Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic.
A sprawling disquisition on “the higher harmonics of the sloshing” and other “polycosmic theories” that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own.
Stephenson (The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune—and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the “anathem,” a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. It’s a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed “the Terrible Events” of a thousand-odd years past. Our hero is set to an epic task, but it’s no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers; more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. The hero’s quest affords Stephenson the opportunity to engage in some pleasing wordplay à la Riddley Walker, with talk of “late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt” and “Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies,” and the like, and to level barrel on barrel of scattershot against our own time: “In some families, it’s not entirely clear how people are related”; “Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures”; and much more.
Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147409-5
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society’s assumptions.
The HSS Matilda is a massive spaceship that has carried a small contingent of humanity for many years away from a destroyed Earth and toward a hazy vision of a promised land.
Over generations, the ship’s decks have become harshly segregated by race and prosperity, and the corrupt leadership of the upper decks has imposed increasingly cruel rules, restrictions, and forced labor on the darker-skinned residents of the lower decks. Aster is an angry and strange young woman of the lower decks who struggles with deeply rooted anger and sadness but also provides medical care to her shipmates with great skill and compassion. When the ship’s sovereign falls ill and Aster’s friend and mentor, the Surgeon General Theo Smith—a member of the leadership class—asks for her help with his treatment, Aster finds herself thrown into the investigation of a personal mystery that is deeply entwined with the fate of the ship. A seemingly inexplicable link between the sovereign’s illness and her mother’s suicide 25 years earlier sends Aster on a dangerous search for answers that threatens to upend her understanding of herself, fuel an uprising, and open up the never imagined possibility of escape. Solomon’s characters are solid and easily likable, even when their more abrasive qualities and lack of self-reflection add exasperating misunderstandings to the plot. The HSS Matilda is a well-crafted world, and while the tyrannical regime of its leadership feels like a familiar dystopic trope, the diversity of the people who inhabit it—their various sexual and gender identities, physical abilities, and psychological burdens—is refreshingly visible and vital even as they face brutal discrimination for their differences.
An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society’s assumptions.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61775-588-0
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.
If you don’t have a woeful countenance already, this knight’s tale will slap one on you right quick.
It’s 1483, and down in Cornwall, a knight is writing a farewell to his children against the possibility that he may fall in battle in a war against the Thane of Cawdor. Not the one whose title King Macbeth usurped 400 years earlier, it would seem—though, given the anachronistic nature of this book, anything’s possible. Take, for instance, a moment just a few pages in, when our seasoned and grown-up knight, settling into his yarn, recalls that the knight to whom he apprenticed as a young man began his tutelage with a nice cuppa. That’s all very well and good, except that tea was unknown in the Middle Ages; a stickler will tell you that it first turns up a century and a half after the events actor/novelist Hawke (Ash Wednesday, 2002, etc.) recounts. That’s either magical realism or sloppiness, both of which this latest effort abounds in. Take the nostrum that Good Sir Knight Senior imparts to Junior: “You are better than no one, and no one is better than you.” All very nicely egalitarian, that, but a bit out of step with the elaborate hierarchy of medieval equerry and nobility. And more: “The simple joys are the great ones. Pleasure is not complicated.” Tell it to Abelard and Heloise, oh Obi-Wan. Elsewhere Hawke merrily (and again anachronistically) stuffs in a well-known Buddhist tale, the punch line to which is, “I set that boy down hours ago, but I see you are still carrying him.” Ah, well. By all appearances, Hawke aspires to write a modern Siddhartha, but what we wind up with is more along the lines of watered-down Mitch Albom—and that’s a very weak cup of tea indeed.
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-96233-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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