R&L Blocher

Too ephemeral. Never connects.

Revisado: 07-24-18

This book seems to have had a similar genesis to 2001: A Space Odyssey. An idea for a novel became a movie before the novel was cooked. Here, the unfinished novel became the seed of a film franchise. The possibilities seemed endless. There must have been so many that they couldn't catch them all. The results on the page and on the screen makes it all seem like so much shimmer.

Content-wise, this feels like a novella. But even at 1.5x speed, this feels like a trudge through allegory and cut-out characters. Motivation constructs are drawn from adjectives found on the cover of Modern Psychology. There's a mystery here. I'm still wondering why the narrative surrounding the mystery had to be so tedious. Part of the fun of the mystery is a good reveal. The chapters including that reveal are missing from my volume.

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Read it for the first part, skip the second.

Revisado: 04-29-17

I love Stephenson's work. Fans and soon-to-be fans should definitely give this one a listen. But it's a broken work. It's as if the author imagined the Seveneves sitting on the shelf next to his other works and found it too thin--so he tacked on a denouement that just doesn't work.

Without spoilers let me give you a sense of this: You've just read Andy Weir's The Martian with all its amazing technical specificity and intricate story. Imagine that our intrepid stranded astronaut makes it back to earth and suddenly we're thrust into the old cheesy Battle for the Planet of the Apes 1973. All rubber masks and distant memories of why we got started on this long adventure.

I've heard the conclusion described as brave. It's deterministic to a fault. It's a role-playing campaign that got the Just So stories slapped on it. What great story it could have been if it were just ended, pinched off, "out with a bang" in one epic instant instead drags on for hours like a Mass Effect script given the pass.

But come for the first part--and it's worth the price of admission--even if the ending drags. My recommendation, close the book when that moment comes. You'll know it.

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This classic continues to surprise!

Revisado: 08-28-12

For film lovers, Tarkovsky's Solaris sits up there with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as ground-breaking classics and front runners of the true space age. But both films are well-known for being a bit opaque. Long shots of space and strange planetary surfaces. Not a lot of dialog. What's there to say?

So I was stunned to find Lem's story--and Julian's incredible narration of this new translation--to be so engaging, intimate, current and accessible. At the same time, the reality facing the newest arrival on Solaris Station is like a litmus test for one's sensitivity to horror. What's your Hari?

While appreciating Tarkovsky's film I was surprised by the technical depth Lem filled the planet of Solaris with and how well-tread he made the Station's halls feel, long before we ever made it into space. This and 2001 are indispensable for fans of the films and the sci-fi genre.

I found something oddly pleasant, albeit anachronistic, in listening to a narrated digital recording of a classic sci-fi novel wherein many discoveries on a distant planet far in the future are made in a library amongst the hand-written notes left by their predecessors.

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Starting to Date Itself

Revisado: 05-08-12

I first heard about this book on Boing Boing and podcasts a couple years back. It sounded awesome to me. Dammit, where IS my jetpack? If you've been hiding for the last ten years perhaps there's a lot here still to find fresh. But much of these trails have been well mapped.

Worse, there's still futurism here disconnected from the cultural and social world that propels the subject. The zest for the Reasons Why at the beginning break down and pretty soon we're being regaled with stories of the absurd fantastic. So we're building houses on artificial islands in the Gulf? How's the market for that going? What's the environmental impact? Underwater hotels? The rooms exist but they're not doing brisk business.

In the meantime, James Cameron shoots to the bottom of the ocean in a torpedo sub.

Hopefully Wilson is working on a follow-up--rather than a new forward--that cuts a little deeper than this light compendium.

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