Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
June 2011
I’ve read Aldous Huxley’s marvelous science fiction because it was my father’s favorite book in his high school years. At first reading, the prose immediately had a sharpness to it that I can feel its sting in my chest once every in a while. The richness of the text has provoked a lot of sensitive imagery which I’m unwilling to entertain at first, yet my mind goes there anyway. They’re disturbing visuals but it only shows the masterful prowess of the writer. It’s a cautionary tale about pure, mad science taking over until it starts to eradicate intimacies in human relationships (including and especially family and monogamy). Not surprising for a controversial piece during its time. Something keeps reeling me in as I peruse the pages. I am propelled to move forward by each turn. I find the hedonism of this novel quite uncomfortable; I suppose absolute lack of inhibition has its dangers. The people of this so-called brave new world are living the Eden paradise ideal; they feel no shame about their bodies and indulge on its needs and desires. It’s called “recreational sex” which has already become an integral part of their society. According to the World State that is the governing power over the masses, sex is a social activity, rather than means of reproduction. But there’s something clinical about it; even injecting drugs into their system to derive pleasure is ironically practical for them. Sexual relations are held to the most extreme level. Everyone belongs to everyone, they say. |
But the book also depicts caste systems where embryos are ‘harvested’ in capsules and labeled from Alpha to Gamma. The very concept of family is cast aside because biological dependence is perceived as a hindrance to evolution. Intimacy is reduced into mere polygamous associations and that is the most terrifying theme of this book as far as I’m concerned, as well as how they don’t encourage individuality at all. In Brave New World, human societies reached ‘utopia’ by discarding the self completely and stressing the importance of systems and communities. The characters view any kind of emotional vulnerability as a glitch in their systems and must therefore be purged out.
However, there are still societies who were untouched by this project and they live in an area called a Savage Reservation. The way this place was portrayed is the same as our world (with families living together) which the New World finds disgusting and barbaric. We are introduced to the character John and his mother Linda and their tale follows the liberation and hardships of being considered ‘uncivilized’. John falls in love with Lenina, who was Beta-born, and she shares the attraction; but theirs is a thwarted love affair because they have different values and cultural perceptions. My favorite part of this book is the really poignant moment in the novel when Lenina offers herself for sex because it feels natural for her to do because that’s how they do things in the New World but John rejects her because he still holds obsolete traditional values of courtship and marriage. They feel love differently because of their respective social conditioning and the glaring differences in their humanity made them unable to emotionally connect.
Another character I adored is Bernard, an Alpha-bred who was too short in height for his DNA so he becomes quite a misfit among his other chromosome-sufficient brothers and sisters, and his journey to individual uniqueness is quite touching take on the importance of being original. I also like his best friend Helmholtz Watson. He is an ‘emotional engineer’; a starving artist whose creativity is trying to break out of its cage, eager to express art that defies his conditioned state. All these characters consider themselves free to make their own choices because the New World has shattered all conventions and taboos and yet its version of humanity loses that beautiful spark that make us strive and thrive for love and acceptance, and has become rather a copycat, cloned versions of everyone else.
As much as there is a comedic approach to this, the underlying sadness seeps through anyway. It brilliantly evoked primitive fears and they certainly haunted me for days. Christian Bale’s movie Equilibrium was also loosely based on this book.
However, there are still societies who were untouched by this project and they live in an area called a Savage Reservation. The way this place was portrayed is the same as our world (with families living together) which the New World finds disgusting and barbaric. We are introduced to the character John and his mother Linda and their tale follows the liberation and hardships of being considered ‘uncivilized’. John falls in love with Lenina, who was Beta-born, and she shares the attraction; but theirs is a thwarted love affair because they have different values and cultural perceptions. My favorite part of this book is the really poignant moment in the novel when Lenina offers herself for sex because it feels natural for her to do because that’s how they do things in the New World but John rejects her because he still holds obsolete traditional values of courtship and marriage. They feel love differently because of their respective social conditioning and the glaring differences in their humanity made them unable to emotionally connect.
Another character I adored is Bernard, an Alpha-bred who was too short in height for his DNA so he becomes quite a misfit among his other chromosome-sufficient brothers and sisters, and his journey to individual uniqueness is quite touching take on the importance of being original. I also like his best friend Helmholtz Watson. He is an ‘emotional engineer’; a starving artist whose creativity is trying to break out of its cage, eager to express art that defies his conditioned state. All these characters consider themselves free to make their own choices because the New World has shattered all conventions and taboos and yet its version of humanity loses that beautiful spark that make us strive and thrive for love and acceptance, and has become rather a copycat, cloned versions of everyone else.
As much as there is a comedic approach to this, the underlying sadness seeps through anyway. It brilliantly evoked primitive fears and they certainly haunted me for days. Christian Bale’s movie Equilibrium was also loosely based on this book.
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
November 2012
I knew little of Michael Cunningham’s work (I just knew that he wrote The Hours which was an Academy Award-winning film my parents loved) so I had no fixed expectations. I gave myself four days to finish this book but managed to do so in three days. That’s how captivating it was. Cunningham’s experimental fiction was masterfully told, like a musical composition that rises and falls with the right notes. In Specimen Days, he writes in three genres, dividing the book into three breathtaking novellas. |
"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?… .I do not know what it is any more than he.”
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
(1) “In The Machine” A Historical Dickensian Tale
The first novella was written in the boy Lucas’ POV. It was set sometime during the industrialization age of America. Lucas’ brother Simon has just died and this left his fiancee Catherine uncared for and with child. Though already shouldering the financial burden of supporting his parents, thirteen-year-old Lucas still felt it was his responsibility to watch out after Catherine. He was a peculiar boy, reciting Walt Whitman poetry as his way to express his feelings or to make conversation. Through Lucas’ narrations, Cunningham’s knack for weaving lyrical phrases is astounding. The paragraphs contain such breathless pacing and descriptive precision which magnified the strength of Lucas’ evocative insights about his surroundings as he tries to understand the concept of labor and death. He wants to de-mystify such adult concepts and it is Whitman’s poetry that guides him. At the very heart of it all, Lucas begins to explore the possibility that his brother’s soul was trapped inside the welding machinery that Lucas uses at his work in the factory. Believing that if men die and they spread out among the leaves and grass (as Whitman eloquently wrote), Lucas was convinced that ghosts dwell among the machinery across New York, including the sewing machine that Catherine tends to at her own workplace. He ventures on to save her.
For such a comical angle to the story, Cunningham was still able to approach it with great sensitivity, providing passages that brood over the simplest but unanswered questions about life which gives Lucas’ character a crushing sort of loneliness. He is a child who tries to make sense of the world by allowing poetry to fill the gaps. It’s a feat that manages to intensify the reading experience even more, and Cunningham drives it home by using Lucas’ “ghost” as an allegory of the American industrialization’s hovering presence, and the gradual withdrawal of human spirit from the organic towards the mechanical. Lucas’ belief of souls being trapped in the machines is a symbolism easy to pick up on, but Cunningham’s beautifully convoluted prose is rich with details that it was able to keep everything subtle. The climactic ending was even transitory to the next novella.
Reading In the Machine was like stumbling in the dark, and trusting all the sensory directions given, but never truly seeing the big picture forming until the novel moves into the second story.
The first novella was written in the boy Lucas’ POV. It was set sometime during the industrialization age of America. Lucas’ brother Simon has just died and this left his fiancee Catherine uncared for and with child. Though already shouldering the financial burden of supporting his parents, thirteen-year-old Lucas still felt it was his responsibility to watch out after Catherine. He was a peculiar boy, reciting Walt Whitman poetry as his way to express his feelings or to make conversation. Through Lucas’ narrations, Cunningham’s knack for weaving lyrical phrases is astounding. The paragraphs contain such breathless pacing and descriptive precision which magnified the strength of Lucas’ evocative insights about his surroundings as he tries to understand the concept of labor and death. He wants to de-mystify such adult concepts and it is Whitman’s poetry that guides him. At the very heart of it all, Lucas begins to explore the possibility that his brother’s soul was trapped inside the welding machinery that Lucas uses at his work in the factory. Believing that if men die and they spread out among the leaves and grass (as Whitman eloquently wrote), Lucas was convinced that ghosts dwell among the machinery across New York, including the sewing machine that Catherine tends to at her own workplace. He ventures on to save her.
For such a comical angle to the story, Cunningham was still able to approach it with great sensitivity, providing passages that brood over the simplest but unanswered questions about life which gives Lucas’ character a crushing sort of loneliness. He is a child who tries to make sense of the world by allowing poetry to fill the gaps. It’s a feat that manages to intensify the reading experience even more, and Cunningham drives it home by using Lucas’ “ghost” as an allegory of the American industrialization’s hovering presence, and the gradual withdrawal of human spirit from the organic towards the mechanical. Lucas’ belief of souls being trapped in the machines is a symbolism easy to pick up on, but Cunningham’s beautifully convoluted prose is rich with details that it was able to keep everything subtle. The climactic ending was even transitory to the next novella.
Reading In the Machine was like stumbling in the dark, and trusting all the sensory directions given, but never truly seeing the big picture forming until the novel moves into the second story.
"And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
(2) “The Children’s Crusade” A Detective Psychological Thriller
The sudden shift of genre by the second novella was not at all jarring. This time it was set on a post-9/11 New York with Cat Martin, a forensic psychologist, as a focus character. She works for a hotline division who handles calls from possible terrorists. She got a message from a young boy who talked about “the family” and recites mantras like "Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me," which she recognized to be a verse from a Walt Whitman poem. Days after, news of child terrorists have spread across the city, claiming both the rich and the poor as victims of homemade bombs. At first glance, this story doesn’t have any sort of connection to the first one until the reader realizes that Cat was short for “Catherine” and her boyfriend’s name is “Simon” and she has a son named “Luke” whom she lost to an illness. But these are different characters with the same names and are a century apart from each other, yet Cunningham weaves these two stories—one of the past and one from the somewhat present—as a dissonance of worlds that are created through the choices of these three central characters.
Whatever the boy Lucas from the first story feared about then, those ghosts he talked about, have now taken shape into something horribly concrete in Cat Martin’s New York where a heightened sense of paranoia and grief is exploited by a terrorist cell composed of children.
It was a detective story, hard-boiled and suspenseful with every turn of the page—right until the moment of a chance meeting between Cat and one of the child terrorists. In this story, Cunningham delves into the scarlet thread so immensely significant in detective stories and The Children’s Crusade became a harrowing tale that overflows with the twisted reflections of humanity’s fears. It was by this installment that I started to tear up completely because Cunningham has a way to string along certain phrases that provokes such a visceral, emotional response that a reader just surrenders without even knowing it. It was juxtaposed perfectly with In The Machine, especially since he used the three characters (Catherine, Simon and Lucas) as representations of man, woman and child; three aspects poignantly enhanced by the last novella.
The sudden shift of genre by the second novella was not at all jarring. This time it was set on a post-9/11 New York with Cat Martin, a forensic psychologist, as a focus character. She works for a hotline division who handles calls from possible terrorists. She got a message from a young boy who talked about “the family” and recites mantras like "Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me," which she recognized to be a verse from a Walt Whitman poem. Days after, news of child terrorists have spread across the city, claiming both the rich and the poor as victims of homemade bombs. At first glance, this story doesn’t have any sort of connection to the first one until the reader realizes that Cat was short for “Catherine” and her boyfriend’s name is “Simon” and she has a son named “Luke” whom she lost to an illness. But these are different characters with the same names and are a century apart from each other, yet Cunningham weaves these two stories—one of the past and one from the somewhat present—as a dissonance of worlds that are created through the choices of these three central characters.
Whatever the boy Lucas from the first story feared about then, those ghosts he talked about, have now taken shape into something horribly concrete in Cat Martin’s New York where a heightened sense of paranoia and grief is exploited by a terrorist cell composed of children.
It was a detective story, hard-boiled and suspenseful with every turn of the page—right until the moment of a chance meeting between Cat and one of the child terrorists. In this story, Cunningham delves into the scarlet thread so immensely significant in detective stories and The Children’s Crusade became a harrowing tale that overflows with the twisted reflections of humanity’s fears. It was by this installment that I started to tear up completely because Cunningham has a way to string along certain phrases that provokes such a visceral, emotional response that a reader just surrenders without even knowing it. It was juxtaposed perfectly with In The Machine, especially since he used the three characters (Catherine, Simon and Lucas) as representations of man, woman and child; three aspects poignantly enhanced by the last novella.
"Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearning the same
The same old love, beauty and use the same.”
(3) “Like Beauty” A Sci-Fi Love Story About Birth and Destination
The final novella was set 150 years in the future in New York. Humans have already made first contact with aliens and they are lizard life-forms called Nadians who are now living as refugees in planet Earth. They are domestic helpers, treated as secondary citizens and enslaved by mankind. Simon—a bio-mechanical cyborg—is the focus character, and he was programmed as a mugger in the New York streets, sought after by tourists who want to be victimized because of the adrenaline release it provides. He was captivated by a Nadian called Catareen whom he starts an adventure with when they decided to escape to Denver. On the road, they met a homeless boy posing as Jesus in a Halloween costume named Lucas. This story was the most challenging of the three because it was science fiction and there is always a strange pull with this genre that Cunningham was able to give justice to. Simon was a biomechanical conception; half-human and half-machine (a literal representation of Lucas’ ghost of a brother from the first story) and his ‘maker’ has included Whitman poetry in his software which he recites every time under duress. What follows after is a redemptive tale about the power of technology and a more humane understanding of how it can enrich lives instead of destroy them.
There is an enduring quality to the prose of this story that was magnified by the previous events from In The Machine and The Children’s Crusade. It seemed to me that these versions of Simon, Catherine and Lucas are products of the past and present colliding together to form a future defined by beginnings and endings that mirror each other. So many imagery and symbolism come full circle by this last story. --
Religious allegories were also used. I was listening to Death Cab For Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels” so I was positively imbued with emotions and sensations that can only be expressed in tears. It didn’t feel cheesy at all because it seemed like a perfectly acceptable response to cry about this book because of its overwhelming poetry in its vitalizing prose.
The final novella was set 150 years in the future in New York. Humans have already made first contact with aliens and they are lizard life-forms called Nadians who are now living as refugees in planet Earth. They are domestic helpers, treated as secondary citizens and enslaved by mankind. Simon—a bio-mechanical cyborg—is the focus character, and he was programmed as a mugger in the New York streets, sought after by tourists who want to be victimized because of the adrenaline release it provides. He was captivated by a Nadian called Catareen whom he starts an adventure with when they decided to escape to Denver. On the road, they met a homeless boy posing as Jesus in a Halloween costume named Lucas. This story was the most challenging of the three because it was science fiction and there is always a strange pull with this genre that Cunningham was able to give justice to. Simon was a biomechanical conception; half-human and half-machine (a literal representation of Lucas’ ghost of a brother from the first story) and his ‘maker’ has included Whitman poetry in his software which he recites every time under duress. What follows after is a redemptive tale about the power of technology and a more humane understanding of how it can enrich lives instead of destroy them.
There is an enduring quality to the prose of this story that was magnified by the previous events from In The Machine and The Children’s Crusade. It seemed to me that these versions of Simon, Catherine and Lucas are products of the past and present colliding together to form a future defined by beginnings and endings that mirror each other. So many imagery and symbolism come full circle by this last story. --
Religious allegories were also used. I was listening to Death Cab For Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels” so I was positively imbued with emotions and sensations that can only be expressed in tears. It didn’t feel cheesy at all because it seemed like a perfectly acceptable response to cry about this book because of its overwhelming poetry in its vitalizing prose.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
January 2014
Since seeing its movie adaptation trailer alongside the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, this book has haunted me. I would be inside bookstores, browsing happily through the comic book sections, only to find myself turning around to face a copy of it perching above a shelf behind me. I’d ignore it and go on with my usual purchases. Until one day while I was merely looking through some collected works of YA books with some slight disdain, I saw the name Orson Scott Card in one of those boxes, and his four books that are collectedly known as Ender’s Quartet. Again, I dismissed the whole thing as commonplace. But a night after that while deciding for my next purchase, that box collection popped in my head all of a sudden. I’ve been collecting SF Masterworks for months so thinking about Card’s books was not unusual because I knew it was a highly-regarded sci-fi work.
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I just couldn’t resist so I researched more about it and found out that Card was the same author whose appointment as one of the new Superman writers for DC stirred a scandal, all because of his bigoted stance against same-sex marriage. Already intrigued, I read some more about this author and came across his said homophobic articles. I was naturally livid—but also begrudgingly amused.
How could someone who writes in a genre that’s all about radical, exploratory themes of the human condition be so discriminatory towards a group of people whose different values he believes threatens his own?
It needs to be stated that this is the motivating factor that made me decide to buy the Ender’s Quartet box. However, I wanted to judge his stories as a literary work, regardless of whatever repugnance I feel toward his own bigotry against LGBT. I proceeded with this mind, and it was surprisingly easy once I began to enjoy the story. My copy of Ender’s Game (which thankfully did not feature the movie cover, no offense intended though) was an author definitive edition so I read his introduction of the novel with a discerning apathy. And then I went right ahead to the story with the idea that this is about gifted children making military strategies; a very peculiar premise that was unexpectedly rewarding and often sublime. What I thoroughly admired about his way of storytelling is the daring simplicity of the prose; and I say ‘daring’ because a lot of today’s writers I’ve encountered in any genre have a tendency to be incessantly verbose which tend to make their narrative superfluous. Granted, verbosity is enjoyable for me when it’s lyrical (Michael Cunningham excelled with this, particularly in Specimen Days), but there is a time and place for such a style, and luckily Card did not find it necessary to tell his story this way. Though told in the perspectives of several gifted children (the Wiggin siblings, primarily) and other adults, the prose itself was not cerebral or too self-aware. The gifted children themselves could have been written as vocabulary juggernauts or savvy scientific savants to accentuate whatever genius they possess but Card did not portray them this because they would have been cartoonish and less believable.
In fact, Ender, Peter and Valentine Wiggin talk like regular children ought to, but once you explore their respective innermost thoughts, you find that because of their high intelligence, they do think and feel beyond their years; able to ascertain their identities and make morally piercing decisions with a restraint and strength that not even adults in their forties have. The burden and frailty of genius is the thematic resonance of this book for me; the titular character Ender (who is stigmatized with the prejudicial ‘Third’ label; since the government-imposed total of children for every household is two) is six years old in the beginning of the story and was twelve by the time he finished his first war with the the alien enemies known as buggers—and in between he was forced to make very adult decisions and the adults themselves (military commanders and teachers) are unable to fully understand how to deal with him; if they would treat his failings compassionately with the knowledge that he is merely a child, or grind him some more for his potentials with the forethought that he is humanity’s ultimate last weapon to survive. The answer, eventually, is a vulnerable balance of both. The painful but redemptive transformations that Ender undergone is too much for any ordinary child to take and it was his uniqueness that truly enabled him to endure the agonies of his training. He was resourceful and calculating yet also reluctant to accept his killer instincts; terrified to emulate his older brother Peter who has a mean streak and a megalomaniac ambition. His humane reflection is his sister Valentine, whose kindness is not as pure as either of them would like to believe but is ultimately the light that brings meaning to the darkness that his life was instilled with.
There is a lot of depth to this story’s structure that makes almost all of the scenes (and supporting characters) unforgettable and pitiful at the same time. The book’s stetting focus is the Battle School, and for someone who enjoys strategies and tactics in game sequences and interplay, I devoured everything that was written. This is when Ender shone the brightest at that; he can always devise and improvise his battle plans that he began to truly excel. But with that came isolation and derision from other children who are insecure of their abilities; but Ender was also able to find respect and camaraderie from those who appreciate and sympathize to a certain extent what he is and what he’s going through. It’s sometimes easy to forget that these are children because they are facing situations that render any innocence of theirs moot.
We could just as well blame the adults of the story for their morally ambiguous step-by-step training to turn these youngsters into killers but the truth is far more complex and magnitude in scope to put it in black-and-white terms. There remains a threat to the human race out there in the blackest of galaxies so this justifies everything they have put Ender through— but is it really worth it?
The answer was not an absolute which is to be expected in such a complicated landscape and characterizations put forth by Card for Ender’s Game. Near the end of the story, our child hero has become cynical and worn-out but he’s still a child nevertheless, and he will continue to reach new heights in worlds that he could not always control, but can always adapt to. And though gifted with uncanny military skills and exacting discipline that rivals that of a holy man, it also needs to be said that Ender’s innate goodness is eventually something that makes him more than just a great soldier—it also defined him as a great leader. This ultimately allowed him to put himself in the mind of his enemies and expose the truth that humanity was not fighting against evil forces at all but an alien race that misrepresented itself to us from the beginning, and is just as eager to survive and thrive as we do if we only help.
How could someone who writes in a genre that’s all about radical, exploratory themes of the human condition be so discriminatory towards a group of people whose different values he believes threatens his own?
It needs to be stated that this is the motivating factor that made me decide to buy the Ender’s Quartet box. However, I wanted to judge his stories as a literary work, regardless of whatever repugnance I feel toward his own bigotry against LGBT. I proceeded with this mind, and it was surprisingly easy once I began to enjoy the story. My copy of Ender’s Game (which thankfully did not feature the movie cover, no offense intended though) was an author definitive edition so I read his introduction of the novel with a discerning apathy. And then I went right ahead to the story with the idea that this is about gifted children making military strategies; a very peculiar premise that was unexpectedly rewarding and often sublime. What I thoroughly admired about his way of storytelling is the daring simplicity of the prose; and I say ‘daring’ because a lot of today’s writers I’ve encountered in any genre have a tendency to be incessantly verbose which tend to make their narrative superfluous. Granted, verbosity is enjoyable for me when it’s lyrical (Michael Cunningham excelled with this, particularly in Specimen Days), but there is a time and place for such a style, and luckily Card did not find it necessary to tell his story this way. Though told in the perspectives of several gifted children (the Wiggin siblings, primarily) and other adults, the prose itself was not cerebral or too self-aware. The gifted children themselves could have been written as vocabulary juggernauts or savvy scientific savants to accentuate whatever genius they possess but Card did not portray them this because they would have been cartoonish and less believable.
In fact, Ender, Peter and Valentine Wiggin talk like regular children ought to, but once you explore their respective innermost thoughts, you find that because of their high intelligence, they do think and feel beyond their years; able to ascertain their identities and make morally piercing decisions with a restraint and strength that not even adults in their forties have. The burden and frailty of genius is the thematic resonance of this book for me; the titular character Ender (who is stigmatized with the prejudicial ‘Third’ label; since the government-imposed total of children for every household is two) is six years old in the beginning of the story and was twelve by the time he finished his first war with the the alien enemies known as buggers—and in between he was forced to make very adult decisions and the adults themselves (military commanders and teachers) are unable to fully understand how to deal with him; if they would treat his failings compassionately with the knowledge that he is merely a child, or grind him some more for his potentials with the forethought that he is humanity’s ultimate last weapon to survive. The answer, eventually, is a vulnerable balance of both. The painful but redemptive transformations that Ender undergone is too much for any ordinary child to take and it was his uniqueness that truly enabled him to endure the agonies of his training. He was resourceful and calculating yet also reluctant to accept his killer instincts; terrified to emulate his older brother Peter who has a mean streak and a megalomaniac ambition. His humane reflection is his sister Valentine, whose kindness is not as pure as either of them would like to believe but is ultimately the light that brings meaning to the darkness that his life was instilled with.
There is a lot of depth to this story’s structure that makes almost all of the scenes (and supporting characters) unforgettable and pitiful at the same time. The book’s stetting focus is the Battle School, and for someone who enjoys strategies and tactics in game sequences and interplay, I devoured everything that was written. This is when Ender shone the brightest at that; he can always devise and improvise his battle plans that he began to truly excel. But with that came isolation and derision from other children who are insecure of their abilities; but Ender was also able to find respect and camaraderie from those who appreciate and sympathize to a certain extent what he is and what he’s going through. It’s sometimes easy to forget that these are children because they are facing situations that render any innocence of theirs moot.
We could just as well blame the adults of the story for their morally ambiguous step-by-step training to turn these youngsters into killers but the truth is far more complex and magnitude in scope to put it in black-and-white terms. There remains a threat to the human race out there in the blackest of galaxies so this justifies everything they have put Ender through— but is it really worth it?
The answer was not an absolute which is to be expected in such a complicated landscape and characterizations put forth by Card for Ender’s Game. Near the end of the story, our child hero has become cynical and worn-out but he’s still a child nevertheless, and he will continue to reach new heights in worlds that he could not always control, but can always adapt to. And though gifted with uncanny military skills and exacting discipline that rivals that of a holy man, it also needs to be said that Ender’s innate goodness is eventually something that makes him more than just a great soldier—it also defined him as a great leader. This ultimately allowed him to put himself in the mind of his enemies and expose the truth that humanity was not fighting against evil forces at all but an alien race that misrepresented itself to us from the beginning, and is just as eager to survive and thrive as we do if we only help.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
January 2014
"At its best, science fiction attempts to reconcile the inhuman scale of the universe with the smaller compass of human life."
~An introduction from Paul McAuley It was only July of last year when I fixated on the Blade Runner movie which was loosely based on this Philip K. Dick novel. It was a Ridley Scott creation foremost, and he infused noir ambiance with science fiction elements in an earnest attempt at preserving not only a beautiful landscape but a vulnerable examination about humanity. I was easily infatuated with the film (which I proceeded to re-watch at least four times since). But I wanted to know the novel itself and so I ventured on with the knowledge that the movie has altered quite a few things from the book and so my possible enjoyment would be incomparable either way. With only 181 pages, it occurred to me that it was only a novella after all, and in that expanse, everything has happened in one fateful day alone. |
With caution, I perused through and found myself helplessly transported to a bleak and unimpressive future where Earth has become uninhabitable with increasing radioactivity that only people who are deemed to possess average intelligence can waste their lives away in it with humdrum woodwork. There are those who function above this cluster of folk (derogatorily called 'chickenheads' and more pitifully labeled as 'special') and one of them is a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard whose personal existential crisis starts the story as he had a dispute with his wife Iran. As readers follow Deckard with his inconspicuous existence, he is received with underwhelming reception. It was often difficult to distinguish him from the androids he hunts down and 'retires' (a necessary euphemism since you cannot kill something that is not organically alive, can you?) but his self-awareness is characteristically human. Still, there's an absence to Deckard that leaves us feeling cold; and almost every human in the story is regarded just the same. I would often pause every ten pages or so just to ponder the inescapable apathy and resignation that these characters are caught up in--and I find myself relating to them more strongly than I hoped and I suppose that's because it's the thematic resonance of this novel: the value of human empathy. Dick shows us skillfully and with subtlety that it's this quality that ultimately separates us from machines and other artificial intelligence.
Deckard's dire countenance is a consequential effect from the extinction of many animals which are replaced with synthetic ones, therefore robbing humans the opportunity to have pets they can bond with. Deckard himself owns an electric sheep and desires to buy a living animal (which are now expensive commodities; with a price range in an accessible pamphlet catalog that Deckard carries around everywhere) not only because it's a status symbol but also because he unconsciously seeks a genuine connection from a slowly disintegrating world and plane of reality. Everything else has become scarce--including faith. A pseudo-religious movement called Mercernism has taken over people's lives. They would watch a video of an old man struggling to climb a hill (reminiscent of the Myth of Sisyphus) and they are allowed to fuse their consciousness with him by touching an 'empathy box'. Through this, it becomes possible for thousands of people to unite into one entity and feel the same emotions together, all at once.
This was one of the saddest things I've ever read; not only are these people living in a radioactive environment without living pets to take care of--they are also only able to experience spiritual meaning through a video that will have been proven faked by a scandalous journalist named Buster Friendly who dominated their waking and sleeping hours both on radio and television as much as the false deity Mercer had occupied their souls.
The character who truly broke my heart was J.R Isidore, a 'chickenhead' who could not even distinguish a live animal from a synthetic (he works in a repair shop who handles artificial pets). He was considered a lesser being because he failed IQ tests, and was essentially discarded by society so when he met an enigmatic young girl who turned out to be an android, he was easily duped and he eagerly considered her a friend rather than to face the alternative which was the constant isolation of his every day life.
His storyline contrasted Deckard's bounty quest but they equally provide that piercing feeling of absence they try to fill with urgent distractions from their overall existential hunger; Deckard hunts androids because he wants to use the money to buy a live animal but along the way ends up falling for an android because of his general unhappy domestic life with Iran. Meanwhile, Isidore clings onto the religious power of the empathy box because it gives him an opportunity to feel as though he wasn't different from other human beings when he fuses emotions with them.
Another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, was even mistaken for an android by Deckard himself and it was only because Deckard has confused his own feelings; he is able to feel something honest with androids more than towards his own fellowman. Once he was able to regain a better perspective of his actions, his road to clarity and redemption is at hand. In a poignant moment when Deckard finds a toad which turned out to be just another fake, he did not brood about it anymore for he has finally understood that nothing needs to be real or genuine itself; and that it's only because we believe something is real or genuine that makes it so. Dick's message is unmistakable: it is us who assign meaning in the world--from objects to animals, to relationships, defeats and dreams--and it is our light that gives the darkness that perpetuates our lives more than just a sense of being.
Unlike the movie, the book was less action-oriented and more intimate in scope. Dick's metaphors (the memorable spider scene) and use of symbolism captures a multitude of insights but delivers with one solid punch to the chest. As bleak and depressing as the lives of the characters in this modest novella were, Dick gradually, steadily--and with touching sincerity--asked hard questions about the importance of human qualities like empathy and faith. His book was even appropriately titled to ask just that: Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?
And by the end of the tale, with a resonating recognition, the answer is understandably NO, and yet it remains a rhetorical one we are not supposed to answer (just like Who watches the Watchmen?).
It's a philosophical statement that allows us to examine and appreciate (even celebrate) the depth of our conscious desire to aspire, live and evolve in contrast with the machines that will never replace us for they lack the spark of our humanity (they are mere empty canvasses while we are the bold brushstrokes). And human beings always seek progress no matter how much it fears change and is haunted by its ghosts. We will never lose that courage to climb up even if there's nothing to grasp onto, even if all we have is the beauty of not knowing.
Deckard's dire countenance is a consequential effect from the extinction of many animals which are replaced with synthetic ones, therefore robbing humans the opportunity to have pets they can bond with. Deckard himself owns an electric sheep and desires to buy a living animal (which are now expensive commodities; with a price range in an accessible pamphlet catalog that Deckard carries around everywhere) not only because it's a status symbol but also because he unconsciously seeks a genuine connection from a slowly disintegrating world and plane of reality. Everything else has become scarce--including faith. A pseudo-religious movement called Mercernism has taken over people's lives. They would watch a video of an old man struggling to climb a hill (reminiscent of the Myth of Sisyphus) and they are allowed to fuse their consciousness with him by touching an 'empathy box'. Through this, it becomes possible for thousands of people to unite into one entity and feel the same emotions together, all at once.
This was one of the saddest things I've ever read; not only are these people living in a radioactive environment without living pets to take care of--they are also only able to experience spiritual meaning through a video that will have been proven faked by a scandalous journalist named Buster Friendly who dominated their waking and sleeping hours both on radio and television as much as the false deity Mercer had occupied their souls.
The character who truly broke my heart was J.R Isidore, a 'chickenhead' who could not even distinguish a live animal from a synthetic (he works in a repair shop who handles artificial pets). He was considered a lesser being because he failed IQ tests, and was essentially discarded by society so when he met an enigmatic young girl who turned out to be an android, he was easily duped and he eagerly considered her a friend rather than to face the alternative which was the constant isolation of his every day life.
His storyline contrasted Deckard's bounty quest but they equally provide that piercing feeling of absence they try to fill with urgent distractions from their overall existential hunger; Deckard hunts androids because he wants to use the money to buy a live animal but along the way ends up falling for an android because of his general unhappy domestic life with Iran. Meanwhile, Isidore clings onto the religious power of the empathy box because it gives him an opportunity to feel as though he wasn't different from other human beings when he fuses emotions with them.
Another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, was even mistaken for an android by Deckard himself and it was only because Deckard has confused his own feelings; he is able to feel something honest with androids more than towards his own fellowman. Once he was able to regain a better perspective of his actions, his road to clarity and redemption is at hand. In a poignant moment when Deckard finds a toad which turned out to be just another fake, he did not brood about it anymore for he has finally understood that nothing needs to be real or genuine itself; and that it's only because we believe something is real or genuine that makes it so. Dick's message is unmistakable: it is us who assign meaning in the world--from objects to animals, to relationships, defeats and dreams--and it is our light that gives the darkness that perpetuates our lives more than just a sense of being.
Unlike the movie, the book was less action-oriented and more intimate in scope. Dick's metaphors (the memorable spider scene) and use of symbolism captures a multitude of insights but delivers with one solid punch to the chest. As bleak and depressing as the lives of the characters in this modest novella were, Dick gradually, steadily--and with touching sincerity--asked hard questions about the importance of human qualities like empathy and faith. His book was even appropriately titled to ask just that: Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?
And by the end of the tale, with a resonating recognition, the answer is understandably NO, and yet it remains a rhetorical one we are not supposed to answer (just like Who watches the Watchmen?).
It's a philosophical statement that allows us to examine and appreciate (even celebrate) the depth of our conscious desire to aspire, live and evolve in contrast with the machines that will never replace us for they lack the spark of our humanity (they are mere empty canvasses while we are the bold brushstrokes). And human beings always seek progress no matter how much it fears change and is haunted by its ghosts. We will never lose that courage to climb up even if there's nothing to grasp onto, even if all we have is the beauty of not knowing.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
January 2014
My words in this review would continue to remain insufficient to fully describe the phenomena within the pages of this book, and the breadth of literary experiences that Arthur C. Clarke had given me when he wrote Childhood's End. This is a science fiction novel that explored the complex relationship between beginnings and endings, and the unfathomable scale of the evolution process. Clarke, however, tried to capture the essence of such bold concepts in his story, and so I feel that I also have a duty to do the same in writing the review.
I first saw this book two years ago and the cover (as you can see in the photo opposite this review) was so captivating. It was this particular book that jump-started my hunt for other SF Masterworks (I have 12 of them in my collection so far). I have no regrets about buying this book, and reading it at a point in my life where I'm also voyaging through new horizons while saying my goodbyes to past lives. |
I always read the introductions when a book has one so I was spoiled earlier on about the staggering revelation concerning the alien "overlords" who have come to Earth and, instead of invading the planet, the overlords launched a long-term strategy to save it from falling into its own nuclear destruction. If anyone has watched the sci-fi series V, the second chapter of that event resembled the first scenes of the pilot episode of that show, and perhaps Clarke's book was the inspiration for it. But that's the only thing this book and that show share.
Childhood's End stands on another level of storytelling altogether. And it's one so subtle in delivery that when it expanded across the pages without warning, I almost wanted to clutch at my chest just to make sure it's still beating.
I don't take it lightly whenever I describe a book as "beautiful" and most of the time, I would use that general description to convey beauty not as an abstraction but more of an expression of spiritual fulfillment that such a story can only cause. I'm not sure if that is enough of an appraisal for Clarke's masterpiece, so perhaps I could do one better by saying that not since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen had a literary piece left me raw and reeling from the experience. In just 237 pages, I was transported into a world that is ripe with possibilities which is the endgame of a genre like science fiction. Clarke's story was beautiful not because it revealed some apocalyptic wasteland so often depicted in futuristic stories that also serve as cautionary tales that deal with everyone's fears concerning our world's mistakes and negligence.
No, Childhood's End, despite of its misleading, ominous title, is about a future that leads inevitably to transcendence. Human beings will evolve even if it means ending the chapters of greatness that humanity was recognized for. It's also a reassuring message that we should not fear our mortality for every ending always leads to new beginnings and that in itself should be comforting enough. The build-up to this pay-off was suspenseful enough though there are times you would think it would be uneventful. I felt like Clarke played a cruel trick on me, too. He would alternate between focusing the camera lens of his writing with the general atmosphere/environment of what the future looks like thanks to the Overlords's continuous supervision among human nations, and then zoom in to the focus characters that help contextualize and humanize the events and changes that the planet is undergoing. I was almost ready to believe that nothing so astounding will happen once the story nears a conclusion--and I was dead wrong.
Since the illuminating final moments of the book caught me off-guard, all I could do was close my eyes and imagine if whatever Clarke has created in Childhood's End will ever happen someday--and I actually want it to. There's just a sense of wholeness, of balance and equilibrium, in the way the story reached its climax. It was then that I was also thankful that I read the introduction because I was able to appreciate the way Clarke approached and weaved the concepts of parenthood and childhood in his story with a discerning and poignant interpretation. I do recommend, however, to just go read the story first then come back to the introduction to avoid the spoiler therein. Childhood's End enabled readers to experience not just scientifically but philosophically what exactly happens when children outlive their parents; how generations in the past need to decay in order for future landscapes to be had. It certainly made me think about the way my parents raised me. It made me wonder if they see me not really an extension of their genes but as the death to their own existence and relevance--and it must be so terrifying that we just don't acknowledge it.
Still, as cruelly eye-opening that epiphany was, I was glad it happened to me because of this book, and now I can love my parents more fiercely than before, knowing fully well now that my survival means that their lives ultimately will not be in vain.
Childhood's End stands on another level of storytelling altogether. And it's one so subtle in delivery that when it expanded across the pages without warning, I almost wanted to clutch at my chest just to make sure it's still beating.
I don't take it lightly whenever I describe a book as "beautiful" and most of the time, I would use that general description to convey beauty not as an abstraction but more of an expression of spiritual fulfillment that such a story can only cause. I'm not sure if that is enough of an appraisal for Clarke's masterpiece, so perhaps I could do one better by saying that not since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen had a literary piece left me raw and reeling from the experience. In just 237 pages, I was transported into a world that is ripe with possibilities which is the endgame of a genre like science fiction. Clarke's story was beautiful not because it revealed some apocalyptic wasteland so often depicted in futuristic stories that also serve as cautionary tales that deal with everyone's fears concerning our world's mistakes and negligence.
No, Childhood's End, despite of its misleading, ominous title, is about a future that leads inevitably to transcendence. Human beings will evolve even if it means ending the chapters of greatness that humanity was recognized for. It's also a reassuring message that we should not fear our mortality for every ending always leads to new beginnings and that in itself should be comforting enough. The build-up to this pay-off was suspenseful enough though there are times you would think it would be uneventful. I felt like Clarke played a cruel trick on me, too. He would alternate between focusing the camera lens of his writing with the general atmosphere/environment of what the future looks like thanks to the Overlords's continuous supervision among human nations, and then zoom in to the focus characters that help contextualize and humanize the events and changes that the planet is undergoing. I was almost ready to believe that nothing so astounding will happen once the story nears a conclusion--and I was dead wrong.
Since the illuminating final moments of the book caught me off-guard, all I could do was close my eyes and imagine if whatever Clarke has created in Childhood's End will ever happen someday--and I actually want it to. There's just a sense of wholeness, of balance and equilibrium, in the way the story reached its climax. It was then that I was also thankful that I read the introduction because I was able to appreciate the way Clarke approached and weaved the concepts of parenthood and childhood in his story with a discerning and poignant interpretation. I do recommend, however, to just go read the story first then come back to the introduction to avoid the spoiler therein. Childhood's End enabled readers to experience not just scientifically but philosophically what exactly happens when children outlive their parents; how generations in the past need to decay in order for future landscapes to be had. It certainly made me think about the way my parents raised me. It made me wonder if they see me not really an extension of their genes but as the death to their own existence and relevance--and it must be so terrifying that we just don't acknowledge it.
Still, as cruelly eye-opening that epiphany was, I was glad it happened to me because of this book, and now I can love my parents more fiercely than before, knowing fully well now that my survival means that their lives ultimately will not be in vain.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
February 2014
When I read Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? and Childhoods's End, I was deeply moved. Then came F. Sionil Jose's Po-On which left me so raw and distraught that right after finishing it, I spent a few minutes under my blankets, crying silently to myself. Naturally, I thought I don't have any more tears to shed for books, so when I ventured on with Flowers for Algernon this time, I was so livid to be proven wrong.
I realized that I poured out all my deepest feelings about the story on my Reading Progress at Goodreads because it brought out the regrets I had growing up with my brother who has autism. I was so affected because I know firsthand how agonizing it is to love someone who is mentally, if not emotionally, incapable of returning it. This novel just reminded me of that, and the painful introspection that came after for me was like a deluge that I couldn't stop from flowing out. I pause every once in a while between pages just to wipe my tears, and I even had to stop reading for two nights just so I can recover from the ways it almost tore me apart. |
Flowers for Algernon is told in the perspective of Charlie Gordon, a mentally-challenged man in his thirties who agreed to undergo an experiment to make him "smart". His progress reports in the beginning weeks leading to the operation are filled with grammatical and spelling errors in order for readers to fully grasp his simplicity and limited mental capacities. After the operation, his writings have significantly changed and improved, not just in structure and content, but the way he would express his innermost thoughts and feelings about himself and the world around him.
The sudden and frightening ways Charlie begins to make sense of his memories with his family in the past, as well as the general treatment of his co-workers, are immensely emotional. Most of the time I would find myself getting really angry at passages depicting the way people with special needs like Charlie are mistreated in the time when this novel was written, since there was hardly that much positive public and media attention for special kids then. It was a slap in the face for me too, considering I have been just as cruel with my brother before, and it took me a while to forgive myself for the things I've said and done during our childhood.
Keyes' first-person prose is uncanny and infectious in its scope and range of emotions. It's a diary of someone's insecurities, self-discovery and painful memories, which only makes it harder for any reader not to feel something so overwhelming for Flowers for Algernon. You get to put yourself in Charlie's shoes yourself, and the world is not a loving place for someone like him at all. The higher his IQ got, the more self-aware and discerning Charlie became. But the people around him did not become any more accepting than when he was just a simpleton. They resented him for his higher intelligence this time; the only difference now is that Charlie can actually understand the sadness and unfairness of it all because intelligence also means bearing the burden of things you'd rather not know. For the first time in years, Charlie really felt that he was alone and unloved.
I'm really not exaggerating when I claimed that I cried so hard while reading. It was just too much for me. It's like I'm reading what my own brother would have said if he could only make sense of things the way normal people do. And if he ever could and he confronted me about it, I would be so ashamed of myself for all the bad things I used to put him through when we were kids. Just thinking about that while I read on became so crippling that I have to give up reading altogether for that night. It's as if Flowers for Algernon is a mirror, and it showed me my shortcomings in the past I'd rather not re-live and think about again. Looking at the reflections it presented was so upsetting.
I cannot express how this work of fiction will change certain perspectives in your life as well, even if you don't have my own personal baggage to contextualize it with. It's an important story because it can make its readers feel like they should protect Charlie from those who hurt him too. I do hope that after finishing the book and you'd meet someone like Charlie yourself, you would treat that person with compassion and kindness because that's all that they ever needed to live and survive the harsh conditions of the world we live in. I certainly learned once again that I'm the only thing Francis has in his life, and I will do whatever it takes to keep him happy and safe.
The sudden and frightening ways Charlie begins to make sense of his memories with his family in the past, as well as the general treatment of his co-workers, are immensely emotional. Most of the time I would find myself getting really angry at passages depicting the way people with special needs like Charlie are mistreated in the time when this novel was written, since there was hardly that much positive public and media attention for special kids then. It was a slap in the face for me too, considering I have been just as cruel with my brother before, and it took me a while to forgive myself for the things I've said and done during our childhood.
Keyes' first-person prose is uncanny and infectious in its scope and range of emotions. It's a diary of someone's insecurities, self-discovery and painful memories, which only makes it harder for any reader not to feel something so overwhelming for Flowers for Algernon. You get to put yourself in Charlie's shoes yourself, and the world is not a loving place for someone like him at all. The higher his IQ got, the more self-aware and discerning Charlie became. But the people around him did not become any more accepting than when he was just a simpleton. They resented him for his higher intelligence this time; the only difference now is that Charlie can actually understand the sadness and unfairness of it all because intelligence also means bearing the burden of things you'd rather not know. For the first time in years, Charlie really felt that he was alone and unloved.
I'm really not exaggerating when I claimed that I cried so hard while reading. It was just too much for me. It's like I'm reading what my own brother would have said if he could only make sense of things the way normal people do. And if he ever could and he confronted me about it, I would be so ashamed of myself for all the bad things I used to put him through when we were kids. Just thinking about that while I read on became so crippling that I have to give up reading altogether for that night. It's as if Flowers for Algernon is a mirror, and it showed me my shortcomings in the past I'd rather not re-live and think about again. Looking at the reflections it presented was so upsetting.
I cannot express how this work of fiction will change certain perspectives in your life as well, even if you don't have my own personal baggage to contextualize it with. It's an important story because it can make its readers feel like they should protect Charlie from those who hurt him too. I do hope that after finishing the book and you'd meet someone like Charlie yourself, you would treat that person with compassion and kindness because that's all that they ever needed to live and survive the harsh conditions of the world we live in. I certainly learned once again that I'm the only thing Francis has in his life, and I will do whatever it takes to keep him happy and safe.
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
March 2014
I never expected Ender's Game to be so damn engrossing when I finally got around it last January. I certainly wasn't expecting I would even read anything written by Orson Scott Card ever, considering his homophobic stance which had personally offended me. However, I wasn't quick to dismiss his literary contributions to the science fiction genre, so I put aside my negative bias and bought the Ender Quartet series.
And I'm glad I gave myself the chance to do that because I can honestly say that two books later into the series, what Card accomplished in both Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead has made me into a massive fan. Unlike its predecessor, Speaker for the Dead is more humane in scope, focusing on the empowering choice of peace and tolerance whilst Ender's Game dealt with war and annihilation of a species that threatened our own. |
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is no longer the sole and primary focus of the story though his importance is still pronounced; but in a different sense from his destroyer days. Set three thousand years later after the bugger wars, Ender is no longer that prodigy child who won the war for humanity's survival; he's a man in his thirties who traveled the stars for so long that he never had a chance to feel at home. Together with his sister Valentine, Ender had seen humanity spread across the galaxies, and he had moved with them but as a Speaker; one who tells the truth about a person's life upon death. He is in fact the very first Speaker since space travel has slowed down his ageing process, and he wanted to once and for all discard Ender by speaking on behalf of the dead to impact their histories on the living. This is the perfect form of penance for Ender, and the only people aware of his identity are his sister and the sentient artificial intelligence Jane who sought him out herself and hoped one day that he could help human beings accept her kind.
Though Ender still plays a huge role in Speaker for the Dead, the story is focused on a human settlement called Lusitania which is a largely Catholic community that lives alongside a newly discovered species called "piggies". Ender was called to speak for someone's death in that place, a summoning by a suffering young girl named Novinha. But before Ender ever gets there, Novinha (who was now an adult) cancels the summoning, especially after she figures out a significant revelation about the piggies, and wants desperately to protect it to avoid bloodshed among the people she loves the most. Novinha's other two children have also called for a speaker, and this is when Ender knew that something troubling is brewing in the stifling confines of Novinha's family; that there is a corrosive wound that has made it essentially hard for both her and her children to move forward with their lives.
The book's plot goes twofold. On one hand, the anthropological examination of the piggies' culture and practices is zoomed in, enabling readers to understand this species in the human context but even that is already limited. With Ender's arrival, he served as an ambassador between humans and piggies, offering agreeable alternatives for co-existence between these two species. On the other hand, Ender's presence was also a powerful instrument that shattered the shackles that surrounded Novinha and her children. By speaking on behalf of their dead father, Ender exposed the painful truth and the healing process thus began. He had also unwittingly woven himself into the family's fabric, and perhaps in doing so he finally had a home to belong to after being a vagabond for so long.
Speaker for the Dead is an astounding follow-up that is drastically different from Ender's Game in tone, setting and execution, and yet in most ways it was also able to surpass its predecessor. It's a daring commentary on science and religion, challenging the limitations of both fields. It also served as a heartfelt testament about the freeing capacity of truth and compassion. It's a searing examination of what makes families grow together and communities prosper as one. The characters are memorable and sympathetic even when they do and say things that are more harmful that they thought (I'm of course referring to Novinha and her insistence to conceal the truth which cost her the love and trust of her own children).
And as much as I enjoyed Ender as a child in the first book, I was pleased to see him in this new role as Speaker, and that he is making amends from his past transgressions and in my eyes he has truly become a mender of worlds.
Though Ender still plays a huge role in Speaker for the Dead, the story is focused on a human settlement called Lusitania which is a largely Catholic community that lives alongside a newly discovered species called "piggies". Ender was called to speak for someone's death in that place, a summoning by a suffering young girl named Novinha. But before Ender ever gets there, Novinha (who was now an adult) cancels the summoning, especially after she figures out a significant revelation about the piggies, and wants desperately to protect it to avoid bloodshed among the people she loves the most. Novinha's other two children have also called for a speaker, and this is when Ender knew that something troubling is brewing in the stifling confines of Novinha's family; that there is a corrosive wound that has made it essentially hard for both her and her children to move forward with their lives.
The book's plot goes twofold. On one hand, the anthropological examination of the piggies' culture and practices is zoomed in, enabling readers to understand this species in the human context but even that is already limited. With Ender's arrival, he served as an ambassador between humans and piggies, offering agreeable alternatives for co-existence between these two species. On the other hand, Ender's presence was also a powerful instrument that shattered the shackles that surrounded Novinha and her children. By speaking on behalf of their dead father, Ender exposed the painful truth and the healing process thus began. He had also unwittingly woven himself into the family's fabric, and perhaps in doing so he finally had a home to belong to after being a vagabond for so long.
Speaker for the Dead is an astounding follow-up that is drastically different from Ender's Game in tone, setting and execution, and yet in most ways it was also able to surpass its predecessor. It's a daring commentary on science and religion, challenging the limitations of both fields. It also served as a heartfelt testament about the freeing capacity of truth and compassion. It's a searing examination of what makes families grow together and communities prosper as one. The characters are memorable and sympathetic even when they do and say things that are more harmful that they thought (I'm of course referring to Novinha and her insistence to conceal the truth which cost her the love and trust of her own children).
And as much as I enjoyed Ender as a child in the first book, I was pleased to see him in this new role as Speaker, and that he is making amends from his past transgressions and in my eyes he has truly become a mender of worlds.
The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
April 2014
Considering this is a Richard Matheson book, an author who is probably best known for his horror stories, I have initial expectations that this was going to be a scary venture in the same manner as Hell House was when I saw the movie as a child and later on read the book.
But in the first fifty pages or so of this novel, my expectations were met in a different way yet it was also something more satisfying which could be what Matheson has intended when he wrote it. The Shrinking Man tells the story of Scott Carey who was one day sprayed with a radioactive chemical by accident, and found himself physically shrinking since. The novel perfectly opens with a very terrifying description of Scott being chased down by a spider. |
At first glance, this book seems to be a very simplistic survivalist story about one man's struggle to endure a hopeless circumstance--but the existential horror that is the overall thematic scope of the plot is definitely its most intriguing aspect. This could almost be an episode in Twilight Zone and that's probably the strength of Matheson's work as a horror writer.
In The Shrinking Man, he gives us a chilling glimpse at the visceral terror of physical helplessness. Scott Carey's anxiety is not just about being erased from existence entirely but it's also about the gradual loss of his relevance as a person of flesh and blood. A man who used to be six-foot tall, he now has to deal with the emasculation of his role both as a husband and father. Scott may be shrinking into a size that's even below his kid daughter, but he still has the same needs and entitlement as any grown man does--and the harrowing and pitiful ways he tries to hold onto these things but fail are almost hard to read for me.
Matheson needs to be commended for his clear-cut prowess as he delicately approached the writing of this story with such an earnest tone even though it has an absurd premise. What Matheson and the readers end up with is a massively heartfelt tale about the importance of spiritual optimism and the ways that a man can still see a point in living despite the uncertainty and despair he faces. The book can also be seen as a deconstruction of masculine roles in society and what happens when those very rigid notions are inspected and essentially stripped away which is the case with Scott Carey's character as we put ourselves in his position of estrangement from the tangible reality including his family.
The Shrinking Man ended with a sincere resolution that is bittersweet and unexpected; Scott Carey has feared about non-existence because he had only defined it in terms of the human context, neglecting the reality that the nature of the universe is not as black-and-white as our own limited perspectives as mortals. Scott Carey, now in his microscopic size, is fortunate enough to witness the everyday miracles of life especially now that he's removed from human bias and that for me is by far the most uplifting kind of pay-off in a science fiction novel that explored such an existential journey. This is a great book filled with engrossing psychological reflections about primal survival instincts and resignation to an inevitable outcome.
In The Shrinking Man, he gives us a chilling glimpse at the visceral terror of physical helplessness. Scott Carey's anxiety is not just about being erased from existence entirely but it's also about the gradual loss of his relevance as a person of flesh and blood. A man who used to be six-foot tall, he now has to deal with the emasculation of his role both as a husband and father. Scott may be shrinking into a size that's even below his kid daughter, but he still has the same needs and entitlement as any grown man does--and the harrowing and pitiful ways he tries to hold onto these things but fail are almost hard to read for me.
Matheson needs to be commended for his clear-cut prowess as he delicately approached the writing of this story with such an earnest tone even though it has an absurd premise. What Matheson and the readers end up with is a massively heartfelt tale about the importance of spiritual optimism and the ways that a man can still see a point in living despite the uncertainty and despair he faces. The book can also be seen as a deconstruction of masculine roles in society and what happens when those very rigid notions are inspected and essentially stripped away which is the case with Scott Carey's character as we put ourselves in his position of estrangement from the tangible reality including his family.
The Shrinking Man ended with a sincere resolution that is bittersweet and unexpected; Scott Carey has feared about non-existence because he had only defined it in terms of the human context, neglecting the reality that the nature of the universe is not as black-and-white as our own limited perspectives as mortals. Scott Carey, now in his microscopic size, is fortunate enough to witness the everyday miracles of life especially now that he's removed from human bias and that for me is by far the most uplifting kind of pay-off in a science fiction novel that explored such an existential journey. This is a great book filled with engrossing psychological reflections about primal survival instincts and resignation to an inevitable outcome.
Dune by Frank Herbert
January 2015
DUNE i ntimidates me.
I don't think I could ever recall a time that I became almost terrified to review a book and share my most intimate thoughts about reading it until now. I confess that I don't know anything about Dune until three years ago when I made the active decision to explore what the science fiction genre has to offer. I researched a lot of online lists regarding the most critically-acclaimed books and Dune was the one that keeps appearing all the time so I know that it must mean something so I ventured into buying it one afternoon in August last year when my laptop's battery charger quit on me suddenly, so I was offline for the rest of the day. And my world in that moment has never been the same since I started reading it. Everything about doing so was unplanned and it couldn't have been more perfect. Just seventy-four pages in and I knew I was reading something special already. |
The magnificence of the novel is often subtle yet clear-cut in an inexplicable manner that leaves me at loss for sufficient words; and I am one who always knows what to say when it comes to the literature I read. So far, I've read Flowers for Algernon, Childhood's End, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Shrinking Man, Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead, sci-fi wise, and all of these books have widened my perspective and weakened me in the knees because of their unanticipated emotional impact--but none of them can compare to the enigma and sheer elegance that Dune was.
A few novels are intricately beautiful, able to scar you with a lasting impression and not only does Frank Herbert accomplish that; he also elevated the genre to me, personally, into a breadth and quality that makes the world of Dune so intimately familiar to readers regardless of the futuristic setting it was created in. Written in the sixties, futuristic doesn't truly reflect the scope of this novel. The locations may be set on a different planet (the desert planet Arrakis which is supposedly rich in spice melange) but the politics, economic divisions, diversity in culture, religious archetypes and superstition somewhat resemble ours--often in the most chilling sense.
But what truly sets Dune apart from other science fiction books is the absence of artificial intelligence. There are no sentient machines here. There is only a human civilization from a thousand years from now, one that is not so different from what we have now, able to develop advanced technology as well as enhance the mental and physical skills that define humans as a species that continue to thrive and evolve, both as individual and society. The world and people Herbert have created are mostly Middle Eastern in concept and influence; a great number of the terminologies in descriptions, dialogue and characterization are Arabic. There are also Islamic overtones that populate the pages but to define Dune in those simplifications alone would be insufficient. There is a varied list of religions, as well as a comprehensive explanation regarding the political dynasties and technology of Herbert's creation. This is only the first novel of a timeless series that spans decades. It belongs to the subgenre of "soft science fiction" which usually focuses more on the social sciences (anthropology, political science, psychology) which for me is what makes Dune both less and more accessible to new readers. More often that not, when we think about science fiction, we think about AI and conflicts between humans and machines so if you're the kind of reader who enjoys these things in other mediums such as television and movies (I know I do), Dune may take some time to get used to.
However, if you're one who can enjoy an expansive universe with sprawling family sagas and cultural nuances, then this book will persistently intrigue and ultimately hold you prisoner. It is a story of a mother and son foremost, and they are two of the most compelling characters in the book who readers will follow closely during their respective self-explorations and strenuous journey into the unexplored territories of the desert planet Arrakis.
Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit (described as "an exclusive sisterhood whose members train their bodies and minds through years of physical and mental conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that can seem magical to outsiders"). She is the concubine and beloved companion to the duke Leto Atreides and their son Paul was touched by a destiny that challenges the norms and comforts of the regime he is a part of. Paul and Jessica as characters and their relationship with each other remain as my favorite aspect of the story. In a sense, this book can be viewed as Paul's coming-of-age story as he slowly but surely accepts his role in spite of its overwhelming dangers and implications. No one in the book has undergone such a crucial transition than this main protagonist. Dune serves like play in three acts where the middle part is where Paul's endurance, identity and mental strength are tested and the very last act solidifies his accomplishment as the new leader of a world that is forced to keep up with him or else.
I would assert that Lady Jessica is the most empowered and admirable female character I've ever read in fiction, and it's mostly because of her pragmatism, unshakable sense of self and autonomy, as well as her skills as a Bene Gesserit which for me shatters the conventions of how women (fiction and in real life) are usually perceived as emotional creatures with fickle passions and impulses. Lady Jessica stands above this, and always lets her head rule her heart but it does not make her frigid or callous. In fact, it has made her so endearing and easy to sympathize with especially whenever she makes decisions whose impact cannot be underestimated. She recognizes the power she has because of her training as a Bene Gesserit, and equips herself with it quite impressively and in service to the people she loves (like the duke and her son). However, the prejudice and negative bias towards her kind are still heavily highlighted. The Bene Gesserit are duped as "witches" because of the superstition that prevails among outsiders when viewing their craft from a distance. Men are always suspicious of her motives, always believing she is capable of the worst (and she is, but cautions herself against it). It's refreshing me for me as a queer woman to encounter a female character who doesn't weaponize her sexuality or deceive men for her own self-serving needs. Lady Jessica is far from perfect but she is poignantly humanized by her actions, thought processes and devotion and faith towards her son Paul. She's a remarkable specimen, that much is certain, who is wise enough to know that she can't know everything or give absolute guarantees about the things she does know.
Paul and Jessica may take the center stage but other characters, supporting allies and villains alike, are just as well-rounded and memorable. I personally adored Kynes, Chani, Stilgar, Galleck Hurney and the elusive Princess Irulan who opens each chapter with excepts from her writings which set their tone. These short excerpts are reflective, often taken from various teachings and commentaries regarding science and spirituality as well as cultural analyses that the princess herself has taken a valued interest and investment in. She is only later introduced as a character by the ending chapters of the novel but her pieces throughout the book have served as narration devices which are consistently atmospheric and insightful.
I would like to recommend Dune to everyone I know but I also recognize how challenging this work of fiction could be. This is not something you can pick up casually. It is the kind of book that is meant to be savored. I find that re-reading it again right after finishing it has even heightened my understanding and appreciation. The truth for the matter is the minute you start reading the first five chapters of the book, you are transported directly into the events without any kind of backstory. You just have to find your way from there and it can get confounding at times but it's also very exhilarating because the world of Duneslowly unfolds before your eyes in a small manner first (with the Atreides household moving to the Arrakis planet largely inhabited by the Fremen) until it sets up the wider stage later on. One of the most beguiling plotlines of the story is the Fremen as a desert society, and the spice melange as the source of their livelihood which is also a substance considered to be most important if not profitable. It certainly reminds me of the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions back in the day that we studied Philippine history in school, where they explored the continents to establish colonies and to look for spices (which eventually led them to my country in the first place).
There are discussions about economics regarding the spice being harvested in Arrakis, as well as the cultural practices of Fremen when it comes to water, a substance they consider very much a scarcity so acquiring and preserving it involves a series of bizarre rituals.
Dune is a classic for many reasons. There is just so much to consume and digest here that will not always be readily accessible so multiple readings of the entire novel itself is something I highly suggest. It gets better every time you willingly emerge yourself with the people and cultures within its pages. It took me two months to finish the first two parts. I then stopped for four months and picked this up again just last December. Its magnetic hold on me never loosened even during such a hiatus. I don't think I can compare Dune to anything else (though some could draw comparisons with a series from another genre, J. R. R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). In that sense, just like LOTR, Dune does stand as a testament of its own making and legacy.
A few novels are intricately beautiful, able to scar you with a lasting impression and not only does Frank Herbert accomplish that; he also elevated the genre to me, personally, into a breadth and quality that makes the world of Dune so intimately familiar to readers regardless of the futuristic setting it was created in. Written in the sixties, futuristic doesn't truly reflect the scope of this novel. The locations may be set on a different planet (the desert planet Arrakis which is supposedly rich in spice melange) but the politics, economic divisions, diversity in culture, religious archetypes and superstition somewhat resemble ours--often in the most chilling sense.
But what truly sets Dune apart from other science fiction books is the absence of artificial intelligence. There are no sentient machines here. There is only a human civilization from a thousand years from now, one that is not so different from what we have now, able to develop advanced technology as well as enhance the mental and physical skills that define humans as a species that continue to thrive and evolve, both as individual and society. The world and people Herbert have created are mostly Middle Eastern in concept and influence; a great number of the terminologies in descriptions, dialogue and characterization are Arabic. There are also Islamic overtones that populate the pages but to define Dune in those simplifications alone would be insufficient. There is a varied list of religions, as well as a comprehensive explanation regarding the political dynasties and technology of Herbert's creation. This is only the first novel of a timeless series that spans decades. It belongs to the subgenre of "soft science fiction" which usually focuses more on the social sciences (anthropology, political science, psychology) which for me is what makes Dune both less and more accessible to new readers. More often that not, when we think about science fiction, we think about AI and conflicts between humans and machines so if you're the kind of reader who enjoys these things in other mediums such as television and movies (I know I do), Dune may take some time to get used to.
However, if you're one who can enjoy an expansive universe with sprawling family sagas and cultural nuances, then this book will persistently intrigue and ultimately hold you prisoner. It is a story of a mother and son foremost, and they are two of the most compelling characters in the book who readers will follow closely during their respective self-explorations and strenuous journey into the unexplored territories of the desert planet Arrakis.
Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit (described as "an exclusive sisterhood whose members train their bodies and minds through years of physical and mental conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that can seem magical to outsiders"). She is the concubine and beloved companion to the duke Leto Atreides and their son Paul was touched by a destiny that challenges the norms and comforts of the regime he is a part of. Paul and Jessica as characters and their relationship with each other remain as my favorite aspect of the story. In a sense, this book can be viewed as Paul's coming-of-age story as he slowly but surely accepts his role in spite of its overwhelming dangers and implications. No one in the book has undergone such a crucial transition than this main protagonist. Dune serves like play in three acts where the middle part is where Paul's endurance, identity and mental strength are tested and the very last act solidifies his accomplishment as the new leader of a world that is forced to keep up with him or else.
I would assert that Lady Jessica is the most empowered and admirable female character I've ever read in fiction, and it's mostly because of her pragmatism, unshakable sense of self and autonomy, as well as her skills as a Bene Gesserit which for me shatters the conventions of how women (fiction and in real life) are usually perceived as emotional creatures with fickle passions and impulses. Lady Jessica stands above this, and always lets her head rule her heart but it does not make her frigid or callous. In fact, it has made her so endearing and easy to sympathize with especially whenever she makes decisions whose impact cannot be underestimated. She recognizes the power she has because of her training as a Bene Gesserit, and equips herself with it quite impressively and in service to the people she loves (like the duke and her son). However, the prejudice and negative bias towards her kind are still heavily highlighted. The Bene Gesserit are duped as "witches" because of the superstition that prevails among outsiders when viewing their craft from a distance. Men are always suspicious of her motives, always believing she is capable of the worst (and she is, but cautions herself against it). It's refreshing me for me as a queer woman to encounter a female character who doesn't weaponize her sexuality or deceive men for her own self-serving needs. Lady Jessica is far from perfect but she is poignantly humanized by her actions, thought processes and devotion and faith towards her son Paul. She's a remarkable specimen, that much is certain, who is wise enough to know that she can't know everything or give absolute guarantees about the things she does know.
Paul and Jessica may take the center stage but other characters, supporting allies and villains alike, are just as well-rounded and memorable. I personally adored Kynes, Chani, Stilgar, Galleck Hurney and the elusive Princess Irulan who opens each chapter with excepts from her writings which set their tone. These short excerpts are reflective, often taken from various teachings and commentaries regarding science and spirituality as well as cultural analyses that the princess herself has taken a valued interest and investment in. She is only later introduced as a character by the ending chapters of the novel but her pieces throughout the book have served as narration devices which are consistently atmospheric and insightful.
I would like to recommend Dune to everyone I know but I also recognize how challenging this work of fiction could be. This is not something you can pick up casually. It is the kind of book that is meant to be savored. I find that re-reading it again right after finishing it has even heightened my understanding and appreciation. The truth for the matter is the minute you start reading the first five chapters of the book, you are transported directly into the events without any kind of backstory. You just have to find your way from there and it can get confounding at times but it's also very exhilarating because the world of Duneslowly unfolds before your eyes in a small manner first (with the Atreides household moving to the Arrakis planet largely inhabited by the Fremen) until it sets up the wider stage later on. One of the most beguiling plotlines of the story is the Fremen as a desert society, and the spice melange as the source of their livelihood which is also a substance considered to be most important if not profitable. It certainly reminds me of the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions back in the day that we studied Philippine history in school, where they explored the continents to establish colonies and to look for spices (which eventually led them to my country in the first place).
There are discussions about economics regarding the spice being harvested in Arrakis, as well as the cultural practices of Fremen when it comes to water, a substance they consider very much a scarcity so acquiring and preserving it involves a series of bizarre rituals.
Dune is a classic for many reasons. There is just so much to consume and digest here that will not always be readily accessible so multiple readings of the entire novel itself is something I highly suggest. It gets better every time you willingly emerge yourself with the people and cultures within its pages. It took me two months to finish the first two parts. I then stopped for four months and picked this up again just last December. Its magnetic hold on me never loosened even during such a hiatus. I don't think I can compare Dune to anything else (though some could draw comparisons with a series from another genre, J. R. R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). In that sense, just like LOTR, Dune does stand as a testament of its own making and legacy.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
June 2015
When it happens, this is what happens: By reading Charles Yu's incomparably original work of fiction, I'm realizing, have realized and will have realized that I've lived and I am still living inside a box that travels backwards in time when I'm supposed to propel myself forward into the unknown future of my own makings. We are all time machines, he claims, but most people's machines are broken that they get stuck or get looped or get trapped. Our greatest anxiety is the box we live inside of--everyone's personal TARDIS, if you may--and it's something we use to evade the present, re-create the past, and deal with the future. We are required to move ahead and yet more often than not we stay in a standstill, reliving memories and regret as if their tune is all we are and what we can only afford to look forward to.
In this inexhaustibly consistent yet still beguilingly self-referential novel is where we meet Charles Yu--a character you may or may not interchange with the author--who is a thirty-something time machine repairman working in Minor Universe 31 whose inhabitants tend to get a little loose with time traveling and get themselves in a pickle all the time. Yu only has two sustainable personal relationships with: TAMMY (his vehicle to travel in time), and Ed (a fictional space-dog of a sidekick). One day he encounters a future version of himself and shoots it dead. Literally running in a loop where all points in his timeline converse and diverse before his eyes, Charles also has to find his father, a failed time-travel theorist who might as well fell in a black hole after he just disappeared with no rhyme or reason, and only a book which Yu himself has written in the future entitled How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the key to unravel it all.
With both unyielding clarity and stupendous lack of linear direction, this book serves more as a commentary of the science fiction genre and its conventions, particularly the literary approach to the time paradox, as well as the rudimentary themes of existential crisis, quest for autonomy, and both the illusion and victory of choice. Most critics have even compared it to Douglas Thomas' Hitchhiker series fused with Philip K. Dick's emphatic literary sensibilities, and yet Charles Yu's scintillating book stands apart and all on its own.
In this inexhaustibly consistent yet still beguilingly self-referential novel is where we meet Charles Yu--a character you may or may not interchange with the author--who is a thirty-something time machine repairman working in Minor Universe 31 whose inhabitants tend to get a little loose with time traveling and get themselves in a pickle all the time. Yu only has two sustainable personal relationships with: TAMMY (his vehicle to travel in time), and Ed (a fictional space-dog of a sidekick). One day he encounters a future version of himself and shoots it dead. Literally running in a loop where all points in his timeline converse and diverse before his eyes, Charles also has to find his father, a failed time-travel theorist who might as well fell in a black hole after he just disappeared with no rhyme or reason, and only a book which Yu himself has written in the future entitled How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the key to unravel it all.
With both unyielding clarity and stupendous lack of linear direction, this book serves more as a commentary of the science fiction genre and its conventions, particularly the literary approach to the time paradox, as well as the rudimentary themes of existential crisis, quest for autonomy, and both the illusion and victory of choice. Most critics have even compared it to Douglas Thomas' Hitchhiker series fused with Philip K. Dick's emphatic literary sensibilities, and yet Charles Yu's scintillating book stands apart and all on its own.
"Most people I know live their lives in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward."
I will attempt to explain why this book can possibly change your life if you're willing to see past through the heavy-laden self-referential flow of the narrative because underneath that seemingly impenetrable exterior is a story so rife with meaningful insights on human connections and the pursuit of happiness all the while paying respects to what the science fiction genre as a whole contributes to our goals of self-fulfillment and progression. I would caution, though, that this is never going to be for everyone; its writing is eloquently paradoxical, and unmistakably a taste only a few might acquire; and those that would will delight in its essence.
I've recommended this book to a close friend of mine who shares my affinity with the NBC-now-Yahoo-sponsored show, Community. Created by Dan Harmon, a showrunner as equally kooky as his own creation, Community is a tremendously meta and experimental basketcase of a situational comedy series that continues to push even its own envelope and has just wrapped up its sixth season earlier this week. Its unique approach to comedy and storytelling is what made it endearing to its fans that the show acquired a cult following whose passion an outsider can never truly understand unless he joins the circle for himself. Much like said show, Charles Yu's novel operates in the same level of manic disregard for what is conventional and safe in telling a story. This two-hundred and thirty-nine paged paperback is INSANE.
Even though it's fairly written in an understandable contemporary language and style, the conceptual narrative framework can still be alienating to a certain extent since it's mostly an open discussion on the theorems and mechanics through philosophical ramblings of the character as the author, and the author as the character. This novel essentially reads like the kind of conversation you will have with yourself if you're someone who is too self-aware for your own good. It breaks itself apart. It questions even the act of asking a question.
It carves itself a special place in the universe where only it can make sense both its own state of being and non-existence. It's quite difficult to get across just how incredibly complex and frustratingly clever this book is. Whatever I type in the review will forever pale in comparison of what the novel itself actually offers the readers, and that is a chance to interrogate oneself in a manner that I can only akin to not only breaking the fourth wall of the plane of reality but hammering it into a shape both familiar and unrecognizable.
"Time isn't a placid lake, recording our ripples...we are too slight, too inconsequential,despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about..sure, there's a little bit of splashing up the surface but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us."
As a self-referential ode to science fiction conventions, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a self-sustaining metaphor of the genre and formula of writing science fiction itself while also making snide or glib commentary upon itself while it's busy outlining the time paradox via a bittersweet personal experience of the lead character he succinctly and quite pitifully termed as the 'father-son-axis'. In a shallow surface, this is an autobiographical search for family and identity; on another level it's a pastiche of humanity's fascination for the concept of time travel; and resting on another layer of that is a symphonic composition that poignantly captures how human beings are their own time machines after all. We are highly intelligent species with an acute sense of time and therefore we are always able to create and define what is past and future while also simultaneously, laughably and heartbreakingly unable to LIVE IN THE PRESENT which is more elastic than we ever realize. We mourn the past; we are eager to discover the future. But we never really enjoy what we are and who we are in the present.
As Charles Yu's insightful manual claims: "Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine." What is about time travel that a lot of us are so smitten by and curious of? Isn't it the uncanny ability to be able to pass through our lives as observers, to re-live our moments of defeat and regret, hoping we can somehow change what happened so it can dictate what will happen next? Being able to time-travel means we might be able to rewrite what has already been read and discarded; worn-out stories that we've desperately clung to because we believe they're the only truths we must preserve in order to live another day. Yu's novel forces us to examine these beliefs, to really dissect why we remain stuck in our time machines, going over events as oppose to creating new ones. On the other end of the spectrum, some of us--like me--would rather SKIP AHEAD.
Right after finishing the book, I realized that I've been caught in a time loop myself. We all have been everytime we get caught somewhere between mourning of what was behind us and daydreaming about what lies ahead. And I for one have this tendency to wish I can fast-forward to my life--ten or twenty years to the future. That's why I like reading science fiction. It appeals to my wish fulfillment of envisioning a made-up future without having to do the work in the present. Hell, while midway through a good book, I would cheat and LOOK AT THE LAST PAGE. And I did the same thing with Yu's novel and you know what I got in the end? An empty page with this note: [This page is intentionally left blank]
I didn't get its significance until I finished the entire novel itself. That's when it hit me--this self-annihilating habit of mine to try and hurry up the steady pace of my life just so I can get over both the small and the big stuff--it's how I keep getting trapped. Upon having that very epiphany now that I'm staring at that said last page of this book for the second time, I actually teared up a little bit. It seemed inconsequential at the moment but contextualizing it with the overall pattern in how I live my life, I realized what a damaged fool I have been.
So this is what Charles Yu, ultimately, wants to say to himself and to us with his book:
RECOMMENDED: 10/10
"Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, LIVE INSIDE IT." |
Flow my Tears, the Policeman said by Philip K. Dick
June 2015
This .GIF image perfectly captures the range of distinct reactions that Philip K. Dick's Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said got out of me in the expanse of reading it in the last four days. There was bafflement--then disbelief--then mild disgust--and, finally, karmic relief. Don't get me wrong, it's not a badly written book. Of course fucking not, it's PHILIP K. DICK! His outstanding Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep will forever destroy me in this world and in another parallel existence because asdfghjklmalfunctionerror10101...
Anyway, that being said, something along the way went wrong as I peruse through the two hundred and four pages of this novel; I can't really pinpoint exactly where, but all I know is that I couldn't help but alternate between confusion and rage as I went on. |
Originally, around eighty pages or so, I was going to rate it with four stars because, right from the get-go, I was just enjoying the brisk, no-nonesense yet highly engrossing pacing and linguistic style that Dick had incorporated in his storytelling; the breadth of the entire narrative work felt so much lighter than Do Androids Dream, honestly, making it easy for me to keep up with every twist and turn as I follow the protagonist Jason Taverner, a government-experimented Six which basically means a person with enhanced physical/sexual appeal and whatever attractive aptitude there is. He's a former musician-turned celebrity talk show host and in a relationship with another icon named Heather Hart, also a Six. After a confrontation with one of the women he duped and took advantage of, promising her a career in showbiz only to sleep with her a few times, he was left physically compromised and woke up in a dingy motel room with only a wad of cash on hand but with no trace of discernible legal records of proof of identity whatsoever.
It's as if he's been literally deduced to non-existence.
Set in a fictional futuristic world of 1988 in the United States where everything seems to be under the command of a rampant police state where laws and legislation are just plain FUCKED-UP (sexual legal consent is reduced to thirteen years of age; African-American lineage is sanctioned to die out), the premise and the mystery that this book are hitched on were promising and I really did eat it all up in the first two days of reading. By the fourth day, however, as I stare blankly at the last page (right after containing myself from convulsing in laughter), I realized it had more to do with my unmistakable dislike for every goddamn character featured in the book with the exception of the police general Felix Buckman (whom I was 50/50 with) and the very brief insert of one Mary Anne Dominic (who really should have been a major character as oppose to some flimsy extra in the background).
Other than those two, I cringe my nose at the rest, more particularly in vile contempt for the overall way the female characters are portrayed, the greatest offenders of them all have to be the insecure, selfish and self-entitled paranoid bitch Heather Hart, and the clinically insane (sort of a) sexual predator who is skilled in the art of emotional blackmail, Kathy Nelson. The least offenders have to be Ruth Mae (whose speech about love and grief was actually pretty philosophical--too bad it came off completely dissonant to her general characterization), and the bisexual (pansexual?) fetish-driven drug addict Alys who had an incestuous affair with her twin brother and sired a son with him. And YES she is less offensive than Hart and Nelson because at least Alys had a personality I did enjoy reading about while the other two were so emotionally flat and perceived only in how the main male character objectifies them. They're placeholders that reflect his sexual frustration and inadequacy which make them rather one-dimensional miserable fuckers.
Normally, I could overlook gender-biased portrayals if it serves the story or a theme in the narrative. However, it didn't feel like these poorly characterized female characters ever served a purpose except to interact with the male protagonist, Jason Taverner. I don't have any kind of concern about his character since he took that mescaline drug. I suppose I eagerly wanted to know what happened to him that he lost his identity and people don't remember him at all in spite of being a popular son of a bitch. My interest in his welfare continued to decline the more he showed what a pompous chauvinist he was (although his very short interaction with Mary Anne Dominic rekindled some sympathy because that was the only sweet and humanizing moment for his character in this book).
Then again, everyone in this book is miserable--and not even in a compelling way that makes me sympathetic for them. Whatever end they got (Dick was kind enough to wrap up their fates nicely in his Epilog) is something they more than deserved, in my brutally honest opinion. It's actually great that Dick didn't leave it to chance, or his readers' imaginations, as to how these characters' fates came to an end because I personally didn't form any sort of connection with them to ponder about what happened in their lives after the novel finished. So thank Loki that Dick inquisitively wrapped it up.
I love character-driven stories; I root for characters with problems and struggles that make me sympathetic to their plights; characters who later on develop self-awareness of their bad choices instead of just going through the motions of being victims forever. None of the characters in this book ever grew or did anything that could have redeemed them, with the exception of Mary Anne (who is so slight of a character that she only appeared in six or eight pages). I did LOVE THE ENDING though. Basically, the beautiful blue vase that was the product of love, commitment and talent that Mary Anne produced was able to be displayed in a museum (while she had a career in ceramics; how ironically bittersweet and awful was it that the shoe-in extra gets a happy ending?) AND MORE OR LESS OUTLIVED EVERY MISERABLE FUCKER IN THIS BOOK. That was poetic justice if nothing else.
In any case, I will keep reading more of Philip K. Dick's books because THERE ARE SO MANY OUT THERE and I am looking forward to acquaint myself more with his writing. Overall, Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said just didn't work for me as a sum of its parts, especially when the parts are composed of characters that I perceived to be grimy, irresponsible, disablers of human dignity and progress. The mystery plot and the answer concerning Jason Taverner's sudden lack of identity was still a pretty thrilling read, though.
It's as if he's been literally deduced to non-existence.
Set in a fictional futuristic world of 1988 in the United States where everything seems to be under the command of a rampant police state where laws and legislation are just plain FUCKED-UP (sexual legal consent is reduced to thirteen years of age; African-American lineage is sanctioned to die out), the premise and the mystery that this book are hitched on were promising and I really did eat it all up in the first two days of reading. By the fourth day, however, as I stare blankly at the last page (right after containing myself from convulsing in laughter), I realized it had more to do with my unmistakable dislike for every goddamn character featured in the book with the exception of the police general Felix Buckman (whom I was 50/50 with) and the very brief insert of one Mary Anne Dominic (who really should have been a major character as oppose to some flimsy extra in the background).
Other than those two, I cringe my nose at the rest, more particularly in vile contempt for the overall way the female characters are portrayed, the greatest offenders of them all have to be the insecure, selfish and self-entitled paranoid bitch Heather Hart, and the clinically insane (sort of a) sexual predator who is skilled in the art of emotional blackmail, Kathy Nelson. The least offenders have to be Ruth Mae (whose speech about love and grief was actually pretty philosophical--too bad it came off completely dissonant to her general characterization), and the bisexual (pansexual?) fetish-driven drug addict Alys who had an incestuous affair with her twin brother and sired a son with him. And YES she is less offensive than Hart and Nelson because at least Alys had a personality I did enjoy reading about while the other two were so emotionally flat and perceived only in how the main male character objectifies them. They're placeholders that reflect his sexual frustration and inadequacy which make them rather one-dimensional miserable fuckers.
Normally, I could overlook gender-biased portrayals if it serves the story or a theme in the narrative. However, it didn't feel like these poorly characterized female characters ever served a purpose except to interact with the male protagonist, Jason Taverner. I don't have any kind of concern about his character since he took that mescaline drug. I suppose I eagerly wanted to know what happened to him that he lost his identity and people don't remember him at all in spite of being a popular son of a bitch. My interest in his welfare continued to decline the more he showed what a pompous chauvinist he was (although his very short interaction with Mary Anne Dominic rekindled some sympathy because that was the only sweet and humanizing moment for his character in this book).
Then again, everyone in this book is miserable--and not even in a compelling way that makes me sympathetic for them. Whatever end they got (Dick was kind enough to wrap up their fates nicely in his Epilog) is something they more than deserved, in my brutally honest opinion. It's actually great that Dick didn't leave it to chance, or his readers' imaginations, as to how these characters' fates came to an end because I personally didn't form any sort of connection with them to ponder about what happened in their lives after the novel finished. So thank Loki that Dick inquisitively wrapped it up.
I love character-driven stories; I root for characters with problems and struggles that make me sympathetic to their plights; characters who later on develop self-awareness of their bad choices instead of just going through the motions of being victims forever. None of the characters in this book ever grew or did anything that could have redeemed them, with the exception of Mary Anne (who is so slight of a character that she only appeared in six or eight pages). I did LOVE THE ENDING though. Basically, the beautiful blue vase that was the product of love, commitment and talent that Mary Anne produced was able to be displayed in a museum (while she had a career in ceramics; how ironically bittersweet and awful was it that the shoe-in extra gets a happy ending?) AND MORE OR LESS OUTLIVED EVERY MISERABLE FUCKER IN THIS BOOK. That was poetic justice if nothing else.
In any case, I will keep reading more of Philip K. Dick's books because THERE ARE SO MANY OUT THERE and I am looking forward to acquaint myself more with his writing. Overall, Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said just didn't work for me as a sum of its parts, especially when the parts are composed of characters that I perceived to be grimy, irresponsible, disablers of human dignity and progress. The mystery plot and the answer concerning Jason Taverner's sudden lack of identity was still a pretty thrilling read, though.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
June 2015
I've had the longest fascination about war and the military lifestyle whether in historical books or works of fiction in general.
There's just something deeply stirring about men and women giving up their lives in service of country or a government system even when that kind of loyalty demands death, destruction and bitter endings. I have great respect and admiration for this kind of people even if those things are mixed with pity and sadness as well. My enjoyment for reading, watching and learning about wars throughout histories is a double-edged one; on one hand, it does break my heart to know about such fragile and empty lives being sacrificed as people in such compromising positions have to face the sharpest consequences. |
On the other, I often view the bloodshed and deaths during war-times (fictional or not) to be the most thrilling and exciting stories ever told. To have literature grant me access and safe passage inside the heads of the people who were part of it, and travel the dystopic landscapes of such times will always be the most fruitful of my reading experiences.
"This is really a novel about coping back to regular life after the thrills and traumas of conflict--and finding that you have become alien. If you want to tell a story about war, you need to find a way of articulating a profundity of alienation, a depth of strangeness and dislocation."
Joe Haldeman's science fiction novel The Forever War was not quite what I was expecting and definitely belongs to the scarcity of books that were able to surprise me in both enlightening and despairing of ways right after finishing them. It tackled some themes concerning sexuality in a manner that I still wasn't sure how to feel about even at this moment, and it fulfilled my earnest desire to read warfare in both its cold and exacting nature and its terrible, malicious form. I felt entirely full on these aspects of storytelling because Joe Haldeman's experiences in the Vietnam War (which was partly an inspiration for this story) truly do come alive for this grand novel, and were contextualized with such an aching retrospection and an uncannily sharp-edged clarity infused with a wicked sense of gallows humor.
This was a story about war and its aftermath and earth-shattering effects on cultures and societies from someone who genuinely knows what a battlefield looks, feels and smells like firsthand which makes the physical and psychological descriptions of the intergalactic and planetary battle scenes here quite haunting. The horrors depicted are uncomfortably clinical at times too.
What was so notably interesting about The Forever War is its science jargon concerning time dilation during space travel which meant that the soldiers, who fight wars against the alien lifeforms they consider enemies named Taurans, are bound to age in a shockingly slow pace. And this is where the central conflict and existential mediation of the book delve deeply about. Told in the first-person perspective of William Mandella, The Forever War is not just a story about war and death or the dystopic concepts of harmony, progress and social change that have always been essential to any grim science fiction novel. The Forever War is foremost about isolation from humanity in the most visceral level of unfamiliarity that one tends to become alien even to himself. In his service as a war veteran and on-and-off-and-on again soldier on duty, Mandella has lived an almost immortal life where he could stay in a certain planet for five months but come back to earth a century later.
This, of course, is a disconcerting transition, particularly when the world that you know changes and destroys itself in order to create a new cultural identity and status quo right before your very eyes and you have no other choice but to adjust to these abrupt changes.
As exciting and wonderfully compelling the moments of Mandella being a soldier were, it's actually the daily grind of his civilian life post-war that provides this novel with its beating, bleeding heart along with all the messy and intricate parts. One of the shift in societal values in Earth is the normalcy of homosexuality and outright abolishment of heterosexuality (which eventually softened in another decade or so where now heterosexuality can be 'reformed' or 'cured'). Procreation between man and woman is now seen as a wasteful activity and biological harvesting is the more prevalent practice so homosexual couplings are encouraged so the population is kept under control as well as the eugenics that come along with it. It's an idea and plotline that has made me shiver. I identify as a queer woman though I'm not very political about it, or at all, honestly.
I wasn't offended or anything like that because I always contextualize the times a book was written in before accusing the material to be hate-mongering or promoting discriminatory propaganda.
True, I found the portrayal of homosexuality in this book as slightly offhanded and bizarre because the reversal of what was considered taboo, sexuality-wise, did not sit well with me, though I understand the point Haldeman is trying to get across by switching the roles. Now, I don't think this novel is trying to promote either sexuality but it does make an interesting argument concerning societal attitudes and how much they can be changed decades or centuries from now. Fortunately enough, I believe the generation of today is taking a more positive step forward in accepting homosexuality and other gender-specifics identifications outside what is considered 'traditional'. But The Forever War is a cautionary tale on how a wrong step does lead to a misdirection where an exclusion of one race, sexuality, etc. does in fact only reinforce damaging and harmful (if not utterly barbaric) way of thinking. Much like how the homosexual society of Haldeman's creation is now the oppressor of a minority it perceives to be sinful or unnatural.
There may be plenty of discussions to be had on that aspect of the novel (and I'm sure other people online and in GR have talked about it too), and it's certainly the one that has struck a chord in me.
In spite of that polarizing theme, this novel has a few other ways to engage anyone who enjoys science fiction in its most eye-opening, radical and unexpectedly humorous and moving of moments. William Mandella's crisis concerning the age-generation gap between him and the platoons he must handle and work alongside with had been an interesting development to watch, as well as his bittersweet relationship with Margay Potter, yet another soldier who is his only connection to a world that was lost to him for good, which provides the book with so much needed warmth and insight.
I also loved the fact that, indirectly, this book also cautions us against the concept, if not the pursuit of some us, for 'immortality' and our rather stupid desire to acquire. Life is only precious because it is supposed to be short. We are supposed to expire. But someone of Mandella's position is not allowed to live a brief yet fulfilled life but rather just exist by default, suspended in a sort of personal limbo of repetitive cycles because he can never be released from active duty as long as humanity keeps fighting its monsters, real or imaginary. This was really well-done in the book; Haldeman has given us a harrowing depiction of Mandella's struggle to fit in in an ever-changing world that always seem to leave him behind as he's stuck in a continuous loop of soul-crushing military service with little to no hope for a normal, well-balanced life.
The Forever War is a highly sophisticated science fiction novel that happens to be only the first book of a series. Its writing is purposeful and meditative, filled with infectious moment of grief, action, philosophical dimensions, and, above all else, one man's tireless quest for a loving life against the suffocating immensity of deaths around him. Now I won't have time to read the next installment this year or the next but I am definitely going to follow up on it once I set up a new reading roster.
This was a story about war and its aftermath and earth-shattering effects on cultures and societies from someone who genuinely knows what a battlefield looks, feels and smells like firsthand which makes the physical and psychological descriptions of the intergalactic and planetary battle scenes here quite haunting. The horrors depicted are uncomfortably clinical at times too.
What was so notably interesting about The Forever War is its science jargon concerning time dilation during space travel which meant that the soldiers, who fight wars against the alien lifeforms they consider enemies named Taurans, are bound to age in a shockingly slow pace. And this is where the central conflict and existential mediation of the book delve deeply about. Told in the first-person perspective of William Mandella, The Forever War is not just a story about war and death or the dystopic concepts of harmony, progress and social change that have always been essential to any grim science fiction novel. The Forever War is foremost about isolation from humanity in the most visceral level of unfamiliarity that one tends to become alien even to himself. In his service as a war veteran and on-and-off-and-on again soldier on duty, Mandella has lived an almost immortal life where he could stay in a certain planet for five months but come back to earth a century later.
This, of course, is a disconcerting transition, particularly when the world that you know changes and destroys itself in order to create a new cultural identity and status quo right before your very eyes and you have no other choice but to adjust to these abrupt changes.
As exciting and wonderfully compelling the moments of Mandella being a soldier were, it's actually the daily grind of his civilian life post-war that provides this novel with its beating, bleeding heart along with all the messy and intricate parts. One of the shift in societal values in Earth is the normalcy of homosexuality and outright abolishment of heterosexuality (which eventually softened in another decade or so where now heterosexuality can be 'reformed' or 'cured'). Procreation between man and woman is now seen as a wasteful activity and biological harvesting is the more prevalent practice so homosexual couplings are encouraged so the population is kept under control as well as the eugenics that come along with it. It's an idea and plotline that has made me shiver. I identify as a queer woman though I'm not very political about it, or at all, honestly.
I wasn't offended or anything like that because I always contextualize the times a book was written in before accusing the material to be hate-mongering or promoting discriminatory propaganda.
True, I found the portrayal of homosexuality in this book as slightly offhanded and bizarre because the reversal of what was considered taboo, sexuality-wise, did not sit well with me, though I understand the point Haldeman is trying to get across by switching the roles. Now, I don't think this novel is trying to promote either sexuality but it does make an interesting argument concerning societal attitudes and how much they can be changed decades or centuries from now. Fortunately enough, I believe the generation of today is taking a more positive step forward in accepting homosexuality and other gender-specifics identifications outside what is considered 'traditional'. But The Forever War is a cautionary tale on how a wrong step does lead to a misdirection where an exclusion of one race, sexuality, etc. does in fact only reinforce damaging and harmful (if not utterly barbaric) way of thinking. Much like how the homosexual society of Haldeman's creation is now the oppressor of a minority it perceives to be sinful or unnatural.
There may be plenty of discussions to be had on that aspect of the novel (and I'm sure other people online and in GR have talked about it too), and it's certainly the one that has struck a chord in me.
In spite of that polarizing theme, this novel has a few other ways to engage anyone who enjoys science fiction in its most eye-opening, radical and unexpectedly humorous and moving of moments. William Mandella's crisis concerning the age-generation gap between him and the platoons he must handle and work alongside with had been an interesting development to watch, as well as his bittersweet relationship with Margay Potter, yet another soldier who is his only connection to a world that was lost to him for good, which provides the book with so much needed warmth and insight.
I also loved the fact that, indirectly, this book also cautions us against the concept, if not the pursuit of some us, for 'immortality' and our rather stupid desire to acquire. Life is only precious because it is supposed to be short. We are supposed to expire. But someone of Mandella's position is not allowed to live a brief yet fulfilled life but rather just exist by default, suspended in a sort of personal limbo of repetitive cycles because he can never be released from active duty as long as humanity keeps fighting its monsters, real or imaginary. This was really well-done in the book; Haldeman has given us a harrowing depiction of Mandella's struggle to fit in in an ever-changing world that always seem to leave him behind as he's stuck in a continuous loop of soul-crushing military service with little to no hope for a normal, well-balanced life.
The Forever War is a highly sophisticated science fiction novel that happens to be only the first book of a series. Its writing is purposeful and meditative, filled with infectious moment of grief, action, philosophical dimensions, and, above all else, one man's tireless quest for a loving life against the suffocating immensity of deaths around him. Now I won't have time to read the next installment this year or the next but I am definitely going to follow up on it once I set up a new reading roster.
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
June 2015
My favorite speculative fiction of all time is Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days which I read back in 2012, while the very first science fiction I read was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I read these books only a few months apart and I was forever changed because of them and this change has definitely got me interested to venture on acquiring and experiencing more of what the science fiction genre has to offer as much as I could. Eleven more sci-fi books later, I remained insatiable, more so after finishing this one.
The very first thing that struck me while in the middle of consuming this novel by Walter Tevis is that it was unmistakably a majestic blend of both the dystopic landscapes featured in Huxley's book, and written in the same nostalgic manner of aching, melancholic sensibility and spiritual contemplation very much alive in Cunningham's work. With that, I couldn't help but find myself deeply embedded in the pores of this haunting tale of Mockingbird. |
Like most sci-fi books, it started with an off-beat promising premise that slowly developed into something personal and tragic for both the characters and a reader like myself. I think books like this one work very well for me because they lavish on the often inarticulately beautiful quality of human life and the art and terrible burden of living itself; how precious and fleeting our lives truly are, and what happens when a certain moral decay or a disintegration of long-held valuable things occur. Truth be told, Mockingbird is a tapestry of themes I mostly associate with some of my favorite sci-fi stories like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, to name a few.
There's the usual existential crisis where characters live in an age of detachment from self and/or others but suddenly and quite poignantly awaken from their stupor to contemplate and pursue the meaning of why they exist to begin with and why the world has been reduced to shambles, whether physically or metaphorically.
Mockingbird follows the same formula with its own invigorating narrative. The central theme of this book focuses on the grim possibility of humanity losing literacy, particularly their ability to read, and how that seemingly simple negligence would follow a series of other significant losses due to population control via fertility-inhibiting drugs (and other forms of recreational drug use to numb everything away), the disappearance of any creative endeavor like art and literature, and utter extinction of family, community and religious inclinations. All of these set-ups sound awfully familiar already, and rightly so because Tevis does share his dystopic characterizations of his world in the same vein as Huxley's inarguably superior novel Brave New World. However, what does elevate Mockingbird in another new level entirely is the quality it also shares with another novel I love to pieces, Specimen Days, when it comes to its character arcs and relationships.
There's the usual existential crisis where characters live in an age of detachment from self and/or others but suddenly and quite poignantly awaken from their stupor to contemplate and pursue the meaning of why they exist to begin with and why the world has been reduced to shambles, whether physically or metaphorically.
Mockingbird follows the same formula with its own invigorating narrative. The central theme of this book focuses on the grim possibility of humanity losing literacy, particularly their ability to read, and how that seemingly simple negligence would follow a series of other significant losses due to population control via fertility-inhibiting drugs (and other forms of recreational drug use to numb everything away), the disappearance of any creative endeavor like art and literature, and utter extinction of family, community and religious inclinations. All of these set-ups sound awfully familiar already, and rightly so because Tevis does share his dystopic characterizations of his world in the same vein as Huxley's inarguably superior novel Brave New World. However, what does elevate Mockingbird in another new level entirely is the quality it also shares with another novel I love to pieces, Specimen Days, when it comes to its character arcs and relationships.
"My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered and drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment." ~ Paul
The summary found at the back of the book was slightly misleading. I originally thought that the android character Spofforth would be the main focus of the entire novel but it turns out that this responsibility belongs to two other characters; a man and a woman named Paul Bentley and Mary Lou respectively who are instantly recognizable as the representational equivalent of their world's very own Adam and Eve, as both stumble their way into consciousness and awareness together. Paul was introduced as the only human being who has the ability to read which he picked up on by accident when he unearthed an instructional videotape on the subject. Spofforth hired him to record the written dialogues in the archives of silent films which was an activity Paul has learned to enjoy and appreciate. By learning to read and watching film from a forgotten era, certain feelings were brought forth from Paul; thoughts and emotions he never recognized which only deepened when he begins a relationship with Mary Lou who dared him to question and outright ignore the rules programmed into them as children. True to being a biblical Eve, Mary Lou dares Paul to challenge the status quo.
Paul's journey to "memorize his life" as suggested by Mary Lou was done by the very simple act of scribbling his daily grind into pages upon pages of diary entries. But the more he records his own memories and encounters, the more miserable he becomes when he realizes how dull the world has become with its people caught in a standstill, burying all their self-awareness through drugs and quick sex. His nuanced journey from imprisonment to liberation on two levels--the physical and the emotional--is, for me, the most humane aspect of this book. I eagerly discovered things alongside him as he devoured what scarce books he can find in the places he travels. One notable place is an abandoned mall outlet where small groups of Christian families reside. His collective experience with these people is one of the most ironically comical yet heartwarming moments found in the novel.
Paul's journey to "memorize his life" as suggested by Mary Lou was done by the very simple act of scribbling his daily grind into pages upon pages of diary entries. But the more he records his own memories and encounters, the more miserable he becomes when he realizes how dull the world has become with its people caught in a standstill, burying all their self-awareness through drugs and quick sex. His nuanced journey from imprisonment to liberation on two levels--the physical and the emotional--is, for me, the most humane aspect of this book. I eagerly discovered things alongside him as he devoured what scarce books he can find in the places he travels. One notable place is an abandoned mall outlet where small groups of Christian families reside. His collective experience with these people is one of the most ironically comical yet heartwarming moments found in the novel.
"Why don't we talk to one another? Why don't we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets in the city? People used to read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquence silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said I am human. I talk and I listen and I read. Why did we stop reading? What happened?" ~ Mary Lou
Mary Lou is an engaging, clever and intelligent young woman who was inquisitive enough to figure out by herself that there is something amiss in the world she lives in. All her life she has been on the run, disobeying rules and making a mockery of the robot-police state, all for the sake of not forgetting what makes her human and unique in spite of the initial programming all children are required to undergo which diminishes personality and identity.
Paul was understandably drawn to her and as he teaches her to read, she in turn opens him up to a realm of turbulent feelings and creative musings, instilling in him dismissed qualities such as imagination and intellectual curiosity. Her journey in this book is about satisfying that same curiosity as well as understanding why children have become extinct and accepting that there is a faint glimmer of hope that she may have found a way to turn things around if she's brave and resolute enough to do it.
Paul was understandably drawn to her and as he teaches her to read, she in turn opens him up to a realm of turbulent feelings and creative musings, instilling in him dismissed qualities such as imagination and intellectual curiosity. Her journey in this book is about satisfying that same curiosity as well as understanding why children have become extinct and accepting that there is a faint glimmer of hope that she may have found a way to turn things around if she's brave and resolute enough to do it.
"I would like to know, before I die, what it was like to be the human being I have tried to be all my life." ~ Robert Spofforth
Spofforth is the first character we get introduced to in this book but the role he plays is much less personal but nonetheless just as moving and sad. A robot created by implanting another living person'a brain, he suffers dreams and thoughts from that late person's life and so develops an acute sense of 'humanness'. This is troubling because what Spofforth really wants to do is to cease to exist but his programming does not allow him to die as long as humans still have a need for his kind, a robot of the Make Nine series, and probably the last one there is. For an android, Spofforth is surprisingly humane and often relatable, especially during such times he is subjected to gloom and suicidal thoughts.
Mockingbird is an enduring work of the heart and the imagination, an enchanting tale about human resilience and creativity while also being a painful yet also humorous commentary on the qualities that we as humans value and celebrate and the awful aftermath that follows once we take these same things for granted in the long run. Much like Brave New World, this book's take on a dystopic society of drug-addled and individual-based society is unforgettable, and its prose is sparse yet can powerfully illuminate dark recesses of the soul in the same manner Specimen Days has achieved as well. The world Paul and Mary Lou live in may be underpopulated but their story will certainly proliferate strong emotions from readers who will consume it and hopefully appreciate such simple yet essential things in life we can so easily forget and destroy.
Spofforth is the first character we get introduced to in this book but the role he plays is much less personal but nonetheless just as moving and sad. A robot created by implanting another living person'a brain, he suffers dreams and thoughts from that late person's life and so develops an acute sense of 'humanness'. This is troubling because what Spofforth really wants to do is to cease to exist but his programming does not allow him to die as long as humans still have a need for his kind, a robot of the Make Nine series, and probably the last one there is. For an android, Spofforth is surprisingly humane and often relatable, especially during such times he is subjected to gloom and suicidal thoughts.
Mockingbird is an enduring work of the heart and the imagination, an enchanting tale about human resilience and creativity while also being a painful yet also humorous commentary on the qualities that we as humans value and celebrate and the awful aftermath that follows once we take these same things for granted in the long run. Much like Brave New World, this book's take on a dystopic society of drug-addled and individual-based society is unforgettable, and its prose is sparse yet can powerfully illuminate dark recesses of the soul in the same manner Specimen Days has achieved as well. The world Paul and Mary Lou live in may be underpopulated but their story will certainly proliferate strong emotions from readers who will consume it and hopefully appreciate such simple yet essential things in life we can so easily forget and destroy. Spofforth is the first character we get introduced to in this book but the role he plays is much less personal but nonetheless just as moving and sad. A robot created by implanting another living person'a brain, he suffers dreams and thoughts from that late person's life and so develops an acute sense of 'humanness'. This is troubling because what Spofforth really wants to do is to cease to exist but his programming does not allow him to die as long as humans still have a need for his kind, a robot of the Make Nine series, and probably the last one there is. For an android, Spofforth is surprisingly humane and often relatable, especially during such times he is subjected to gloom and suicidal thoughts.
Mockingbird is an enduring work of the heart and the imagination, an enchanting tale about human resilience and creativity while also being a painful yet also humorous commentary on the qualities that we as humans value and celebrate and the awful aftermath that follows once we take these same things for granted in the long run. Much like Brave New World, this book's take on a dystopic society of drug-addled and individual-based society is unforgettable, and its prose is sparse yet can powerfully illuminate dark recesses of the soul in the same manner Specimen Days has achieved as well. The world Paul and Mary Lou live in may be underpopulated but their story will certainly proliferate strong emotions from readers who will consume it and hopefully appreciate such simple yet essential things in life we can so easily forget and destroy.