Book Review: Paolo Bacigalupi—The Windup Girl

I struggle with calling The Windup Girl a good book. And I’m surprised at the acclaim showered on it. The prose is bland and often repetitive. Most of the large cast of characters are completely uninteresting: Emiko, Jaidee/Kanya, and Hock Seng being the only characters that carry any emotional weight. And the plot, while it does finally come to an interesting head, is meandering and tedious. The author presents complications, and not only fails to resolve them, but tosses them aside as though they are irrelevant to the long term plot structure. It’s a bait and switch to artificially heighten the tension. Though the book improves as it progresses and there are scenes, especially toward the end, that are really well done.

But what undermines the book even more is the poorly developed setting. This is a world where you can genehack humans into super powered “new people”,but tomatoes and lemons are extinct? Their seeds have got to be everywhere. Genehack them back from the dead. Considering the technology on display it seems like a much simpler feet then what is routinely accomplished. It feels like the author didn’t take the time to fully develop the repercussions of the technology he is describing.

I think this problem derives from the fact that the author is very much an activist. To him, his message is so important, he will sacrifice his story. The world needs to justify the author’s predefined conclusions, not make sense on its own. Frankly I would expect the events implied by the book’s epilogue to be the real face this world.

And this is unfortunate, because his ideas are really compelling. The “message” is a good one. But over all the quality is definitely that of a first time author.

Book Review: David Mitchell—Cloud Atlas

Is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell a masterpiece or a gimmick? The novel is composed of six narratives, each with a different setting and written in a different style. The first starts in the South Pacific in the mid 1800s. It cuts off mid sentence so the next story can commence. It too cuts off in the middle for the next story and so on. The sixth story, a tale of the post-apocalyptic future, is told to completion, then the fifth story is concluded and so on until the novel itself concludes with the conclusion of the first story.

I’m am blown away by Mitchell’s ability to shift in style and tone from one story to the next. Each story is its own unique entity, and yet there are curious ties between them. That each story has its own identity is a testament to Mitchell’s writing powers. The only flaw is that I’m not sure each story has the quality to survive on it’s own. It’s only the cleverness of the novel’s construction that makes them great. And so there’s a sense of the gimmicky.

There is a sense of fatalism. After reading the central story, which takes place long after all the other’s have concluded, despite the individual resolutions of the surrounding stories, you know as a reader how it’s all going to be in the end.

It’s interesting to contemplate how history is filtered through fiction and ideology. Our understanding of reality is truly fluid. Our subjective experience has as much to do with our perceived reality as any hard facts. Is this good or bad? Is it simply a hard fact that we need to weave into our world view?

In the end I’ll give Mitchell the benefit of the doubt. The book is amazing. The stories tie together thematically in a wonderful way. It is fun to follow the threads between the stories and contemplate what they say about each other. Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece.

2016.07.11 

Book Review: William Gibson—Burning Chrome

I read this book mainly because I was curious about the short story “Johnny Mnemonic”. There are a couple other Sprawl short stories as well: “China Rose Hotel” and “Burning Chrome”. Having come to these stories after reading a few of Gibson’s novels makes some of the things I’ve previously read fall into place. He’s still developing his style, so the stories are more directly narrated and easier to follow. He also takes some time to explain some of the elements of his Sprawl setting, while in the novels he expects the readers to already know. It’s fun to read the development as the author works out the details of the world he is building. And some of the building blocks are later cannibalized for his novels.

The other stories are interesting in the sense that it’s like reading an alternate universe William Gibson. When Gibson hit pay-dirt with Neuromancer, he became pigeon-holed. You know what you are getting when you read one of his books. But when he was still trying to make it, he wrote short stories in a wider variety of science fiction sub-genres and his distinctive writing style had yet to crystallize.

For me, the most memorable story is “The Hinterlands”. While it is ultimately unsatisfying, the themes regarding how much we can and ought to sacrifice for scientific progress are fascinating.