A Momentary Taste of Being

Jack the Ripper, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Her Majesty the Queen with a Squirrel Monkey, and the end of the world in the year 2000.  Those are only some of the delights that await the intrepid reader willing to enter the metafictional world Mr. Palma has created for the reader in this novel. The novel consists of three interlaced stories all of which center around time travel and its possibilities and all of which involve that foremost inventor of time machines.  Because the jacket copy is so vague I hesitate to provide any additional information that might detract from the readers' enjoyment of this marvelous book. I'm not sure how I felt about the metafictional element and the occasional authorial intrusions.  They didn't particularly bother me, but I'm not certain I have enough distance to understand how they enhance or alter the work.  They were, at times, quite amusing and generally were not enough to get in the way of the determined reader....

I first picked up Edge in a bookstore because of the unique cover treatment.  There was an end-dump with books from Angry Robot ( a press I had not heard of) and this one had a cover design that was nearly all words--so much so that the title is a little difficult to distinguish the title.  The cover described what can only be described as a "Running Man" type scenario with knife fights and sudden death. So, in an England of the future where the right to vote is dictated by the willingness to carry a knife and engage in knife duels and challenges, a young man runs away from his psychiatrist's office and the young man's father goes on a legal rampage against the psychiatrist.  He also hires our knife wielding hero to find his son.  One would think given that this is a future of intense monitoring of all activity that it wouldn't be such a trick.  But just as everything is monitored, much can be cloaked, hidden, and changed in the system. We follow for much o...

An interesting, intriguing history of science fiction diagram that clamors for more attention than I can give it right now.

And Steven King's time-travel novel is announced.  It will be interesting to see how he handles the themes. What is intriguing to me is how many people think that writing outside one's home genre is something readily done.  I encounter it time and again. "I plan to write an SF novel." "Oh, have you read much SF." "No, but I watch movies and TV." It might not occur to such a one, but that acquaintance is insufficient to sustain a literary work with the specific conventions of a genre.  Many think that they will be ground-breaking and convention shattering, but to shatter conventions, one must know what the conventions are. All this really has nothing to do with Mr. King's book--it just occurs to me as a result of a conversation that occurred this weekend.

A TOR books poll lists them I have to admit to really liking Scalzi's Old Man's War , to not yet having penetrated the length of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and to being relatively ignorant of the rest.  So, I must make headway in the list and see if my tastes still coincide with those of the insiders.

The City and the City by China Miéville

Walter Jon Williams gives us a fascinating look into the world of online role playing games and gamers.  We start with our protagonist Dagmar flying into Jakarta on her way out of India and back to the U.S..  Just as she does so a currency collapse in Indonesia sends Jakarta into chaos and she finds herself trapped in the city and virtually trapped in her hotel room.  But, she's still connected.  Using those connections and getting the help of literally hundreds, if not thousands of fans, she bests the mercenaries hired by her employer to spring her from Jakarta. Back in the states one of her best friends from college is murdered and his death caught on film by one of the gamers.  And so it goes. Williams effectively explores the world in which all of the ingenuity and person power that goes into online games is exploited toward good ends--uncovering a murderer and undoing some of the damage cause in a world-wide currency crisis. The book moves--fast....

Do keep in mind that these are the musings of a rank amateur who has neither the breadth of reading nor the deep understanding of the field that might make for a more coherent set of speculations.  However, ignorance has never stopped me from flapping my gums and I don't see any particular reason to start now. One of the "givens" of zombie fiction is the so-called Zombie Apocalypse.  Given that I do have a resolutely scientific mind in these matters and I had cause to ponder this question over the weekend it occurred to me that the triggering mechanism for the plague had a great deal to do with the possibility of such an apocalypse. Let us consider the matter--if the trigger is based in the material and scientific world, it most likely consists of some strain of virus, prion, or other contagion.  This has practical consequences--either a virus, bacterium, fungal, or protozoan infection have means of redress and an incubation period.  The scenario resembles that p...

I somehow missed these before: Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars I Red Mars II The Dispossessed Ursula K. Leguin Compared with Ayn Rand's Anthem .  To be honest, I did not notice the similarity before and I've always loved this book above other highly touted Leguin.  So I'll have to pay more attention.  Am I secretly imbibing at Ayn's well--if so it must stop.

I hope to post shortly a review of This is Not a Game . But in the meantime--its sequel Deep State and how life imitates science fiction.

The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett She was also a hollywood screen writer and responsible for one of the worst muddles of script ever (though much of it wasn't her fault and she probably had no control over it.  But it is a guilty pleasure, mostly for Mancini's music-- Hatari!   To her credit she also did The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back --both of which show her in better form.

Orson Scott Card Launches two at nearly the same time

. . . that I answer in the post below-- Space Station Mir

Bibiblio challenges us to come up with 20 genre books that one could argue are not only genre, but literature. I'm not much into the realm of argument, but perhaps I can start a list of what I like (which does not make it literature) and then try to figure out whether or not it falls into this ultimately elusive category.  For now, a few books I think may fall into the category-- Mary Shelley-- Frankenstein , I don't much care for this book, finding it at times overwritten and very difficult to follow, but it did set the groundwork for what a science fiction novel could do and the themes that it could explore. Philip K. Dick-- The Man in the High Castle --perhaps his most perfect work, the best conceived and the most rivetingly written.  Does it qualify for literature?  Exploring themes first articulated in Chuang-tzu, it asks us to consider what is reality and what do we make of it. Mary Doria Russell-- The Sparrow --exploring deep themes of faith, religion, and ...

Joseph Conrad's Science Fiction novel --written in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford In case you want to read it:  The Inheritors

Not one of my favorite Asimov's, but worth a read, The God's Themselves

Otherworldly--The Year's Most Transporting Books Having read Mockingjay , I can certainly agree with that choice. I've avoided The Passage until the effect of reviews, negative and positive wears off.  I'm in the midst of Hull Zero Three and find that it is one of the more persuasive SF environments in recent years.

The Map of the world from The Man in the High Castle

World Building via Books Inq.

A review of a Korean Science Fiction film hommage á Blade Runner As a general thing I love Asian films, particularly Asian horror films, where the horror is so much more gut level than most of the splatter and torture-porn that passes for horror here.  There, all ghosts are bad and all ghosts are destructive and they're not particular interested in who or what they are destroying.  It is the disinterested malevolence that raises the Asian vision of the supernatural to truly terrifying.  One the other hand when handled deftly as in the Hong Kong film My Left Eye Sees Ghosts you have one of the frothiest confections of a film since Hollywood exited the 1930s/40s.