ezekielsdaughter | Entries tagged with review

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I would rate this book around a 3.5 in terms of my reading pleasure. I am largely a SF/fantasy reader but I also absolutely adore John le Carre' novels. I don't care for Ton Clancy styled novels. I am more interested in the moral ambivalence found in le Carre', therefore it is difficult to find new novels in which the spies are not patriotic without interior questioning. That establishes what I am looking for.

This novel satisfied some of that itch. As a Black American, the protagonist Marie is the descendent of an American father who is a policeman in a racist environment, and a mother from the former French colony of Martinique. She knows that America's hands are not clean, yet both she and her sister see government work for the FBI and the CIA as their way out of an oppressed life. As Marie tells her story, we see her realize that neither is truly a way out. The men at the FBI shuttle Marie to paperwork and trivial surveillance. We don't completely know her sister's viewpoint, but we know that her hopes are dashed by a fatal accident. Marie jumps to the CIA in hope of fulfilling their sibling desires only to discover yet another confining box.

My rating is somewhat lower because of several factors, many of which are probably personal to me. (a) I don't understand how Marie was able to turn off her abhorrence of the misogyny and racism that she found within the CIA and FBI. What does she get out of her work? I can understand her father working with the police because he is also protecting his neighborhood. All of the cases that we see Marie involved with are FBI CONINTELPRO or the CIA seeking to undermine a nascent African nation.
I wanted Marie to protest more! Yet, I know that this is illogical. To be a Black employee in America to accept that your employer is sometimes acting against your freedom and your people. Marie's response is believable even if depressing.
(b) the pacing is somewhat slow for a spy novel. Once I realized that this was not an action-oriented novel, I settled down to enjoy the tale of Marie's life. However, I can understand the dismay that I see in other reviews if they expected a typical spy novel.

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Current Mood: busy

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was a strange duckling. The tone is like that of an old fashioned police procedural. It was amusing at times to see the detective tropes come hard and fast at the beginning--including the detective's quick glimpse of a mysterious woman in red at the beginning. Despite the existence of cell phones and the occasional vehicle that runs on vegetable oil, it feels like a novel set in the 40's. The difference, of course, being that this is a future in which an asteroid is heading for the earth. There is a strong chance that no one will survive the impact. This makes the novel fit into another sub-genre of impending-world-ending-doom. I am debating whether to continue the series. It was a fast read. But the characters didn't really fascinate me. There are only a few female characters; the book couldn't pass any type of Bechdel test because the female characters never talk to one another at all. That said, if you like this type of bare bones dry narrative, the book can be quite enjoyable. I finished it in two days.

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I did not pick this up after seeing one of the movies based on a PKD story. For a while now, I have been reading what a great writer PKD was and I resigned myself to thinking that I just came along too late to appreciate his writing.

I still think that in some of these stories. "Adjustment Team" is in this book, and, heresy-of-heresies, I don't think it is far better than the movie "Adjustment Bureau" . The movie adds a central plot line of a love story that isn't in the short story at all. But then, the short story has this irritating imitation of a woman that is the main character's wife. Yes--it appears that directors are constantly adding love stories to PKD's work. Most of the men in all of these stories are sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily, and sometimes boringly married. These are people of the 50's and 60's who find themselves in an altered world.

But not too altered. And that gives me a few diamonds. In "Foster, You're Dead", one father is refusing to buy the latest bomb shelter for his family. He wisely guesses that the now that the security of the country has been privatized--every community must protect itself--the selling of shelters has become just another capitalistic ploy. As soon as he buys one, the powers that be announce that the enemy has developed the means to penetrate that model. Everyone will have to buy a new one.

I had read "Minority Report" report; I will only say that it is more cynical than the original. And there is no redemption for the pre-cogs. The technology in the short story is outdated. (That's true for all these stories). That's where the movie was an improvement. However, the movie aims for a redemption that the story doesn't give.

I don't have the dates for the stories in front of me, but I wonder if they are post-Bradbury's Mars. I guess that they have to be. There are a number of stories set on Mars with Earth colonists. The Earth colonists also have a running battle with an alien race from Proxima and there are a number of stories about that clash. The "approximations", an Earth slur PKD tells us, can appear to look like humans and in one story they want to investigate our religiosity. They save the mind of human who died in an accident, call in their Earth counterparts. Apparently the rule about rescuing people lost at sea is universal. The mind of the rescued astronaut is isolated and begins to hallucinate the image of Christ. The Prox scientists and the Earth scientists have a very different reaction.

In this collection, the stories become more and more like the type of Philip K Dick stories that I've read about. The characters are unsure of reality. In some cases, we know that the narrator is unreliable, but there are no other narrators in the story to choose. A few of the characters are non-white. Which was a surprise to me until I remembered that this is also the man who wrote "The Man in the High Castle". I'd definitely recommend the book for people curious about Dick's actual stories.

“Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline

I was up until 4 am this morning and finished this book. It’s a first novel by the author, moves quickly, and is often quite enjoyable.

The author was on panels at Armadillocon and everyone was raving about the book. Even while in Austin, I came quickly to the conclusion that I was not the target audience, but I picked it up at the library anyway. It was described as rich in details about gaming and the 1980 era. It’s set in 2044 and the protagonist is a 18 year old man/boy who is living in a dystopian America and world. The economy has crashed; global warming is in full blossom, but the world spends as much time as it can in a virtual game environment. The one hope in this world is the will and behest of the James Halliday, the game’s designer who has left his entire fortune to the person able to solve his last puzzle/game. A culture of game hunters has grown up to solve this final puzzle. The game designer/business owner was crazy about the 1980’s so that’s where the 80’s trivia comes up. Everyone is certain that the clues--which have to be discovered first--are hidden in the details about Halliday’s life. Imagine if Steve Jobs had left his fortune to gamers. It’s especially a good comparison because Jobs had a business partner, Woz, that left Apple. Same thing in this novel. Halliday has a friend who left the gaming company and the friend becomes a critical part of the story near the end.

So--what did I think? I was up until 4 a.m., so yes I enjoyed it. However, I will admit that I had to push through some chapters and some paragraphs. I skipped some of the 80’s stuff. And the gaming stuff. Like I said that I am not the target audience. However, it was instructive for me that this two-part story--the love story and the gaming story--ends at the same time.

There is one major female character and in most cases, she is well served by the writer. She is intelligent; she resists being only a love interest. If anything, I would say that her healthy self-interest is a little overwritten.

There were none of the twists that I kept expecting. The villain as described in the beginning is still the villain at the end of the novel. (There are some minor twists that I won’t give away.)

The author leaves himself a chance at a sequel very, very obviously. I am hoping that he doesn’t actually take the bait. I find it interesting that most of the recent books with this background--an American dystopia--manage to end “happily” end with the society unchanged but the protagonist obtains the money that he needs to survive. That’s the happy ending. He becomes part of the monied society that was previously oppressing him. The ending is happy because he able to become monied on his own terms. I am of two minds about this....I regret seeing writers give up the possibility of changing society; I see this ending as more realistic.

Current Mood: tired

The Anthologist
by Nicholson Baker

This is another case where I don’t recall why I put this book on my read-this list. It is only 243 pages long but I began faltering early. It is surprisingly engaging when the protagonist is arguing aloud/teaching us about poetry. Poetry may have evolved technical terms, like iambic pentameter for a reason but Paul--our protagonist--feels that those terms do nothing but isolate regular people from poetry and make them feel that it can’t be understood. He also feels that iambic pentameter is not really five beats to a measure so the text is strewn through with poetry written in music form or poetry written with the beats underneath the words. That I found interesting. And when our interlocutor occasionally wandered off to talk about the mouse that runs across the curtain rod, I was initially amused. Indeed, Paul tells us that he is not able to write an introduction to his anthology “On Rhyme” and meanwhile a great deal of the book explains what happened to rhyme in English poetry. I began to wonder if the book represented the missing introduction. Especially since the length of the hard-to-write introduction is the same as the book I held in my hand.

Listen, nothing happens in the book. Even the book flap will tell you that; I am not giving anything away. Yet, it is not like Seinfeld, about “nothing”. When Paul whines about his life, I was ready to drop the book. However, it is only 243 pages and the pages on poetry are beautiful. It is, alas, very Anglo. Paul, our protagonist does acknowledge Black poets or any poets of color. No wait, rap poetry is used at least once to point out that regular people do listen to poetry; it’s just not acknowledged as poetry. He points that out, but Paul, the anthologist never consists adding hip hop to his anthology. Nothing happens. We follow Paul as he tells his invisible readers about poetry, tries to woo our lover back, and as he attends poetry readings and conferences. When he talks about poetry, I am engaged. When he so carefully describes his environment that I know I am listening to a poet, I am engaged. When he whines about his girl friend, I am bored. If form follows function, I would say that Paul is a great poet of everyday life, but he can’t write a love poem.