I really wanted to enjoy The Brief History of the Dead, but unfortunately it just didn't do anything for me. The novel attracted me with its intriguinI really wanted to enjoy The Brief History of the Dead, but unfortunately it just didn't do anything for me. The novel attracted me with its intriguing premise, but ultimately proved to simply be far too long and too dull.
The premise makes this story: The Brief History of the Dead features the concept of a city to which the recently dead travel after they pass away. They can stay in the city, but only as long as someone who remembers them is still alive - after which they disappear, never to be seen again by other puzzled souls. And inhabitants of the city are disappearing at an alarmingly fast rate - back on earth a mysterious plague is wiping out the rest of humanity. Laura Byrd, a lone scientist on a research mission in the Antarctic, begins to suspect that she might be the last living person on earth: as she journeys from station to station, clinging desperately to life, she slowly loses herself in memories of people she used to know: in the city of the dead, these few souls depend on her survival for their own.
Kevin Brockmeier can write very well, and really set the mood for his scenes - of particular interest are his atmospheric descriptions of ice and cold through which Laura has to travel - but with this book he just can't bring himself to tell an interesting and captivating story; the entire book feels like a good idea which was stretched out way too thin, and for way too long. Funnily enough, it probably was the case - The Brief History of the Dead was originally published in New Yorker as a short story in 2003, and the novel just feels like an unnecessary expansion on that idea.
Many novels found their beginning in short stories and novellas, but The Brief History of the Dead is one of these books which should have stuck to the short form - for their own book. In longer form, the novel ultimately fails to engage and captivate the reader - I could not get involved in any of the characters and their stories, and ultimately just did not care about any of them. Though I did get a chuckle with the idea of (view spoiler)[the world ending because of Coca-Cola (hide spoiler)], but I really don't think that makes the book worth reading. ...more
Joe Hill's last novel, NOS4A2 was an engaging horror romp which lasted for more than seven hundred pages, but maintained to keep both tension and inteJoe Hill's last novel, NOS4A2 was an engaging horror romp which lasted for more than seven hundred pages, but maintained to keep both tension and interest in the reader to the very end. In comparison, Hill's latest novel is completely unlike its predecessor, with whom it only shares its enormous length. To put it simply - The Fireman is an overly long, convoluted, uninteresting and ultimately very disappointing effort.
At its heart, The Fireman is a post-apocalyptic novel, with a premise that has by now been done hundreds of times: the majority of humanity is inflicted by a ravaging disease, leaving only a small group of survivors trying to scrape by. This time humanity is afflicted by a disease which becomes known as Dragonscale - its symptoms include dark marks on the skin, which spread across the body and eventually cause the individual to literally erupt into flames and burn to death. Dragonscale spreads rapidly, and soon consumes millions of people - as well as the environment, causing uncontrollable forest fires and so on. Although the demise of humanity is not a new theme, you have to give it to The Fireman - it is probably the world's first novel about human extinction by spontaneous combustion.
The problem with the book is that not much else about it is new, or even particularly interesting. As we read the The Fireman, we get the sense of crossing through familiar territory - one which has been done many times before, and much better so. Since every post-apocalyptic story requires a bunch of survivors, we find ourselves in a tight spot. Consider this - how does one escape a disease which literally consumes human bodies and turns them to ash? Easily - by learning how to not be unharmed by it. And not only that - it turns out that you can learn how to control the disease and use it to your advantage.
That's right. The disease kills most of humanity, but luckily for a selected number of people - who happen to be the characters which the book focuses on - it can also provide handy superpowers. Joe Hill said at a panel that his book would be "less like Matheson, and more like Crichton" and cited Crichton's first novel, The Andromeda Strain as an example. The only link with Michael Crichton that I can find in this book is Joe Hill's attempt at quasi-scientific explanation of Dragonscale and how it affects human bodies - something which he later totally throws out of the window by essentially allowing several characters to overcome its malicious effect by their own feelings, as apparently this is all what it takes (and somehow we have to believe these same characters never thought about broadcasting their solution to the problem to the entire world, but then again if they did we would not have a book to read and review).
As I mentioned, people in this book not only escape death by learning to coexist with a disease that should burn them to death, but also learn how to control it and use it to their advantage. This means that later in the book characters in the book are able to generate fire literally from their fingertips, control and shape it - throw fireballs and whatnot, or in case of one character create creatures made of fire. This is why the supposed inspiration by Michael Crichton was so puzzling - Crichton was a writer interested in science and technology, famed for his research and the ability to plausibly convey and explain his theories, and would not employ a purely fantastical cop-out as a solution to them. What made his books interesting was not his prose style , or the depth of his characters- he was a passable writer at best, and his characters are forgettable cardboard cutouts - or even in most cases the story itself, which usually consisted of little more than a bunch of frenetic action sequences. What made Crichton's novels so interesting were the ideas within them, which usually focused on mankind's technological progress and the way it affects our life and society. Usually, Crichton would have his characters engage in long discussions about the nature of what they were experiencing - its moral, ethical and scientific implications - and these formed the most interesting part of the book; it is especially evident in books such as Sphere, which is probably his best novel.
This is precisely what The Fireman lacks - any kind of complexity, something to chew on, somethink would give readers a lot to think about. This is a novel which does not give any answers except the most obvious ones, and does not ask any questions. Its characters are very forgettable and barely, and there is no real reason to care about any of them. Even the eponymous character, en English guy who wears a fireman's suit and is henceforth nicknamed "The Fireman" is little more than a convenient plot device to rescue our protagonists in their moments of trouble - he rarely makes an appearance throughout most of the book until the very end, and spends most of his time hiding away in a remote cabin. Interactions between these characters are boring and simply unimaginative, including what is probably a most ham-fisted romantic relationship written in recent fiction. Poorly designed characters who do not grow as people hurt the book twice, as they make it hard for us to care about the story, since it is difficult to care for what these uninteresting people experience. Because why should we?
Not that the story itself is complex and interesting; it really is not, and the vast majority of it reminds me of a very (pardon the pun) watered down version of The Stand. It is darkly ironic that Joe Hill began writing under a pseudonym because he wanted to escape his father's shadow, yet in this book he falls completely under it. The Fireman features all of the classic Stephen King tropes - the constant foreshadowing at the end of the chapter (in the vein of "it was a good plan, until everything blew up", "he never saw her again), many references to popular culture, endless references to music that the author likes (which sound completely unbelievable when put into minds of the characters many years younger - how many 26 year olds think about the difference between The Rolling Stones and the Beatles?), a crazed sociopath ex-husband/lover, crazy religious woman leader who seems to find her way here from The Mist...there is even an unsympathetic character named Harold who is almost a carbon copy of his namesake from The Stand, not to mention a mute character named Nick who is the epitome of innocence and good, just like the mute Nick from The Stand. All this can be explained as a homage or an Easter egg, of course, but if the book features little else than homages and Easter eggs, what is left? Not much.
Yes, despite all this, The Fireman is the longest of all of Joe Hill's novels so far, and perhaps his most disappointing ones. Its length is in no way justified, and feels padded to the bone; I do not think I exaggerate when I say that you could skip entire chapters and not miss out on much, if anything. It reads well and fast, since Joe Hill is a good and able writer, but there is little point in reading most of it. There is nothing enlightening or innovative in this book; neither the story or the characters are deep enough to become memorable and worth revisiting. For a novel focused on the element of fire, it inexplicably lacks the spark to keep the flame going; and it eventually goes out, quietly and without much smoke. I have given the book two stars only because of my sympathy for its author, and because it is not completely terrible - but it definitely is uninspired, unimaginative, uninteresting and definitely unworthy of your time....more
Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army takes place in northern Britain in the future, after an unnamed environmental catastrophe has totally changed the islaSarah Hall's The Carhullan Army takes place in northern Britain in the future, after an unnamed environmental catastrophe has totally changed the island's weather and replaced it with a climate that's almost tropical. Along the way, civil society has disintegrated and democracy has been replaced by a totalitarian regime known only as the Authority, which has imposed strict control on the population under the disguise of a recovery plan - population is made to live in communal housing in isolated communities, where electricity and food are rationed; women are forced to wear coils to prevent reproduction.
The protagonist, known only as Sister, has had enough of this treatment and decided to escape to a remote farm in Carhullan n the far north of Cumbria. In the once beautiful Lake District a group of determined and rebellious women have established their own settlement and militia, defying the regime of the Authority - but the nature of the community and its inhabitants might not be the one that Sister has expected.
The Carhullan Army's main point - would a society composed only of women turn to violence and savagery? - is interesting, but the rest of the novel drags it down. The book suffers from poor pacing - despite its short length it can be a real slog at times - and never manages to properly develop its characters; they're never more than stand-ins for the author's ideas and concepts that she wanted to present. World building - something I find essential in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction - is minimal; the ending is abrupt and reads like a cop out. As a whole the novel doesn't say anything that hasn't been said before and better by other authors, and just isn't a particularly interesting and valuable addition to the genre. ...more
Bird Box offers a well-known premise - the world as we know it suddenly coming to an end, and the few who survived trying to cope with the new realityBird Box offers a well-known premise - the world as we know it suddenly coming to an end, and the few who survived trying to cope with the new reality - but with an interesting twist (certainly a desirable addition to the formula which, much as I enjoy it, is now beginning to resemble a really dead horse). This is both a good, and a bad thing - and the book is also both these things, as it began well but ended up being disappointing.
The hook of Bird Box is, like in much post-apocalyptic fiction, The Event: a phenomenon which single-handedly destroys the old world order, and usually also depopulates most of the planet*. A typical example of The Event is the Pandemic - such as the flu outbreak in The Stand. The Cold War brough about the very real fear of a Nuclear Holocaust, when the possibility of nuclear powers annihilating one another and the world with them seemed very real. A great example of this is Nevil Shute' On the Beach - a moving novel, set in Australia after the nuclear world war which destroyed the northern hemisphere, and where the protagonists can only wait for the cloud of nuclear dust to reach the southern hemisphere and claim them too. There are other causes, of course, but these are easily the most popular.
*A relatively common variant of depopulation has most people not actually dying, but losing their humanity and turning into strange creatures hostile to humans. A classic example is the global pandemic turning all of humanity into vampires in Richard Matheson's great I Am Legend, whose protagonist - Robert Neville - is literally the last (hu)man on earth.
Bird Box, although set in Michigan, begins with a series of events in eastern Russia - first reports of people inexplicably attacking others and murdering them, and taking their own lives afterwards. There seems to be no link between these events and people, except for one thing - all of them apparently saw something which affected them so badly that they completely lost their minds. Expectably, the phenomenon spreads across the Bering Strait and first reports from Alaska soon follow - and soon it's chaos and death everywhere.
We met the protagonist, Malorie, a young mother hiding with two small children in a house somewhere in the suburbs of Detroit. The children have never seen the outside world - Malorie has been training them for over four years to hear and understand many different sounds, and be able to orient themselves with only their hearing, because she will need their ears to help guide them all on a journey across the river, towards what she believes to be a safe haven. To survive they must tie blindfolds across their eyes and not look at the world, where something might be waiting - something which only a sight of is enough to drive a person to insanity and murder.
The novel alternates between the present day and Malorie leaving the house and rowing across the river, and flashback chapters which tell the story of how she came to be in the house with the children in the first place. She was pregnant when the chaos began to unfold, and through personal effort found solace with fellow survivors who barred their windows shut and covered them with carpets to block the insanity of the outside world. What follows is a typical societal microcosm - cabin fever, worry over dependence on shared resources, discussions on the nature of the horror. There's an existential question or two thrown into the mix, but it's all neither very deep or new - it's just another trope of this genre, its obligatory element.
I purposefully avoided reading anything about Bird Box prior to reading it, and while I appreciate the author's creative idea - being forced to retire your sight and have to move about a hostile world depending entirely on hearing, smell and touch is terrifying as we realize how we depend on one sense almost entirely on one sense and understand the feeling of being blind. The threat of a something so inexplicably horrifying that the mere sight of it is enough to turn anyone insane is reminiscent of Lovecraft and his creations. All the factors are there - so why the low rating?
To say it best, the novel simply didn't work for me as a novel. When I was a young boy I adored listening to radio theater - ofen when I was supposed to be asleep I'd smuggle my walkman in bed with me and put the earplugs in my ears, very late at night, to listen to the performance (to the big annoyance of my even younger brother, with whom I shared a room and who was just a kid who wanted to sleep). Being in the dark in a quiet house heightened my sense of hearing, and I could hear things I would otherwise be unable to notice. This is why I think Bird Box would be a much better audio experience - especially when created specifically as a dramatization, with all the proper sound effects in their place. I would love to listen to a project like this - close my eyes and stop seeing, be unnerved, frightened and shocked by what I only could hear. It was especially interesting to learn that the author is a musician, someone who deals with and specializes in sound - just think of the possibilities!
But this is obviously not the case, and as soon the novelty of the idea wore down, it became obvious that the book will not be a compelling study of fear and how it is manifested, but rather a pretty standard horror story depending on shock and plenty of "boo!" moments, when we're constantly going to be told how something unbearably scary is just around the corner. But this jack won't pop up from its box; while Lovecraft created an entire universe around his Elder Gods, the things which are happening in the book are purposefully left almost entirely to the reader's imagination. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in a novel based largely on the build up of suspense I found it to not be acceptable. I didn't demand a revelation, but I could take a few gospels - something to give momentum to my imagination, to let it spin. What I got was an ending which was too neatly tied, too ideal,too perfect; it felt like a cop out, an anticlimatic cheat. Perhaps I've been reading too much Cormier?
To sum up - while Bird Box is a book which shows promise, it unfortunately falls squarely into the box of those which didn't deliver. It's not a bad book, certainly not bad for a debut, but it marks more of the same territory - and we've been there and we've seen it before. For an intriguing novel which features creative and original take on blindness and its impact on human personality, please do check out Rupert Thomson's great and underrated The Insult - one of the eeriest and weirdest novels I've ever read, and one of my personal favorites.
People, you say? No, my friend, they are beasts. They are a pack of jackals. They were preparing to tear us apart. And they would have. But they foPeople, you say? No, my friend, they are beasts. They are a pack of jackals. They were preparing to tear us apart. And they would have. But they forgot one thing. They are jackals but I am a wolf.
Most people who come to Metro 2033 probably do so after playing the excellent video game adaptation (you can see the trailer here). The game is an immersive first person shooter with great atmosphere, and has received very favorable reviews. I completed it once, and would like to do so again one day. The game's success brought much interest in the source material - Dmitry Glukhovsky's eponymous novel. Glukhovsky started writing the book when he was just 18 years old, and first published it on the internet for free in 2002 (complete Russian text is still available on his personal website). Although a print version was eventually published in Russia in 2005, the novel was translated into foreign languages only in 2010, to coincide with the game's release date. It has since spawned a sequel and started a book franchise, allowing other writers to experiment in its universe.
It's an interesting spin on an old premise. The novel is set in Moscow, and the year is 2033 - two decades after a nuclear war, when civilization like we know it has literally disappeared from the face of the planet. To escape radiation and nuclear winter most of the surviving population was forced to flee underground and settle in the city's vast metro system, which became the world's largest nuclear bunker. Soon, a new order was established within the metro - with each station becoming an independent state, with its own security and border controls. Stations formed alliances and confederations with one another, and broke them through war. People organized themselves into fractions, with two biggest ones - the communist Red Line and the fascist Fourth Reich - engaging in a full and permanent war with one another over the metro and its resources. Not all stations are inhabited - some have been abandoned because of floods and fires, or cut off from other stations because connecting tunnels have collapsed. Some stations have been lost to the Dark Ones - mythical, paranormal creatures who are said to have come from the ravaged surface.
People of the metro have never seen natural light - even Stalkers, who venture to the surface to explore the ruined city for supplies, do so only at night. Although some stations breed pigs and other animals, people mostly eat mushrooms as they do not require natural light to flourish. Stations are on constant alert, as they come under constant attack from either of the two major fractions, ordinary bandits or mutated creatures - and on one of such stations, VDNKh, lives our protagonist, Artyom. Artyom is 21, and was born before the nuclear holocaust destroyed the planet - but has spent his entire life at the VDNKh, where he eventually joined the security guard. One day at the closing of his shift the border outpost is approached by a strange man named Hunter, who is bent on fighting and destroying the Dark Ones; he makes Artyom promise that if he does not return, he'll travel to Polis, a far-away station, and seek its assistance in his name. Can you guess what happens?
Where Glukhovsky really succeeds is the building of the metro's lore - the atmosphere of the decaying, ruined network of tunnels and railways, where people live in constant half-shadows and where a tent is the most one can hope for privacy. The fact that the population is not only literally cut off from the world, but often also from other human settlements created significant social degradation through delearning: people forgot their past and gave in to primitive beliefs and superstition, and formed totalitarian and oppressive regimes in a situation when human unity is most necessary. On his journey to Polis Artyom will encounter many characters, each of which will give him a tour of a different philosophy - from simple and ordinary thugs, through revolutionary communists and cruel fascists, to spiritual mystics and religious extremists. Every encounter will have an influence on Artyom, and shape his character throughout his journey.
Unlike the game, however, Metro 2033 is a lot less action oriented and linear. The novel focuses much more on Artyom's internal existential dilemma whereas the game focuses mostly on simple survival in hostile conditions; there are plenty of action sequences but they are a background to the narrative, and not the focus. Glukhovsky was inspired by the Strugatsky brothers, Stanisław Lem and Ray Bradbury among others, and his ideas are many - along with histories, myths, legends and secrets, philosophy and social commentary. This is a very sprawling and expansive book which covers a lot of ground, but might leave the reader desiring that it had done so on a bit clearer path. But this would be against its nature, which is like the metro - branching out in many directions, and to see all that it has to offer you have to take every line.
The novel is offered in translation, which might sometimes make the prose sound stilted and unnatural to readers unaccustomed to the natural rhythm and melody of the Russian language. Still, it's a ride worth taking and I believe it will satisfy most readers looking for interesting - and mature! - dystopian fiction. Very dark and atmospheric book, and a good game to boot - I can't wait to read the sequel.
I was drawn in to this book because of the title and its gorgeous cover, which is why I'm sad to report that it turned out to be a total mess.
InitiallI was drawn in to this book because of the title and its gorgeous cover, which is why I'm sad to report that it turned out to be a total mess.
Initially, I was excited by the synopsis - a retelling of The Odyssey performed against the background of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. This is a story with real potential - I expected beautiful and unusual imagery, and a touching and moving story with plentiful of poetic references to classic Greek mythology...but Love in the Time of Global Warming is none of these things.
I'm not sure the book actually knows what it would like to be. It begins with the cataclysmic event known only as The Earth Shaker (what else could have brought down L.A.?) destroying pretty much everything, and leaving 17 year old Penelope (Pen for short - just like the wife of Odysseus) on her own. Obviously, Pen sets out to find her missing family - but then the book loses whatever focus it had and completely derails, becoming muddled, confused and unconvincing.
Instead of being merely an analogy to The Odyssey, the book introduce actual elements from the classic epic - Giant cyclops, Sirens, Sorcerers - and tries to mix them with teenage angst of its young characters who try to survive after the apocalypse, which goes as well as you might imagine. The result is a scattered series of events which do not make any sense ,and do not join together to form any coherent plot - things just happen because the author wants them to happen. Multitudes of characters are introduced in a very short amount of time which makes it all but impossible to care for any of them, no matter how fantastical and unique they are described to be. The main character accepts even the weirdest events as if they were the most ordinary, never questioning anything that happens. All other characters are archetypes - they're special, unique, and do not act or think like ordinary human beings. The whole thing perplexing and difficult to follow.
To top everything it all ends with a cliffhanger, indicating that it's just a first novel in a series - the second volume is already announced and will be published later this year. This was not the case when I discovered this book, and I read it with expectations that it's a fully self-contained story - that it's not the case is even more disappointing. I can't really recommend this to anyone, and the only things which save it from 1 star is my love for dystopias and the author's occasionally good surreal imagery. I just wish there was more in these pages to care about - such as a good story!...more
World War Z is an interesting project. A self proclaimed Oral History of the Zombie War, the book is presented as a collection of oral interviews withWorld War Z is an interesting project. A self proclaimed Oral History of the Zombie War, the book is presented as a collection of oral interviews with key survivors of the global war against the undead, conducted and compiled by the unnamed narrator (an agent of the UN's postwar commission). Contrary to the geocentrism of most novels concerned with the end of humanity, Brooks is concerned with a World War - his interviewees come from various countries, and their combined testimonies all provide an insight into changes which swept the globe as its result.
Brooks's novel is a double-edged sword. On one hand, his effort at providing an international perspective of the conflict is admirable - most of its literary and cinematic cousins usually focus on a small group of survivors who fight their way through their home country (usually the U.S.), and the rest of the world is is pushed back to provide merely background information - newspaper scraps, bites from television clips - if it's included at all. Brooks's tours the planet, and gathers eyewitness reports from citizens of multiple countries - these range from today's giants to small island nations - and whose roles in the war varied greatly: doctors who saw the first outbreaks, generals who guided their armies in active resistance, and ordinary people who were trying to escape their homes before they turned into their graves.
BUT precisely because of its nature it also has a significant drawback: a lack of a single, unifying thread which would connect all the entries into a coherent narrative sequence. Although Brooks maintains relatively stable chronology the book remains a series of relatively short individual accounts, independent from one another, which literally jump all over the planet from one spot to the other. Brooks doesn't give himself either the time or space to get his readers emotionally invested in the fate of his characters; there are no heroes to root for or antagonists to root against. Although he tries to diversify his cast of interviewees as much as possible, he doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off. By nature oral storytelling is very intimate - the collected story is presented as a verbatim account as told by the person, inseparably tied to his/hers character, mood, style, age, culture, ethnicity, nationality, social class, education level ...the amount of factors which have to be included and emulated by an author who attempts to present his story as a whole series of such diverse accounts is enormous, and requires copious research along with considerable linguistic skills. It is then perhaps no surprise that the diverse people of World War Z sounds suspiciously similar to one another, and all point toward the same person writing them. This doesn't have to be a criticism of Brook's style - it's the criticism of precisely that style as being transparent in all these accounts, which should be diverse and unique. Some of the depictions border on cliches ranging from the known and tiresome - tough military generals, corrupt doctors, tough army chicks - to almost dumbfounding: there are two Japanese characters in this novel, and one of them is a blind ninja-zen master, who fights the zombies with a stick. The other just uses an ordinary Katana he finds in an apartment, and later becomes the blind man's apprentice. No joking.
Since we know in advance that humanity ensured its survival, all we really have left is to discover how they got there. While Brooks aims to present his story from different locations, he falls into his own booby trap and is unable to develop any real tension. Brooks's interviews read like a series of disconnected vignettes - a series of half-finished ideas, employing themes and methods familiar to the genre but not nurtured enough to stand on their own as separate stories, lacking both character and plot development. It does not help that the reader is totally dependent on the characters to fill him in on every small detail, and in places the book turns into nothing more than a big infodump - buying the interesting moment under a heavy amount of (often technical) slog.
Last, but not least: It's obvious that Brooks thought for a considerable amount of time at how the world and individual people would react to and change after such an epidemic, the social and political commentary still comes out as localized and rather ham-fisted. (view spoiler)[Just look at what's happening in the Middle East: Iran not only is a nuclear state, but also uses its nuclear weapons to nuke Pakistan out of existence after the Pakistanis are unable to stop the flow of their sick refugees into Iranian territory. Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons in real life) nukes Iran right back, and both nations wipe each other out of existence. Israel, on the other hand, is shown to be as almost fantastically benevolent and humane - in the novel only Israel knows how to protect itself from the plague by erecting proper fortifications along its borders, and not only doesn't nuke any other nation (which is ironic, considering the fact that it's the only nation in the Middle East which actually has the capabilities to do so) but also takes in all Arab refugees who have a clean bill of health (not zombified). Technically they had to be Palestinian, but nobody really checked. The two sides kiss and make up for past conflicts, and go on to form a new country called "United Palestine" (Wonder if Brooks remembers the name of the Israeli PM who said that there was no such thing as Palestinians). This turn of events jumps out of the blue in a book which clearly aims to mimic real accounts, but it uncannily resembles actual relationships between the U.S. and both nations - the long-lasting and extremely generous support and approval of Israel and its actions, and the demonization and vilification of Iran - it being included by president Bush as one of the three countries in the Axis of Evil, and with the Obama administration making remarks about their "deep commitment" to preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which includes possible U.S. military action. Perhaps it's just me, but this makes me shiver and remember all the fearmongering of the early 2000's which was based on Saddam supposedly having nuclear weapons in Iraq, and the subsequent invasion of said country. Remember how well that went? There's more of this kind of perspective: Cuba is OK because it turns democratic and Castro votes himself out of power, and becomes the world's most vibrant economy. China also becomes democratic and gives total independence to Tibet, which becomes the world's most populated city. Not all nations are so lucky. The Saudis burn their oil fields (???), and there's no grand Korean reunification party - North Koreans disappear from the face of the planet, and it's suggested that they might have gone underground to pursue more communism with their Dear Leader. Russia is actually called "Ivan" by some of the characters, and this kind of sympathy prevails for the country - Brooks has it establish a theocracy at the end of the book, and start annexing the former Soviet territories in an attempt to restart an Empire. The Russians also turn their women into walking incubators - it's implied that they're killed after they can't breed anymore. Interestingly, not a word is said about all the crazy religious zealots from the Bible Belt, and such a scenario is particularly interesting to read when American conservative politicians push for restricting abortion, access to contraceptives and even sexual education in their country. (hide spoiler)]
in the end, the greatest flaw of World War Z is that it's too isolated from itself - some of the vignettes contain ideas which would greatly benefit from further development, but it never happens. Brooks could have added or subtracted 20 chapters from his work, and nothing of value would be gained or lost. World War Z reads like a collection of non-connected and unfinished short stories: while they're definitely readable and often well-constructed, they simply lack the weight to stand on their own and make a proper impact. As I mentioned before, the effort needed to create a work of fiction resembling an oral history is enormous, and I think that Max Brooks simply set for himself a too big task, and had to resort to simplifying it - and published the book, for better or worse, looking as it does. It can be intriguing to those interested in apocalyptic fiction, but it's a hardly groundbreaking or life-changing reading experience....more
Martin Amis hates nuclear weapons. With a passion. He doesn't know what to do with them and would rather they did not exist in the first place. And whMartin Amis hates nuclear weapons. With a passion. He doesn't know what to do with them and would rather they did not exist in the first place. And who can blame him? Einstein's Monsters, a collection of five stories dealing with people living under constant threat of a nuclear war and survivors of nuclear apocalypse was published in 1987.when the Doomsday Clock stood at just three minutes to midnight - its closest position since 1953, when the clock stood at two minutes when both the Soviet Union and the United States detonated nuclear bombs within months of one another. Exactly ten years after that the world held its breath for thirteen days during the Cuban Missile Crisis; thirty years later it's deep Cold War, and the two superpowers are at race with one another to strengthen their nuclear capabilities even further. And the clock is ticking, ticking...
Amis prefaces his stories with an essay titled Thinkability, a heated introduction, seeing the world enter a state of perpetual paranoia as a result from the invention of nuclear weaponry and man's struggle for more of it. Nuclear war is seven minutes away, and might be over in an afternoon - Amis's essay full of anxiety at the face of what he considers to be an unsolvable situation: What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. Thinkability is a show of frustration, as Amis sees the world with nuclear warheads as being engaged in a perpetual Mexican standoff, since we opened the Pandora's box and can't possibly hope to close it again. Amis fears not death itself, but that it could come as as a conclusion to the horrifying reality of a nuclear war, which in his eyes nothing else could match in its monstrosity: Events that we call "acts of God"-floods, earthquakes, eruptions-are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here.
Unfortunately, none of the stories contained in Einstein's Monsters match the intensity of Thinkability, and all lack its directness and urgency. It's clear that Amis, although an acclaimed novelist, is not a writer of science fiction and quite possibly not a short story writer either; in these stories he seems to struggle with finding a way to best use his ideas and themes, but fails to do what other have achieved both before him and since - create a narrative which would not just be a background for his ideas but would be a world of itself, filled with people who live and breathe on their own and are not just playing their part. Amis's stories here are far too allegorical and seem almost like pastiches, full of half-finished ideas and scenarios. Two of the stories are set in a world tottering on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse, and three in one in post-apocalyptic reality. The first story, titled Bujak and the Strong Force, or God's Dice attracted my attention immediately, since one of my university friends' nickname was Bujak and I wondered where did Amis come up with such name? Bujak of the story was also a Polish man - here I begun to feel uncanny - who tracks down Nazi colaborators after World War 2, and whose personal hero is Einstein. Bujak lives in South London and has the gift of the "strong force", meaning literally being strong as an ox. Interestingly enough Bujak is opposted to using it, and his opposition to use of said force comes from him attributing all the evils of the world to Einsteinian strong force - knowledge of nuclear energy. The allegory is heavily handed throughout, and the ending doesn't help it. The rest of the stories are interesting but suffer from the same symptoms: they don't quite seem to fit the subject they're describing. Insight at Flame Lake features Dan, a schizophrenic boy who stays with Ned, his uncle, after his father - who worked with delivering nuclear weapons - has committed suicide. The story consists of Dan's and Ned's respective diary entries, but the link to apocalypse and nuclear dangers is almost non-existant. The Time Disease is reminiscent of Amis's famous novel Time's Arrow, where the protagonists experiences time backwards - a play on Benjamin Button. In this story the narrator's wife has come down with the time disease - a disease which reverses the aging process and restores vitality, which is unwanted as all humans want to do is grow older, ill and die in a bizarre post-apocalyptic world. An interesting idea, but I fear that it's all there is to it - especially when a very similar concept has been done before by the same man. The Little Puppy That Could obviously takes its title from The Little Enginge That Could an is a parody on a children's fable, where a society is preyed on by a giant mutated dog which eats one human a week. Personally, I thought that Harlan Ellison had a more interesting idea with his famous short A Boy and his Dog, where a boy and a dog work together as a team in a post-apocalyptic world. Ellison's protagonists, both human and canine, are memorable - Amis's story vanishes from memory rather quickly. The last story, The Immortals, is probably most interesting of the lot - narrated in the first person by an entity which claims to be immortal and which narrates the end of time, as the last of humanity came to New Zealand to die from radiation poisoning after nuclear warfare. This being has existed for millions of years and observed the development of earth and evolution of life, observing humanity from the outside and offering scathing commentary: Just as I was thinking that no century could possibly be dumber than the nineteenth, along comes the twentieth. I swear, the entire planet seemed to be staging some kind of stupidity contest. I could tell then how the human story would end. Anybody could. Just the one outcome. The story is conceptually interesting and unlike other stories - with the exclusion of Little Puppy - is not narrated nor deals with any concrete characters; the unnamed immortal entity, an outside observer of humanity and its follies is a perfect way for Amis to employ his own famous ironic and biting voice without having to bother with writing it on cue cards of his characters or employ any sci-fi tropes. It reminded me of my favorite Ellison story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream which is never a bad thing. The narrator of the last story can be Amis himself, as indeed unlike him his words are immortal, and what he has written in these pages can never die.
Ultimately, Einstein's Monsters contains a quite good introductory essay and two good stories, with The Immortals being the best of the bunch - curiously also being the Most Amis-like piece. It is however quite dated, as ironically in 1988 both the Soviet Union and the U.S. would sign treaties eliminating immediate-range nuclear forces and their relations would improve, and in 1991 the Soviet Union would dissolve altogether. However, in 1987 a year of fear of living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud could feel like a lifetime, and nuclear weapons are indeed here to stay,and we can't ever uninvent them. More remarkable fiction about the dangers and consequences of nuclear warfare has been written - such as Nevil Shute's sad and affecting novel On the Beach - and a reader interested in the topic would be better advised to skim Einstein's Monsters for its introduction and one or two stories, and read the grand classics instead....more
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