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hayleyish's review against another edition
4.0
Most of the men are gone, those that are left compete to be the top 'Pig' and women who can afford it or who get it as a perk of the job vote on which one's offspring they want to have. Dr. Baldino already has a clone daughter but she wants the real deal and her work developing assassin bugs on a male 'Y-autistic' clone is supposed to get her there.
That's one thread of the novel, the other is girlz w/guns shooting up the maul.
Some mysteries are there to be seen throughout, you just have to twig, and others are slowly revealed over the course of the book. From about 40% (I'm a Kindle reader) it became unputdownable for me and I'll definitely be reading Tricia Sullivan's Lightborn soon.
That's one thread of the novel, the other is girlz w/guns shooting up the maul.
Some mysteries are there to be seen throughout, you just have to twig, and others are slowly revealed over the course of the book. From about 40% (I'm a Kindle reader) it became unputdownable for me and I'll definitely be reading Tricia Sullivan's Lightborn soon.
house_of_scatha's review against another edition
3.0
Not 100% sure about this one, If I could, I'd give a 3.5. Some parts were brilliant, but some parts were frustrating, and unfortunately it was less than the sum of its parts. For a feminist sci-fi novel I found it odd that the two male protagonists and the first person narrator were the most sympathetic characters. Many of the other women characters could have just as easily been men in another novel. They are cardboard cutouts sprayed pink.
The novel didn't really say very much interesting about a future society ruled by women, It seemed to be junk-food corporate America-lite with women at the mercy of their desire to breed and the limited options available to them. Even the really smart Doctor does incredibly dumb things in the presence of male pheromones.
Yes, its supposed to be about evolution and the arms race between viruses and the human immunes system. So breeding is part of it, but it rankled that that only the male character who is immune to the Y-plagues does anything clever. (The graphic novel series: Y the Last Man is far superior in looking at a society where all the men die out).
Actually the more I think about it, the more this book irritates. Characters come and go. I still don't know what happened to Naomi, who I quite liked. The clone-daughter is there at the start, disappears in the middle, and then comes back: the clone-mother / Doctor has no feelings for her daughter at all, and by the end of the book I thought she was quite a despicable piece of human trash. Why she was a researcher I have no idea and she is completely unlike any scientist I have ever met.
Its actually a strength of the writing that it doesn't rankle so much when reading it. No, not 3.5 stars, just 3 stars. Or maybe 2.5. Which is a shame, because I want to like it more that but unfortunately it is flawed. I wanted a book where a future matriarchy was more though out, where women aren't just slaves to their desire to breed, where characters were clever and smart. Unfortunately I didn't get that.
The novel didn't really say very much interesting about a future society ruled by women, It seemed to be junk-food corporate America-lite with women at the mercy of their desire to breed and the limited options available to them. Even the really smart Doctor does incredibly dumb things in the presence of male pheromones.
Yes, its supposed to be about evolution and the arms race between viruses and the human immunes system. So breeding is part of it, but it rankled that that only the male character who is immune to the Y-plagues does anything clever. (The graphic novel series: Y the Last Man is far superior in looking at a society where all the men die out).
Actually the more I think about it, the more this book irritates. Characters come and go. I still don't know what happened to Naomi, who I quite liked. The clone-daughter is there at the start, disappears in the middle, and then comes back: the clone-mother / Doctor has no feelings for her daughter at all, and by the end of the book I thought she was quite a despicable piece of human trash. Why she was a researcher I have no idea and she is completely unlike any scientist I have ever met.
Its actually a strength of the writing that it doesn't rankle so much when reading it. No, not 3.5 stars, just 3 stars. Or maybe 2.5. Which is a shame, because I want to like it more that but unfortunately it is flawed. I wanted a book where a future matriarchy was more though out, where women aren't just slaves to their desire to breed, where characters were clever and smart. Unfortunately I didn't get that.
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/59559.html[return][return]I couldn't see the connection between the two storylines, one of a savage gun battle between girl-gangs in a contemporary shopping mall, and the other a future setting of women experimenting on one of the few remaining men in the world. There was a sort of hint that the contemporary setting was in some way an artifact of the nanobots in the body of the hero of the future setting, but it didn't really hang together for me. Having said that, the two storylines taken separately are convincingly and breathlessly written.
indiepauli47's review against another edition
2.0
2-2.5 stars.
Malgré une multitude de questions sans réponse, j'ai bizarrement assez apprécié ma lecture.
J'ai gobé les 540 pages en 2 jours étonnement, mais sans jamais avoir d'émotions particulières. J'étais intéressée de savoir ce qui allait se passer, mais sans plus, aucune connection avec aucun des personnages.
Et malheureusement, il y a tellement d'évènements qui arrivent sans explication claire, ou des faits admis normaux, alors qu'ils n'ont pas été présentés auparavant, Bref, j'ai lu ce livre sans vraiment le comprendre à certains endroits.
Malgré une multitude de questions sans réponse, j'ai bizarrement assez apprécié ma lecture.
J'ai gobé les 540 pages en 2 jours étonnement, mais sans jamais avoir d'émotions particulières. J'étais intéressée de savoir ce qui allait se passer, mais sans plus, aucune connection avec aucun des personnages.
Et malheureusement, il y a tellement d'évènements qui arrivent sans explication claire, ou des faits admis normaux, alors qu'ils n'ont pas été présentés auparavant, Bref, j'ai lu ce livre sans vraiment le comprendre à certains endroits.
jeffreyp's review against another edition
5.0
I haven't ever ready anything quite like this. Chock full of ideas, surreal and satiric, I loved it. Sullivan uses the now-familiar trope of all-the-people-of-a-certain-gender have died off in the most ingenious ways, the whole while dropping in name-braded humor that really was Laugh Out Loud.
This is one of those books that makes me look at the world differently, knowing that my take on reality isn't as solid as I would like to think.
Can't wait to read her other stuff.
(Oh, and it's feminist as hell. I kind of can't believe that this book got published, given both it's ideas and it's prevalent use of "cunt" and "pussies".)
This is one of those books that makes me look at the world differently, knowing that my take on reality isn't as solid as I would like to think.
Can't wait to read her other stuff.
(Oh, and it's feminist as hell. I kind of can't believe that this book got published, given both it's ideas and it's prevalent use of "cunt" and "pussies".)
survivalisinsufficient's review against another edition
3.0
I actually enjoyed this well enough in the end, but it's not the type of sci-fi I usually like. One storyline is set in a world where men contract a horrible plague that kills/disfigures them and follows a research subject being experimented on with different plagues. The other is set in a crazy mall with adolescent girls trying to kill each other. Entertaining and way out there.
j00j's review against another edition
2.0
Maybe I need to read this again to grok it. Parts of it were fascinating, and other parts... really confused me.
xterminal's review
4.0
Tricia Sullivan, Maul (Night Shade, 2006)
Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's “A Lifetime” or Vertical Horizon's “Everything You Want”. It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious.
The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book.
What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B0grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite tell. ****
Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's “A Lifetime” or Vertical Horizon's “Everything You Want”. It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious.
The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book.
What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B0grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite tell. ****
will_sargent's review
3.0
An interesting read, but the science is terrible, and for what's billed as 'feminist SF', women are far too eager to throw their lives and careers away for sperm.
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