4 new SF posts on Weighing A Pig:
EXHALTATION - Ted Chiang (2008)
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This time the main focus is on neuroscience, and the debate on the classic boxological Theory Of Mind: do our brains have representations of their content inside their brains, or not? The Nobel Prize winning research by Kandel and O’Keefe & the Mosers on rats has proven the classic T.o.M. wrong, and Chiang has managed to translate that into a kind of steampunk-ish robot setting. At least, that’s my guess, as I haven’t read any author notes. I know Chiang included those in this first collection, but I’m not sure if they exist for this particular story. (If they do exist, and somebody could prove or disprove my hypothesis in the comments, that would be great.)
The other focus is a classic cosmology conundrum: is our universe finite, and will it get to a final (dead) state of equilibrium? He cleverly inserts a bit of speculation about possible multiverses too.
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full review here
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THE MAN IN THE MAZE - Robert Silverberg (1969)
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So what we get is a strange hybrid: on the one hand a kind of technological action feast, with the maze itself as a protagonist, and on the other hand a psychological study of those three characters, and how they interact. The alien mysteries that Silverberg set up work really well to keep the tension going, but in the end they turn out to be a sideshow only, and ultimately they are underdeveloped – as I said: they would get 100 pages per alien race extra if this book would have been written today.
So now that we have whittled it down to the 2 main dishes: are they tasty?
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full review here
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THE WILD SHORE - Kim Stanley Robinson (1984)
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Partly coming of age story, the narrator is the 17-year-old Hank Fletcher, who lives in a small community of about 60 people that try to make by in 2047, about 6 decades after a nuclear attack sent The United States back to a pre-industrial setting, with isolated communities of survivors scattered across the land. And even while The Wild Shore has a subtle hint of space lasers, at times it reminded me of the similarly low tech Shaman – there’s a great paper to be written on how the themes of both books relate.
Information is key in the novel. Just like the readers, the characters are in the dark about what happened. They are also in the dark about what is happening, for Robinson shows glimpses of a bigger narrative in world politics in the aftermath of the attack – but characters nor readers get to know its true extent. It is a clever narrative device, maximizing the reader’s empathy with the characters: we share uncertainty and frustration about it. It is especially clever because – like the readers – the characters do know about what once was: trains, electricity, hospitals, national pride, and general literacy.
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full review here
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UBIK - Philip K. Dick (1969)
When I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 5 years ago, I approached it the wrong way. That novel is full of plot holes & other inconsistencies, and while I appreciated the mood, I ended up being bothered by its mushy core. I decided to not make the same mistake for Ubik, and see if a go-with-the-flow attitude would yield another reading experience.
Being who I am, I still ended up writing down numerous inconsistencies, but indeed, they did not really bother me. Maybe that is because Ubik simply is a much better novel, I don’t know: I’d have to reread Androids, and that’s not going to happen.
A bit before I started Ubik, I read a review on Calmgrove that determined my reading experience this time. It hinted at Serious Levels of Depth, and that provided the novel with lots of my credit upfront. It made me go down another rabbit hole this time: in search for truths about life & death.
For the uninitiated: Ubik is a strange novel, in which Dick draws back the curtain numerous times, only to close it a bit later on. It involves time travel – or not?, strange temporal digressions, merged states of half-life, a conflict between two psychic mutant factions, a trip to the moon and capitalist consumerism satire. An American-made Kafka: light in calories, and with a dose of cigarettes, X-Men & half-baked religion.
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full review here