Book Review: Verne, Jules—Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I first read this book when I was in 6th grade. It was one of the reasons I spent the next five years almost exclusively reading science fiction. There a lot of famous and visually stunning scenes in the book, most of which were incorporated into the Disney movie. But one that wasn't has always stayed with me. When the Nautilus is sailing through the Mediterranean Dr. Arronax sees a man swim up to the observation window in the salon. Nemo tells Arronax that this swimmer lives most of his life floating unprotected in the sea.

How can that even be possible? How can anything in this book be possible? And yet Verne manages to make the reader want it to be possible because it’s just so cool. And he backs it up with enough science so that it’s easy to believe.

I have read that most English translations of 20,000 Leagues were heavily edited and marketed as stories for children. So when I bought a copy to read to my kids I made sure to get the most recent and robust translation I could find.

And I needed to read my kids the real thing because their elementary school only stocks “Great Illustrated Classics” versions, which is to say they are dumbed down and full of pictures. My kids were reading them and spoiling all these great books, including this one, in the process.

In reading this version as an adult, I found that Verne spends a lot, and I do mean a lot, of words detailing the taxonomy of the flora and fauna Dr. Arronax observes while traveling under the sea. And when you’re reading it out loud to your kids it makes for some interesting tongue gymnastics. Some whole chapters are devoted to little more than scientific observations. After a while of reading lists of longitude and latitude coordinates, I asked my kids if they had any idea what those were. They didn’t so we had to discuss what that meant. Also much of the science and speculation of Verne has been superseded by newer developments (the geography of the South Pole, the existence of Atlantis) and resulted in discussion about what people knew then compared to what people know now.

There’s another aspect to the book and that is the adventure. Being trapped in the antarctic ice, fighting giant squids, and exploring the sea floor.

And finally there is the political, revolutionary and even anarchic undertones. These notions are subtle at first but play an increasing role in the story as it progresses. These also led to discussions about everything from the definition of misanthropy to the French revolution.

At the beginning my daughters weren’t to excited to have me read 20,000 Leagues to them. By the end they were begging me for one more chapter every night.

Book Review: Wiest, Andrew—The Boys of '67

I’ve encountered a couple of broad overviews of the Vietnam war before. I picked this book up at the library because I was interested in the day to day experiences of a US soldier fighting in Vietnam.  This book is about “Charlie Company” drafted right at the beginning of the Vietnam war. It goes through their experiences in basic training, the year or so they spent in Vietnam, and  a quick overview of a few of the men’s family they left behind and their experiences after getting home from the war.

When you read about most wars they seem to have some sort of geographical goal. The strategists running things are trying to move the front forward with a final aim of conquering a something. In Vietnam soldiers were sent out to patrol specific areas, kill as many Viet Cong as possible and then come back to camp for a little R&R before going out again. Sometimes they would patrol the exact same area where that they had previously fought a bloody battle only a few months prior.

This aimlessness combined with the normal rigors of war seems to have horrible effects on morale. What is the point to fight and die in order to kill random people in a foreign country that doesn’t really want you there to begin with? Imagine if our police force was tasked, not with sustaining law and order, but with prowling around various neighborhoods and killing as many perceived criminals as possible. The emotional effect on both the police and the people being policed would be enormously traumatic.

The soldiers in Vietnam consequently spent lots of their free time drinking, doing drugs and availing themselves of prostitutes.

On the other hand there seems to be this emotional rush that comes with fighting for your life, and an intense sense of brotherhood for those with whom you fight that can’t be replicated anywhere else and that is extremely compelling. So much so that some men re-enlist because they can’t experience it anywhere else.

The book also describes the bouts with PTSD the soldiers experienced after coming home from the war. One man, once he was diagnosed with PTSD, was kicked out of the army. When he showed up at the VA for PTSD treatment, that same army told him that PTSD was not a recognized condition and therefore they couldn’t help him.

The quality of writing is merely sufficient, and it has a tendency toward being overly sentimental. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating bit of history from the soldier's point of view.

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.

Book Review:William Gibson's Count Zero

Neuromancer is rightly one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. You can tell because it has never been made into a movie, much less a successful one. Count Zero is a loose sequel. It references some of the occurrences of its predecessor but is mostly its own thing.

The author has a very distinct style. Very noir. Very ambiguous. He describes in great detail the trees and lets you figure out what the forest looks like for yourself. This is both wonderful and teeth grindingly frustrating. Sometimes he literally skips the action he’s been building up to, leaving the reader grasping for closure and a sense of what’s going on.

At the same time the world he has created and the big ideas he casually throws around are compelling enough to make the reader persist. Having said that, the world he has created is not pleasant. The common theme is humanity losing its humanity in a sea of information and technology. So in spite of some dated technological ideas, it’s still relevant.

Book Review: Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny

I’ve been on a Zelazny kick of late. I really like Lord of Light and the first Amber series. There are definitely ideas in Creatures of Light and Darkness that have carried over from the former. And there are ideas that are more fully explored in the latter.

The novel, inspired by Egyptian myth, is both beautiful and horrific with numerous stylistic changes. But at the same time it can drift into mythical and allegorical territory. Is anything in this book to be taken literally?

At one point a character is wrestling with all comers at a public fair. It’s very concrete with lots of blood and mud and nothing but a rope barricade holding back the spectators. Then another character shows up to do battle with the first character and their conflict is so intense it threatens to destroy the entire planet. What kind of power do these characters have?

Nothing is explained in depth. The bizarreness is accepted as just the way things are. I found myself looking for a grand unification theory to explain everything. But maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s just a myth written from the far future. Draw from it what beauty and morals are available and don’t try to explain it.