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defrogAnother year, another book-reading marathon. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I tried Robert Sheckley once way back in the mid-90s with Options, and I remember being somewhat entertained but not particularly inspired to try more of his work. But recently he’s been namedropped by the kind of people whose opinions I respect, and when one of them noted that this book (now back in print) was an accidental precursor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, well, I had to try it out, didn’t I?
The premise: present-day earthman Thomas Carmody is notified that he has won the Intergalactic Sweepstakes (despite being unaware that there was such a thing), and is whisked away from Earth to Galactic Centre via a space-time portal to claim his prize. The problem is that Galactic Centre can only return him to Earth if he can tell them its exact coordinates in space as well as time (and which timeline) – which of course he can’t. As Carmody travels from one world to another trying to find someone who can help him get home, he encounters incompetent bureaucrats, disenchanted demi-gods, talking dinosaurs, annoying sentient cities and a mysterious predator out to kill him, among other things.
I kind of get the H2G2 comparisons (and for the record, Douglas Adams once said he wasn’t aware of the novel until he’d already written the first H2G2 book, but agreed there were some uncanny parallels), but for me the resemblance is superficial – Dimension of Miracles is more free-wheeling and absurdist, for one thing. It’s also not quite as good in terms of characterization – there’s not much to Carmody, who serves as an existential straight man for everyone else. That said, it’s delightfully weird, fun and entertaining.
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter Brueggemann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I enjoyed Walter Brueggemann’s Out of Babylon, and when I came across this, the title alone was a great hook – the idea of the Sabbath as a form of resistance to the never-ending demands of late-stage capitalism. Brueggemann’s basic thesis is that the Fourth Commandment is not only more significant than it looks, it’s also arguably the centerpiece of the list – a bridge between Commandments 1 to 3 and 5 to 10. The book offers a concise exploration into just why God felt it necessary to stick that particular commandment in the list in the first place.
Without giving too much away, it’s not simply to celebrate the event of God “resting” on Day 7 of creation – it’s largely to do with the context of the Exodus from Egypt where the Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years, but it’s also a command to resist any economic system that demands endless non-stop work and requires immediate and ever increasing consumption. Brueggemann argues that the Sabbath offers an alternate system that in turn creates a society better enabled to fulfil God’s other commands – especially Jesus’ “first and greatest” commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s a short and interesting take, and one I am of course rather sympathetic to. Brueggemann covers a lot of bases, and makes a good case. That said, this is more of a Bible study exercise than a manifesto, and doesn't offer any concrete steps to implement this on a personal or policy level. Then again, there’s really only one step: take one day off a week and relax. You can tell your boss it’s for religious reasons.
Fiasco by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Stanislaw Lem’s final novel, though he continued to write non-fiction long after this was published in 1986. It’s also the last of his pessimistic “first contact” novels, though this isn’t obvious at first, as the first part of the story involves Parvis, an astronaut who is frozen on Titan after an accident during a mission to find the missing astronaut Pirx. Either he or Pirx (no one knows) is revived over a hundred years later by a passing expedition – which, it later transpires, is on its way to establish contact with an alien race on the distant planet Quinta. Just one problem: the Quintans don’t seem to want contact.
Much the novel’s content is dedicated to pages and pages of philosophical and ethical musings, as well as dense hard SF explaining how they use black holes to enable faster-than-light travel, and the various other technologies at their disposal. Buried under all of that somewhere is the actual storyline, in which attempts to force the Quintans to talk to them escalate into increasingly insane and cataclysmic violence. Hence Lem’s pessimistic tone, as his take is basically that if humans went to all that effort to travel to a distant planet to offer our hand in friendship, and they ignored us, we probably wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Which is kind of an extreme take, but then satire sometimes is. And I can't say he's totally wrong. What’s also interesting to me is Lem’s reversal of the first-contact trope in which humans are the hostile aliens arriving unannounced and how the locals might react to us. It also covers (for Lem) familiar ground in terms of the problems of communicating with a civilization we know nothing about, and our tendency to assume that alien races think and behave like we do. All of which is great. The main problem with Fiasco (and it's a big one) is that Lem drowns the interesting parts of the story in way too much science – unless that’s what you’re here for, in which case this may work better for you than it did for me.
View all my reviews
Talk to me,
This is dF
Dimension of Miracles by Robert SheckleyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I tried Robert Sheckley once way back in the mid-90s with Options, and I remember being somewhat entertained but not particularly inspired to try more of his work. But recently he’s been namedropped by the kind of people whose opinions I respect, and when one of them noted that this book (now back in print) was an accidental precursor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, well, I had to try it out, didn’t I?
The premise: present-day earthman Thomas Carmody is notified that he has won the Intergalactic Sweepstakes (despite being unaware that there was such a thing), and is whisked away from Earth to Galactic Centre via a space-time portal to claim his prize. The problem is that Galactic Centre can only return him to Earth if he can tell them its exact coordinates in space as well as time (and which timeline) – which of course he can’t. As Carmody travels from one world to another trying to find someone who can help him get home, he encounters incompetent bureaucrats, disenchanted demi-gods, talking dinosaurs, annoying sentient cities and a mysterious predator out to kill him, among other things.
I kind of get the H2G2 comparisons (and for the record, Douglas Adams once said he wasn’t aware of the novel until he’d already written the first H2G2 book, but agreed there were some uncanny parallels), but for me the resemblance is superficial – Dimension of Miracles is more free-wheeling and absurdist, for one thing. It’s also not quite as good in terms of characterization – there’s not much to Carmody, who serves as an existential straight man for everyone else. That said, it’s delightfully weird, fun and entertaining.
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter BrueggemannMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I enjoyed Walter Brueggemann’s Out of Babylon, and when I came across this, the title alone was a great hook – the idea of the Sabbath as a form of resistance to the never-ending demands of late-stage capitalism. Brueggemann’s basic thesis is that the Fourth Commandment is not only more significant than it looks, it’s also arguably the centerpiece of the list – a bridge between Commandments 1 to 3 and 5 to 10. The book offers a concise exploration into just why God felt it necessary to stick that particular commandment in the list in the first place.
Without giving too much away, it’s not simply to celebrate the event of God “resting” on Day 7 of creation – it’s largely to do with the context of the Exodus from Egypt where the Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years, but it’s also a command to resist any economic system that demands endless non-stop work and requires immediate and ever increasing consumption. Brueggemann argues that the Sabbath offers an alternate system that in turn creates a society better enabled to fulfil God’s other commands – especially Jesus’ “first and greatest” commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s a short and interesting take, and one I am of course rather sympathetic to. Brueggemann covers a lot of bases, and makes a good case. That said, this is more of a Bible study exercise than a manifesto, and doesn't offer any concrete steps to implement this on a personal or policy level. Then again, there’s really only one step: take one day off a week and relax. You can tell your boss it’s for religious reasons.
Fiasco by Stanisław LemMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Stanislaw Lem’s final novel, though he continued to write non-fiction long after this was published in 1986. It’s also the last of his pessimistic “first contact” novels, though this isn’t obvious at first, as the first part of the story involves Parvis, an astronaut who is frozen on Titan after an accident during a mission to find the missing astronaut Pirx. Either he or Pirx (no one knows) is revived over a hundred years later by a passing expedition – which, it later transpires, is on its way to establish contact with an alien race on the distant planet Quinta. Just one problem: the Quintans don’t seem to want contact.
Much the novel’s content is dedicated to pages and pages of philosophical and ethical musings, as well as dense hard SF explaining how they use black holes to enable faster-than-light travel, and the various other technologies at their disposal. Buried under all of that somewhere is the actual storyline, in which attempts to force the Quintans to talk to them escalate into increasingly insane and cataclysmic violence. Hence Lem’s pessimistic tone, as his take is basically that if humans went to all that effort to travel to a distant planet to offer our hand in friendship, and they ignored us, we probably wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Which is kind of an extreme take, but then satire sometimes is. And I can't say he's totally wrong. What’s also interesting to me is Lem’s reversal of the first-contact trope in which humans are the hostile aliens arriving unannounced and how the locals might react to us. It also covers (for Lem) familiar ground in terms of the problems of communicating with a civilization we know nothing about, and our tendency to assume that alien races think and behave like we do. All of which is great. The main problem with Fiasco (and it's a big one) is that Lem drowns the interesting parts of the story in way too much science – unless that’s what you’re here for, in which case this may work better for you than it did for me.
View all my reviews
Talk to me,
This is dF
