Andrew

Reads like Neal Stephenson read his older books and decided to write a parody of that type of fiction. Or a rip-off. Or an homage? It wanders between all three but what it definitely is not is original in any way. The premise is somewhat interesting but the moment to moment text may have been written by an neural network based on his previous works.

Current progressive politics is I think only just now catching up to the things Bisson was saying here 35 years ago.

Most writers trying to say something via SF will never catch up to the way Bisson is saying it.

Thought provoking and well written, I know it will sit in my mind a long time.

This is an amazingly bad book (one star) that I'm not sorry to have read (so another star for that).

It barely advances its central thesis, that Zen/Ch'an are more Taoism that Buddhism, I was hoping for a good exploration of that. Each plausible bit of evidence is surrounded by mountains and rivers of twaddle, so even the things not obviously false would have to be confirmed somewhere else before you should believe them. Nothing is supported with any references, and many things are presented as “it is obvious that (ridiculous thing)”. Did you know that because Chinese is not phonetic, but originally vaguely pictographic, that its words are more connected to the thing they represent than a phonetic alphabet? My wife - who is both a philosophy major and Chinese - made a snorting noise when presented with that gem.

It combines a few intriguing translations with willfully difficult translations - for example every teacher's name is rendered completely into English, rather than the Japanese you might be familiar with or the Chinese that is more accurate. Yes, their names were taken to mean something, that could be laid out the first time you see each master and then left in the Chinese so you could cross reference them with other readings. Similarly some terms are rendered into English so tortured (“existence-tissue”) that the original would be much less pretentious.

Buried in this compost heap are a few notions worth the dig, so I'm not sorry to have bought this book and spent time with it. But I can't really recommend it to anyone else.

Another book where the major voice is the main character psychoanalyzing herself. There's slightly more excuse for it here that in many books but still it means whenever you're in danger of empathizing with her she steps in and does it for you. Combine that with merely ok worldbuilding that throws too much ultratech around for you to care about any of it and at 80% I check out because I have stuff I could reread that is much better.

At 3/4 of the way through I have only briefly cared about anyone or anything the author has presented. The stakes are clearly supposed to be massive and yet are massively unclear. Every now and then a beautiful idea appears, and then we run way from it. I have loved some past Ian McDonald books, but this one put him on the “buy only at a discount” list. DNF.