', 'sinkers', 'techni', 'tubbies', 'ockpu', 'rhinomen', the odd Orwellian acronym); although there are some good ones ('esod', 'utod', 'werewhisper'). Further, the background story of the utods patently borrows from Animal Farm. The advent of interstellar travel drive is mentioned in passing as a eureka moment of some spotty youth, the context of local (Earth-bound) wars and political divisions as uninventive and consequent as a politician's marital indiscretion. As for the story, any child would know that to study an alien species, it should at least be in its natural habitat. These merely require mud. They already have healthy telomeres. And telepathy. And are seemingly painless. A little imagination is really all that's required of these so called intelligents (the men). But so little is observed by so many men absorbed by their own self-interest and comfort that this polemic about the innate evils of patriarchy and 'man' becomes irritating rather than amusingly true, and surely, science fiction should be using large brush-strokes to debate that given, not a series of annoying truisms, even though we 1) agree, and 2) read this stuff to escape that quotidian exasperation. But if anthropology - or xenology - and its debates is what interests, then this mirror is an intelligent means if a dull end, despite that it is well written, with a certain humour, and pointedly finished. None of it, though, makes for the advancement of science fiction as a canon (perhaps the concept of voluntarily changing sex), nor consequently, of interest. Sometimes you have to read to know what not to read. Thankfully it was slight in volume as well as quality. John Scalzi's Old Man's War [2005] had much the same feel, but did it all a hundred-fold, with many more sound ideas. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 15, 2019
|
Jun 16, 2019
|
May 27, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
165
| 
| 1841490954
| 9781841490953
| 1841490954
| 4.28
| 75,100
| Aug 1988
| 1999
|
really liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 2005
|
May 17, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
139
| 
| 1857231465
| 9781857231465
| 1857231465
| 4.28
| 75,100
| Aug 1988
| Jan 01, 1989
|
really liked it
|
My third read of this novel over 14 years and, where I was once sceptical about some of its devices, I am no longer. Banks's style, while at times, in
My third read of this novel over 14 years and, where I was once sceptical about some of its devices, I am no longer. Banks's style, while at times, in his later Culture novels, slightly bogged down by his proselytising about pet subjects - storage, Subliming - and on occasion, here, a little turgid with lists, is part of the whole fun of reading him. He says, outright: 'I'm going to have a little fun, at times sexy and at times witty, and I'm glad you're along for the ride on this one, so... welcome aboard your host for 5 years, the Limiting Factor, a de-militarised GCU (as if they ever are), and your assistant, the library droid (is if it ever was), Flere-Imsaho, where we're going to play a lot of intricate games... Not least, the game of Azad, upon which an entire belligerent and offensive empire is based, and, well, since you're The Player Of Games, we need you for a little hush-hush SC work for Contact...' The set-up is passable, if not quite sufficient grounds for blackmail (if you handled it smartly), and the development pretty well distracting, if you're the kind to work out all the puzzles before the dénouement, which was artfully done, if over too soon. But... that's the thing, isn't it, with most Banks 'M' novels: they're usually over too soon, but such great fun during the ride. Although not my favourite Culture nor 'M' novel nor Banks novel, this is still a pretty good work considering it's his second after Phloebus [1987], and building up to that piece of sheer brilliance, Excession [1996], which is one of the best (fun) sf novels I've read, alongside Asimov's Foundation trilogy [1951-53], Herbert's (first) Dune trilogy [1965-76], and Cherryh's Cyteen/Regenesis pairing [1988;2009] - and, in fact, one of the best novels I've read. This, while never so sexy nor witty nor sheer fun, is still a great read, if you're going through his sf canon by publication... and then you've got all his mainstream novels as well (Walking On Glass [1985], The Bridge [1986], The Crow Road [1992], The Business [1999]...). Such an impressive legacy. The Culture, by the way, is one of the most perfectly integral 'worlds' created in sf. Banks is up there as (not with) the best of them, even if this one is not quite. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 17, 2019
|
May 19, 2019
|
May 17, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
170
| 
| B007JWH85C
| 4.00
| 10,391
| 1988
| Mar 13, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
Outstanding. The precursor to Regenesis (2009), one of the best books I've read, successor to Downbelow Station (1981), which provides some wider back
Outstanding. The precursor to Regenesis (2009), one of the best books I've read, successor to Downbelow Station (1981), which provides some wider backstory of the development of this Union-Alliance series. While not quite full-blown space opera, it has, in its Alliance-Union series prequels, extra-Solar expansion, and is the most intensely detailed SF I've read, rivalling Asimov's Foundation series and Herbert's Dune series for the verisimilitude of their sociological foundations that make all great science fiction books GREAT. It is a psychological thriller and a SF political novel - very rare. Herbert's CHOAM and Asimov's Empire are rivalled here as political meta-civilisations - something Banks has never attained directly like these. Further - perhaps most of all - I love the character and being inside of the young Ari all the way through. You not only like her, you adore her, admire her, smile at her throughout. A perfect character. A bit girly sometimes (a hint of Elizabeth Moon), for she's a girl for much of the story. But she's smart, redefines 'precocious', one of a list of uber-geniuses: Einstein, Bok... Emory. So smart, she feels sometimes 'the universe going too slow for her mind' (audiobook 5, 3, 00:47:15). Despite the obvious technological anachronisms (taking 'tape'), this is SF of the first order. Premised on the widescale evolution of cloning, it is fundamentally about power in the new galactic quadrant. Both Emorys are constantly under threat, from without and within. Who they trust is a very limited cadre, and even those have to be suspect (it is only her bodyguard-companion clones - Catlin and Florian, beautifully drawn - who can really be trusted). Similarly for Justin and his Grant. Indeed, one major story strand is ostensibly thematically about the vicissitudes of their suffering, but the book is saved by the development of the young Ari - for although Justin may be smart, special and necessary to the new Ari, he is also an exceptionally irritating personality throughout the novel - dammit. And although Cherryh subtly alters your opinion of him as the story reaches its climax, he reminds you of having to suffer distasteful work colleagues. Yet it is this tension that pervades the book, more so than the political machinations and threats from outside, or the perverse intimate-enemy tensions from within, from Giraud and Denys. There is a distinctly vinegary flavour to this particular enforced symbiosis with Justin, and tolerance of his acid father Jordan, yet it is also these two who we follow through the sequel Regenesis, tainting everything. It is also one of the triumphs of these books that Cherryh can lean so heavily on such unpalatable irritating principal characters and yet keep you absorbed in the story and their fates. Because, above everything - and these books are rich in detail and character and in place - it is the person of the young Ari that fascinates and secures your affection. Living within her head, her thoughts, her feelings, her unique place, panders to your own need for being special but above all - makes you feel safe. If there is any presiding feeling while reading Cyteen or Regenesis - beyond total absorption, every reader's need of a novel - it is that wonderful cosy feeling whilst doing so of feeling completely safe. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 07, 2020
|
Mar 02, 2022
|
Apr 09, 2019
|
Audiobook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
182
|
| 4.04
|
liked it
|
Feb 17, 2024
|
Apr 12, 2023
|
|||||
174
|
| 4.03
|
liked it
|
Jul 07, 2022
|
Jun 23, 2022
|
|||||
172
|
| 4.00
|
not set
|
Mar 04, 2022
|
||||||
169
|
| 4.27
|
really liked it
|
Mar 2022
|
Feb 22, 2022
|
|||||
167
|
| 3.17
|
liked it
|
Feb 18, 2022
|
Feb 17, 2022
|
|||||
168
|
| 3.59
|
liked it
|
Feb 17, 2022
Oct 17, 2012
|
Feb 17, 2022
|
|||||
160
|
| 4.08
|
really liked it
|
May 27, 2021
|
May 26, 2021
|
|||||
162
|
| 4.11
|
liked it
|
Jul 07, 2021
|
May 24, 2021
|
|||||
163
|
| 4.12
|
really liked it
|
Jun 21, 2021
|
Apr 13, 2021
|
|||||
158
|
| 3.74
|
really liked it
|
May 16, 2021
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
|||||
157
|
| 4.28
|
Jan 1986
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
||||||
150
|
| 3.89
|
liked it
|
Aug 17, 2020
|
Aug 16, 2020
|
|||||
171
|
| 4.05
|
not set
|
Apr 25, 2020
|
||||||
147
|
| 4.20
|
liked it
|
Apr 03, 2020
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
|||||
149
|
| 3.59
|
liked it
|
Apr 17, 2020
|
Jun 27, 2019
|
|||||
142
|
| 3.37
|
it was ok
|
Jun 05, 2019
|
Jun 02, 2019
|
|||||
144
|
| 3.45
|
liked it
|
Jun 16, 2019
|
May 27, 2019
|
|||||
165
|
| 4.28
|
really liked it
|
Dec 2005
|
May 17, 2019
|
|||||
139
|
| 4.28
|
really liked it
|
May 19, 2019
|
May 17, 2019
|
|||||
170
|
| 4.00
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 02, 2022
|
Apr 09, 2019
|
Loading...
