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A review by yevolem
Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
3.0
Nova Swing is Roadside Picnic reimagined with a Philip K. Dick aesthetic as a New Weird Cyberpunk Noir set in the city of Saudade in 2444. That's reductive because it's also literary, subversive, and much else. There's a lot to say for the beauty of its style, but I'm not one to do so. I found its substance to be a secondary consideration at best. Its literary qualities probably go a long way to explaining its award nominations and wins.
This time it was extremely obvious that I didn't understand the meaning of what I was reading and wasn't able to appreciate what was there. That's not to say that there isn't anything to appreciate. Its greatest strength to me was how much it felt like this was something that had happened. The sense of surreal verisimilitude for something that almost surely could never be, yet was so clearly presented is praiseworthy. Everything else though, not so much.
The characters were too much like people in ways that I don't usually like to read in fiction. Their motives were inscrutable, their impulses irrational, and their behavior inexplicable. The reader never really gets to know any of them and I assume that was intentional. As I wrote of the first book, Harrison seems almost indifferent to entertaining the reader and that's much more so the case this time.
There's only one character that was mentioned in passing from the first book in this one. Other than that they don't seem to have almost anything in common other than the setting and cats. There's Vic Serotonin, who travels into the Saudade Event as a travel guide for tourists and also to smuggle out items to sell. Inside the event zone anything could happen and everything is always changing. Those who go in never return exactly as they were before. This time he's unknowingly brought out something dangerous, which leads to detective Lens Aschemann to investigate his activities. They're the two primary perspectives, though various others have a go at it as well.
There are a few sex scenes, which run more towards the metaphorical than the erotic, some masturbation, and several descriptions of the female breast. After the first sex scene one of the characters says that he's very puzzled by why the sex happened, which I found funny, though it would've had more impact if variations of "puzzled", weren't used 29 times, or 2-5 times per chapter, except for one that only had a single instance, throughout the ~300 or so pages. The characters apparently were as puzzled as I was, though in a different way.
Despite my disinterest more than disappointment, I'll be reading the third as well, if only to see how what I assume will be another disconnected entry finishes out the series. Reading this still gave me a strange feeling, though unfortunately it wasn't also moderately enjoyable.
Rating: 2.5/5
This time it was extremely obvious that I didn't understand the meaning of what I was reading and wasn't able to appreciate what was there. That's not to say that there isn't anything to appreciate. Its greatest strength to me was how much it felt like this was something that had happened. The sense of surreal verisimilitude for something that almost surely could never be, yet was so clearly presented is praiseworthy. Everything else though, not so much.
The characters were too much like people in ways that I don't usually like to read in fiction. Their motives were inscrutable, their impulses irrational, and their behavior inexplicable. The reader never really gets to know any of them and I assume that was intentional. As I wrote of the first book, Harrison seems almost indifferent to entertaining the reader and that's much more so the case this time.
There's only one character that was mentioned in passing from the first book in this one. Other than that they don't seem to have almost anything in common other than the setting and cats. There's Vic Serotonin, who travels into the Saudade Event as a travel guide for tourists and also to smuggle out items to sell. Inside the event zone anything could happen and everything is always changing. Those who go in never return exactly as they were before. This time he's unknowingly brought out something dangerous, which leads to detective Lens Aschemann to investigate his activities. They're the two primary perspectives, though various others have a go at it as well.
There are a few sex scenes, which run more towards the metaphorical than the erotic, some masturbation, and several descriptions of the female breast. After the first sex scene one of the characters says that he's very puzzled by why the sex happened, which I found funny, though it would've had more impact if variations of "puzzled", weren't used 29 times, or 2-5 times per chapter, except for one that only had a single instance, throughout the ~300 or so pages. The characters apparently were as puzzled as I was, though in a different way.
Despite my disinterest more than disappointment, I'll be reading the third as well, if only to see how what I assume will be another disconnected entry finishes out the series. Reading this still gave me a strange feeling, though unfortunately it wasn't also moderately enjoyable.
Rating: 2.5/5