User Profile

Two stories in this book are about humans being dominated by nightmarish aliens. After reading Butler's time travel and slavery novel "Kindred", and knowing what a pioneer she was as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, it's hard to miss the influence her real life had on her fiction.

But there's a tremendous compassion and hope for reconciliation in her stories. Anger and outrage are built into the premise of a Butler story, but the future always contains love and optimism... more than the domineering aliens seem to deserve. Her stories have such clarity and simplicity, and I feel like I know her personally, or I WANT to know her, even as she's creating one her uniquely bizarre science fiction scenarios. Everything I've read by her makes me feel her loss. 58 is too young.

I take half a star off only because I thought the story "Near of Kin" was distasteful. Maybe you need to have a different relationship with the Christian bible to get it, but I think it was a rare failure. It's probably the least significant of the stories in this little collection, and others refloated the book as I read on.

It took me a while to get around to reading this. Perhaps it's the title, indicating that this is one of his non-SF books, inasmuch as any of his books can be described as SF. Vonnegut gently mocks himself, his characters, the entire universe, and that includes readers like me. I should have learned from him by now that it's actually absurd to approach Vonnegut from the direction of science fiction. He is clearly not a genre writer, unless you perceive him as being his own genre.

In my defence, I suggest that "Cat's Cradle", which preceded "God Bless You Mr Rosewater", is the best of Vonnegut's novels when read from the perspective of science fiction. But I digress...

There are several Rosewaters in the book - the main one is Eliot, heir to a fortune who turns his back on his privileged life and lives in a backwater county, devoting himself to giving away his money and being a friend to the poor. His father is the monstrous Senator Rosewater, who is staunchly, moralistically committed to the pure conservative ideas of capitalism and the power of money. He despises his son and is horrified at the idea of treating disadvantaged people with the same dignity as any other human being.

Senator Rosewater's speeches have a new currency in this age of American despotism, where the likes of Trump and DeSantis are rewarded with high office, in return for their vicious contempt for the masses they are intent on crushing. What's different today is the way the new breed of wannabe tyrants are lauded by the very people they trample on, as they slash welfare and health care, and shower the rich with dazzling largess.

While this book looks at the big ideas of America, the later "Breakfast of Champions" focuses on the small town and the personal trauma the USA inflicts on its people. In between, you have Vonnegut's masterwork "Slaughterhouse Five". You can see the germination of that book in "God Bless You Mr Rosewater". Eliot is a world war two veteran, his experiences in that conflict against the forces of tyranny lead him to develop a social conscience that his father so reviles. The war is the central motif in "Slaughterhouse Five".

Oh, and like all Vonnegut's work, "God Bless You Mr Rosewater" is laugh-out-loud funny, despite the dark and heavy themes that predominate.

I feel like re-reads of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" are in order. Vonnegut was a visionary and I love his work a lot. If I wasn't such a staunch atheist I'd say "god bless you Mr Vonnegut".

This 1952 novel has new currency in the age of surveillance capitalism. Pohl and Kornbluth conjure a dystopian future where the advertising industry has come to dominate human affairs. Politicians no longer represent districts, they are instead controlled by one of several all-powerful advertising conglomerates. Anyone who speaks against sales and marketing is immediately suspect as some sort of traitor or terrorist. When a new industrial project is developed, it is not owned by the traditional industrial leaders, like the factory maven or the shareholders. Instead, the company which advertises the product has control.

The biggest ad agency takes it to a new level when an international plan is hatched to modernise and industrialise India. The ad company ends up effectively running the country, which is now referred to as "Indiastries". Then they move on to the ultimate prize - the colonisation of Venus. The dream/nightmare is of a whole planet where all affairs are completely dominated by advertising from the very first day the colony is established.

In 1952 the authors couldn't conceive of the internet, but the coercive control advertising now has over populations hypnotised by their personalised social media feeds, is redolent of the world Pohl and Kornbluth describe. The Martian fantasies of certain ego-maniacal billionaires in the real world of 2023 also make the scenario in this novel seem prophetic.

I knock off a star because the second half of the book loses some of the compelling storytelling rhythm established in the opening. But for its prescience this is well worth a read.

I'm a big fan of Stroud from the Bartimaeus days. This could be his best series since that ground-breaking epic of a djinn and his human. Stroud's humour and the accessibility of his writing put him in the confectionery aisle of the literary supermarket, but there's a lot of mental and cultural nutrition mixed in with his sweet booky treats.

First up, the characters. Scarlett is a robber and an assassin, a total bad-arse heroine with a dark past. Just one line should dispel any worries from those who felt a bit let down by the self-doubting lovesick Lucy from "Lockwood and Co".

Albert, the Browne of the title, is a kind of autistic superhero, the opposite of Scarlett, but charming and lovable in his youthful innocence and uncontrolled power. There is an impeccable balance in this dynamic duo. They seem to reflect the potential and the challenges faced by young people today, reminding me of Todd and Viola in Patrick Ness' "Chaos Walking".

The post-apocalyptic setting also works beautifully. It is part "Riddley Walker", part "The Chrysalids". From the latter, it also inherits a future world of dangerous and oppressive religious extremism. Stroud conjures a multi-faith theocracy, where Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and the rest join forces in a nasty cabal of murderous oppression, with Scarlett and Browne sharing the podium as its its public enemies number one.

There are obvious references to westerns in the title and the story, but this is English to the max. Calling the post-apocalypse Britain "the seven kingdoms" is also a cheeky swipe at that preposterous yank George RR Martin.

Harari says the problems of famine, war and pestilence have been largely solved. How can he not be bothered by climate change and the threat of nuclear war? He deftly taxonomises reality into three forms - objective, subjective and inter-subjective, then fails to apply his specious system to his own dogma. He declares the ideas of techno-fascist Peter Thiel to be worthwhile simply because Thiel is rich. He equates emotions to algorithms, as if a parent's love for their child could be reproduced as a slider in a character creation page in The Sims video game.

These are the ideas of delusional trans-humanists who think they will be able to use their money to turn science fiction ideas into reality and buy immortality.

I give him one star for two reasons: his ideas on inter-subjective reality are actually quite powerful if applied judiciously. Also, there's a killer sentence: the line about god being dead but believers are having trouble trying to hide the body is an atheistic sick burn. But he then goes on to praise his own religion, Vipassana meditation, which looks suspiciously like an abusive new age cult where I'm from. I might have given him two stars if it weren't for that supreme silliness.

Harari should be wearing the same hair shirt as Francis Fukuyama.

Jherek Carneilan is the protagonist of this book, but in a way I identify more with Lord Jagged of Carnaria. He is the one who has seen the beauty of the world at the End of Time, where the last few living creatures in the universe have solved every problem of life, death and existence. There is a sort of superficiality to their lives, but this is really due to them being effectively immortal and omnipotent. Heaven, as David Byrne mused, is a place where nothing ever happens. But Jherek, The Iron Orchid, the Duke of Queens and the rest of them ensure that the End of Time does not get to be like that, purely through the exercise of will and acts of creativity. If you prefer the value that mortality gives to human life, and impermanence to an environment, you can always get satisfaction from the story of Jherek and Mrs Amelia Underwood. And I do. But I think I'd be staying with Lord Jagged to enjoy an eternal party with energy from the multiverse putting the big freeze on hold forever.

One of my all-time favourite books, and a kind of philosophical fuel for the anarchist temperament.

I remember seeing this in a book shop with a shiny silver highlight on the cover, and recognisng the name of the author of "The Wasp Factory", which I had read and really enjoyed. But what was he doing in the SF section, and what was the "M" all about? I guessed correctly that here was an author living a double life in so-called literature AND my home base of genre fiction, especially SF. And I found his SF was far superior to his realistic fiction or whatever you call that rubbish :-).

On early readings I didn't quite absorb the brilliant creation of Banks' future utopia the Culture, partly because this first novel highlights a character who has turned against this pan-galactic anarchist society, and worked for a religious extremist society sworn to destroy it. It's like Banks wanted to stress-test his perfect society by portraying one of its apostates first up.

Anyway, it's a great book, as the horrible Idirans and the Culture operatives race to rescue a stranded "mind" one of the super-powerful artificial intelligences which are at the core of the Culture.

My first copy of this book was the 1971 Puffin. I would have been about 10 or 11. I think as a young reader I was looking for escapism, and this book delivers it. It has everything I could relate to: a family setting, boys and girls, younger and old protagonists. And what happens to them? Space travel, meeting witches, an epic battle between good and evil, and an authoritarian dystopian planet. It's a hell of a mash up, but somehow it works beautifully.

I later read that Madeleine L'Engle was an Episcopalian (I think that means American Anglican). You can certainly see the religious influence on her book, but she got in trouble because when the characters list the historical warriors of light against darkness, they name Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Marie Curie alongside the perfunctory Jesus. That's a banning, or maybe a paddling, to quote The Simpsons.

I now have the 50th anniversary edition on my e-reader. The image here on Bookwyrm/ramblingreaders I believe is a 1983 hardcover edition, which I'm not keen on. I also had a T-shirt based on the 1962 first edition dustjacket illustration, which has a nice mid-century modern design.

I read the sequels and saw the movie, they somehow lacked the spark I always get from this lovely little book.

The turning point in this book is where the author renounces his piratical ways. He takes all his hard drives full of music downloaded illegally from Napster and the like, and destroys them. But why do that? Music got free, only to be locked up again on youtube, where google uses every microgram of surveillance they can muster to make money from their audience. Or spotify, where artists get even less than they did in the bad old days of record company debt bondage, and the profits are used to invest in the global arms industry.

If his title was to be accurate, he would keep his hard drives, and continue to defy the corruption of music capitalism, with a civil disobedience campaign to download as much music as possible and not pay for it. Give me excess of it!

Apart from that, there are some interesting historical accounts, including how the mp3 format got started, and how CD factory workers were the source of leaked albums, sabotaging the carefully planned release schedule of the big music companies.

China Mieville turned me on to these children's books, and I treasure them. They were originally published in 1978, 1981 and 1986... not exactly synchronous with the emergence of punk, but for me the parallel is there. They are set in a grotty contemporary London, with descriptions of crumbling landmarks which are now almost certainly gone. Some of the settings were photographed by fans before they disappeared.

The Borribles are a cross between elves and street children. A Borrible never grows up, unless the top of their pointed ears are cut off, thus ending their joyous existence, allowing them to become adults and enter the mundane world of ordinary people - a terrible fate. The vile chief of police is their nemesis, committed to catching every Borrible and clipping their ears.

It might sound like some sort of twee Peter Pan type of thing, but it is gritty and violent, an evocation of the war of destruction waged by the establishment against emerging youth culture in the decades after the second world war.

It's nine years since I first read this trilogy, a re-read is due!