Kait

There comes a clichèd point in most stories that deal with insanity where the nutjob asks the sane one who determines what sanity is, and maybe we've got the whole thing inside-out. I can say without hesitation that The Hike is batshit insane, but there's nonetheless a steadfast internal logic and heart that undergirds the craziness and connects all of the terrifying parts into a cohesive (if hallucinatory) whole.

It's rare to find a “grounded” fantasy that doesn't traffic overtly in “magic” with laws and rules (think Harrys Potter and Dresden), especially when combined with a rollicking adventure plot. Think of The Hike as a modern-day Odysseus, only with lot more LSD involved (in execution if not authorship). Eminently relatable main character, highly entertaining and endearing sidekicks, thoroughly enjoyable to read (unlike trying to slash your way through the thickets of this review), this is a fun book.

Lots of good information, though it it feels more like an expanded excerpt of a biography of CV Wood than an exploration of Disneyland.

Reads like a first novel, in the best possible way (though it's actually a sophomore outing). This story is so full of ideas, histories and emotions that I can't believe it didn't germinate and grow inside the author's brain for an entire lifetime before bursting forth in full bloom. I can't wait to go back and read other works, or for something new to come.

What an awful message all the way around. You should definitely judge things on their appearance, and don't piss off the weirdos ‘cuz you might use them later against bigger weirdos.

This is either a very poorly constructed argument for a taxonomy of technology that forever loses the thread when it wanders into blimps, or a decent history of the folly of Zeppelins with a malformed treatise on the author's invented “pathological technologies” grafted on. Either half can't be given more than three stars, and this is not a case where there's anything gained by pairing them together.

I don't even necessarily think the author's theory is wrong or uninteresting, but the examples he chooses seem spectacularly ill-advised and not internally consistent. He also presents an extraordinarily narrow of view of how science happens and what benefits any individual project or research brings.

Written two centuries earlier, one can imagine the scorn brought onto “electricity” — imagine the immense expense of installing wires into every home simply in order to give light, which we already have with fire. How could one possibly hope to harness such a fundamental energy of the cosmos?

Extra bonus raspberries are due for attempting to sarcastically damn with faint praise a DARPA project as having an “original” way of doing things because the agency funded an outlandish idea (a 100-Year Starship program) in the hopes that something good might come out of it — in other words, every DARPA project, ever.