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matthewcpeck's reviews
573 reviews
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Updated Edition) by Anthony Bourdain
3.0
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
4.0
'Oh Pure and Radiant Heart' is a meditation on the irreversible changes to our world after the invention of the first atomic bomb. It's told in the form of a wacky road-trip story about Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard spontaneously finding themselves transported from the spring of 1945 to the 21st century, having 'split off' from their other selves that lived through history and died. It's a credit to Lydia Millet's style that she can tell such a bizarre tale in a stately, dreamlike fashion, rather than as a cartoon.
The three confused scientists shack up with a timid librarian and her skeptical husband in Santa Fe, and ultimately lead a massive convoy traveling the country in support of disarmament, while warding off threats from shadowy government forces and from religious zealots who affirm that Oppenheimer is the second coming of Christ. Throughout this page-turning plot, Millet intersperses the history of nuclear weapons from 20th century to the present day.
As in Millet's subsequent novel 'How The Dead Dream', there is a somber but lyrical obsession with the extinction of a species and with the havoc wreaked on the environment by the human race. There is also an unfortunate tendency in both books to mock the SUV-driving, corn-syrup-eating American masses in a manner that straddles the line between accurate satire and downright misanthropy. But this is mostly overshadowed by OPaRH's haunting, hilarious, epic, and tragic vision. I hope there's a movie.
The three confused scientists shack up with a timid librarian and her skeptical husband in Santa Fe, and ultimately lead a massive convoy traveling the country in support of disarmament, while warding off threats from shadowy government forces and from religious zealots who affirm that Oppenheimer is the second coming of Christ. Throughout this page-turning plot, Millet intersperses the history of nuclear weapons from 20th century to the present day.
As in Millet's subsequent novel 'How The Dead Dream', there is a somber but lyrical obsession with the extinction of a species and with the havoc wreaked on the environment by the human race. There is also an unfortunate tendency in both books to mock the SUV-driving, corn-syrup-eating American masses in a manner that straddles the line between accurate satire and downright misanthropy. But this is mostly overshadowed by OPaRH's haunting, hilarious, epic, and tragic vision. I hope there's a movie.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
4.0
'Hyperion' is sort of a luxury gift basket of science fiction. Its 'Decameron'-style stories within a story contain a little cyberpunk, nail-biting survival stories, satire, grisly horror, space opera, hallucinogens, etc. And beneath it all, a genuinely haunting meditation on the arrow of time.
It's around this time of year, trudging through the last and dreariest leg of a New England winter, that I find myself seeking an escape from reality in my fiction. There's part of me that wants to re-experience the wonder and delight of the science fiction/fantasy/horror that I consumed in my childhood and adolescence. And that part of me is usually disappointed by the prose. Dan Simmons does ameliorate this completely - he incessantly inserts hyphenated phrases like this - and he succumbs to occasional clumsiness and portentousness. That's why I knock off a star, but these tropes are very difficult to avoid in a novel that builds a detailed world set over 700 years in our future, in which the human race has mastered interstellar travel and colonized hundreds of other planets after 'Old Earth' has been destroyed in a 'Big Mistake' (not environmental, but scientific, apparently). Simmons' tale-spinning ability is marvelous, while the exposition is seamlessly incorporated. And his prose can be quite lyrical at times.
As other reviewers have likely pointed out, it's a good idea to have 'The Fall Of Hyperion' at the ready when you've finished this novel, as 'Hyperion' comes to more of a stop than an end. With his exceptional genre novels 'The Terror' and 'Hyperion', Mr. Dan Simmons has proved that he can bring a little of that old wonder and inspiration back to this disillusioned nerd.
It's around this time of year, trudging through the last and dreariest leg of a New England winter, that I find myself seeking an escape from reality in my fiction. There's part of me that wants to re-experience the wonder and delight of the science fiction/fantasy/horror that I consumed in my childhood and adolescence. And that part of me is usually disappointed by the prose. Dan Simmons does ameliorate this completely - he incessantly inserts hyphenated phrases like this - and he succumbs to occasional clumsiness and portentousness. That's why I knock off a star, but these tropes are very difficult to avoid in a novel that builds a detailed world set over 700 years in our future, in which the human race has mastered interstellar travel and colonized hundreds of other planets after 'Old Earth' has been destroyed in a 'Big Mistake' (not environmental, but scientific, apparently). Simmons' tale-spinning ability is marvelous, while the exposition is seamlessly incorporated. And his prose can be quite lyrical at times.
As other reviewers have likely pointed out, it's a good idea to have 'The Fall Of Hyperion' at the ready when you've finished this novel, as 'Hyperion' comes to more of a stop than an end. With his exceptional genre novels 'The Terror' and 'Hyperion', Mr. Dan Simmons has proved that he can bring a little of that old wonder and inspiration back to this disillusioned nerd.