A stupefying sci-fi meditation on mind and matter.
Fabulous computing technologies render profound intellectual concepts totally indecipherable in this debut sci-fi head-scratcher.
Professor Jim Schmitt of the Computational Neurosemantics Lab at the Salk Institute shows science reporter Jane Smith the lab’s Human Visual Cortex Recorder, which records everything that passes through one’s consciousness, real or imagined. (In the story, real-life director James Cameron uses it to make a movie straight from his imagination, without the bother of sets or actors.) It’s eerie as well as handy: one test subject recorded a video sequence of blinking lights, the mere sight of which makes Jane sob. After the disjointed narrative lurches through interludes of mystical talk about a “peaceful planet” near Alpha Centauri and a “Quantum Consciousness Bridge,” Jane begins having online conversations with the Google-Oracle Database System, a repository of all human knowledge that spits out baffling computer-ese and translates it into bromides such as “Make Love not War.” Then Jim and Jane go to a lab under the Australian desert, where real-life luminaries, such as physicist Stephen Hawking, hold forth. More enigmatic conversations ensue, and then a powerful superconducting magnet materializes a cat from the future. Formatted as a play, the story’s speeches and keystroking by impassioned nerds seem intended to get at something about the linkage between concepts and existence. However, it’s impossible to say exactly what that is, as it’s couched in impenetrable babble, including philosophical assertions (“The most important question you can ask is whether Something includes a Concept”) and Dungeons & Dragons-like text (“A Human in First World can have Form Skill in Second World, only by having Pure Form Skill in the Transcendence Form Field and by creating a Form in Second World using a Non-Human in Second World with Form Skill but without Nod Skill”). There are also reams of babble from the GODS computer—“A Third Something in Existence, said Third Something including a First Something in Existence and a Second Something in Existence”—that drone on for chapters. Mathiassen is a courageous writer, unafraid to potentially baffle readers. Some of his conceits sound like they could eventually ripen into interesting thought experiments. However, few readers may stay awake to find out.
A stupefying sci-fi meditation on mind and matter.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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