Recent reading

[avram]

I finished rereading Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden on the trip up to Boston. Though it’s got a couple of scientific mistakes that bugged me, it remains my favorite book I’ve read in the past decade or so. It’s got memorable characters in a strange, startling, vividly-described future: A Communist revolution has swept the globe, using biotechnology to transform humanity. Now people can feed off sunlight via photosynthesis, and mind-altering viruses give everyone an encyclopedic education in childhood, as well as enforcing honesty and conformity. Milena, our protagonist, had a natural immunity to the viruses. One big dose left her educated, but unable to remember her childhood, and failed to correct her non-standard behavior, leaving her the world’s only lesbian, or so she thinks. Then she meets Rolfa, an opera-loving “polar bear”, one of a group of genetically-engineered people living outside the revolutionary society, and therefore unaltered by the viruses. Their story gets stranger from there, with Milena becoming possessed by a dead Marxist scholar, and devoting herself to producing Rolfa’s operatic version of Dante’s Divine Comedia on a holographic stage the size of the Earth.

I started John Crowley’s Aegypt, but the beginning annoyed me. Here’s an opening scene set in the 16th century, then another set in mid-20th-century America, then we switch to one character in late-20th century America, then here’s another, and damn it, the plot hasn’t started yet, why the fuck can’t you just get on with telling a story, and not waste my time getting all the chess pieces into place! As you can see, I’m growing impatient with currently-popular storytelling techniques.

So I picked up the copy of Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad that I got for six bucks from a sidewalk book vendor a few weeks back. Ah, that’s better! It’s just as good as I remember, perhaps better. Not very moving, but overflowing with wit.

I hope I’m not losing my ability to enjoy new books.

Comments

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

My god, Glen Cox handed me a copy of The Child Garden when I came down to Austin for Armadillocon back in 1990. I was floored. It's a brilliant, inventive book. It's been ages since I read it. Have you read The Unconquered Country?

[avram]

Yup; that’s the one that made me a fan of Ryman. I’ve also read 253 and started Was (but put it down after a bit).