"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (DNF)
I discussed this one briefly in another thread. Not ostensibly SF, but it has ghosts, magic, and ESP, so it's at least arguably on- topic. Relates the history of the founding, life, and death of the fictional village of Macondo and the family stemming from the founder. The narrative style and structure are interesting, but the story and characters are not. Most often, they're just baffling and surreal. If I had to read this for a class, I would not find it an onerous task, but since I'm reading for enjoyment, I quit trying about 3/4 of the way through. As Dorothy's cookbook says, "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom."
"The Android's Dream" by John Scalzi
I enjoyed this quite a lot. It was not exactly what I was expecting given the cover blurb, but that's OK. The cover blurb wasn't all that exciting. The pace is quick, the story pulls you forward, and it's rarely predictable. It's exciting and funny and fun to read. It's not without problems -- The level of violence seemed a bit high for what is ostensibly a farce, the squick factor of the provenance of the "sheep" is a bit high for my taste, and while Harry Creek is one of Scalzi's best characters ever, I wouldn't have minded a little deeper development of some of the others, especially Robin Baker. And the ambiguity of Sam Berlant is distracting -- it's obvious Scalzi is trying to get away without specifying Sam's gender. It works at first, but as the story goes on, some of the passages involving Sam become stilted as Scalzi struggles to avoid using a personal pronoun. As I said, distracting, and it pulls me out of the story.
But these are small problems. It took me a month to get 3/4 of the way through Marquez "Solitude". "The Android's Dream" took me three days to finish. If you've enjoyed any of Scalzi's other novels, you'll probably like this one. If you haven't read any Scalzi, and the first couple sentences in the book don't scare you away, I'm guessing you'll like it as well.
"Neptune Crossing" by Jeffrey A. Carver
I haven't read anything else by Carver. I picked this up as a free ebook at the Baen Library. I liked it well enough that I'm continuing the series. With more free ebooks from Baen.
John Bandicut is a pilot with an outfit mining the alloys left by an ancient civilation on Neptune's moon Triton. He's been badly damaged by some recent hardships, most notably the loss of the "neuralogical implants" that enable him to access the "Datanet" and pilot spacecraft, the result of an accident combined with incompetent medical treatment by the company doctors. The loss of the implants make him subject to bouts of "Silence Fugue", and during such a bout, he wanders far from the mining base to an area on Triton where he's not supposed to be.
There he encounters the "translator" and meets a "quarx". The exact nature of these... creatures? artifacts? things? ... is never completely revealed, but the quarx takes residence in Bandicut's brain, and together they undertake a mission to save the Earth. From what, or how, they're not quite sure yet...
The nature of the relationship between Bandicut and the quarx (whom Bandicut calls "Charlie") has echoes from Hal Clement's "Needle", which I read about 30 years ago. Much of the first quarter to half of the book is Bandicut and Charlie getting to know and trust one another. Sadly most of the rest of the book doesn't have these echoes. The major flaw in the book is that most of the action (though not all) takes place in Bandicut's head, and most of what goes on in there is "Woe is me" and "What's going on?"
So it's not as good as "Needle", or at least not as good as I remember "Needle" being. There aren't a lot of real surprises, though there are a few tense moments once the adventure gets underway. The story holds together, the characters (the human ones, anyway) are believable, and the author isn't trying to trick us. Things happen that (I feel) deserve more explanation, such as the events in the chapter titled "Memory Death", and the book ends abruptly (if at all) with a 2 page lead-in to the next book.
One particularly sour note is the author's use of made-up epithets in place of something recognizable. Every time Bandicut uses the phrase "Mokin' foke" (and he uses it a _lot_) or uses "fr'deekin'" as an adjective, it jars me out of the story.
But the flaws are tolerable, and I'm not sorry I started. The next book in the series is "Strange Attractors", which so far (about 1/3 the way through) is similar in tone ("Woe is me," and "What's going on?"), but has a lot of interesting ideas floating around. I'll talk more about that when I finish it.
Dave Hansen wrote: > "Neptune Crossing" by Jeffrey A. Carver ... > One particularly sour note is the author's use of made-up epithets in > place of something recognizable. Every time Bandicut uses the phrase > "Mokin' foke" (and he uses it a _lot_) or uses "fr'deekin'" as an > adjective, it jars me out of the story.
That didn't bother me, but the use of wacky punctuation to set off the alien's speech was a major roadblock for me. It was like reading while driving over speed bumps.
On Nov 20, 6:18 pm, Dave Hansen <i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (DNF)
> I discussed this one briefly in another thread. Not ostensibly SF, > but it has ghosts, magic, and ESP, so it's at least arguably on- > topic. Relates the history of the founding, life, and death of the > fictional village of Macondo and the family stemming from the > founder. The narrative style and structure are interesting, but the > story and characters are not. Most often, they're just baffling and > surreal. If I had to read this for a class, I would not find it an > onerous task, but since I'm reading for enjoyment, I quit trying about > 3/4 of the way through. As Dorothy's cookbook says, "Life's too short > to stuff a mushroom."
I haven't read either of the other books, so I didn't read your discussions of them. I would like to say that there is no reasonable way to claim that "magical realism" isn't fantasy. This book is clearly on-topic. I read it a long time ago and I liked it somewhat better than you do. However, the usual arguments given for not classifying it as fantasy amount to one or two tired lines of reasoning, usually a little of each.
1: I like and respect this, so it can't be fantasy. 2: There's no elves, no dragons or whatever ingredient the ignorant critic thinks is central to fantasy.
This book is fantasy and only ok fantasy, at that.
> I haven't read anything else by Carver. I picked this up as a free > ebook at the Baen Library. I liked it well enough that I'm continuing > the series. With more free ebooks from Baen.
> John Bandicut is a pilot with an outfit mining the alloys left by an > ancient civilation on Neptune's moon Triton. He's been badly damaged > by some recent hardships, most notably the loss of the "neuralogical > implants" that enable him to access the "Datanet" and pilot > spacecraft, the result of an accident combined with incompetent > medical treatment by the company doctors. The loss of the implants > make him subject to bouts of "Silence Fugue", and during such a bout, > he wanders far from the mining base to an area on Triton where he's > not supposed to be.
> There he encounters the "translator" and meets a "quarx". The exact > nature of these... creatures? artifacts? things? ... is never > completely revealed, but the quarx takes residence in Bandicut's > brain, and together they undertake a mission to save the Earth. From > what, or how, they're not quite sure yet...
> The nature of the relationship between Bandicut and the quarx (whom > Bandicut calls "Charlie") has echoes from Hal Clement's "Needle", > which I read about 30 years ago. Much of the first quarter to half of > the book is Bandicut and Charlie getting to know and trust one > another.
I started reading it last year and didn't finish. From what I recall of it, I must have lost interest somewhere soon after they met each other.
<bill.re...@taylorandfrancis.com> wrote: > On Nov 20, 6:18 pm, Dave Hansen <i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (DNF)
> > I discussed this one briefly in another thread. Not ostensibly SF, > > but it has ghosts, magic, and ESP, so it's at least arguably on- > > topic. Relates the history of the founding, life, and death of the > > fictional village of Macondo and the family stemming from the > > founder. The narrative style and structure are interesting, but the > > story and characters are not. Most often, they're just baffling and > > surreal. If I had to read this for a class, I would not find it an > > onerous task, but since I'm reading for enjoyment, I quit trying about > > 3/4 of the way through. As Dorothy's cookbook says, "Life's too short > > to stuff a mushroom."
> I haven't read either of the other books, so I didn't read your > discussions of them. I would like to say that there is no reasonable > way to claim that "magical realism" isn't fantasy. This book is > clearly on-topic. I read it a long time ago and I liked it somewhat > better than you do. However, the usual arguments given for not > classifying it as fantasy amount to one or two tired lines of > reasoning, usually a little of each.
> 1: I like and respect this, so it can't be fantasy. > 2: There's no elves, no dragons or whatever ingredient the ignorant > critic thinks is central to fantasy.
Let me offer a third possibility.
"Fantasy" the genre, isn't just "fiction with magic and other stuff that isn't real". Fantasy is a genre with conventions on how to write and present a story. Fantasy attempts to suspend disbelief by creating an internally-consistent imagined universe, even if it follows different laws of nature than ours. If there's magic, it has some rules. Things happen for a reason - even if the reason is "the gods decried so". In fantasy, we need some pretense: either that the story takes place in a secondary world, or that there is a secret history to ours which lets the supernatural roam the streets along with mundanes.
Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange, unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained. There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange things happen to people ostensibly living in our world. In 100YoS, the list of things that happen includes: *A rain that keeps on falling for months, making the air so thick with water fish can swim in the air. *A plague of amnesia that forces people to label everything (foodstuffs, people, furniture etc) lest they forget what they are. *A gypsy bazaar with a working flying carpet.
There is no unifying theme to any of the things that happen, nor is there ever an explanation.
The "flavor", techniques, style and purpose of magical realism is substantially different than that of fantasy, and it caters to a different audience. You may claim that MR is a subset of fantasy if you want, but if you treat genres as something that should help readers find works they would like to read, you should keep them separate.
That said, I believe it's still on topic here, just 'cause.
In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Great and Powerful Michael Grosberg declared:
> Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange, > unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained. > There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange > things happen to people ostensibly living in our world.
So the Stephen King story "Trucks," in which automobiles come to life and kill humans for no apparent reason, is magical realism?
On Nov 23, 10:24 pm, Sean O'Hara <seanoh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Great and Powerful Michael Grosberg > declared:
> > Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange, > > unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained. > > There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange > > things happen to people ostensibly living in our world.
> So the Stephen King story "Trucks," in which automobiles come to > life and kill humans for no apparent reason, is magical realism?
> On Nov 23, 10:24 pm, Sean O'Hara <seanoh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Great and Powerful Michael Grosberg >> declared: >>> Magical realism does not attempt to suspend disbelief: strange, >>> unexplained things happen and the remain strange and unexplained. >>> There is no pretense of a secondary world or secret history: strange >>> things happen to people ostensibly living in our world. >> So the Stephen King story "Trucks," in which automobiles come to >> life and kill humans for no apparent reason, is magical realism?
In article <7108de5a-f9a8-48eb-aea5-0854d3e16...@r31g2000vbi.googlegroups.com>, Michael Grosberg <grosberg.mich...@gmail.com> said:
> The "flavor", techniques, style and purpose of magical realism is > substantially different than that of fantasy, and it caters to a > different audience. You may claim that MR is a subset of fantasy > if you want, but if you treat genres as something that should help > readers find works they would like to read, you should keep them > separate.
Q: Is it true that one of the major traits of magic realism is that bizarre things, wholly outside of scientific reality, occur in a universe entirely mimetic of ours and nobody in the story thinks this is strange?
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