Recently Read
Dave Hansen
I discussed this one briefly in another thread. Not ostensibly SF,
but it has ghosts, magic, and ESP, so it's at least arguably on-
topic. Relates the history of the founding, life, and death of the
fictional village of Macondo and the family stemming from the
founder. The narrative style and structure are interesting, but the
story and characters are not. Most often, they're just baffling and
surreal. If I had to read this for a class, I would not find it an
onerous task, but since I'm reading for enjoyment, I quit trying about
3/4 of the way through. As Dorothy's cookbook says, "Life's too short
to stuff a mushroom."
"The Android's Dream" by John Scalzi
I enjoyed this quite a lot. It was not exactly what I was expecting
given the cover blurb, but that's OK. The cover blurb wasn't all that
exciting. The pace is quick, the story pulls you forward, and it's
rarely predictable. It's exciting and funny and fun to read. It's
not without problems -- The level of violence seemed a bit high for
what is ostensibly a farce, the squick factor of the provenance of the
"sheep" is a bit high for my taste, and while Harry Creek is one of
Scalzi's best characters ever, I wouldn't have minded a little deeper
development of some of the others, especially Robin Baker. And the
ambiguity of Sam Berlant is distracting -- it's obvious Scalzi is
trying to get away without specifying Sam's gender. It works at
first, but as the story goes on, some of the passages involving Sam
become stilted as Scalzi struggles to avoid using a personal pronoun.
As I said, distracting, and it pulls me out of the story.
But these are small problems. It took me a month to get 3/4 of the
way through Marquez "Solitude". "The Android's Dream" took me three
days to finish. If you've enjoyed any of Scalzi's other novels,
you'll probably like this one. If you haven't read any Scalzi, and the
first couple sentences in the book don't scare you away, I'm guessing
you'll like it as well.
"Neptune Crossing" by Jeffrey A. Carver
I haven't read anything else by Carver. I picked this up as a free
ebook at the Baen Library. I liked it well enough that I'm continuing
the series. With more free ebooks from Baen.
John Bandicut is a pilot with an outfit mining the alloys left by an
ancient civilation on Neptune's moon Triton. He's been badly damaged
by some recent hardships, most notably the loss of the "neuralogical
implants" that enable him to access the "Datanet" and pilot
spacecraft, the result of an accident combined with incompetent
medical treatment by the company doctors. The loss of the implants
make him subject to bouts of "Silence Fugue", and during such a bout,
he wanders far from the mining base to an area on Triton where he's
not supposed to be.
There he encounters the "translator" and meets a "quarx". The exact
nature of these... creatures? artifacts? things? ... is never
completely revealed, but the quarx takes residence in Bandicut's
brain, and together they undertake a mission to save the Earth. From
what, or how, they're not quite sure yet...
The nature of the relationship between Bandicut and the quarx (whom
Bandicut calls "Charlie") has echoes from Hal Clement's "Needle",
which I read about 30 years ago. Much of the first quarter to half of
the book is Bandicut and Charlie getting to know and trust one
another. Sadly most of the rest of the book doesn't have these
echoes. The major flaw in the book is that most of the action (though
not all) takes place in Bandicut's head, and most of what goes on in
there is "Woe is me" and "What's going on?"
So it's not as good as "Needle", or at least not as good as I remember
"Needle" being. There aren't a lot of real surprises, though there
are a few tense moments once the adventure gets underway. The story
holds together, the characters (the human ones, anyway) are
believable, and the author isn't trying to trick us. Things happen
that (I feel) deserve more explanation, such as the events in the
chapter titled "Memory Death", and the book ends abruptly (if at all)
with a 2 page lead-in to the next book.
One particularly sour note is the author's use of made-up epithets in
place of something recognizable. Every time Bandicut uses the phrase
"Mokin' foke" (and he uses it a _lot_) or uses "fr'deekin'" as an
adjective, it jars me out of the story.
But the flaws are tolerable, and I'm not sorry I started. The next
book in the series is "Strange Attractors", which so far (about 1/3
the way through) is similar in tone ("Woe is me," and "What's going
on?"), but has a lot of interesting ideas floating around. I'll talk
more about that when I finish it.
-=Dave
Jack Tingle
> "Neptune Crossing" by Jeffrey A. Carver
...
> One particularly sour note is the author's use of made-up epithets in
> place of something recognizable. Every time Bandicut uses the phrase
> "Mokin' foke" (and he uses it a _lot_) or uses "fr'deekin'" as an
> adjective, it jars me out of the story.
That didn't bother me, but the use of wacky punctuation to set off the
alien's speech was a major roadblock for me. It was like reading while
driving over speed bumps.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
Will in New Haven
> "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (DNF)
>
> I discussed this one briefly in another thread. Not ostensibly SF,
> but it has ghosts, magic, and ESP, so it's at least arguably on-
> topic. Relates the history of the founding, life, and death of the
> fictional village of Macondo and the family stemming from the
> founder. The narrative style and structure are interesting, but the
> story and characters are not. Most often, they're just baffling and
> surreal. If I had to read this for a class, I would not find it an
> onerous task, but since I'm reading for enjoyment, I quit trying about
> 3/4 of the way through. As Dorothy's cookbook says, "Life's too short
> to stuff a mushroom."
>
I haven't read either of the other books, so I didn't read your
discussions of them. I would like to say that there is no reasonable
way to claim that "magical realism" isn't fantasy. This book is
clearly on-topic. I read it a long time ago and I liked it somewhat
better than you do. However, the usual arguments given for not
classifying it as fantasy amount to one or two tired lines of
reasoning, usually a little of each.
1: I like and respect this, so it can't be fantasy.
2: There's no elves, no dragons or whatever ingredient the ignorant
critic thinks is central to fantasy.
This book is fantasy and only ok fantasy, at that.
--
Will in New Haven
netcat
b0b7c2...@g27g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>, id...@hotmail.com says...
>
> "Neptune Crossing" by Jeffrey A. Carver
>
> I haven't read anything else by Carver. I picked this up as a free
> ebook at the Baen Library. I liked it well enough that I'm continuing
> the series. With more free ebooks from Baen.
>
> John Bandicut is a pilot with an outfit mining the alloys left by an
> ancient civilation on Neptune's moon Triton. He's been badly damaged
> by some recent hardships, most notably the loss of the "neuralogical
> implants" that enable him to access the "Datanet" and pilot
> spacecraft, the result of an accident combined with incompetent
> medical treatment by the company doctors. The loss of the implants
> make him subject to bouts of "Silence Fugue", and during such a bout,
> he wanders far from the mining base to an area on Triton where he's
> not supposed to be.
>
> There he encounters the "translator" and meets a "quarx". The exact
> nature of these... creatures? artifacts? things? ... is never
> completely revealed, but the quarx takes residence in Bandicut's
> brain, and together they undertake a mission to save the Earth. From
> what, or how, they're not quite sure yet...
>
> The nature of the relationship between Bandicut and the quarx (whom
> Bandicut calls "Charlie") has echoes from Hal Clement's "Needle",
> which I read about 30 years ago. Much of the first quarter to half of
> the book is Bandicut and Charlie getting to know and trust one
> another.
I started reading it last year and didn't finish. From what I recall of
it, I must have lost interest somewhere soon after they met each other.
rgds,
netcat
Michael Grosberg
Let me offer a third possibility.
"Fantasy" the genre, isn't just "fiction with magic and other stuff
that isn't real". Fantasy is a genre with conventions on how to write
and present a story. Fantasy attempts to suspend disbelief by creating
an internally-consistent imagined universe, even if it follows
different laws of nature than ours. If there's magic, it has some
rules. Things happen for a reason - even if the reason is "the gods
decried so". In fantasy, we need some pretense: either that the story
takes place in a secondary world, or that there is a secret history to
ours which lets the supernatural roam the streets along with mundanes.
Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange,
unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained.
There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange
things happen to people ostensibly living in our world.
In 100YoS, the list of things that happen includes:
*A rain that keeps on falling for months, making the air so thick with
water fish can swim in the air.
*A plague of amnesia that forces people to label everything
(foodstuffs, people, furniture etc) lest they forget what they are.
*A gypsy bazaar with a working flying carpet.
There is no unifying theme to any of the things that happen, nor is
there ever an explanation.
The "flavor", techniques, style and purpose of magical realism is
substantially different than that of fantasy, and it caters to a
different audience. You may claim that MR is a subset of fantasy if
you want, but if you treat genres as something that should help
readers find works they would like to read, you should keep them
separate.
That said, I believe it's still on topic here, just 'cause.
Sean O'Hara
declared:
> >
> Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange,
> unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained.
> There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange
> things happen to people ostensibly living in our world.
So the Stephen King story "Trucks," in which automobiles come to
life and kill humans for no apparent reason, is magical realism?
--
Sean O'Hara <http://www.diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
New audio book: As Long as You Wish by John O'Keefe
<http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-010/>
Michael Grosberg
> In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Great and Powerful Michael Grosberg
> declared:
>
>
>
> > Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange,
> > unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained.
> > There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange
> > things happen to people ostensibly living in our world.
>
> So the Stephen King story "Trucks," in which automobiles come to
> life and kill humans for no apparent reason, is magical realism?
I think this was made into a movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB-1d9fM3OU
Seriously though, unexplained occurrences are also a staple of the
Horror genre.
(It's in the Horror Genre, BTW)
Sean O'Hara
That's my point -- your definition could apply to magical realism or
horror.
William December Starr
Michael Grosberg <grosberg...@gmail.com> said:
> The "flavor", techniques, style and purpose of magical realism is
> substantially different than that of fantasy, and it caters to a
> different audience. You may claim that MR is a subset of fantasy
> if you want, but if you treat genres as something that should help
> readers find works they would like to read, you should keep them
> separate.
Q: Is it true that one of the major traits of magic realism is that
bizarre things, wholly outside of scientific reality, occur in a
universe entirely mimetic of ours and nobody in the story thinks
this is strange?
-- wds