4thace

A classic big idea SF novel

Revisado: 05-04-23

This was an influential novel at the time it came out for the ideas it advanced and the huge contours on which it painted its story. For much of it, the focus is split between the galactic view of a Blight that threatened enormous stretches of space reaching down from the Transcend and the one planet where a family fleeing the Blight landed on a planet of non-spacefaring sophonts, soon reduced to only two children unaware of the secret their cargo vessel was carrying. In the middle section of the novel there is a slow motion voyage to bring the two plotlines together and at the end an action section to show how both groups manage to solve the desperate situations in which they were enmeshed. This is a book with big ambitions which influenced other authors to produced their own big concept books.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding in the space opera sections, but found the planet-based portions less compelling. The level of emotional investment I had with the characters was only just enough to pull me through the whole book, however, and I'm afraid that the big climax was for me marred by plot and character elements I disliked. The resolution at the very end, with the surviving High Beyond characters stranded on the planet, is something hard for me to accept as having solved all their issues in a satisfying way, despite the author's best efforts to tell me otherwise. He mentions the enormous side effects of the way the magical technological solution reshaped the nature of a large section of the galaxy and I wondered whether the probably suffering of any advanced inhabitants of those places was being soft-pedaled. So while I admire the profusion of new ideas found here, these cracks in the storytelling bothered me enough to keep from giving it a top rating.

I listened to the interesting sections at 1.5X speed in my audiobook and the other sections at 2X. I am glad I made it to the end but I do not plan to read the other books in the series.

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Stories from a bygone time

Revisado: 11-17-22

On February 12, 2011, I rated this book based on decades-old memories then. This is a review of the Audible version ten years later, a very long time after the first time I read this.

This book attempts to portray what it felt like to live in small town Illinois in the summer of 1928. At the center is the character of Douglas Spaulding who stands in for the author as a young boy during that time. His family members and other members of the community recur in the different short stories.

In these stories themes of history and discovery and loss turn up repeatedly. The stories are reflective of the time in which they were written and the time and were written to appeal readers of those times. The book's title refers to the home-bottled refreshment harvested in late spring and fermented over summer which the characters associate with the memories of those seasons. Bradbury is known as a speculative fiction author but there's really only one story that's what I would consider fantasy in this group. Some are comic, even slapstick, and some are just faintly nostalgic. That is not to say that these are light stories. There's a fair amount of death that goes on in this little town that happens just as it did in real life. These deaths and the near brushes with death weigh upon the main character's mind as he tries to understand what's in store for him.

The wording he uses is quaintly old fashioned and the character in it are utterly conventional so this is not a place to look for diverse, unconventional representation. At times the writing did veer toward the sentimental and perhaps the preachy. But for me these were outweighed by the many passages of luminous prose style, purple, but not off-putting in my opinion. Listening to this description of Green Town, Illinois of nearly a hundred years ago was an enjoyable refuge for me. And I found there were enough interesting ideas there to maintain my interest. The tales made me remember those stories by Ray Bradbury which happen to conjure up that sweet, sad wistfulness, such as the ones I found the most memorable in The Martian Chronicles. But just as bottles of dandelion wine do not pretend to be wine from vintage grapes, these deftly crafted tales can be appreciated for what they are, without pretensions. I was interested to see that he'd written a couple of sequels taking the description of Douglas Spaulding's life beyond his childhood which I might want to pick up some time too.

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Enthusiasm and battle stories make it work

Revisado: 10-08-22

This book is intended for those who identify as makers, whether of art or of technology or of craft. The people who should get the most out of this book are the ones who are trying to think about how they can bring the things they have in their minds into being and how they can how they can hang onto the critical momentum they need to complete their projects. His background is working for special effects houses and for the cinematic industry which is something very distant from my experience. He does mention some of the epic builds that happened on the Mythbusters television program that fans will recall. Some of those exploits happened not far from where I live now. But this book goes far beyond that by describing his life as a maker long before and after that program that made him famous. I can relate to it because I used to work with my hands quite a lot when I was an experimental physicist building experiments and later on when I was a small business owner repairing furniture. That was when I had my own tools and had a stock of materials with properties I needed to understand. Now I'm very detached from that state of mind that the author describes which includes single-minded devotion to the process of making the object, the proper maintanance of a workspace, and working with other makers.

He consistently comes across as a person who has always thrown himself into the work. The book is thematically organized with plenty of stories along the way. The parts that stick out in my mind are the sections on checklists and organizing projects by checking off boxes for each atomic step. He talks about tools and about materials organization working with others and a lot of it has to be in service to his cosplay passion. When he talks about the role of drawing in clarifying one's ideas and communicating them to others you can see that this is something that he finds really as a core part of his way of thinking.
I liked learning about his idea of how you start out working with a cheap tool of a given type to learn whether it's for you and how to graduate to a more perfect version of the tool once you know that it is. He writes and speaks with an appealing humility, or, rather, tends to boast about about the artifacts that he's been to do justice to by applying the toolkit of a generalist to every challenge they posed. He owns up frequently to times where he didn't measure up and the lessons that he learned from those episodes. There are many reminiscences of manic energy in this book, but towards the end he takes on on a more reflective attitude to where he's been and what he's learned over the years. This philosophical section may be the most valuable take away from the book. A lot of the ideas he includes are credited to other makers he has gotten to know, whether craft people, skilled tradespeople, or trainees who have worked in one of his shops.

So I would say that I admire this book though it's not immediately applicable to my situation since I have no immediate desire to set up a shop. I can see it being life changing for other makers who have similar broad interests. He sees something transcendent in works of cinema that I find uninteresting. And that's okay. I think he's just more in tune with his senses, from the years of working a piece of material and fashioning it into something, compared to the more conceptual approach to projects that I favor.

I listened to this as an audiobook read by the author which also comes along with a PDF containing illustrations of the works he describes in loving detail. Of course his enthusiasm and deep knowledge shines all through this book.

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An entertaining mystery with a bonus

Revisado: 09-06-22

This is a debut novel by a celebrity beloved by the geek crowd mainly, and it isn't too bad. The mystery element isn't too taxing on the reader and there's a lot of far-fetched mystery stuff mixed in with the Hollywood memoir material. I'm guessing a lot of its audience will be reading to find out what they can about the people behind their favorite Star Trek characters of the 1980s. The author wisely takes a self-deprecating tone that is appealing and there are enough allusions to old classic movies to give you a good idea of what really motivates him as an artist. There is one subplot which actually does relate to the "fan-fiction" of the title, but the story does not much hinge on authorial rights and control, fortunately.

The big bonus of the audiobook version is all the voices of the featured cast, including Brent Spiner reading his own narration. If you aren't a Star Trek The Next Generation fan this won't do so much for you maybe, but I liked it.

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The limits of a

Revisado: 08-05-22

I am squarely in the target demographic for this book, not because I am an actual supervillain but because I appreciate nonfiction books that take the time to dive deep into unusual factual topics and bring to light whatever unexpected gems are encountered on the way. The kind of bad guy the author is thinking about is not the one primarily motivated by hatred or resentment, but the freethinking genius who chooses not to respect the boundaries society places on behavior. And yet the most noteworthy schemes described are the ones which are technically legal and conceivably possible, given enough perseverance. There is a steady escalation in scope from the early sections concerned with the money and land resources to carry out the real schemes that will cement the reputation of anyone with the intellect and daring to pull them off. By the end he's talking about cosmic-scale ideas far beyond the scope of what any mundane mind would dream up, and it's exhilirating. If you are looking for something easier for the average person to wrap their mind around, a cozy read, this might not be the book for you. There's a kind of giddy optimism when pushing a loopy notion all the way to its furthest limit when trying to bring it into being. But he is careful to keep things honest when he runs into one of the numerous blind alleys a mad genius might come up with.

There could be no better narrator than the author. It becomes clear how some of these notions took hold as he sat down to write this when you hear them spin out the tale, with frequent digressions.

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Silly yet insightful fun

Revisado: 07-06-22

It seems that this collection of postindustrial fairy tales of uncharacteristic of the author's other work. You could tell that he must have enjoyed writing them based on the unbridled exuberance in them, and it must have been both a pleasure and a chore to translate them into English. Many of the tales have a setup which sounds like a story you know already, but in nearly all cases the author manages to do something surprising and delightful by the end. More than a few instances of situations intended for a mature audience take place, so they really aren't intended for the very young, but I imagine a smart teen might really enjoy these for their subversive wit. The craftsmanship runs more toward farce them beautiful language but now and then there are surprises in the character insights. I would like to listen to these once more some day to catch the sly little surprises I think are hidden among the seemingly throwaway details. The vocal performance in this edition was engaging and lively too, with just the right comic timing.

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The best way to understand this comic genius

Revisado: 05-22-22

This is my first time being exposed to the work of Molière, who has been in my To Be Read list since high school. This was an audiobook version performed by LA Theater works using the Richard Wilbur translations of the 1960s. Wilbur somehow manages to preserve the rhyming couplets of the original in a manner that to me does not come off as forced. Maybe I had to get used to the format or may be there was some difference in the quality of the first few works as compared to the last few, which I enjoyed quite a bit more for their ingenuity. I liked how I could understand the ridicule of the social customs of the time without having to be heavily acquainted with the influential members of the French royal court then, it would be hard for someone to do the equivalent for our time without ridiculing the personalities of the famous in a way that would be unintelligible to most three centuries later. So much of the human is at the expense of the patriarchy, still recognizable now. There are some historical notes included about the author's life and times. The players have lots of fun and communicate this well.

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A tragedy seen from the doctor's point of view

Revisado: 04-11-22

This book is often hailed as the first science fiction novel, grown out of the Gothic style, but to me it came off more like a morality story that alluded to things that could only happen in science fiction as we see it now. Mary Shelley alludes to chemicals and apparatus needed to create the monster without really evoking what any of this was about. Instead we spend long stretches in the head of the title character whose fate is to do things he comes to regret bitterly afterwards. It is told as a sort of double framing story, where an explorer is sending letters to his sister, and in one of these is the tale related by a Swiss wanderer he picks up in the far north, turning out to be Victor Frankenstein fruitlessly pursuing his monster to make it pay for the crimes it committed. And inside Victor's story are passages where the monster gets to relate his own fantastical tale including how he learns to speak and read and understand this hostile world into which he was thrown in his hideous misshapen form incapable of redemption. That part, by far, was the most interesting bit, and when the book reverts back to the travels of Victor with his friend and his family and engagement and so on, it just felt lackluster to me. But throughout it is a curious account of characters doing things for unfathomable reasons. Why did Frankenstein create the thing, just because he could? Why did it decide to kill even after it had acquired reason? Why did Victor not take any precautions against the hostile deeds the monster pretty clearly told him he was going to do well in advance? I think there's no good to be thinking about these plot points rationally, which to me was a disappointment, because the author was evidently much more intent on evoking a Gothic mood and depicting a tragic outcome by any means possible. I felt impatient at times but kept reminding myself that this was written long before any idea that something more coherent to modern tastes could grow out of the genre.

I listened to the audiobook which helped carry me through the parts where I would have set the book aside because of my problems with it. Of course many have run with the germ of this tale and made popular works which go in different directions from Shelley's original, which is why we still remember it today. The later works all try to connect the elements in their own way, but the gaps in the original story (I think the one I listened to was a revision of the original) point to a different artistic goal I have to respect for what it is.

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An accessible but deep novel

Revisado: 12-19-21

In college I was assigned A Passage to India in English class and did not appreciate it much. But I thought I might not have given the author a fir chance and decided to listen to the audiobook version of this other novel of his, which is best remembered by many in its cinematic version (which I have not seen). I am glad that I did, to experience some good writing of a non-experimental sort that combines a domestic drama with some explosive class ideas due to take to take center stage in the following decades of the twentieth century.

We see the story largely through the eyes of the elder Schlegel sister, Margaret, who is progressive socially without being flashy about her opinions. Somehow, I am not entirely clear how, she ends up with the capitalist Henry Wilcox as his second wife, which constitutes the engine of the major part of the story. Also key to the plot are the Bast couple, impoverished and unable to improve their circumstances on their own. I think another author (D. H. Lawrence?) might have made them the central figures instead of this lower rank. It's interesting to see how the tumult surrounding them is given no purple prose by Forster. Disgrace and death are mentioned in such an offhand way it would be easy to miss while going through the pages quickly. I have to think this is because the Bast's class of people was virtually invisible to those of privilege, if one disappears, then another will just appear in their place, according to Henry. Telling the story from the Bast's point of view would have deprived the reader of the understanding of the way the economic system is constructed by those at the top, the ones they have to defer to even if they hate it. So by shifting the viewpoint to the more privileged, yet not exalted, person of Margaret the author allows us to see and sympathize to some degree with both ends of the class system.

Besides this careful plot construction, there is beauty in the words as Forster describes the changing face of London with its new construction all practicality without quaintness, and with the motor car taking its dominance there and in the countryside. He invests the secondary characters with enough care that we can remember them when they reappear in the story, and gives enough clues about the relative worth of the houses the Wilcoxes have collected to establish a sense of their power in the hierarchy. This skill at storytelling enhanced my pleasure in reading a book fundamentally about ideas, by making the abstract signifiers of station concrete. Some time, not right away, I may tackle A Passage to India once more.

The book narration pulled me along well, helping me to make sense of the various convolutions of the story and most of the characters popping up. By the end, I had a sense of what relation the house Howards End had to the themes of the story, which turned out not to be the role I had been expecting.

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An engrossing space opera

Revisado: 08-08-21

This second book in the Teixcalaan series moves in larger circles than the first one which mostly confined itself to the politics of the world city. Most notably, this story has multiple viewpoints running at the same time, including that of the non-human alien adversaries. It is out and out space opera with those baffling aliens, enormously powerful military spaceships, technologies which are being kept secret from the Emperor herself, and a romance acknowledged in the midst of everything. In the end there are three ways of direct mental communication which were all unknown to the ordinary citizen of the Empire. The author does a decent job of raising the stakes again and again leading up to the big climax, and when early on the characters make decisions which advance the plot while at the same time seeming somewhat unmotivated, I was okay with it, because I just wanted to see how it would play out.

I wouldn't recommend reading these books out of order. While the plots are not closely intertwined, the characters who recur certainly are.

Because I read this as an audiobook unlike the first in the series which I consumed as an ebook, I think this heightened the differences I felt between them. It had more examples of shared minds on the grand scale as opposed to the small scale sharing of the Stationer imago technology we learned about in the first book, by the aliens, by the Teixcalaanli shard pilots, and by their Sunlit police force. It is a mixed subject, with its obvious frightening aspects but also glimpses of how it can enrich lives too and provide a communal meaning to a group. The first part of this book portrays the villainy of the Lsel station directorate up close as the precipitating event for the characters' flight out to the battle zone, and it crops up again at the end. Charges of spying by Mahit are not new, but supporting evidence of those loyalties is. The settings are in space more often than on planets as they were in book one, although they do not feature the microgravity experience at all.

I was fine with the planet side subplots, though I didn't really understand the palace intrigue fully. It was clear that hiding information is an important motif both on the personal level and institutionally. I also don't completely understand where the aliens' motivations lay, such as why exactly they had slaughtered everyone on a colony planet even though it didn't benefit them. Maybe it was a mistake on their part? I'm not sure. The tension leading up to the climax was undercut for me because I never really believed that the atrocity being advocated would actually get carried out.

I can understand that the author's style, which emphasis the interior lives of the characters so much, might not be what everyone prefers. It is a book where no one in the halls of power say anything without calculation, in their own mind or that of an image riding along, and what a person says to you and does not say is subjected to deep analysis, even when a person is in the throes of death. Rarely does anyone say a line of dialogue without a heavy dose of premeditation, which plays well for readers that are that way by temperament too, maybe not for everybody. I will be looking forward to the next thing coming from her along with the fans, however, whether it is set in this universe or something completely new.

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