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

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Because the prologues themselves are interesting? Can't think of a better reason to have something in a book than that. What Kelly sees in the stone, and what Pierce does before church, are as much a part of the plot as what Pierce does twenty years later in Blackberry Jambs.

I bounced off of AEgypt more times than I bounced off Little, Big. Now they're two of my favoritist books in the whole whorl.

[avram]

I think I’d be a lot happier if authors made a habit of spending the first, oh, fifty or so pages of a book focused on just one protagonist. I could probably make do with twenty. I hate having to jump around every couple of pages just at the point where I’m trying to get into a new book.

[yottle.livejournal.com]

I think Crowley's chronically guilty of tough beginnings. Worth it in the end, but it's not unusual to pick the book up and book it down a dozen times before trudging on. Worth it, though. :)

[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).

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

It really all depends -- are the prologues interesting? I've not yet tried Aegypt. Illuminatus! shifts points of view rapidly at the beginning, and it certainly sets up chess pieces, and I'm not sure when one would consider the story to have begun -- but it certainly held my attention.

OTOH, there's Diamond Age, which I read and enjoyed while I was reading it, but had the same reaction as my father -- read a bit, put it down, read something else, pick it back up, repeat. Now, how much of this was due to what seemed to be the book's basic message, in so far as it had a message, rather than being a work of entertainment, is an interesting question. And there's Ash, which has one pov character, and which I will finish, but I put it down halfway. I consider it fascinating, but not gripping.