For this post to work, I had to add @import "bootstrap/scss/variables-dark"; to my global styles scss file because updating Bootstrap from 5.2.3 to 5.3.0 broke the building process due to, apparently, not a breaking change introduced by the developers. Who needs books when the comments to the Github issue, discussing how when existing code breaks and needs to be fixed it’s still not a breaking change, are such fun?
Now, to the topic of the post:
Vernor Vinge
The Peace War is a first installment in the Realtime series. It’s basically about the possibilities of technological advances (read Manhattan project-scale advances) to both aid and counter the authoritarian regimes, sprinkled with child prodigies and incredible scientific breakthroughs made in garages. I’d put this book somewhere near his Rainbows End - a good science fiction, but a tiny bit less entertaining than any of the first two books in the Zones of Thought series. Tines rulez!!1
Samuel Delany
The Einstein Intersection is where science fiction meets philosophy meets Greek mythos. This book is on the short-y side of the scale of science fiction books, and yet it strives to deliver something very profound in so many pages. Does it deliver, though? I don’t think so. Even if were the size of Simmonses Hyperion/Endymion, who knows whether we’d have another great cantos or just a Joyce’s Ulysses-sized incongruity? Certainly not I. Verdict? Go read Babel-17 instead.
While I sat there, it occurred to me how hard breathing was.
Me too, Samuel, me too…
Kazuo Ishiguro
This Nobel Prize laureate doesn’t need to be introduced. The laurels notwithstanding, his style of putting words to the paper has left me quite an ambiguous impression. For starters, the butler-protagonist of The Remains of the Day seems a bit too mechanistic, a bit too fixated on his job to represent a real human… or does he really? Remember, we’re reading his story as he told it. Maybe he’s just trying to justify his actions to himself and the audience, and thus comes off as slightly unreal? Who of us doesn’t lie to himself now and then? If that was the author’s goal, he reached it with flying colors. The last pages, where the butler’s inner self starts to shine through the gaps in his almost impenetrable I’m the butler robot professional armor, are the best; if anything, the last chapter really redeems all the perceived flaws of the previous ones.
This novel is best read in the evening (not in the evening of life, if one can help it)).
The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
Never Let Me Go is the one with the touching story of love and hope among sentient sterile human clones born and bred to be organ donors. Well, not exactly bred, for they are sterile, and it might have been very touching if not for all the inconsistencies always getting in the way. In one of the interviews, Ishiguro said that, as opposed to the thoughts and feelings of the heroes that he really invested in in the novel, he doesn’t really cares about all this clone and science-fictionesque stuff, and it really shows. I understand that it’s soft science fiction, but why choose the setting you don’t care about at all?
For the life of me I still don’t know if Never Let Me Go is a work of a genius or just a colossus on the feet of clay, the feet being the sci-fi component. At the first glance, some of the premises of the book look preposterous. Who on earth could invent growing and rearing up live thinking human beings to be organ donors? What Frankenstein-grade scientists could develop such an elaborate process? It could’ve been done with much fewer moral ambiguities and, probably, a lot cheaper if the donors didn’t require as much investments as real humans. For instance, if they were lobotomized hunks of meat rotating on spits in the growing vats filled with jello somewhere in the clandestine underground facilities.
By the way, why couldn’t eagles fly into Mordor and drop the ring directly into the mountain? Because of Sauron’s AA guns?)
The next marvelous idea is to harvest the organs one-by-one, letting the donors recuperate between taking yet another of their essential (!) organs. Why is this necessary and how can one even live without a couple of vital organs is beyond me.
Next, like the butler above, the donors often look unreal, as in “more or less educated, well-read twenty-something adults still believing in Santa Claus” unreal. Santa in this case represents an unfounded childish belief that if two donors are in love they can apply for putting off their inevitable donations and death. Duh.
Finally, one could imagine that sentient people would be more rebellious towards an idea that all they amount to is, well, their intestines and stuff, and that they wouldn’t behave at all times as ineffably meek, childish meat puppets, would they?
Would they really?
here, the author of this post stops typing and starts thinking of all the historic precedents when humans were not quite rebellious. thinking that, at times, adults act really childish. thinking of the real-life humans acting as meat puppets. thinking of the relevant examples from his own life.
Would they?..
In the end, for all the softness of the science fiction involved, I’d say that the “human psyche” component of the novel is sufficiently well-developed. If, of course, I’m not trying to read more sense into the novel then there actually is. I’m not at all good at reading between the lines.
And now, a message from our sponsor—the Donor-Growing Corporation of the brave new world—to his most loyal subjects:
But think of it. You were better off than many who came before you. And who knows what those who come after you will have to face.
Graham Greene
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party is a bit tongue-in-cheek tale of the limits of human greed and grief. The Power and the Glory, being more solemn, describes the struggles of a whiskey priest in Mexico at the time of immense anti-clericalism in that country. This one was inspired by the real events witnessed by the author while he worked in Mexico reporting on the persecution of Catholic priests. The Power and the Glory is an engaging novel on sin, redemption and the definition of goodness (not given explicitly, thank God for that!), permeated by the sense of duty and pervaded by thin threads of commonplace venality. Highly recommended!
This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.
I don’t know whether it’s Greene’s writing style, his POV, or the moral issues involved, or maybe it’s just that the people in his novels seem to behave like real ones and not as if they were Ishiguro’s meat puppets - in the end, I must confess that I like Graham Greene’s novels, especially the spy novels that don’t figure in this post. And, indeed,
What was the good of confession when you loved the result of your crime?
PS: It’s curious how just about the only thing in common between the Greene’s priest and the Ishiguro’s butler is their attention to their duty.