Doom is a much more immediately rewarding read for sure
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Still hanging with it actually. It’s kind of fun to notice what he appropriated from his short story Under the Rose in V.
One of my goals this year is to read more sci-fi by authors I have never read before. Living through the Handmaid’s Tale craze left me with a sour impression of Atwood, but when people described Oryx and Crake I was always a little intrigued. Has anyone read it, or other Atwood stuff? Just curious to hear people’s thoughts.
I read Oryx and Crake as a teenager for a class on “environmentally dystopian literature” in college and remember really disliking it. If I recall, I felt like it was cheesy and regressive—like, that its views on gender had a frustrating “second wave” quality despite its sort of radical posturing, the characters were really thin with hammy dialogue, the plot played too much on just what it felt like would be shocking (and yet was really kind of low-key IIR as far as “shocking lurid sci-fi” goes)…I guess like, in short, that it felt kind of like a “Saturday morning cartoon for adults” that wanted you take it really seriously, or something like that. This was around 15 years ago now though (and I was a teen) so definitely take it with a grain of salt.
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Still early on myself but this is kind of the impression I have of it too.
There was a paragraph talking about what people in the setting of the book would talk about when remembering our present time, and it was passionate listing of things like remember when we used to have burgers for dinner, with real meat. And remember when you could fly anywhere? and in that list is also And remember when voting used to actually do something? and in addition to what you’re talking about with the second wave feminism it’s this that hangs over the book as I read it.
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Yeah…It’s kind of too bad, I was sort of hoping that maybe I remembered it as being worse than it is, but based on what I recall it makes sense to me that you would cite a passage like that. I have a feeling about Atwood—based mainly on that book supplemented by random synopses and magazine articles and things—that she’s aiming for something at the most abstract level I feel like would be a nice thing for a writer to accomplish, but that she needs to get out way more, or something like that.
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I just finished this one, between a treatise on cocaine (still working on this one) and some Wendell Berry. A completely circumstantial yet utterly entertaining case study from back before psychiatry got too rigid but after it was scary. Or vice-versa. It’s hard to tell sometimes…
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I gotta read some good fucking book one of these days. been too long.
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I just finished In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish. It’s an incredible work of self-elegy from somone whose life paralleled the struggle for Palestinian liberation. I recommend it if you like prose poems.
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I wanna read some Thomas Bernhard, whats good? probably gonna start with The Loser and also ordered Wittgenstein’s Nephew
i like Woodcutters and Concrete most personally but i think he arrived and stayed pretty fully formed, to me he is one of those guys whose books are mostly distinguished by which bits they contain… like Concrete is “the one with the insane four page long riff on dogs” etc… i still feel like woodcutters might be the best for being the one where the claustrophobic setting lets his characteristic voice modulate and chase itself most intricately but it was the first one i read and compared to the venom of some of the others it felt downright restrained when i went back to it recently
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Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
Finished it but took even longer than the usual 600 pager.
What a book. It took me at least 2 chapters to really encode my brain to work with it and resist the tugging to understand ‘what is happening’ at all times. My edition comes with some reader notes and scene guides which I think I’d probably have been lost without in the 2nd and 3rd book but I still managed to get a lot out of it. My favourite chapter was the séance, I think book III.3, had a very visceral sense of sound with Shaun voicing different people through telemechanical sounds, as if the four interrogators are trying to get him to connect to the truth through an unreliable dialup connection. At times I think the book feels the most like horror to me.
Ultimately, I think Ulysses is the better book, but they form a nice pair. Ulysses is also a lot more recommendable and generally a bit more human. The Wake feels a bit more abstract, the sum total of human consciousness but not as much in it that is directly relatable.
I am struck by how often people talk up Joyce’s humour. Like, it is clearly there but some readers seem to report literally ROFLing on every page which has never been my experience and I doubt is for any reader. We used to learn about jokes in Shakespeare plays at school and they make sense but aren’t really laugh out loud funny because of either subtlety or cultural distance. I suspect a similar thing happens with Joyce where people claim hilarity which is probably referring to more subtle humur. Like there’s 3 points in the entire book I laughed out loud, the rest is occasional smirks.
An aspect of the freedom of interpretation is how some misspellings or phrasings call to mind things the author could never intend. For example, one extract had me thinking about games as a service.
anti-sexuous, misoxenetic, gaasy pure, flesh and blood games,
Others are just fun to read, the meter takes you with it.
TAFF (who still senses that heavinscent houroines that enter-
trained him who they were sinuorivals from the sunny Espionia but
plied wopsy with his wallets in thatthack of the bustle Bakerloo,
(11.32), passing the uninational truthbosh in smoothing irony over
the multinotcheralled infructuosities of his grinner set). The rib,
the rib, the quean of oldbyrdes, Sinya Sonyavitches! Your
Rhoda Cockardes that are raday to embrace our ruddy inflamtry
world! In their ohosililesvienne biribarbebeway. Till they’ve
kinks in their tringers and boils on their taws. Whor dor the pene
lie, Mer Pencho? Ist dramhead countmortial or gonorrhal stab?
Mind your pughs and keaoghs, if you piggots, marsh! Do the
nut, dingbut! Be a dag! For zahur and zimmerminnes! Sing in
the chorias to the ethur:
I can definitely see myself returning to the book again but reading in a more jump-about way. As a whole piece it is without any rival and even when there were struggles with its meaning there are passages which feel like the best thing you ever read. I thought about it a lot when not reading it.
Diaspora – Greg Egan
Very good but a bit science-headed for me. I kinda feel like the book would be improved by adding some simple diagrams. Even with the clearest written descriptions, multidimensional settings and theory are very hard to communicate in writing alone. I’d even take some of it in the form of mathematical expressions if it meant I didn’t feel like some pages were just relating something scientific textbooks can better illustrate. If I hadn’t played https://4dtoys.com/ I think I’d be lost in some sections. This also occasionally leads to the problem of every character being a highly qualified scientist and nobody having much in the way of flaws beyond some occasional friction against each other. Everyone can sometimes feel a bit clean and viceless but it kinda comes with the setting. Overall, I enjoyed the escalating scale of the story and the way in which it oscillates between hope for the future and sheer terror at the scale of the universe. Curious to know if people think this is Egan’s best book or if others are highly worth reading.
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I think Diaspora is a wonderful development of Permutation City but you’d never know if you didn’t read both. and that Schild’s Ladder is not much of a development of Diaspora.
still meaning to read Zendegi, the first book I saw a trailer for
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imagine my surprise finding out that Glenn Gould is not a fictional character from Thomas Bernhard’s “the loser”
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I’m a third of the way through Mistborn which I borrowed from the library a week back and… they had to borrow it from another library from elsewhere in the town as it had been unavailable for the two weeks beforehand. The issue is that I can’t recall exactly what spurred me to as I had never heard of the book or author beforehand (the librarian said a lot of people were reading that author recently so I assume he is popular?) as high fantasy isn’t exactly my scene but I happened to look at the goodreads score and went “that’s about as high as I’ve seen” and got curious. Even searching all the message boards I frequent there was only a sole mention back in January, but the following post in said topic was about Poppy War books and I know I looked into those before this one (I have a word document named “books the read maybe” and that confirms the order I stumbled upon them) so I’m now left feeling vaguely curious as to how I got here.
Anyways the book seems good enough so far, whoever mentioned it would have been better off selling it as a heist book rather than a fantasy/magic one as that would have had me more excited heading in.
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I just finished Brian by Jeremy Cooper, the story of a man who goes to daily screenings at the British Film Institute from around 1980 - 2020. He keeps his life purposefully dull as a hedge against anxiety, and bits and pieces of his traumatic early life in Ireland emerge through a narrative that’s mostly a catalog of films that he and presumably the author have seen. The protagonist is aloof, often dissociative, in his daily life, but the screenings are a safe, controlled microcosm where he and his fellow film buffs’ aesthetic judgements are sovereign. There’s something here about the mind’s natural tendency to right itself from even foundational insults when you run enough experience through it, even if a total realization of its potential under these circumstances might require longer than the life-span of a human body. There’s also a spirit that strikes me as very un-American in it, about getting on in life without any grand hopes or plans. The book touched me as a sympathetic portrait of someone who shares the aspects of myself that I’m least happy about (aloof, sexless, judgmental, habit-bound) and as such I expect to be chewing on memories of it for a while.
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oh shoot, john barth died on the 4th. rip to a wacky one. never read too much of his stuff, but appreciated lost in the funhouse and the floating opera when i read them. i really love “good-bye to the fruits” (go figure), which you can read here
"I agreed to die, stipulating only that I first be permitted to rebehold and bid good-bye to those of Earth’s fruits that I had particularly enjoyed in my not-extraordinary lifetime. What I had in mind, in the first instance, was such literal items as apples and oranges. Of the former, the variety called Golden Delicious had long been my favorite, especially those with a blush of rose on their fetchingly speckled yellow-green cheeks. "
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remembered two books I read in uni, borrowed from a friend who was heavy into scifi & ‘reading’, “weren’t those fun? I don’t remember anything??” & tracked down some copies. both UK authors
Vurt by Jeff Noon
I’ll skip to the end, both these books annoyed me. both heavy with getting over a failed relationship, both about a man struggling to recover a lover/deal with the repercussions, both not mentioned until the back half of the book. a terrible plot structure to hang a scifi story on
I’m not looking for catharsis or resolution in a scifi story, I want:
- the tedious horrors of living/social systems pilloried & funnelled into the experience of a protagonist, who frankly is 100% replaceable and basically faceless
- gee-whiz wonder realised into a rigorously consistent setting starring one person who’s mad as hell & not going to take it anymore
- art
- (sometimes) a puzzle, or mysterious unknowableness
and am not looking for:
- brother against brother
- half-arsed third act twists
- act structures
- words put together in a way that annoys me
yes, I did find Use of Weapons insufferable, how could you tell
Vurt by Jeff Noon
Vurt is a story about drugs without any social commentary, pro or con. Jeff obviously had spent time around users but doesn’t have the veracity to sell a substance abuse problem. which is not good when most of your narrative is about drugs. the titular Vurt is a shared hallucination/multiplayer VR game delivered by shoving a feather down your throat. the plot: protagonist (who is of course a writer) is looking for a specific feather (Curious Yellow, not the movie but a fucking Alice in Wonderland reference, it’s full of them, no it’s not The Matrix’s fault this is from 1993). the feather is one he took his sister to so they could fuck (in a technical dream, so it’s not really incest, this is addressed even less than the drugs) but something happened and she got trapped. it doesn’t matter, I got bored of the descriptions of driving round Manchester
there are some flashes of brilliance, like the Vurt that starts with the opening scene of the book but modified to remove initial fuckup that provides the friction for the story to kick off. and the somewhat deranged taxonomical aside about the combinations of the various transhuman identities Dog Human Robo Shadow Vurt. but they are few and short.
funny how both this and Neuromancer include canine-based transhuman identities but figured on the physical modification angle and totally whiffed the cartoon aspect
verdict: a Shadowrun novel is more honest with your time
Only Forward by Michael Marshal Smith
I think I gave up on his short story collection as I read it when older and had more developed my “this is a waste of time” detection. I forgot this until I got to the third act
Stark lives in The City which is composed of Neighbourhoods with a lot of Titlecased Things that do Neat Futuristic Shit. each Neighbourhood has its own cultural history based off truly RPG-archetype-poisoned concepts, so there’s:
- the crime neighbourhood
- the really nasty crime neighbourhood
- the business neighbourhood
- the wealthy upper-middle-class neighbourhood
- the computers neighbourhood
- the neighbourhood where the colours change to suit your mood
- the neighbourhood where no one is allowed to make noises
- the neighbourhood that has vaulted itself off from the others and pretends they all died in a nuclear war
- the very nice and lovely neighbourhood that is perfect where the romantic interest grew up
- cats
which, fair play, obviously had some thought put into it and would have given the best and brightest regulars of Azimov & Analog a run for their money. there’s some plot that means Stark has to go from Neighbourhood to Neighbourhood and then eventually to Jeamland—
jesus christ what a stupid name. the book should have been called Jeamland but then no one would have bought it as they would have thought it to be a total waste of time to read. quite correctly too
—the land of dreams where Stark and his old friend Rafe first travelled to from what you might call your Earth time. Stark discovered the City when trying to return home and found out you can move Only Forward (whatshisface pointing, there it is) & that The City is in fact the future & everyone he loved is dead. Rafe stays in Jeamland giving people nightmares & they fight because they were both fucking the same woman, and after Stark gave up on their relationship & broke it off she had an abortion, father unknown.
why would you do that, call up someone you used to love and tell them something that can only hurt them and they can learn nothing from? to hurt them? catharsis? her character isn’t written this vindictive in the brief few sentences she’s mentioned, but I’m not the best at picking up this kind of thing
part of the nightmares is horrifying apparitions (and the hyperviolence of future gang warfare) but Smith drops the ball with tedious swirling descriptions of meat, like the most fucked-up place is an abattoir. pretty gross places but not scary or dangerous. “imaging a sausage” ok “where your face used to be!!!” uh sure
verdict: clearer prose than Noon & more imaginative. I liked it more until the terrible horror and reveal overwhelmed, so read up to chapter 13 (inclusive) and then stop
Wot I Fink
both these books were about a man overcoming some internal mourning for something they lost, which didn’t need a scifi scaffolding to support at all. Vurt could have easily been about actual drugs and actual inappropriate sexual relationships and people being literally trapped in real institutions & spent more time on characterisation & dialogue instead of lazy filling the cracks with supercool meaningless fabrications. and Only Forward could have started with the twist and had Stark move to the US (hinted at in the story, even) and trying to build a new life. if the past is another country, &c.
the real catharsis is knowing something terrible and sad and regrettable happened, and acknowledging it, and accepting it. and I feel like these books say that you have to make a effortful gesture to try to reclaim it, fix it. which is impossible, and an unhelpful approach. and they don’t spend many pages on learning/sharing how juvenile a thought pattern it is.
I’ll looking for scifi as an escape from this!!
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I’m reading 巨乳の誕生 (Birth of big breasts) in recently days, it mentioned the movie Riso amaro run a wild advertising poster emphasis on the woman body in Japan, quite interesting marketing strategy for different regions
Amazing strength! An Italian movie where female body odor and sensuality are present throughout the scene (top words on the poster)
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