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adam_mcphee's Reviews (2.87k)
Feels like the start of a second wave of Iraq war literature. All the tropes are firmly in place and now the author is trying to do something with them. Especially towards the end of the novel, it started to feel like Generation Kill meets Raymond Chandler, ie there's a whole lot of violence and a detective who means well but isn't always up to the task at hand.
I was quite leery going into this novel–it's an understatement to say that what's essentially a thriller set in an ongoing war risks being glib. But the author never lets you forget that this is America's biggest foreign policy blunder in a generation, and that the American military–even when employing soldiers with the best of intentions–isn't the force for good that so many people wish it was, or at least not in this way.
Other thoughts:
– There's seems to be more about Iraq's people and culture than most of these sorts of books, though that's a low bar to set.
– The ending was perfect.
– There were parts in the first bit of the book where I found myself not trusting the author. Too many of the characters seemed like little more than the standard tropes, but it's just a setup. Some of the best parts of the book are where the characters show how much of a facade some of these stereotypes are.
– I liked how all of the Americans were disillusioned with the promise of their country, even warning the Iraqi civilians not to bother immigrating. Rios says there's no war in Texas, but theres also no Mercedes or mansions there either, not for the likes of us.
– I wish there'd been more about the stolen money. You hear so much about that sort of thing having happened, it would've been nicer to take a closer look at it.
I received a free copy of this novel from the publisher.
I was quite leery going into this novel–it's an understatement to say that what's essentially a thriller set in an ongoing war risks being glib. But the author never lets you forget that this is America's biggest foreign policy blunder in a generation, and that the American military–even when employing soldiers with the best of intentions–isn't the force for good that so many people wish it was, or at least not in this way.
Other thoughts:
– There's seems to be more about Iraq's people and culture than most of these sorts of books, though that's a low bar to set.
– The ending was perfect.
– There were parts in the first bit of the book where I found myself not trusting the author. Too many of the characters seemed like little more than the standard tropes, but it's just a setup. Some of the best parts of the book are where the characters show how much of a facade some of these stereotypes are.
– I liked how all of the Americans were disillusioned with the promise of their country, even warning the Iraqi civilians not to bother immigrating. Rios says there's no war in Texas, but theres also no Mercedes or mansions there either, not for the likes of us.
– I wish there'd been more about the stolen money. You hear so much about that sort of thing having happened, it would've been nicer to take a closer look at it.
I received a free copy of this novel from the publisher.
What a magnificent book. One of the few I know that's genuinely optimistic without being condescending or pollyanna. Robinson's faith in the human species is remarkable. The fear of utopias is is that they grow boring, but that fear is cast aside because here utopia is always a work in progress.
The idea of the terraria - wildlife sanctuaries inside spaceship asteroids - is the most beautiful science fiction idea I can remember reading about since I was a child.
The idea of the terraria - wildlife sanctuaries inside spaceship asteroids - is the most beautiful science fiction idea I can remember reading about since I was a child.
A Venetian freelancer scuba dives for artifacts. A man goes for a hike after having his brain repaired following a car accident. The backup crew of the Enola Gay has the chance to change world history. Slave miners on the Moon make a desperate bid for freedom. A peasant boy joins the Spanish Armada. An archaeologist in Newfoundland confronts a Scandinavian hoax dating back centuries. A blind mathematician falls for an unusual honeytrap. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab Scientists are forced to cancel a manned Mars mission after the discovery of native bacteria. Yeti is kidnapped in Nepal. A Canadian family flees to a glacier-covered Boston at the dawn of a new ice age. A writer struggles with his history of the twentieth century. It's the best of Kim Stanley Robinson.
He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night.
A great space opera but a second tier KSR novel.
Holywelkin was a brilliant physicist whose Ten Forms of Change unified relativity and quantum mechanics and allowed humankind to bring sunlight and 1g gravity -- and thus civilization -- to the far reaches of the Solar System. He also invented a strange musical instrument, the Holywelkin Orchestra, a one-man orchestra seen by many as nothing but a gimmick.
Johannes Wright is the ninth master of the Holywelkin Orchestra. He is the musical genius who will create the new paradigm of the age, one that doesn't just explain Holywelkin's new model of reality, but actually suggests there is a connection between our structure of thinking and the structure of reality itself. Because Wright has discovered the Holywelkin's ten equations map a little too neatly to the ten ways a composer can alter a piece of music for it to be a coincidence.
But Johannes Wright has enemies. As he travels downsystem on his great tour, he is attacked by a shadowy troupe of metadramatists, Actors whose theatre is real life. The troupe is composed of a member of the Orchestra's board of directors, a clan of Mercurian Mithraists and a former music school rival. They believe that their metaplay can determine Wright's destiny, and Wright's destiny will determine his music, and his music may very well determine reality...
And then there's Dent Ios, a rustic plutonian tapir farmer who reluctantly accepts his farming cooperative's request that he follow the tour and cover it for their literary music journal, Thistledown. If he'd just shown up for the co-op meeting he could've stayed home.
From anyone else, it would be an instant sci-fi masterpiece. But it's a little bit too neat. There's a bit too much of Arthur C Clarke's-sufficiently-advanced-science-looking-like-magic. I mean, the terras are cool, but they look like cheap Jack Kirby knock-offs when you compare them to KSR's terraformation of Mars, or his asteroid terrariums. The characters aren't much: one's a villain, one's Bilbo Baggins, and one's the next Bach. But then, this was his first novel (second to be published), and his writing about music (and his justification of writing about music) is interesting. The author hasn't quite found his voice, but you can see all of the elements for it are there.
A great space opera but a second tier KSR novel.
Holywelkin was a brilliant physicist whose Ten Forms of Change unified relativity and quantum mechanics and allowed humankind to bring sunlight and 1g gravity -- and thus civilization -- to the far reaches of the Solar System. He also invented a strange musical instrument, the Holywelkin Orchestra, a one-man orchestra seen by many as nothing but a gimmick.
Johannes Wright is the ninth master of the Holywelkin Orchestra. He is the musical genius who will create the new paradigm of the age, one that doesn't just explain Holywelkin's new model of reality, but actually suggests there is a connection between our structure of thinking and the structure of reality itself. Because Wright has discovered the Holywelkin's ten equations map a little too neatly to the ten ways a composer can alter a piece of music for it to be a coincidence.
But Johannes Wright has enemies. As he travels downsystem on his great tour, he is attacked by a shadowy troupe of metadramatists, Actors whose theatre is real life. The troupe is composed of a member of the Orchestra's board of directors, a clan of Mercurian Mithraists and a former music school rival. They believe that their metaplay can determine Wright's destiny, and Wright's destiny will determine his music, and his music may very well determine reality...
And then there's Dent Ios, a rustic plutonian tapir farmer who reluctantly accepts his farming cooperative's request that he follow the tour and cover it for their literary music journal, Thistledown. If he'd just shown up for the co-op meeting he could've stayed home.
From anyone else, it would be an instant sci-fi masterpiece. But it's a little bit too neat. There's a bit too much of Arthur C Clarke's-sufficiently-advanced-science-looking-like-magic. I mean, the terras are cool, but they look like cheap Jack Kirby knock-offs when you compare them to KSR's terraformation of Mars, or his asteroid terrariums. The characters aren't much: one's a villain, one's Bilbo Baggins, and one's the next Bach. But then, this was his first novel (second to be published), and his writing about music (and his justification of writing about music) is interesting. The author hasn't quite found his voice, but you can see all of the elements for it are there.
It's weird how there's a subgenre sustaining the Canadian publishing industry that consists of dramatized re-tellings of how writers or their ancestors made it to North America. Though this one was particularly good, about a Vietnamese school teacher slash gambler in the sixties and seventies.
"If anyone found out, you could be arrested for unlawful dreaming!"
Impeccable dream logic that leads to great moments of catharsis, where you realize what you're reading is totally ridiculous but you don't care because you're having too much fun.
dead dreams were an exceptional source of pollution
Similar in concept to Inception and The Matrix, but it's a lot more fun. Kind of like [b: Heroes Die|311864|Heroes Die (The Acts of Caine, #1)|Matthew Woodring Stover|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1403193753s/311864.jpg|302782]. My only quibble is that by the end of the first chapter it almost feels as if he's exhausted the possibilities of his dream world, because you imagine it getting solipsistic, stuck inside his own head. I have trouble caring for characters that the narrative doesn't consider 'real'. But the author gets this and the focus temporarily switches to how dreams impact the real world, and by the time we re-enter the thief's dreamworld the solipsism problem has been neatly sidestepped.
Nadia frowned. No one, indeed, knew how time down below compared to time on the surface. The flow of time in the dream world seemed to proceed by fits and starts. Sometimes gestures stretched out endlessly Nadia frowned. No one, indeed, knew how time down below compared to time on the surface. The flow of time in the dream world seemed to proceed by fits and starts. Sometimes gestures stretched out endlessly like in a slow-motion scene, and at other times, it all went by very fast. Actions fled by, sped up, while conversations became an incomprehensible chirping. David wondered if the temporal flux wasn’t governed by purely subjective criteria, the mind condensing painful or boring moments in order to protract pleasant ones instead, dragging them out until they were a kind of amber where you wound up getting trapped. It was just a theory, but he knew an hour of dream didn’t equal an hour of reality; the exchange rate was much more complex.
Impeccable dream logic that leads to great moments of catharsis, where you realize what you're reading is totally ridiculous but you don't care because you're having too much fun.
dead dreams were an exceptional source of pollution
Similar in concept to Inception and The Matrix, but it's a lot more fun. Kind of like [b: Heroes Die|311864|Heroes Die (The Acts of Caine, #1)|Matthew Woodring Stover|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1403193753s/311864.jpg|302782]. My only quibble is that by the end of the first chapter it almost feels as if he's exhausted the possibilities of his dream world, because you imagine it getting solipsistic, stuck inside his own head. I have trouble caring for characters that the narrative doesn't consider 'real'. But the author gets this and the focus temporarily switches to how dreams impact the real world, and by the time we re-enter the thief's dreamworld the solipsism problem has been neatly sidestepped.
Spoiler
Without thinking, he patted his jacket pocket, where he kept a dime bag of realism powder. He could sniff it on the glass-topped desk right here and now, but even though the powder curbed oneiric drift, it also hastened the ascent: a side effect he had to keep in mind. He fingered the bag, hesitating. Too much realism and he could take off right in the middle of the heist. He didn’t relish the prospect. Better to try to push forward through the parasitic drift, keeping his eye on the prize.Spoiler
His last few dreams had died in quarantine, poisoned by ham-fisted vets who thought they were still working on plow horses and jabbed at dreams as if inoculating hippopotami.Spoiler
High priest of breakfast, David conducted a ritual at once epicurean and austere, banishing jam, croissants, and even brioche, which for him represented an extremity of depraved sybaritic decadence. For a while he’d tried making his own bread, obeying some strange inner stubbornness to live off the grid, depending as little as possible on others. Fermenting yeast had given him too much trouble, and he’d been forced to give up. At first it had upset him, since he had a hard time finding a bakery with bread that met his standards. People today were fine with any old subpar product, and the bakehouses of yore had become automated factories where an artisan’s barely flour-dusted hand was reduced to pushing buttons. David had wandered from bakery to bakery, sullen, despairing of ever finding the spongy bread that was his one and only fare, when he’d met Madame Antonine.Spoiler
Only then would the blue depths of dream open, would he feel himself sucked toward the bottom, would he sink like a stone. And David knew the hour had not yet come to step over the ship’s rail. His nerves weren’t crackling, they seemed relaxed, limp, like the strings on an old tennis racket. When he touched things, he didn’t feel that little crackle of static electricity at the ends of his nails that announced his internal battery was ready once more to short-circuit reality itself. He was flaccid, emptied out, condemned to wait, and that drove him crazy. Some divers resorted to drugs to speed up their process, but David didn’t believe in those techniques, which smacked of charlatanry. Besides, chemical substances filtered directly into the world down below, its rivers and streams. Hadn’t Soler Mahus said so? They ran from its faucets and stagnated at the bottoms of soda bottles, poisoning everything. No, he had to make do with waiting. And it was a long wait. Terribly long.Spoiler
There were concentrated rationality pills, logic tablets, plausibility adjustment drops. And above all, an array of fast-acting tone powders that allowed him to instantly modulate the nuance of a moment: irony powder, comedy powder, distancing powder, which when snorted off the back of your hand immediately attenuated the excessively tragic outline of any situation. Used wisely, these chemical tools enabled He reckoned he had set things straight enough to wake his companions. He grabbed the saucepan and poured the water slowly over the grounds filling the paper filter. He was a bit afraid of seeing Nadia emerge from the sleeping bag with a misshapen, cuboid body, her legs crooked, her breasts square. He’d never dragged them this far down before, to these unfathomable depths, the hunting ground of great dreamers. How would they take the submersion? The smell of coffee spread through the air, supplanting that of gasoline. Nadia stirred, then Jorgo. Their awakenings were always difficult, mechanical, their gestures horrendously approximate. Whenever they came out of sleep, it was like they needed to learn to stand again, to walk, to speak. They were like babies with only a few minutes to learn everything. However brief, these moments were extremely painful for David, who felt each time like he was seeing cardboard dummies or lobotomized simpletons come to life. He decided to let the aroma of the coffee do its work and left to get dressed. His clothes had been tossed in a heap on the suitcase of brushed steel he was never without in the world of the dream. He knelt and undid the clasps. The armored luggage contained quite an assortment of drugs whose vials were lined up like strange ammo on a sheet of black rubber, held in place by leather loops.Spoiler
“My body,” the young man confessed. “I left it up there, unmonitored. It’s the first time, see? No one knows I’m here, and I can’t figure out how long I’ve been gone. If something happens to it up there—”Nadia frowned. No one, indeed, knew how time down below compared to time on the surface. The flow of time in the dream world seemed to proceed by fits and starts. Sometimes gestures stretched out endlessly Nadia frowned. No one, indeed, knew how time down below compared to time on the surface. The flow of time in the dream world seemed to proceed by fits and starts. Sometimes gestures stretched out endlessly like in a slow-motion scene, and at other times, it all went by very fast. Actions fled by, sped up, while conversations became an incomprehensible chirping. David wondered if the temporal flux wasn’t governed by purely subjective criteria, the mind condensing painful or boring moments in order to protract pleasant ones instead, dragging them out until they were a kind of amber where you wound up getting trapped. It was just a theory, but he knew an hour of dream didn’t equal an hour of reality; the exchange rate was much more complex.
Surprisingly good for a modern war story where nothing really happens. I'd place it ahead of similar stuff I've read on the more recent Iraq war: it's definitely better than The Yellow Birds or The Long Walk, though it's behind Generation Kill if only because stuff happens in that book, but I guess you can't choose your war experience.
As always, John Dolan provides the definitive review: http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6965&IBLOCK_ID=35
As always, John Dolan provides the definitive review: http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6965&IBLOCK_ID=35