Posts Tagged ‘fiction’

Having done some background reading I made a start on the first of Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, The Caves of Steel. It is set in the semi-near future where positronic robots have been developed and 50 other planets have been colonised.

I came into it thinking there was no way it could be as good as the Foundation series, which is amazing. However, as I go on, I’m less sure. Asimov once again shows why he is the master of science fiction. Blending future technologies with the troubles we all encounter every day he creates a half-exciting believable vision of the future.

Already having been familiar with R. Daneel Olivaw from the Foundation series, it was interesting to go back to his roots. Elijah Baley is a cool character too, walking a nice line between identifiable good guy and man who can get things done.

Definitely worth a read for all science fiction fans.

The Complete Robot brings together most of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the Robot series. It goes on from his early stories and some which are unrelated to the Robot series as it were, while still being about robots. As the book goes on, Asimov builds up the universe that will eventually become the backbone of his science fiction writing.

The short story format works really well for me as I can read a bit, finish a story, then come back to the book later. As a consequence, even though it was almost 700 pages long, it did not feel like a chore to get through.

Some of it is deeply philosophical. Can a robot love? Can it have rights? If you have a pet robot dog, it is less real than having an organic robot dog? How much can you bend the three laws of robotics?

The stories at the beginning were interesting and gave a nice side from everything being in the same universe, but the fiction really comes into its own as the world around it develops. Next I am going to read the Robot novels and continue on to gradually fill in the gap between this and Foundation.

As I mentioned in my post about part one most A Song of Ice and Fire novels follow a predictable format of not a lot happening then a bunch of people dying. Again in part two though, there were not actually that many deaths.

George R. R. Martin has never been one for going over dramatic. The Red Wedding was a series finale in the TV series, but was just a part of the story in A Storm of Swords and while brutal, he never went into much detail or spent much time on it. Parts of A Feast for Crows felt similar – it would look much more dramatic on screen than it is written in the book.

I was never really sure whether to call myself an Aldous Huxley fan. Brave New World is one of my favourite books but does one book make you a fan?

To find out, I went back to his first novel, Crome Yellow. The plot is about a group of artists and intellectuals that seem to live out a life as pointless as a Jane Austen character brought forward into the twentieth century.

I didn’t find it that interesting, to be honest.

Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. The description announced Stephenson had “burst onto the scene” or something similar, which immediately put me off because who uses language like that. However, he does have a cool beard, so I decided to push on anyway.

It tells the story of the central character, aptly named Hiro Protagonist, who works as a pizza deliverer for the Mafia. As you do.

All set in a world where the government has crumbled and everything has been privatised. The police, the libraries, the roads, the whole lot. It’s GabrielÄ—’s liberation paradise come true.

Indeed it’s very similar to Jennifer Government, though pre-dates it by 11 years.

The plot is interesting enough. It explores themes of viruses, memes, religion, virtual reality and linguistics, on top of the political backdrop. Some of it felt a little like a formulaic essay of explanations, which I tuned out a little, but fore the most part it presented engaging ideas.

If you’ve read Ulysses you will know that it is full of Irish vernacular, fusions of literary styles and a fog of general confusion that makes it very difficult to follow what is going on.

Or so I thought, until I read Finnegans Wake. It turns out that Ulysses was really more of a warm-up for James Joyce. I now yearn for the comparatively clear plot of Ulysses in which, for some stretches, I could follow what was going on, without the aid of Wikipedia.

I have now finished reading Finnegans Wake and I have literally no idea what happened in it. The language seems even more esoteric, the plot even more muddled. I think there was some stuff about a butcher, who used to be a baker, but is now just a butcher, and sells liver as a special. Also one of the characters was called Anna Livia. The rest is a blur.

Even Wikipedia does not know what it is about. I went to see if I could follow by reading the plot description alongside the book and here is what the article said:

Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book’s central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive.

Thanks for that. I don’t recommend reading it. You will probably be able to make more sense of it than I did, but maybe not that much.

Galápagos is a Kurt Vonnegut novel and there are some mild spoilers below.

Told from a million years in the future, it is narrated by a ghost who has watched humanity evolve from the big-brained creatures we are today into a species similar to seals that spend all day in the sun, eating and mating.

Elina promised me she could tell me all this because you get it all at the start of the novel. However, you don’t. You only find out he is a ghost halfway through. Maybe I could have worked it out, but it’s hard to say given I already knew that was the case.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I am not a fan of Vonnegut’s work. As with Slaughterhouse Five, nothing is ever particularly clear, he just slowly drip-feeds you information throughout the story. Good concept, and an interesting story, but I found reading it quite hard work.

When reading A Song of Ice and Fire you soon get into the George R. R. Martin routine. Nothing happens for ages and then loads of people die. The first book of A Feast for Crows follows a similar vein but with surprisingly few deaths. Which just leaves the large spaces of nothing happens.

That is not to say it is not enjoyable. The large amount of nothing that happens in each novel is politically interesting and the constant changing between characters keeps things fresh. I enjoyed the last book more though. Perhaps it’s all building up for the second half.

Imagine walking up on the surface of Mars, to find that the rest of your crew had left you for dead and set off back to Earth. You have few supplies and no way to contact anyone.

I know what I would do. Crawl up in a ball and die. That is possibly why ESA are unlikely to select me for a manned mission to Mars. This question is the one put to protagonist Mark Watney. When we walks up on the surface of Mars, to find that the rest of the crew have gone…

Oh, and there are some spoilers in this article.

It is told from two perspectives. First of which is the log entries of Mark, which sometimes moves into a 3rd person description. The second is a third person narrative of what is going on back on Earth.

This is a little odd to go between the different forms, and also gives the lot away to some point. If Dr Hassall had not already ruined the ending for me, I suspect the fact that there was a separate thread based on Earth would have lead me to guess the eventual outcome.

In some ways, certainly in the first half the book, it would have been better to solely tell the story from Watney’s log entries. If you had to have a strand based on Earth you could have put the entire thing as a part 2 at the end of the book. Joe Berlinger wanted to do something similar when filming Book of Shadows.

However, as time went on I settled down into the format.

I enjoyed it throughout. The humour was quite dark and very geeky in places. There was a lot of science, though nothing that a lay person such as myself would struggle to comprehend (I think). Plus, as Mark points out, in some ways it is a story about a space pirate. An actual space pirate. That’s pretty cool.

1914 was a simple time. Back then, you could actually work out what was happening in a James Joyce novel. This is why the description of the book includes the following helpful line.

This book holds none of the difficulties of Joyce’s later novels, such as Ulysses, yet in its way it is just as radical.

It is indeed more comprehensible. The opening dialogue of each story may not be quite as verbose as a Jane Austen novel, but you can pretty much work out what is going on within the first half of the story (the book itself being a collection of short stories).

In some ways though, this takes away a little piece of the James Joyce magic. The descriptions, by being less surreal, become a little less vivid as well.