Book Notes

 I wrote this some time last year or the year before. I'm not sure when this is from, exactly. I am posting without further comment. Island in the Sea of Time
– SM Stirling
This is a series
that I have known about for some time and I read the opening novel of
the sister series about a year and a half ago. Without being too
glib about it, I will just say that these books aren't for me. They
straddle the line between SF and fantasy and I think that they end up
being a bit on the fantasy side of things for my tastes.

The basic story is
that the island of Nantucket is inexplicably transported 3000 years
into the past and the islanders have to figure out how to survive. I
like the concept. Stirling really gets into details on various
aspects and has a very broad view of the world he wants to remake. I
don't fault his vision or the writing. I just don't particularly
care for the kind of tactical writing that he gets into. There are a
lot of descriptions of fight scenes and war tactics that don't do it
for me. For the right person, though, I can see this being a
fantastic series.


Lincoln in
the Bardo – George Saunders

I'm not sure I get George Saunders anymore. I wonder if I ever did.



The Bone
Clocks – David Mitchell
I
first read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
when I was in graduate school. That is a nesting novel that
interlaces several different characters and settings into a sort of
cosmic return/cycle/metempsychosis that is pretty entertaining but
unravels after one particular narratological mis-step that I won't
get into here.

The Bone
Clocks revisits some of the
themes and narrative techniques featured in Cloud Atlas.
Characters called “atemporals”
live outside of time, fight an unseen war, and influence mortal
humans around the world. Pretty good stuff. The opening sections of
the book serve as character studies for the principal characters that
will influence the latter half of the novel and the way that Mitchell
interlaces their stories is confusing at first but comes together as
the novel progresses.
While
I found myself getting a little lost in the particulars of the
individual characters I did enjoy the leaps in time that occur
throughout the novel. Mitchell predicts a future Ireland in the
“Endarkenment” after some cataclysmic event forces much of
humanity back into a mostly pre-technology existence. I ended up
liking the near-future predictions a bit more than some of the other
aspects that ran a little more fantastic. This ends up being a
better novel than Cloud Atlas
and a better representation of some of the same ideas.



Riot Baby
– Tochi Onyebuchi

This is a fantastic novel that blends near-future carceral dystopian
elements with just enough fantasy to keep it going. The meditations
on the impacts of violence on physical and psychological beings are
moving and inspiring.


Read it.



How to
Survive a Robot Uprising –
Daniel H. Wilson
This
is an odd little book that came to my attention recently. Over the
last couple of years I have been trying to read more pop science
books. This book came up on a list and so I requested it through the
county library. This book is actually a guide to surviving a robot
uprising. It includes some meditations on current technologies
(well, current as of its publication in 2005) and how to evade,
defeat these things. It is billed as a humor book as well, and it
has its moments. I burned through the book pretty quickly because
much of it is laid out in very small sections. Interesting book but
I have the feeling that it will soon be completely obsolete if it is
not already due to the rise of smart phones and all of that attendant
technology. It would be cool to see an update of this written with
more contemporary tech in mind.