Laith
This is my second reading, and I really never thought I'd open this book again. When I first cracked this in college my feelings were typical of the general reception to the book: I found it excessive in its violence and sadism, nihilistic to a fault; the only apparent goal seemed to be to shock the reader. In fact I don't think I made it past chapter 42 (Girl) in my first reading, I know I put it down thinking that what I was reading was truly appalling and that 41 chapters and the movie had driven the point home well enough. This book is just as appalling the second time through, but- and maybe because my sense for this stuff has been dulled by I Was Dora Suarez or maybe it's my increased exposure to rich white assholes- I found myself looking past the smokescreen of insanity and violence and realizing just how prophetically reflective this book is.
Given the popularity and fidelity of the film adaptation I doubt that I need to tell anyone what American Psycho is about; Patrick Bateman is a part of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. That said it's not difficult to summarize the book, it's the diary of a crazed yuppie serial murder; a sensory experience rather than a traditional story-a manic episode of a novel. In fact, based on interviews with Ellis that's precisely the intention with which he sat down to write what was initially conceptualized as a continuation of his prior works (Less than Zero and Rules of Attraction).
I won't quote directly but Ellis held firm to a belief that the only remaining frontier in literature was sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism. So he sought to craft a story which evoked in the reader extreme feelings, sought to provide otherwise inaccessible experiences that would addict and alienate. This is lost on anyone who wasn't 20ish in the early 80's but Ellis was a rock star, authors could be rock stars- back then you see, people used to read. His two prior books were supremely popular with the MTV generation- his first an instant bestseller and quickly adapted for film, his second getting the same treatment. Since Ellis was eighteen he'd been thrust into the limelight, his name on NYC guest-lists second only to Andy Warhol, his evenings out recounted to him secondhand by the tabloids. It's from the isolating, surreal, and indulgent cocaine-fueled lifestyle of success and celebrity that Ellis was living where we get the seeds of Patrick Bateman.
If I were to judge this book based solely off of intention and execution then I would have to give it full marks. It was one of the most banned books of all time, sold shrink wrapped in Australia- from a perspective of shock and awe this book is a tour de force. But obviously that's not the sole criteria on which anyone would judge a book; a novel is judged on the quality of its world and narrative not just its sensory effects. This kind of judgement based on sensation was/is typically reserved exclusively for pieces in a visual medium, which begs the obvious question, are we to take this plainly repulsive and horrifying thing that Ellis made and treat it as a piece of art? This is the lens through which most people digest this book, as piece of concept art, a discourse of aesthetics.
That discourse is a surface level one, one that could be had with any other piece of transgressive lit. But, American Psycho captured the public's attention like nothing that came before. Unlike Crash or Naked Lunch, books which garnered immense critical praise and eventual cult popularity, Psycho ascended past cult status and into the mainstream almost immediately and its popularity has endured since- Why? Why is it that this specific piece of literature has shifted into mainstream awareness when all the other equally good-equally sensationalist pieces are just cult obscura in the modern day?
The simplest answer is that AP is shallow and accessible on its surface- this is a book about a consumerist serial killer in the 80s. Consumerism bad, Bateman bad, 80s bad, world is bad. It's not just a reflection on and of the culture of the time, it's also made for that self same culture- a kind of cultural Ouroboros. You don't even have to read through the whole thing to get yourself there, the themes may as well be printed on the dust jacket they're so loud. The magic of American Pyscho isn't in the portrayal of white collar douche-bags, for me it's what's subtly buried beneath the noise.
In many ways, despite its immediate popularity, this is a book that's waited for the current moment to unfold itself. What is Patrick Bateman if not the archetype of the modern conservative operator? It was lost on me in the initial reading, partly because the culture and political gap between left and right wasn't as wide at the time. But take a look at the the exchange on politics in the first chapter, it is eerily close to what you'd hear at CPAC today, and the orators not all too dissimilar from Bateman:
But we can’t ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.
Bateman is plainly echoing the classic circular talking points that had already worn themselves out at the time of AP's publishing. The reader knows Bateman doesn't give a single care about anything he's talking about, he's saying what he says because he believes it to be the "correct" answer. Deep down at the core of Patrick Bateman is an all consuming void, he's an automaton in the thrall of his cyrenaic pursuits. His politics like his person are the mask by which he disguises his contempt for humanity and lust for power/control/violence.
There's also his incredibly coincidental obsession with Donald Trump, the man he views as paragon and benchmark. Is it coincidence? Ellis was likely in the first wave of NY socialites put off by Don's gaudy mien and rapacity, who better to symbolize the kind of person Bateman is than the Barron and his golden toilet. The fact that Ellis's icon of social rot became the President and pseudo-deity of the corrupt and malformed can't be coincidence. Ellis knew where we were going, I think he saw what American society valued and sought to paint its portrait. Like a modern day Stańczyk sat in his chair, Ellis presents us with truth dressed as the absurd, animals in clean and pressed Armani suits- something for us to ogle and gasp at, to mock and reference and laugh at- though he's the only person not laughing, the ever ironic Jester.
This is a completely different book from what I first read, though I think the point remains the same. American Psycho is a looking glass into a part of reality that is just not accessible from the normal vantage- it's nihilistic and insane, but that's the rub, the world is the same way, and just like Bateman the very worst of it hides in plain sight. This is fascinating and horrible, if you make it past the blood and gore you'll walk away with plenty to think about.
This is my second reading, and I really never thought I'd open this book again. When I first cracked this in college my feelings were typical of the general reception to the book: I found it excessive in its violence and sadism, nihilistic to a fault; the only apparent goal seemed to be to shock the reader. In fact I don't think I made it past chapter 42 (Girl) in my first reading, I know I put it down thinking that what I was reading was truly appalling and that 41 chapters and the movie had driven the point home well enough. This book is just as appalling the second time through, but- and maybe because my sense for this stuff has been dulled by I Was Dora Suarez or maybe it's my increased exposure to rich white assholes- I found myself looking past the smokescreen of insanity and violence and realizing just how prophetically reflective this book is.
Given the popularity and fidelity of the film adaptation I doubt that I need to tell anyone what American Psycho is about; Patrick Bateman is a part of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. That said it's not difficult to summarize the book, it's the diary of a crazed yuppie serial murder; a sensory experience rather than a traditional story-a manic episode of a novel. In fact, based on interviews with Ellis that's precisely the intention with which he sat down to write what was initially conceptualized as a continuation of his prior works (Less than Zero and Rules of Attraction).
I won't quote directly but Ellis held firm to a belief that the only remaining frontier in literature was sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism. So he sought to craft a story which evoked in the reader extreme feelings, sought to provide otherwise inaccessible experiences that would addict and alienate. This is lost on anyone who wasn't 20ish in the early 80's but Ellis was a rock star, authors could be rock stars- back then you see, people used to read. His two prior books were supremely popular with the MTV generation- his first an instant bestseller and quickly adapted for film, his second getting the same treatment. Since Ellis was eighteen he'd been thrust into the limelight, his name on NYC guest-lists second only to Andy Warhol, his evenings out recounted to him secondhand by the tabloids. It's from the isolating, surreal, and indulgent cocaine-fueled lifestyle of success and celebrity that Ellis was living where we get the seeds of Patrick Bateman.
If I were to judge this book based solely off of intention and execution then I would have to give it full marks. It was one of the most banned books of all time, sold shrink wrapped in Australia- from a perspective of shock and awe this book is a tour de force. But obviously that's not the sole criteria on which anyone would judge a book; a novel is judged on the quality of its world and narrative not just its sensory effects. This kind of judgement based on sensation was/is typically reserved exclusively for pieces in a visual medium, which begs the obvious question, are we to take this plainly repulsive and horrifying thing that Ellis made and treat it as a piece of art? This is the lens through which most people digest this book, as piece of concept art, a discourse of aesthetics.
That discourse is a surface level one, one that could be had with any other piece of transgressive lit. But, American Psycho captured the public's attention like nothing that came before. Unlike Crash or Naked Lunch, books which garnered immense critical praise and eventual cult popularity, Psycho ascended past cult status and into the mainstream almost immediately and its popularity has endured since- Why? Why is it that this specific piece of literature has shifted into mainstream awareness when all the other equally good-equally sensationalist pieces are just cult obscura in the modern day?
The simplest answer is that AP is shallow and accessible on its surface- this is a book about a consumerist serial killer in the 80s. Consumerism bad, Bateman bad, 80s bad, world is bad. It's not just a reflection on and of the culture of the time, it's also made for that self same culture- a kind of cultural Ouroboros. You don't even have to read through the whole thing to get yourself there, the themes may as well be printed on the dust jacket they're so loud. The magic of American Pyscho isn't in the portrayal of white collar douche-bags, for me it's what's subtly buried beneath the noise.
In many ways, despite its immediate popularity, this is a book that's waited for the current moment to unfold itself. What is Patrick Bateman if not the archetype of the modern conservative operator? It was lost on me in the initial reading, partly because the culture and political gap between left and right wasn't as wide at the time. But take a look at the the exchange on politics in the first chapter, it is eerily close to what you'd hear at CPAC today, and the orators not all too dissimilar from Bateman:
But we can’t ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.
Bateman is plainly echoing the classic circular talking points that had already worn themselves out at the time of AP's publishing. The reader knows Bateman doesn't give a single care about anything he's talking about, he's saying what he says because he believes it to be the "correct" answer. Deep down at the core of Patrick Bateman is an all consuming void, he's an automaton in the thrall of his cyrenaic pursuits. His politics like his person are the mask by which he disguises his contempt for humanity and lust for power/control/violence.
There's also his incredibly coincidental obsession with Donald Trump, the man he views as paragon and benchmark. Is it coincidence? Ellis was likely in the first wave of NY socialites put off by Don's gaudy mien and rapacity, who better to symbolize the kind of person Bateman is than the Barron and his golden toilet. The fact that Ellis's icon of social rot became the President and pseudo-deity of the corrupt and malformed can't be coincidence. Ellis knew where we were going, I think he saw what American society valued and sought to paint its portrait. Like a modern day Stańczyk sat in his chair, Ellis presents us with truth dressed as the absurd, animals in clean and pressed Armani suits- something for us to ogle and gasp at, to mock and reference and laugh at- though he's the only person not laughing, the ever ironic Jester.
This is a completely different book from what I first read, though I think the point remains the same. American Psycho is a looking glass into a part of reality that is just not accessible from the normal vantage- it's nihilistic and insane, but that's the rub, the world is the same way, and just like Bateman the very worst of it hides in plain sight. This is fascinating and horrible, if you make it past the blood and gore you'll walk away with plenty to think about.
This is an extension to the Library of Babel short story by Borges. Where Borges sketches out the concept this is a story told from the perspective of someone living in his imagined hell. It's a mundane, ruthlessly boring hell, one where you could spend lightyears just falling down to the very first floor, your eventual exit a guaranteed inevitability. The torment is mathematical, hope is made infinite and therefore unusable- suffering born not from ignorance but from the unbearable proximity of an inaccessible truth. Hope survives, but only as torment.
It's a short read that adds a little levity, drama, and needed characterization to Borges' sketch. It's a creative twist on a fantastic concept, and it sticks with you just like its inspiration.
This is an extension to the Library of Babel short story by Borges. Where Borges sketches out the concept this is a story told from the perspective of someone living in his imagined hell. It's a mundane, ruthlessly boring hell, one where you could spend lightyears just falling down to the very first floor, your eventual exit a guaranteed inevitability. The torment is mathematical, hope is made infinite and therefore unusable- suffering born not from ignorance but from the unbearable proximity of an inaccessible truth. Hope survives, but only as torment.
It's a short read that adds a little levity, drama, and needed characterization to Borges' sketch. It's a creative twist on a fantastic concept, and it sticks with you just like its inspiration.
This is an extension to the Library of Babel short story by Borges. Where Borges sketches out the concept this is a story told from the perspective of someone living in his imagined hell. It's a mundane, ruthlessly boring hell, one where you could spend lightyears just falling down to the very first floor, your eventual exit a guaranteed inevitability. The torment is mathematical, hope is made is made infinite and therefore unusable- suffering born not from ignorance but from the unbearable proximity of an inaccessible truth. Hope survives, but only as torment.
It's a short read that adds a little levity, drama, and needed characterization to Borges' sketch. It's a creative twist on a fantastic concept, and it sticks with you just like its inspiration.
This is an extension to the Library of Babel short story by Borges. Where Borges sketches out the concept this is a story told from the perspective of someone living in his imagined hell. It's a mundane, ruthlessly boring hell, one where you could spend lightyears just falling down to the very first floor, your eventual exit a guaranteed inevitability. The torment is mathematical, hope is made is made infinite and therefore unusable- suffering born not from ignorance but from the unbearable proximity of an inaccessible truth. Hope survives, but only as torment.
It's a short read that adds a little levity, drama, and needed characterization to Borges' sketch. It's a creative twist on a fantastic concept, and it sticks with you just like its inspiration.
The Gamesman imagines a society organized around “The Game,” a system that promises transcendence to its victor while withholding any clear account of how victory is achieved. This dystopia is tightly controlled and resource-scarce, its comforts hoarded by a social elite. The majority live dull, constrained lives, their only sanctioned diversions being participation in the Game and state-regulated teleportational travel.
The novel follows a man who is both competitor and administrator, enforcing rules he does not fully understand while striving for rewards he cannot verify. Though the mechanics remain opaque, the Game appears as a series of tests, intellectual, physical, procedural, administered by players who have themselves opted in. Above them stands the elusive Game Master, the final arbiter of rules that are never fully disclosed.
What little the reader gleans of the Game’s structure, and the reverence with which it is discussed, echoes religious liturgy. The protagonist’s faith in the Game is absolute; he believes not only that it is just, but that he will ultimately win. Yet during play he encounters a secret that destabilizes this faith and exposes the fragility of the system’s promises.
The Game is less a competition than a total structure. It defines social mobility, aspiration, and meaning itself, even as no one can clearly articulate what victory entails. Replacing both divine judgment and bureaucratic authority, it is equal parts Kafka’s The Trial and Borges’ The Lottery in Babylon. It is not something one plays; it is the condition of existence.
I have to talk about the sexual ineptitude that recurs throughout Malzberg’s work here. It is, in fact, his most recognizable signature, and in The Gamesman it fuses seamlessly with his critique of systems. He threads sexual anxiety through the novel with deliberate discomfort. Yet here it is not provocation for its own sake. The protagonist’s ineptitude mirrors his spiritual condition. He is adept at navigating procedures but incapable of unmediated connection. Where the Game promises transcendence through evaluation, sex exposes him to judgment without rubric or appeal. Relationships are first treated as leverage within advancement, and only when he relinquishes that calculus does genuine contact emerge. The final sexual encounter reads not as conquest but as fragile recognition, an encounter momentarily outside the Game. Whether this marks progress within the Game or exists outside it remains unresolved, and that ambiguity is precisely the point.
In this sense, The Gamesman exemplifies what I've coined as Malzberg’s anti–science fiction. Where the genre often celebrates expansion and spectacle, he offers contraction and recursion. His futures are bureaucratic rather than visionary. Advancement is paperwork. Transcendence is a rumor. He writes anxiety with forensic clarity, the dread of scrutiny, the suspicion that the rules are arbitrary, the fear that aspiration itself has been proceduralized.
For readers weary of recycled galactic empires and reheated mythologies of expansion, Malzberg’s work functions as a bracing palate cleanser. He offers no spectacle to hide behind, no sentimental reassurance disguised as futurism. His work strips away the genre’s pageantry and leaves the skeleton exposed. The result is not comforting, but it is clarifying.
Such work has never been commercially successful. Malzberg offers no heroic arc, no redemptive overthrow, no unveiling that restores coherence. His protagonists do not break the system; they absorb it. The rewards are intellectual rather than escapist, and the emotional register is deliberately uneasy. It should track, then, that Malzberg remains a largely underground figure, and that The Gamesman is unlikely to appear on lists of essential dystopias. Yet its refusal of catharsis is precisely what gives it staying power.
The Gamesman does not resolve so much as persist. The promise of transcendence remains intact, even as its substance dissolves. The Game endures because belief endures. And that endurance is what lingers with the reader. Malzberg leaves us with a finely tuned anxiety that continues to reverberate, a quiet suspicion that the systems we trust may require nothing more than our participation to sustain themselves.
The Gamesman imagines a society organized around “The Game,” a system that promises transcendence to its victor while withholding any clear account of how victory is achieved. This dystopia is tightly controlled and resource-scarce, its comforts hoarded by a social elite. The majority live dull, constrained lives, their only sanctioned diversions being participation in the Game and state-regulated teleportational travel.
The novel follows a man who is both competitor and administrator, enforcing rules he does not fully understand while striving for rewards he cannot verify. Though the mechanics remain opaque, the Game appears as a series of tests, intellectual, physical, procedural, administered by players who have themselves opted in. Above them stands the elusive Game Master, the final arbiter of rules that are never fully disclosed.
What little the reader gleans of the Game’s structure, and the reverence with which it is discussed, echoes religious liturgy. The protagonist’s faith in the Game is absolute; he believes not only that it is just, but that he will ultimately win. Yet during play he encounters a secret that destabilizes this faith and exposes the fragility of the system’s promises.
The Game is less a competition than a total structure. It defines social mobility, aspiration, and meaning itself, even as no one can clearly articulate what victory entails. Replacing both divine judgment and bureaucratic authority, it is equal parts Kafka’s The Trial and Borges’ The Lottery in Babylon. It is not something one plays; it is the condition of existence.
I have to talk about the sexual ineptitude that recurs throughout Malzberg’s work here. It is, in fact, his most recognizable signature, and in The Gamesman it fuses seamlessly with his critique of systems. He threads sexual anxiety through the novel with deliberate discomfort. Yet here it is not provocation for its own sake. The protagonist’s ineptitude mirrors his spiritual condition. He is adept at navigating procedures but incapable of unmediated connection. Where the Game promises transcendence through evaluation, sex exposes him to judgment without rubric or appeal. Relationships are first treated as leverage within advancement, and only when he relinquishes that calculus does genuine contact emerge. The final sexual encounter reads not as conquest but as fragile recognition, an encounter momentarily outside the Game. Whether this marks progress within the Game or exists outside it remains unresolved, and that ambiguity is precisely the point.
In this sense, The Gamesman exemplifies what I've coined as Malzberg’s anti–science fiction. Where the genre often celebrates expansion and spectacle, he offers contraction and recursion. His futures are bureaucratic rather than visionary. Advancement is paperwork. Transcendence is a rumor. He writes anxiety with forensic clarity, the dread of scrutiny, the suspicion that the rules are arbitrary, the fear that aspiration itself has been proceduralized.
For readers weary of recycled galactic empires and reheated mythologies of expansion, Malzberg’s work functions as a bracing palate cleanser. He offers no spectacle to hide behind, no sentimental reassurance disguised as futurism. His work strips away the genre’s pageantry and leaves the skeleton exposed. The result is not comforting, but it is clarifying.
Such work has never been commercially successful. Malzberg offers no heroic arc, no redemptive overthrow, no unveiling that restores coherence. His protagonists do not break the system; they absorb it. The rewards are intellectual rather than escapist, and the emotional register is deliberately uneasy. It should track, then, that Malzberg remains a largely underground figure, and that The Gamesman is unlikely to appear on lists of essential dystopias. Yet its refusal of catharsis is precisely what gives it staying power.
The Gamesman does not resolve so much as persist. The promise of transcendence remains intact, even as its substance dissolves. The Game endures because belief endures. And that endurance is what lingers with the reader. Malzberg leaves us with a finely tuned anxiety that continues to reverberate, a quiet suspicion that the systems we trust may require nothing more than our participation to sustain themselves.
I first read this while traveling in the summer of 2014. I'd seen the movie, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but this book blew my socks off. Not only that, but I couldn't believe how different the book was, where was Denise Richards? The troopers wear mobile suits? Neodogs? Why did the military government have such an American ring to it? I wish I had sat down and took some notes from that first read, but I didn't. It feels weird to review on a re-read and this book already has like a million reviews anyway, so I guess this will be more like a blog entry than an actual review. If you haven't read this book, but you like SF then do yourself a favor and read it, the same goes for fans of the movie and more generally for people with pulses who like good books.
I recently read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, it's a completely opposite end of the spectrum type of book compared to Starship Troopers. But I want to note that Troopers came out just 5 years after Lucky Jim. They couldn't be more different, but somewhere in the time between them, one era ended and another began. I see the impact of the times in both of these books: In Jim we see the angst of the post-war educated and a rejection of the old ordering of society. Troopers takes that post-war angst and extrapolates it onto a galaxy-spanning human empire, the concept of a technocratic authoritarian future looming large in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I would call this one of the modern classics.
Modern? This book is 60 years old! You say.
This book is old. You'd be forgiven for seeing the publishing date and thinking that fact would reflect in the writing. Let's get one thing straight, minus the Neodogs and small traces of the Leave it to Beaver Era vocab, I thought this could have been published last week. The secret sauce here is that unlike something relatively contemporary to Troopers, something like Lucky Jim, this is genre writing. At this point in time, I get the sense that the modern tropes for the SF genre were being unveiled. The SF stories of the Golden Age started taking on a more realistic tone. The concept of a technologically advanced future was legitimized as we gained the ability to vaporize whole cities. The period in which this was published is the transition between the Golden Age and the New Wave of SF. We're talking Bradbury to Dick, books like 1984 and I, Robot, ad infinitum; these classics went on to define the genre's unique embrace of hard edged science and political philosophy.
That's the best thing about Troopers (and SF larger still), even if you find the philosophy contained therein to be a little dusty or unsound, there is a philosophy to engage with, and it's a philosophy that modern readers are more than capable of engaging with. A lot of early SF that made a mark were books that delivered this engaging blend of interstellar scenario and secret philosophy essay. But those titles which predate this period never really got the story mechanics as polished as they were by this point, compare Huxley and Burroughs to Bradbury or Asimov. To me, Troopers embodies this personal definition of modern SF, it's a philosophy dissertation masquerading (quite well) as a pulpy SF Man vs Alien story.
The philosophy is a double-edged sword here. I think the main thing that holds Troopers back for a lot of people is that the philosophy of the book is absolute blue bleeding conservative fascism. I think that it is perfectly acceptable to read this book and think that it's disgusting and perverse; this window into the possible future is heartbreaking and pessimistic. Furthermore, I think the modern worldview is in part defined by the active prevention of a Kipling tinted future. To learn the right lesson from the tragedies of both World Wars is to stand in opposition to endless war and military rule. In blowing the whistle and calling Nazi, you would in-fact be echoing the critical reception this book received from its contemporaries and from scholars in the following decades.
I say all that, so I don't sound an apologist for this next part. This book is a product of its time to its core. This is the postwar era, the president has been General Ike for the last two terms, and here comes another veteran in JFK. The America of this time is the post Korea-post McCarthy-baby boom-domino theory American Empire we're talking about. To read Starship Troopers and not see it belie the course of American politics in the 1950s is to put one's own head in the sand. Consider that Heinlein is painting with the colors of the time, and you will see that this work is not entirely self-consistent. Given a purity test, there are some elements that read as liberal, elitist, or even libertarian alongside the more apparent Fascist overtones; there's a dual-handedness to a lot of the ideas as they are presented. Women in this book are a perfect example of what I'm talking about: on one hand it's a progressive concept to have women serve alongside men, on the other hand how much of this book is antiquated machismo and paternalism directed in the female direction (a lot). There is some nuance here is my point, and I choose to take it as Heinlein inviting the reader to grapple with the philosophy rather than espousing those beliefs as right and true.
I think that invitation to grapple is the ethos that inspired the satirical nature of the movie (Of course, I have to mention the movie, name a more iconic pairing). I think that in nerddom it's rare to see a movie that strays so far from the source material wind up being the most appropriate adaptation. I don't think I would be such a fan of the movie if I wasn't also a fan of the book. Even without reading Troopers, you can see the satire in the film-it's dripping off of the poster. Once I gave this book a read I found myself appreciating the movie differently, a straight adaptation may as well just be an extended recruitment advertisement and even that remark makes its way into the film. As a satire the film manages to highlight the aspect of Troopers that dares you to disagree, it has its own magic and message and without that aspect to it, I doubt Troopers would be a definitive cult classic in either medium.
TL;DR: It's classic for a reason, and it isn't a tough or boring read either.
I first read this while traveling in the summer of 2014. I'd seen the movie, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but this book blew my socks off. Not only that, but I couldn't believe how different the book was, where was Denise Richards? The troopers wear mobile suits? Neodogs? Why did the military government have such an American ring to it? I wish I had sat down and took some notes from that first read, but I didn't. It feels weird to review on a re-read and this book already has like a million reviews anyway, so I guess this will be more like a blog entry than an actual review. If you haven't read this book, but you like SF then do yourself a favor and read it, the same goes for fans of the movie and more generally for people with pulses who like good books.
I recently read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, it's a completely opposite end of the spectrum type of book compared to Starship Troopers. But I want to note that Troopers came out just 5 years after Lucky Jim. They couldn't be more different, but somewhere in the time between them, one era ended and another began. I see the impact of the times in both of these books: In Jim we see the angst of the post-war educated and a rejection of the old ordering of society. Troopers takes that post-war angst and extrapolates it onto a galaxy-spanning human empire, the concept of a technocratic authoritarian future looming large in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I would call this one of the modern classics.
Modern? This book is 60 years old! You say.
This book is old. You'd be forgiven for seeing the publishing date and thinking that fact would reflect in the writing. Let's get one thing straight, minus the Neodogs and small traces of the Leave it to Beaver Era vocab, I thought this could have been published last week. The secret sauce here is that unlike something relatively contemporary to Troopers, something like Lucky Jim, this is genre writing. At this point in time, I get the sense that the modern tropes for the SF genre were being unveiled. The SF stories of the Golden Age started taking on a more realistic tone. The concept of a technologically advanced future was legitimized as we gained the ability to vaporize whole cities. The period in which this was published is the transition between the Golden Age and the New Wave of SF. We're talking Bradbury to Dick, books like 1984 and I, Robot, ad infinitum; these classics went on to define the genre's unique embrace of hard edged science and political philosophy.
That's the best thing about Troopers (and SF larger still), even if you find the philosophy contained therein to be a little dusty or unsound, there is a philosophy to engage with, and it's a philosophy that modern readers are more than capable of engaging with. A lot of early SF that made a mark were books that delivered this engaging blend of interstellar scenario and secret philosophy essay. But those titles which predate this period never really got the story mechanics as polished as they were by this point, compare Huxley and Burroughs to Bradbury or Asimov. To me, Troopers embodies this personal definition of modern SF, it's a philosophy dissertation masquerading (quite well) as a pulpy SF Man vs Alien story.
The philosophy is a double-edged sword here. I think the main thing that holds Troopers back for a lot of people is that the philosophy of the book is absolute blue bleeding conservative fascism. I think that it is perfectly acceptable to read this book and think that it's disgusting and perverse; this window into the possible future is heartbreaking and pessimistic. Furthermore, I think the modern worldview is in part defined by the active prevention of a Kipling tinted future. To learn the right lesson from the tragedies of both World Wars is to stand in opposition to endless war and military rule. In blowing the whistle and calling Nazi, you would in-fact be echoing the critical reception this book received from its contemporaries and from scholars in the following decades.
I say all that, so I don't sound an apologist for this next part. This book is a product of its time to its core. This is the postwar era, the president has been General Ike for the last two terms, and here comes another veteran in JFK. The America of this time is the post Korea-post McCarthy-baby boom-domino theory American Empire we're talking about. To read Starship Troopers and not see it belie the course of American politics in the 1950s is to put one's own head in the sand. Consider that Heinlein is painting with the colors of the time, and you will see that this work is not entirely self-consistent. Given a purity test, there are some elements that read as liberal, elitist, or even libertarian alongside the more apparent Fascist overtones; there's a dual-handedness to a lot of the ideas as they are presented. Women in this book are a perfect example of what I'm talking about: on one hand it's a progressive concept to have women serve alongside men, on the other hand how much of this book is antiquated machismo and paternalism directed in the female direction (a lot). There is some nuance here is my point, and I choose to take it as Heinlein inviting the reader to grapple with the philosophy rather than espousing those beliefs as right and true.
I think that invitation to grapple is the ethos that inspired the satirical nature of the movie (Of course, I have to mention the movie, name a more iconic pairing). I think that in nerddom it's rare to see a movie that strays so far from the source material wind up being the most appropriate adaptation. I don't think I would be such a fan of the movie if I wasn't also a fan of the book. Even without reading Troopers, you can see the satire in the film-it's dripping off of the poster. Once I gave this book a read I found myself appreciating the movie differently, a straight adaptation may as well just be an extended recruitment advertisement and even that remark makes its way into the film. As a satire the film manages to highlight the aspect of Troopers that dares you to disagree, it has its own magic and message and without that aspect to it, I doubt Troopers would be a definitive cult classic in either medium.
TL;DR: It's classic for a reason, and it isn't a tough or boring read either.
*Disclaimer: This book was written by a good friend of mine. I purchased my own copy at full price and while I was asked to read the book, this review was not solicited in any way. That said, my star rating is going to be pinned at a 5 regardless of quality- not because I can't bear to be critical of a friend's work but because of the nature of Amazon's recommendation algorithm, so feel free to disregard it. Excepting the rating this review will contain my honest and unfiltered opinion of the book.
_____
Every year thousands of would-be lawyers across the country face a rude awakening- they enter law school dreaming of Atticus Finch/Mike Ross and dramatic legal battles only to realize that the overwhelming majority of lawyers will never see the inside of a court room. Something you learn on the first night of law school is that the case books suck to read. Shocking I know, but those massive tomes are crammed with case law and commentary that you are expected to internalize. They're textbooks, and they're just a taster of how minutiae obsessed the legal field can be. Mercifully this is NOT a legal textbook, Matt walks us through the variety of cases and courts that he worked during his time at the State and Federal prosecutors table. Unlike the casebooks, American Justice is in the vein of those much cherished legal dramas; cataloging his time pursuing carjackers, delinquent fathers, and violent fraud rings Matt paints a picture of what it's like to actually fight in court.
Don't get the impression that you need some type of legal training to appreciate this book, this should be broadly understood by most of its readers. In typical litigator fashion the author has boiled away the jargon and left only the most necessary legal terms. Matt clearly subscribes to the economy of words, as he takes great pains to explain any potentially foreign concept in plain English. What remains are a series of very interesting anecdotes of various criminal prosecutions pared down to the juiciest details. If you've ever wondered how a prosecution actually goes down, what a prosecutor actually thinks beyond just legal theory, then this is the candid peek behind the curtain you were looking for.
There is a point buried behind the anecdotes, a consistent criticism of the often-times nonsensical nature of courtroom politics. Matt describes his cases as not only as adversarial between prosecutor and defendant but as a battle between the lawyers and the law itself, highlighting issues he's observed that undercut the pursuit of justice. These are systemic issues that no one lawyer can address on their own ranging from gaps in sentencing guidelines to full blown legal loopholes that can derail an otherwise air-tight case.
It's not without flaws. The prose though coherent and concise reads in the style of a legal brief, without embellishment or characterization. I think that each case anecdote would have benefited had they been presented in a more narrative forward style. My main criticism with the book follows along similar lines, the whole thing is just a bit too brief- the cases themselves, but also the connective tissue that joins them. I felt that this was building towards a point, possibly about legal reform, but I can't say definitively because we never truly get there.
If the worst thing I can say about a book is that it's too short- it must be pretty good. That's the case for American Justice, it's interesting and easy to understand, and brevity isn't all bad because you can read this in 3-4 hours.
PS: Wasn't sure where in the review to include this, but there's humor and personal anecdotes in here. Knowing the author's sense of humor I definitely got a few laughs from the dry wit and occasional interjection. Great Job Matt!
*Disclaimer: This book was written by a good friend of mine. I purchased my own copy at full price and while I was asked to read the book, this review was not solicited in any way. That said, my star rating is going to be pinned at a 5 regardless of quality- not because I can't bear to be critical of a friend's work but because of the nature of Amazon's recommendation algorithm, so feel free to disregard it. Excepting the rating this review will contain my honest and unfiltered opinion of the book.
_____
Every year thousands of would-be lawyers across the country face a rude awakening- they enter law school dreaming of Atticus Finch/Mike Ross and dramatic legal battles only to realize that the overwhelming majority of lawyers will never see the inside of a court room. Something you learn on the first night of law school is that the case books suck to read. Shocking I know, but those massive tomes are crammed with case law and commentary that you are expected to internalize. They're textbooks, and they're just a taster of how minutiae obsessed the legal field can be. Mercifully this is NOT a legal textbook, Matt walks us through the variety of cases and courts that he worked during his time at the State and Federal prosecutors table. Unlike the casebooks, American Justice is in the vein of those much cherished legal dramas; cataloging his time pursuing carjackers, delinquent fathers, and violent fraud rings Matt paints a picture of what it's like to actually fight in court.
Don't get the impression that you need some type of legal training to appreciate this book, this should be broadly understood by most of its readers. In typical litigator fashion the author has boiled away the jargon and left only the most necessary legal terms. Matt clearly subscribes to the economy of words, as he takes great pains to explain any potentially foreign concept in plain English. What remains are a series of very interesting anecdotes of various criminal prosecutions pared down to the juiciest details. If you've ever wondered how a prosecution actually goes down, what a prosecutor actually thinks beyond just legal theory, then this is the candid peek behind the curtain you were looking for.
There is a point buried behind the anecdotes, a consistent criticism of the often-times nonsensical nature of courtroom politics. Matt describes his cases as not only as adversarial between prosecutor and defendant but as a battle between the lawyers and the law itself, highlighting issues he's observed that undercut the pursuit of justice. These are systemic issues that no one lawyer can address on their own ranging from gaps in sentencing guidelines to full blown legal loopholes that can derail an otherwise air-tight case.
It's not without flaws. The prose though coherent and concise reads in the style of a legal brief, without embellishment or characterization. I think that each case anecdote would have benefited had they been presented in a more narrative forward style. My main criticism with the book follows along similar lines, the whole thing is just a bit too brief- the cases themselves, but also the connective tissue that joins them. I felt that this was building towards a point, possibly about legal reform, but I can't say definitively because we never truly get there.
If the worst thing I can say about a book is that it's too short- it must be pretty good. That's the case for American Justice, it's interesting and easy to understand, and brevity isn't all bad because you can read this in 3-4 hours.
PS: Wasn't sure where in the review to include this, but there's humor and personal anecdotes in here. Knowing the author's sense of humor I definitely got a few laughs from the dry wit and occasional interjection. Great Job Matt!
I think this book has been around long enough to have a reputation that precedes it. In fact, the only thing I knew about 2666 was its reputation for quality among contemporary literary works. It absolutely lives up to that reputation, this book is challenging and ambitious; sprawling in scope and content, and I'm not just talking page count. This is a novel that overwhelms you, basically guaranteeing itself a reread before it's even finished.
It's a challenge just to explain what the book is about, because unlike a standard novel which delivers one linear plot, this story is fragmentary. 2666 is broken up into 5 distinct parts, which surround a series of unsolved murders in the city of Santa Teresa (a facsimile of Ciudad Juárez). The city is a nexus that draws to itself literary critics, sportswriter journalists, convicts, and dreamers; these stories of murder and mystery run tangential to the search for a reclusive German novelist, Benno Von Archimboldi (a reference to B. Traven, which is worth a Google). These parts are not genre writing, do not expect to read anything at all like a mystery novel, the mystery is the novel itself.
Those are just the broad strokes, each part tells an independent story, and it's the shared details of those minor stories which inform the larger narrative. When I first cracked this open, my intent was to review each piece independently, in keeping with the Author's last will. But that's not how something like this works. 2666 is the sum of its parts, and structured unlike anything else I've ever read. The pieces fit together however you want to puzzle it- but there are only enough pieces to give the impression of the image on the box.
This is an ambitious project, and if you're anything like me, you'll rip through the first three parts of this book grasping for anything resembling a meta-narrative to connect them. Then you'll read the fourth part, the part about the crimes, which was the literary equivalent of spending the day inside a war memorial or a holocaust museum, only for the fifth part to drag you through the horror of the Eastern front of WW2. It’s only once you're beaten down and exhausted, your expectations of what a book could be completely shattered, that Bolaño finally releases those last, crucial details to tie it all together. And then you realize that you've spent the last month reading almost a thousand pages, driven on almost solely by the brilliance of the prose and your own increasingly ravenous curiosity.
That's four paragraphs just on premise and structure alone, and we haven't even touched on prose or theme or the context of the author's life-are you starting to see the problem when it comes to reviewing this? It's a Masterpiece, like one for the canon and not just hyperbole, you could write 10,000 words on it and not even come close to paying it justice! Look at the other reviews, others have tried! This book is a deep sea of ideas and philosophy and perspective and metatextual commentary; these ideas serve as Bolaño's mark on the field of literature. I find it telling that it's only within the book itself that I can find the words to describe both the spirit and the enormity of its contents.
"Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my Vulture self, [...] You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wild-flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. [...] Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces [...] There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself I mean, [...] His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!"
I won't gush any further, because this book is not perfect. If you've skipped straight to the cons, then let me summarize the reading experience: exhausting and overwhelming. As novel as the structure is, and as successful as Bolaño is in delivering the narrative in spite of it, there are long stretches of the book where the reader is completely in the dark and subjected to the vicissitude of his trains of thought. If you're, someone who needs a constant sense of narrative progression, you are going to hate this book. If you are someone who cannot stand it when authors go off on long tangents that weave in and out of dialogue, you are going to hate this book. It's as simple as that.
You may also get the sense that the book is unfinished, and that's because by norms of publishing it is. Bolaño was racing the reaper by the end of the writing process, with the book only receiving one round of editing and feedback before his passing, and the posthumous release. There are gaps in quality and gaps in the narrative, but it's not clear if the final product was delivered by design or simply the clock's final result. This is my first Bolaño novel, so I can't really weigh in, people with more grounding in his body of work generally agree that what we got is very close to that hypothetical final draft.
It doesn't escape me that I've been complimenting the prose in a translation, so I must give a nod to Natasha Wimmer, I've read enough poor translations to recognize quality when I see it. While I obviously cannot compare the translation to the original, for the prose to contain so much of the author's voice and so little of the translator's interpretation speaks volumes.
For me 2666 sits up there with Moby Dick, a reading experience that I had all but forgotten until 2666 reminded me. I can recall how difficult I found Moby Dick at the start, only to read on, dictionary close to hand, and find myself transformed by the experience. Not only had I just exposed myself to something profound, but I had tested my mastery over language and redefined what I found to be a challenge. It was an eye-opening piece of literature to me, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming something challenging was just the cherry on top.
While 2666 isn't perfect, and something of a chore to read, I felt the same feeling as I did with Moby Dick when I turned the last page of this book. A feeling that the experience of reading the book was just as valuable as its content.
PS: I know this review is huge, but I have a few extra notes as I come back to edit this.
First: I’ve tried really hard not to comment directly on the themes/my interpretation of the book in this review. That’s unique to this book because a. I could probably go on for at least another thousand words and b. I think your enjoyment of this text is determined by how curious of a reader you are. Much of this book is focused on the surface level events, the banal, and the remaining elements all point away from resolution; trying to understand the why, piercing through the subtlety, that is the core of the reading experience. I feel like explaining would spoil that experience, interpretations are something best saved to discuss with other readers.
With that said, if you somehow read through this whole review and you need to know what it's actually about, I can't put it any better than phantom_fonte did in this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1coc67d/comment/l3g1qjm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1).
Second: I managed to get through all this without ever commenting on how much I adore the cover? People say don’t judge a book by its cover but like, this must be the exception that proves the rule. It’s a just small portion of Jupiter and Semele, the painting by the symbolist Gustave Moreau, and you should really look at the entire thing of it. If you know the story of Semele, the cover becomes yet another element added to the narrative. Out of all the possible elements in the full painting, the selection of death and the white lily is not lost on me either, “At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life.”
I think this book has been around long enough to have a reputation that precedes it. In fact, the only thing I knew about 2666 was its reputation for quality among contemporary literary works. It absolutely lives up to that reputation, this book is challenging and ambitious; sprawling in scope and content, and I'm not just talking page count. This is a novel that overwhelms you, basically guaranteeing itself a reread before it's even finished.
It's a challenge just to explain what the book is about, because unlike a standard novel which delivers one linear plot, this story is fragmentary. 2666 is broken up into 5 distinct parts, which surround a series of unsolved murders in the city of Santa Teresa (a facsimile of Ciudad Juárez). The city is a nexus that draws to itself literary critics, sportswriter journalists, convicts, and dreamers; these stories of murder and mystery run tangential to the search for a reclusive German novelist, Benno Von Archimboldi (a reference to B. Traven, which is worth a Google). These parts are not genre writing, do not expect to read anything at all like a mystery novel, the mystery is the novel itself.
Those are just the broad strokes, each part tells an independent story, and it's the shared details of those minor stories which inform the larger narrative. When I first cracked this open, my intent was to review each piece independently, in keeping with the Author's last will. But that's not how something like this works. 2666 is the sum of its parts, and structured unlike anything else I've ever read. The pieces fit together however you want to puzzle it- but there are only enough pieces to give the impression of the image on the box.
This is an ambitious project, and if you're anything like me, you'll rip through the first three parts of this book grasping for anything resembling a meta-narrative to connect them. Then you'll read the fourth part, the part about the crimes, which was the literary equivalent of spending the day inside a war memorial or a holocaust museum, only for the fifth part to drag you through the horror of the Eastern front of WW2. It’s only once you're beaten down and exhausted, your expectations of what a book could be completely shattered, that Bolaño finally releases those last, crucial details to tie it all together. And then you realize that you've spent the last month reading almost a thousand pages, driven on almost solely by the brilliance of the prose and your own increasingly ravenous curiosity.
That's four paragraphs just on premise and structure alone, and we haven't even touched on prose or theme or the context of the author's life-are you starting to see the problem when it comes to reviewing this? It's a Masterpiece, like one for the canon and not just hyperbole, you could write 10,000 words on it and not even come close to paying it justice! Look at the other reviews, others have tried! This book is a deep sea of ideas and philosophy and perspective and metatextual commentary; these ideas serve as Bolaño's mark on the field of literature. I find it telling that it's only within the book itself that I can find the words to describe both the spirit and the enormity of its contents.
"Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my Vulture self, [...] You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wild-flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. [...] Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces [...] There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself I mean, [...] His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!"
I won't gush any further, because this book is not perfect. If you've skipped straight to the cons, then let me summarize the reading experience: exhausting and overwhelming. As novel as the structure is, and as successful as Bolaño is in delivering the narrative in spite of it, there are long stretches of the book where the reader is completely in the dark and subjected to the vicissitude of his trains of thought. If you're, someone who needs a constant sense of narrative progression, you are going to hate this book. If you are someone who cannot stand it when authors go off on long tangents that weave in and out of dialogue, you are going to hate this book. It's as simple as that.
You may also get the sense that the book is unfinished, and that's because by norms of publishing it is. Bolaño was racing the reaper by the end of the writing process, with the book only receiving one round of editing and feedback before his passing, and the posthumous release. There are gaps in quality and gaps in the narrative, but it's not clear if the final product was delivered by design or simply the clock's final result. This is my first Bolaño novel, so I can't really weigh in, people with more grounding in his body of work generally agree that what we got is very close to that hypothetical final draft.
It doesn't escape me that I've been complimenting the prose in a translation, so I must give a nod to Natasha Wimmer, I've read enough poor translations to recognize quality when I see it. While I obviously cannot compare the translation to the original, for the prose to contain so much of the author's voice and so little of the translator's interpretation speaks volumes.
For me 2666 sits up there with Moby Dick, a reading experience that I had all but forgotten until 2666 reminded me. I can recall how difficult I found Moby Dick at the start, only to read on, dictionary close to hand, and find myself transformed by the experience. Not only had I just exposed myself to something profound, but I had tested my mastery over language and redefined what I found to be a challenge. It was an eye-opening piece of literature to me, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming something challenging was just the cherry on top.
While 2666 isn't perfect, and something of a chore to read, I felt the same feeling as I did with Moby Dick when I turned the last page of this book. A feeling that the experience of reading the book was just as valuable as its content.
PS: I know this review is huge, but I have a few extra notes as I come back to edit this.
First: I’ve tried really hard not to comment directly on the themes/my interpretation of the book in this review. That’s unique to this book because a. I could probably go on for at least another thousand words and b. I think your enjoyment of this text is determined by how curious of a reader you are. Much of this book is focused on the surface level events, the banal, and the remaining elements all point away from resolution; trying to understand the why, piercing through the subtlety, that is the core of the reading experience. I feel like explaining would spoil that experience, interpretations are something best saved to discuss with other readers.
With that said, if you somehow read through this whole review and you need to know what it's actually about, I can't put it any better than phantom_fonte did in this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1coc67d/comment/l3g1qjm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1).
Second: I managed to get through all this without ever commenting on how much I adore the cover? People say don’t judge a book by its cover but like, this must be the exception that proves the rule. It’s a just small portion of Jupiter and Semele, the painting by the symbolist Gustave Moreau, and you should really look at the entire thing of it. If you know the story of Semele, the cover becomes yet another element added to the narrative. Out of all the possible elements in the full painting, the selection of death and the white lily is not lost on me either, “At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life.”
