Oryx and Crake illustrations

An artist named Jason Courtney has done a short series of very cool illustrations based on Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake. Go, look.

(Found on the blog Uncertain Times, which you really should check out.)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road

I burned through this in a few hours while sitting in the waiting room while my sister was in labor. Maybe not the best choice to read while attending the birth of a baby boy, but it passed the time well enough.

This was one of those rare apocalyptic novels I throw into the dystopian mix to keep things interesting (that was, I say, that was a joke, son). And, boy howdy, McCarthy hit every square on that end-of-the-world lit bingo sheet. Cannibals? Check! Horrific environmental damage? Check! A trek through the rotting remains of our culture? Check! A taste of deus ex machina when things get too bleak? Check!

Which isn't to say that I didn't like it. Those things became tropes because we find them both likely and interesting. This is the first thing I've read by McCarthy, and he has a spare style that works well with this sort of story. It's bloody, but even the blood is shadowed, the reds muted and greyed out with ash.

The movie version comes out this month. I'm wondering if they'll keep the ending as is or go Hollywood.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Altered Carbon

I really dig the hardboiled sf/mystery style (Lethem also does this really well). After Halting State, all the violence and action that Morgan packs into his work was especially welcome. It's not great literature, but it's a fun ride.

I have this massive fear of being trapped. Trapped underground in a tight cave. Trapped under the ice (not that I have ever seen a really frozen lake or pond - I'm a Florida boy). Trapped in my own body, mind alive but unable to move (China Miéville's books tap into some of that, especially some of the punishments in the Bas-Lag novels). So Morgan's vision of mind being kept "on the stacks", frozen in time or manipulated by anyone who can afford the technology, really gave me the heebie jeebies.

Not to mention all the brutality in Altered Carbon. Now, this isn't packed full of detailed violence like Chung Kuo, by David Wingrove, but he does linger on some pretty fucked up torture a time or two. I don't have a problem with that. It fuels the rage behind the story, and who among us isn't a little fascinated by blood and gore?

All in all, a dark, flowing cyberpunk adventure. I thought I knew the answer to the whodunit early on but turned out to be wrong - a good thing, indeed. I look forward to reading more in the series.

comment moderation

I hate to do this, but I'm switching on the comment moderation for a while. I'm fighting an Asian spammer.

Adding: crisis over, back to normal.

Halting State by Charles Stross

Halting State

Have you ever had to listen to someone describe to you, in detail, this killer videogame they've been playing lately? For hours on end? And they're really excited about it, but it's worse than listening to someone describe their dreams, because there's not even any chance of hearing about some sort of really fucked up dream sex between them and someone you know? That was Halting State for me.

I'm no gamer. Okay, I play Kingdom of Loathing from time to time, and I'm enough of a geek to get many of Stross's references, but the whole god damned concept of the real world and game worlds interacting on a full immersion level leaves me bored to tears. Or maybe it's just his writing. He obviously felt that your average person wouldn't be able to follow along with those more familiar with MMORPGs, and he winds up discarding, oh, such trifles as character development or actual plot action to deal with blah blah blah explanations and exposition.

Boring beyond belief is what I'm saying. Bloodless murders, thefts that don't matter, kidnappings of no one. There were a few interesting concepts buried in there somewhere, but damned if I wound up caring. And, of course, it dragged on forever because it never drew me in enough to keep me reading for long. If I didn't have a habit of finishing every book I start, I'd have chucked this one over the fence two weeks ago.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We

Pretty much the grandfather of the classic, totalitarian dystopias. 1984, Brave New World, Kallocain - this novel helped spawn them all. Often, I'll find that I don't enjoy a book that's become this huge influence, preferring the distilled version found in later works. In this case, however, it turns out that the original charmed me in ways that the later novel (no matter how much I did enjoy them) simply couldn't.

Orwell's best work is very spare and stripped down, for example, but Zamyatin's writing in We is almost romantic. His main character, D-503, tell the whole story as a sort of love poem. At first, he is driven by love of state, love of belonging, love of work. As he progresses, he falls not only for mysterious and rebellious I-330, he also freely expresses his feelings for the voluptuous O-90 and their friend/her other lover R-13. His journal style matches this outpouring of emotion. Just riding in an air car comes out as:

Five minutes later, we were already in the areo. The blue majolica of the Maytime sky; the light sun in its own golden aero buzzing after us, neither falling behind nor overtaking us. And ahead of us - a cloud, white as a cataract, preposterous and puffed out like the cheeks of an ancient cupid, and somehow disturbing. Our front window is up. Wind, drying the lips. Involuntarily, you lick them all the time, and all the time you think of lips.

"And all the time you think of lips." I didn't find anything that simply beautiful in 1984. And that feeling remains until the end, even though the narrator's soul is lost, the people themselves may be rescued. It's no accident that this is shown by the flight of birds, formerly banned from the city. All of We, from the space craft to the love stories, is a longing toward flight.

Battle Royale

Julian Callos gives good dystopia.

unforeseen effects

Every time I go out to my mama's house and walk out to look at the chickens, I find myself having to say "Four legs good, two legs bad!"

I feel so creative.

I got a blogging award bestowed upon me by Rhiannon Hart:

The rules state that:
Once you receive this award you are to list seven of your favorite things and then nominate seven other blogs.

Here are a few of my favorite things...
1. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
2. Going out of town with the crew to see a friend's band play at a large show.
3. Discworld (my go-to when the dystopias get a little heavy).
4. Bamboo House Chinese buffet.
5. Unexpectedly being smiled at by a pretty girl.
6. Office supplies.
7. Napping in a hammock in the shade.

And the award goes to...(not in any particular order):
- Smoke and a Coke (photography)
- I've been reading lately (literature)
- Caustic Cover Critic (book design)
- Sarcastic Bastard (awesomeness)
- Doc's 50 (reading challenge)
- Roll Up the Rugs (my sister, sue me)
- Forgotten Bookmarks (what it sounds like)

Sea of Glass by Barry B. Longyear

Sea of Glass

This isn't the first one I've read that plays with the idea of the government restricting the number of children a family can have. And it's not the first one to show a group of kids bonding together in a home run by the powers-that-be to combat abuse and their own confinement. But this is definitely the first one in which the battered, raped, orphaned-by-the-state kid winds up, through a lifetime of his own research, agreeing with those in charge and actively working for them right up through the end of the book.

I think SoG will stick with me in same way that The Sheep Look Up has, though it is more sf and less likely. Over and over in these latter day dystopias, the idea crops up that we need to cut back on population to the point that mass killings becomes the answer. Will that happen? Could be, in the fullness of time. I can't imagine feeling that it's moral even then, though.

There's just so much death in this novel, from characters we know and grow to feel close to up through the nameless, faceless masses. And, in the end, is death actually life? Does it save the world, or is it all just pain for the sake of pain? Almost every destructive or horrific action in the book is taken for what the perpetrator considers a positive reason. Revenge for a friend. To prevent wholescale war. In search of affection. Do the means justify the ends? That's not a question that I have the philosophical credentials to answer, in the large scale.

final thought: One of the better ones I've read in the past year and a half, and one I'll pass on to others.