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regorama's review against another edition
5.0
The tagline says it best, "SEX. DRUGS. REVOLUTION. CROSSBOWS.", all things I'd've done well to have kept in mind throughout.
It was hard for me to start, for some reason—perhaps, it was too good of a description of what happens in mental institutions. I wouldn't know, but it was uncomfortably…uncomfortable. Grime and sweat and blood and mental instability are not things I generally seek out—and perhaps my reaction to it is more telling than I'd like it to be.
There's a lot of drugs in this book. But they fall distinctly into two categories: the pharmaceuticals used to keep people in line, to close their minds and turn things grey; and the illicit drugs that open people's minds, trigger their imaginations and set them free in a new world of color and dimension. It causes this reader to wonder why one set is legal and the other illegal; why one set is used on our children while the other set was used by our parents, in times gone by, to imagine a better world.
There's also a strong current of religion—the opiate of the masses?—but not any one religion. There are no abbesses or bishops telling people what and how to believe: only gods and goddesses walking among us, shaping our world. Or are they us shaping their world? Religion in "Fallen Nation" is not something that happens on Holy Days of Obligation, taught to children before they know better, or governmentally forced upon the unbelievers, but something that just simply is.
At the end of the day, this is a book about gods—whether the Jesuses and Dionysiuses of legends, the Liliths and Lokis of curses, or simply us in our day-to-day sanctity.
It was hard for me to start, for some reason—perhaps, it was too good of a description of what happens in mental institutions. I wouldn't know, but it was uncomfortably…uncomfortable. Grime and sweat and blood and mental instability are not things I generally seek out—and perhaps my reaction to it is more telling than I'd like it to be.
There's a lot of drugs in this book. But they fall distinctly into two categories: the pharmaceuticals used to keep people in line, to close their minds and turn things grey; and the illicit drugs that open people's minds, trigger their imaginations and set them free in a new world of color and dimension. It causes this reader to wonder why one set is legal and the other illegal; why one set is used on our children while the other set was used by our parents, in times gone by, to imagine a better world.
There's also a strong current of religion—the opiate of the masses?—but not any one religion. There are no abbesses or bishops telling people what and how to believe: only gods and goddesses walking among us, shaping our world. Or are they us shaping their world? Religion in "Fallen Nation" is not something that happens on Holy Days of Obligation, taught to children before they know better, or governmentally forced upon the unbelievers, but something that just simply is.
At the end of the day, this is a book about gods—whether the Jesuses and Dionysiuses of legends, the Liliths and Lokis of curses, or simply us in our day-to-day sanctity.
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