Reviews and Comments

Wow. In the classic way of much great sci-fi, this book uses a couple of outlandish inventions to explore the human society of its time. The inventions themselves are interesting, but their reflections in earth society much more so.

This is partly a book about China--particularly about how the horrors of the Cultural Revolution still shape survivors even now--but it also has a lot to say about globalised culture, especially the divisions within the environmental movement.

The first 2 or 3 chapters are set in the Cultural Revolution and are absolutely harrowing. If you have a hard time getting through them, it's worth knowing that the book doesn't stay that dark.

This was a fun read, and evokes its setting very effectively. But it also falls into some formulaic fantasy traps that detracted a lot from the ending for me.

An essential introduction to the rather distinctive body of scifi coming out of modern China. It's hard to pin down exactly what the characteristics of "Chinese Science Fiction" are--in fact one of the essays at the end labours that point somewhat--but much more fruitful to show than tell, which this collection does by covering a very wide range. There are stories that are obviously mocking the Party, openly enough that I'm surprised they were allowed to be published, and stories that feel much less political but go deep into technological fantasy or just straight fantasy worlds. And in between there are some social commentary stories that bite just as hard in the US as they must in China.

As with any diverse collection I didn't love every single story, but there are so many that I did that I'm already looking forward to getting my hands on the next volume that Liu's edited and translated. And adding books by at least half of the authors to my wishlist.

This book introduces a large number of practices that seem potentially useful for coping with fear of things we can't control. But that's all it does - each chapter is a short, superficial description of a practice, very few of which I feel able to really engage with from just that description. I suppose this is more a case of just not being what I was looking for than a real flaw in the book.

On some level this is a deeply haunting book, confronting us with the people society leaves behind in a sympathetic first-person perspective. But the devices Ishiguro uses to achieve that effect also put me off the book itself. Without wanting to get too spoliery, the smallness of the narrator's world is kind of the point, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a slow paced book in a very small world, which I kept getting frustrated with.

I hadn't even realised Le Guin had published poetry until I saw this on a shelf. It's a wonderful collection; very clearly from the same mind that gave us her scifi novels but focussed much more on Earth and her own life.

This was so close to being an incredible, essential book, but some fatal flaws halfway ruined it for me.

First the good: it's a powerful story, primarily about the atrocity that was the US's WW2 internment of Japanese-Americans, and with some important secondary themes like how the war itself damaged people and how men can hurt ourselves by internalising all our problems. Guterson's also a very talented writer, switching easily between a precise clinical style that fits the courtroom elements of the story, and a lyrical style that captures the feel of Puget Sound in winter beautifully.

But there were three flaws that by the end of the book really took a lot away in my eyes:

1. The two Japanese families who have major parts in the story feel like instances of a culture, not sets of living breathing characters. Even the two individuals from those families who are at the centre of the story felt more like roles than people. By halfway through I found myself really wanting to read a Nisei author's telling of the same story. And it's odd because this isn't about trading in nasty stereotypes--the author is clearly very much on their side, but still can't quite get past essentialising their culture.

2. Guterson has a strange obsession with penises, the size thereof, and writing very mechanical sex scenes in which the insertion of peg A into slot B is jarringly unsexy but kicks off massive emotional repercussions. Those scenes felt like they were written by a teenage boy feeling pressure to lose his virginity, and it's all the stranger because he's so good at writing other types of scene.

3. I'm going to hide this one. It's not exactly a suspense spoiler, but I don't want my impression of it to colour other peoples' reactions if you're reading this book with fresh eyes. I hated how at the end the book suddenly becomes Ishmael's redemption story. That character was interesting--I liked him a lot at the start of the book and progressively less as the story unfolded--but ultimately worthwhile for how disturbingly relatable his faults were. But suddenly at the end Guterson made the story not about Kabuo, Hisao or Carl at all, and all about the emotionally-still-a-teenager white boy saving the day by getting over his baggage. I wish I could rewrite it to either not require him to be the one who announces the new evidence, or having his mum coerce or shame him into revealing it.

Oh, this book was frustrating.

It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.

So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" do, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.

But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.

Meh.

Actually that's not quite fair. I wish I'd read this when it first came out, because it would have saved me several years in getting a sense of what the nebulous-sounding global social justice movements that spawned things like the Seattle WTO protests were about. But reading it in 2018 I found myself too often reacting with either "how did you not see that [e.g.] Chavez was a problem?", or "yes, that's nice in itself, but we're so manifestly losing this battle". There are some useful rays of light in it, and Solnit's a great writer, but on balance I think this book left me feeling more hopeless and depressed.

This feels like a book that needs two distinct reviews.

First, Emily Wilson's translation, which is wonderful. Just as Heaney moved Beowulf from "worthy work" to a fun read, Wilson's made The Odyssey eminently readable, while keeping it a formally structured long poem and apparently sticking scrupulously to the pacing of the original Greek. I had started reading other translations of this work but never actually finished them, so I'm delighted that this one now exists. And the maps, introduction, footnotes and dramatis personae all helped me follow a work that's heavy on reference and allusion.

But I have to say I didn't get on very well with the content. Some of it is delightful, from learning that Greeks have appreciated wine, olive oil and the sea for longer than much of the world's had written records, to all the descriptions that weren't about Odysseus himself. But there's a degree of repetitiveness to the language that grated--Wilson's introduction explains why it was so in a work written to be performed but it still took away from my experience of reading this as written text--a few too many passages that consist of just listing characters from other Greek myths to the point that they felt like the Torah's "begats", and by the end I found the character of Odysseus dislikable enough to not care about his fortunes.

I'm still glad to have read this. I didn't get anywhere near the exposure to Greek mythology that US schools seem to give, so much of the story was either new to me or connected dots that I'd picked up scattershot from English literature referencing them. And I have to say that I'm re-reading the Torah this year, which seems to be of approximately the same age, and found The Odyssey so much more sophisticated and compelling as a work of literature. But I can't exactly say that I like this story.

A lovely exploration of a utopia that Le Guin managed to make seem both appealing and plausible without shrinking from the sacrifices that it entailed.

At times the weird temporal structure of the book confused me, though it does make sense given the principal character's work. And there are moments when the utopians' political talk starts to feel like author lecturing reader - though really only moments, this isn't one of those books that bludgeons you with its rhetoric. It is one of those that I've spent as long thinking about after finishing as I had spent reading it, because there's more substance and subtletly to its politics and sociological observation than you might expect after I've thrown the "utopia" label at it.

Oof. This collection pulls no punches. And is great as a result. Beautiful when it can be, ugly when it has to be, but consistently penetrating.

I appreciated this window into a lifestyle I sometimes fantasize about but don't really think is for me. It's a very wide-ranging collection of essays, in a nice steady voice.

A beautiful book about migration, and how that might look in the face of one big change in how the world works. Like so many migration stories, it starts with an intensely sad premise, and even though the book is not an unrelenting wallow in that, the sadness is never exactly absent.

It's written in a very distinctive style, full of long sentences that at times can be achingly beautiful, and at times feel like a useful device for conveying the complexity of the characters' entangled lives, but at other times also become rather grating, as though the author's forgotten that breaking a paragraph up into sentences is an option available to him, or just become too reliant on this device because when it does work it works so well, and I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because long run-on sentences are a common flaw in my own writing, but by the end of the book it was definitely taking something away from what was otherwise a wonderful read.

A lot of fun, and with a beautiful sense of pace and timing, though at times the lessons feel a bit clunky. This book's made me very keen to read some of Okorafor's non-YA work.