Prosthetic Conscience

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One of my goals in keeping this log is to make a little record of what I’m reading, with a little bit of commentary. However, my reading choices sometimes seem to conform to Sturgeon’s Law. Nevertheless, here’s a little catch-up.

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson is described on the cover as an “eco-thriller”, but really, it’s more of a hardboiled detective novel, except that the hardboiled gumshoe is a chemist working for a Greenpeace-like environmental organization. It’s told in first person, and you can almost hear the voice-overs. It was a fun, fast read, and very hard to put down. The main character is an asshole, but he’s an asshole to the right people. There’s not much in there that’s really thought-provoking. The book could have supported a discussion of the ethics of direct-action activism, but it doesn’t really. The bad-guys get what’s coming to them, and the good-guys have fun giving it to them in ways that are nonviolent, but extremely unfriendly.

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer is a science fiction novel involving anthropology and physics. The premise is that in a parallel universe, anatomically modern humans died out and Neanderthals prospered, eventually developing a global, highly technological civilization. A Neanderthal physicist working on a quantum computing experiment finds himself thrown into our universe, where he must struggle to adapt and to get home, while his partner is investigated for his disappearance. The author seems to have done his homework on the Neanderthals (clearly more than I ever did, anyway), though of course the social organization of the modern Neanderthals is purely speculative. He does an excellent job of creating a non-agrarian technological society, which is something I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen done in science fiction. There are a few weak points, though. The Neanderthal society seems relentlessly utopian (compared to ours). I love utopian SF, especially Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, and Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. However, it seems to me that if you are setting out to write about a utopia, you should do so more or less explicitly, and you shouldn’t try to accomplish something else in designing the same society. The Neanderthal society in this novel is both a speculative “alien” society and a utopia, and I think it is a bit overloaded. Also, one of the plot points hinges on Robert Penrose’s quantum interpretation of consciousness, which is rather ridiculous IMO. It does fit the plot well, however. This is the first volume of a trilogy, and I plan on at least starting the next one.

Vampire$ by John Steakley is the novel that served as the basis for John Carpenter’s Vampires. I haven’t seen the movie, but from what I can tell of the reviews, the book is much better. It’s far from high literature, but in amid the vampire action and macho posturing, there’s a fair amount of psychological insight, into victimization, and into keeping on a task you know is doomed to end in failure.

[ Posted: 11:48] | [ Category: /books] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]