Kim Miller
David Queston is an anthropologist who has spent some years studying tribal communities in South America. One of those communities has gone through some catastrophe that he is trying to identify. When he has completed his studies he returns to England to write up his thoughts.
He finds England changed. A mad psychopath has taken control and is isolating the country from the world and sending everybody back to where they came from. This means local people are sent back to their family roots. i.e. families named Stewart are sent back to Scotland regardless of them never having lived there.
The Minister of Planning and then Prime Minister is named Mandrake. Two obvious parallels come to mind. First, the author would have known of the syndicated cartoon, Mandrake the Magician. He could 'gesture hypnotically' and people would be open to suggestion. Second, the mythological plant, the mandrake, screams when it is uprooted. Both these metaphors run through the book. Everybody seems under the thrall of Mandrake.
Queston spends two years in a quiet country cottage writing up his notes, unaware that the social structures around him are failing so badly. Then men from the Ministry of Planning call on him. They want his notes and they want his mind. His research is too close to revealing what is happening in England. He goes on the run.
As England dissolves into a dystopian hellscape it seems that there is a malevolent intelligence driving everything. From isolationist paranoia to earthquakes and wild snowstorms, everything is bent on the destruction of the country and dead bodies line the streets. Queston and some companions he finds along the way are torn between escaping it and facing it to destroy it.
The darkness increases as Cooper sets the scene of humans against the unknown. Is it supernatural evil? Is it aliens? Is it some new weapon system? The tension builds and the end of the book approaches. The reader asks, "Are all these threads going to get tied up by the end?"
No spoilers, folks.
David Queston is an anthropologist who has spent some years studying tribal communities in South America. One of those communities has gone through some catastrophe that he is trying to identify. When he has completed his studies he returns to England to write up his thoughts.
He finds England changed. A mad psychopath has taken control and is isolating the country from the world and sending everybody back to where they came from. This means local people are sent back to their family roots. i.e. families named Stewart are sent back to Scotland regardless of them never having lived there.
The Minister of Planning and then Prime Minister is named Mandrake. Two obvious parallels come to mind. First, the author would have known of the syndicated cartoon, Mandrake the Magician. He could 'gesture hypnotically' and people would be open to suggestion. Second, the mythological plant, the mandrake, screams when it is uprooted. Both these metaphors run through the book. Everybody seems under the thrall of Mandrake.
Queston spends two years in a quiet country cottage writing up his notes, unaware that the social structures around him are failing so badly. Then men from the Ministry of Planning call on him. They want his notes and they want his mind. His research is too close to revealing what is happening in England. He goes on the run.
As England dissolves into a dystopian hellscape it seems that there is a malevolent intelligence driving everything. From isolationist paranoia to earthquakes and wild snowstorms, everything is bent on the destruction of the country and dead bodies line the streets. Queston and some companions he finds along the way are torn between escaping it and facing it to destroy it.
The darkness increases as Cooper sets the scene of humans against the unknown. Is it supernatural evil? Is it aliens? Is it some new weapon system? The tension builds and the end of the book approaches. The reader asks, "Are all these threads going to get tied up by the end?"
No spoilers, folks.
Rudy Waltz grows up in Vonnegut's Midland City in Ohio. His 'memoir' tells of his father's failed life as an artist, during which he become friends with another failed artist, Hitler. His parents are wealthy and Rudy grows up a rich kid until he shoots a gun out of the top of his house and the bullet hits somebody. From there everything becomes a train wreck for him and his family.
Rudy sleepwalks through life until ending up as co-owner of a hotel in Haiti, from which he tells the story.
The book is a rich stew of Vonnegut's acidic satire and written in a way that immediately fills out the characters and draws in the reader. From his father's delusions and non-ironic contact with Hitler, the dissociated family, police brutality, government incompetence, until the final escape as refugees into the country of refugees.
I was left feeling I'd been in a Wes Anderson movie with a darker than normal colour pallette. It was a very enjoyable fantasy world.
Rudy Waltz grows up in Vonnegut's Midland City in Ohio. His 'memoir' tells of his father's failed life as an artist, during which he become friends with another failed artist, Hitler. His parents are wealthy and Rudy grows up a rich kid until he shoots a gun out of the top of his house and the bullet hits somebody. From there everything becomes a train wreck for him and his family.
Rudy sleepwalks through life until ending up as co-owner of a hotel in Haiti, from which he tells the story.
The book is a rich stew of Vonnegut's acidic satire and written in a way that immediately fills out the characters and draws in the reader. From his father's delusions and non-ironic contact with Hitler, the dissociated family, police brutality, government incompetence, until the final escape as refugees into the country of refugees.
I was left feeling I'd been in a Wes Anderson movie with a darker than normal colour pallette. It was a very enjoyable fantasy world.
Alvin lives in the city of Diaspar. He's a young man who has a problem. He can't remember any of his past lives as expected, and as is the experience of everyone around him. The city births its citizens according to the inner thoughts of a central computer. And at the end of their lives it takes them back into itself, to be birthed again in some distant future.
But Alvin is a disruptor. He is curious. He wants to know what is outside the city. He goes exploring. All of these are not the life of his companions.
With the help of the mysterious city jester, another disruptor, he finds his way into the depths of the city and out to the wider world. And in that moment he seals the fate of the city to a future they have feared for a billion years.
The book is let down by long passages of descriptions of what Alvin sees on his travels, material that does not move the story along. The characters are also a bit thin until Alvin meets Hilvar who becomes his traveling companion and his first ever real friend. Hilvar brings a certain kind of humanity to Alvin and to the story.
Alvin and Hilvar travel to distant stars to try to understand the origins of Earth's current situation, a place trying to recover from inter-planetary warfare. They return to find the city in crisis, and Alvin at last learns the reason for his existence. The book closes on a world that knows it has change, and it is only in the closing pages that Alvin starts to draw some emotion from the reader as he realises who he is, what he has done, and what will be his future.
Alvin lives in the city of Diaspar. He's a young man who has a problem. He can't remember any of his past lives as expected, and as is the experience of everyone around him. The city births its citizens according to the inner thoughts of a central computer. And at the end of their lives it takes them back into itself, to be birthed again in some distant future.
But Alvin is a disruptor. He is curious. He wants to know what is outside the city. He goes exploring. All of these are not the life of his companions.
With the help of the mysterious city jester, another disruptor, he finds his way into the depths of the city and out to the wider world. And in that moment he seals the fate of the city to a future they have feared for a billion years.
The book is let down by long passages of descriptions of what Alvin sees on his travels, material that does not move the story along. The characters are also a bit thin until Alvin meets Hilvar who becomes his traveling companion and his first ever real friend. Hilvar brings a certain kind of humanity to Alvin and to the story.
Alvin and Hilvar travel to distant stars to try to understand the origins of Earth's current situation, a place trying to recover from inter-planetary warfare. They return to find the city in crisis, and Alvin at last learns the reason for his existence. The book closes on a world that knows it has change, and it is only in the closing pages that Alvin starts to draw some emotion from the reader as he realises who he is, what he has done, and what will be his future.
Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.
Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.
Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.
It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.
The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.
It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.
Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.
Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.
Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.
It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.
The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.
It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.
A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.
The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.
Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.
The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.
I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.
Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.
The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.
Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.
The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.
I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.
Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
PKD novels need a rating scale from ho-hum through weird to trippy, with a few more levels thrown in somewhere. If Ubik and Palmer Eldritch are trippy, Dr. Bloodmoney falls into weird.
A sudden nuclear war leaves the world mostly destroyed, with small communities forming around centres of survival. We find ourselves amid a disparate bunch of people struggling to make sense of things. The Dr.Bloodmoney character is a minor player for most of the narrative. In focus are a young man born with no limbs because of thalidomide but with telekinetic ability, and a young girl whose imaginary brother turns out to be a parasitic twin in her belly. These three form a centre of warring power against each other.
Above them all is an astronaut, stranded in orbit from which he transmits book readings and DJ music to the world. The only surviving radio broadcast on Earth.
The story is one of dark humor, the writing off-handed, and the characters totally unbelievable. But PKD uses his inner weirdness to pull it together into a tale of guilt, power, and a desire for peace and calm. He starts with a bland city street encounter but ends with a growing sense of unease as a crisis builds. And suddenly it's over. Not with a bang but a whimper. OK, that's probably the way nuclear war always ends.
PKD novels need a rating scale from ho-hum through weird to trippy, with a few more levels thrown in somewhere. If Ubik and Palmer Eldritch are trippy, Dr. Bloodmoney falls into weird.
A sudden nuclear war leaves the world mostly destroyed, with small communities forming around centres of survival. We find ourselves amid a disparate bunch of people struggling to make sense of things. The Dr.Bloodmoney character is a minor player for most of the narrative. In focus are a young man born with no limbs because of thalidomide but with telekinetic ability, and a young girl whose imaginary brother turns out to be a parasitic twin in her belly. These three form a centre of warring power against each other.
Above them all is an astronaut, stranded in orbit from which he transmits book readings and DJ music to the world. The only surviving radio broadcast on Earth.
The story is one of dark humor, the writing off-handed, and the characters totally unbelievable. But PKD uses his inner weirdness to pull it together into a tale of guilt, power, and a desire for peace and calm. He starts with a bland city street encounter but ends with a growing sense of unease as a crisis builds. And suddenly it's over. Not with a bang but a whimper. OK, that's probably the way nuclear war always ends.