READ: The Prince by Tiffany Reisz

15704485Yes. I know. There is a pattern here.

I must admit: I’m a fan. As I’ve once admitted to Ms. Reisz on Twitter: “I want to be you when I grow up”.

This is the third in the Original Sinners series (see my reviews of the first and second books) and it still is as original and fresh as ever.

The Prince follows directly after The Angel. Nora goes with Wesley to Kentucky to try and work out her relationship with her young, virgin protégé. Back in Connecticut, Soren and Kingsley return to the site of their teenage relationship and discover a secret that endangers Nora.

This book develops through three major parts: Soren and Kingsely as teenagers, Soren and Kingsley now, and Nora and Wesley in Kentucky trying to be together.

To be honest, I was much more interested in the Soren and Kingsley sections than I was with Nora and Wesley. Their relationship is cute, but I have my doubts that Nora will really find happiness with him. A kinkster with a totally vanilla boy? While I get that Nora finds relief from the constant demands of a BDSM relationship, and that it might be a nice vacation for her, it’s obvious that she can’t just choose to be vanilla. She is too wild and too assertive to repress this important part of herself. Wesley, as nice and rich and cuddly and innocent as he is, cannot satisfy her forever. He only answers to part of her needs, and I think that Nora needs a more… varied sex diet.

Soren and Kingsley, however, have a relationship that’s just as interesting and tangled as the one between Nora and Soren. They truly are the holy trinity of New York’s underground, with Soren at the top and Nora and Kingsley both, literally, at his feet. Their story is just as heartbreaking and beautiful as that between Soren and Nora, and it’s truly worth reading through. There is no judgement anywhere in the book, nothing to make us feel like their relationship was somehow wrong or unclean. It felt… purifying.

This is the most brilliant insight of this book, and of this series in general: that love is complicated and that it isn’t the safe and sanitary thing of romance novels. Sex and love are messy and painful, but they are also exquisitely beautiful and a truly human thing that needs to be embraced fully. No puritanical bullshit anywhere here: just love in a variety of expressions.

I can’t stop thinking about Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa of Avila, where an ecstatic Theresa is about to be pierced by the arrow of God’s love. Nora and Kingsley and Soren are all in this tableau, constantly re-enacting this original ecstasy and never able to reach it again, always grasping for God’s pure, unadulterated love that none of them felt in their life, except through pain. The books expose a truth that very few of us ever get to experience, or even believe is possible: that pleasure can come from pain, and that both of them opens up the most direct path to God. The Hindus got it right, but Christian asceticism has shut it out of our culture. That Soren is a Catholic priest, Nora the daughter of a nun and Kingsley religious in his own way simply make this argument more poignant.

I’m waiting, definitely with bated breath, for the final part of the series, titled The Mistressto be published on August 1st. Too long, way too long, Tiffany! But expectation is the best part of pleasure, and we will wait for yours, because this cliffhanger of an ending really sets the stage for an explosive finale.

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READ: Sins of the Angels by Linda Poitevin

10661603Sometimes, you read books not because they seem to your liking at first glance, but because you’ve been learning about the author for some time.

Last year, when I expressed the goal to become a professional writer and maybe write novels, a friend on Twitter suggested I follow her friend Linda Poitevin, an Ottawa-based urban fantasy novelist.

So after a few months of reading her tweets and hearing about her book series, The Grigory Legacy, I picked up the first of them, Sins of the Angels, from the library.

All in all, this book gave me an entertaining time. Given my previous experience with urban fantasy, I wasn’t expecting much, but this book was fairly well written and had an actually interesting and plausible (for the genre) plot.

Here’s an overview of the story. A fallen angel finds his way back to the human plane and starts killing humans to regain his powers. His brother, an angel called Aramael, joins up with Alexandra Jarvis, a Toronto homicide investigator who’s just lost her partner, to find and stop him.

At first, Alexandra wants nothing to do with her new partner, but an inexplicable electricity between them, and several strange visions when she’s around him, tell her that this is no ordinary man… and that she is no ordinary woman. Follows a convincing investigation with high personal stakes.

In general, the book was pleasing. There were some really good action scenes, and I liked how Alexandra was portrayed: independent and taking no bullshit from anyone. Aramael seemed a bit boorish and single-minded at first, but his character develops throughout, and we can see a more flexible angel peeking through at the end.

The potential love story between Aramael and Alexandra, however, sometimes felt a little too convenient. Of course, it’s a convention of this type of book that there should be some kind of love interest for the heroine. But the whole “it’s fated” thing was a little easy, I think. Basically, because of their resonant energy, the developing feelings between the two of them are described as pretty much inevitable and out of anyone’s control. While I can appreciate that sometimes that’s the way love is, I would have liked to see a little more agency on Alexandra’s part. She doesn’t really like him, after all, despite appreciating the Greek perfectness of his body from the very beginning. I find there’s a big difference between finding a man attractive and falling in love with him.

I liked how Poitevin incorporated the secondary plot, Jarvis’ colleague’s struggles with a very magnetic priest and a strange disappearance in one of Toronto’s most prominent families. I was actually intrigued by her character and would have liked to learn more about her. These passages were a clever way to give us an idea of the bigger picture surrounding Jarvis’ investigation.

I haven’t yet read the second book, and I know the third is slated for publication very soon. Overall, Sins of the Angels was a quick and pleasant read, not too complicated but interesting enough to keep my attention for its duration. It’s refreshing to see a good detective story set in Toronto that isn’t Flashpoint.

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READ: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

26146This book was suggested to me a while ago by my friend Raul. I was having an existential crisis, you see, and I was wondering how to bring meaning to my life.

Viktor E. Frankl is a renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a neuroscientist, who developed a form of therapy called “logotherapy”, or therapy of meaning. This type of therapy is meant to reconcile individuals with the meaning of their lives.

But this book isn’t read so much for its description of logotherapy as it is for the Frankl’s personal account of life in concentration camps during WWII.

It’s not the first time I have read such accounts. They are all touching, tragic but also infinitely hopeful. Someone survived to tell us the story. Enough of them survived to tell us many stories.

Frankl uses his psychological training to analyze the mental state of prisoners through three stages: moving in the camp, living in the camp and life after the camp. The organization of the book is thus not chronological: it is thematic.

Through his narrative, Frankl displays the strength of the human heart, the power of love and the importance of meaning in one’s life. Indeed, only those who held on to meaning–a family to love, a project to finish, people to change–were able to survive the camps. 

It’s difficult to review this book in a traditional way because it’s not a traditional story. It was also read millions of times and translated in dozens of languages. The detached, clinical approach to Holocaust survival is different from other Holocaust memoirs I’ve read, and yet speaks to the same experiences. And, as every Holocaust story that’s ever been published, it highlights the worst of human cruelty and the best of human fortitude.

It was a touching story, and yet intellectual at the same time. As you try to grapple with the indescribable human consequences of this darkest of times, Frankl calls on your intellect so you, the reader who didn’t live in a camp, can at least rationally grasp the meaning of such an experience.

Here’s my favourite passage; I’ll leave you on this, I think, as it encapsulates the essence of human life:

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.

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WRITE: New project in the works!

headerHello everyone,

Here’s an exciting update: I’ve finally begun work on my new project, called Writefulness.

It’s still in construction for now, but stay tuned for the official launch date.

What is Writefulness about?

Writefulness is about writing, obviously. It’s about how to become more confident as a writer. It’s not a blogging blog (although we’ll probably talk about it) nor is it a blog for professional writers. It’s just a blog about different aspects of writing and different ways to approach the many writing tasks and opportunities of this hyper-connected world.

You will learn to reflect on your own writing and to respond and react to others’. We will discuss how to consider audiences, or when to write simply for oneself, and the benefits of it all. I will share things I’ve learned along this winding road to writing as a profession… but you don’t need to be a professional writer to gain from this advice.

Basically, this blog is about how to express yourself and communicate with others in writing with more clarity and authenticity, no matter whether you do it in emails, letters, business memos or poetry. It’s about going back to the fundamentals of the why and the how of using language to communicate something.

The Facebook page is already up. I will also make announcements here as the launch date approaches.

I hope you’ll join me!

 

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The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

The Peach Keeper book coverI recently joined a book club here in Victoria, and The Peach Keeper was our first read for March. I think it’s fun that we get to read something as a group to discuss it later–it gives me a reason to read things that I would otherwise have not chosen, or read in its entirety.

Because, to be honest, I often wanted to put this book down and stop reading it. After the first chapter, I knew what the “twist” would be, who would get together with whom, and how it would all end happily ever after.

This book isn’t announced particularly as “chick lit”; it’s categorized in magic realism. However, if this is what general chick lit is like, minus the mysterious 80-year-old murder and magic stuff happening, I don’t really want anything to do with it.

Let’s start with the main character, Willa. Somewhat whiny, without much personality (she seems to have left it in high school, where she was the school’s prankster), you often want to slap her in the face and say “wake up, this dude is hot for you, for the love of God.” It seemed like everything in the story took twice as long to happen as in normal life. And she whines about how she dropped out of college and disappointed her dad, and how now she has to run a shop and how she absolutely can’t be adventurous in any way because dead daddy would disapprove. SE-RIOU-SLY.

Her counterpart, wealthy Paxton, is also a somewhat clueless, whiny rich girl who thinks that driving, drunk, to a gas station squatted by the town thugs is a good idea. In what world is this a good idea?It serves a purpose in the plot, but I didn’t find it realistic. Her character always seems on the verge of a change, and I suppose it does change a little in the end, but I didn’t feel it strongly enough. You could easily see her keep the same sort of life, just not living in her parents’ house.

The male counterparts are also problematic in this book, starting with the elusive Sebastian. Everybody assumes he’s gay. Even Paxton, who’s in love with him, thinks he is. But she can’t stop being in love with him. Fact is (and it won’t really spoil it because it’s kind of obvious) he’s not really gay. A member of my book club brought up this important point: why would he be a closeted hetero guy? If the perception of him being gay brings him problems, why would he not come out as hetero? It seems like the sensible thing to do. And yet, he doesn’t do it until the very end, when it becomes obvious that the book would end tragically without it. It seems like the book wanted to play with sexual identity but failed to recognize the basic heterosexual privilege of our heteronormative society.

Colin, Willa’s love interest and Paxton’s twin brother, is the character equivalent of a cardboard cutout. All we know is that he likes trees, doesn’t like living in Walls of Water, and loves Willa. And he loves her not for what she is now, but for what she used to be in high school. Which poses, again, another litany of problems with how the characters evolve both personally and in their relationships. He just seems like a puppy-eyed fan following Willa everywhere because she was cool in high school, and wants to bring her back to what she was then, without any consideration for the changes in her life and her experiences since then. I don’t know if I’d want a boyfriend like that, to be honest.

The mystery of the book, “who is that skeleton under the peach tree?”, isn’t very mysterious. By page 50 I had already figured out not only the relationship to the other characters, but also the reason and manner of his death. And Agatha, Paxton’s grandmother, seemed way to eager to spill the beans. This part of the book was just a big wet “meh”.

I say quite often that I can’t really bring myself to hate any book I read. I don’t hate this, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for anything else than a beach read. It’s sappy, simplistic and, in the end, unsatisfying.

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READ: The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Before I proceed with the review, let me begin by apologizing for the long silence. The last few months have been emotionally challenging and I have barely found the energy to read, let alone write about it. Now everything is a little better, and I find myself with a need to reconnect with you here, and honestly just write more in general.

13069116Now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about my latest read: The Blondes by Emily Schultz.

This novel, about a PhD student who ends up getting pregnant in the worst of circumstances, caught my attention with its apocalyptic premise (a virus that affects blonde-haired women and turns them into zombies!). It kept me with its strong characters and its pace, but it didn’t quite satisfy me at all the levels I wanted.

I was easily taken in by Hazel Hayes’ character: a studious, somewhat plain young woman with somewhat innocent expectations of love and sex, despite her academic knowledge of women’s objectification in publicity and the media. I enjoyed how transparent and honest she was throughout, and I appreciated how I didn’t have to always second-guess her motivations or her statements. Despite everything she’s been through, she keeps a kind of hopefulness and joy that I, being in the same situation, would certainly never have displayed.

In that sense, maybe she is a little idealized. Not that she is perfect, far from it, but Hazel constantly made me feel like everything was going to be okay. I was happy with her as a narrator, and she kept me coming back to learn more about her adventures coming back to Canada. As a heroine, she is ordinary: not beautiful, not rich, smart but not overly so; just the usual PhD smart. Her appeal lies in this commonness, in our ability, as women who statistically always think ourselves less beautiful than we really are, to see ourselves in her hatred of her hair color, in her uncertainty about her physical appeal and in her discomfort with a body (and a survival situation) that is not under her control anymore.

Just as I can’t prevent you growing inside me, little baby, my skin bulging more around you each week. I can’t stop your growing, can only watch and wait. I’m sure that Grace has left me here all alone on purpose, that this is a power play in the ongoing sad tale of the fallout from my affair with her husband. She’s left me in this, their second home, with all their things–and still I have nothing. She must know that to be alone out here at this stage in the pregnancy is more dangerous for me than anywhere I’ve been.

Hazel’s longing is for belonging, for family. She keeps imagining her best friend Larissa’s family and wishing the perfect mother, father and child would happen to her. But even that idyllic story doesn’t end well, and Hazel must find a different kind of family, one that isn’t printed on pregnancy pamphlets.

Interestingly, the final household of women, one of whom has had a baby with the other one’s husband, reminds me of the end of George Eliot’s Romola, where the same situation is presented as an alternative to men-dominated, morally imperiled families. And if The Blondes is about anything, it’s about the lengths at which women go to please men–and how men react when this turns against them. Women must, again, change their appearance, but this time for their own and everyone else’s safety.

The main focus of the book is on Hazel’s trying to come back home from New York while having to make a difficult choice about her pregnancy. The virus threat is treated as a circumstantial thing, an obstacle in Hazel’s way. This is where the book faltered a little for me. The adventure part was interesting–it was like running away from a part-time zombie apocalypse–but in the end, I was left on my appetite as to the whys and hows of the virus, called “SHV”.

Now, I get what the author tried to accomplished: she wrote from the point of view of an ordinary person, who knows nothing about science or viruses, and who only wants to be safe. However, by setting up such an interesting premise, I felt a bit let down by the lack of clear explanations. I suppose this is where too much realism can hurt fiction: there are rarely ever clear explanations for things in real life, but in a book I like my is dotted and my ts crossed.

But what was fascinating was the characterization of this threat: it affected not only natural blondes, but dyed blondes as well (and only the women). “Blondness” is not simply a genetic threat: it becomes a sociological one. Blondness, as the most common of hair color for models, women actors and women in the media, becomes a symbol of complicity with the system that forces women from all over the world to conform to this ideal of beauty.

When blondness turns deadly, the entire system of inspection, gaze and observation of women becomes sanctioned by the government and explicitly imposed on blondes, or “in-between” colors like Hazel’s red. The fact that some women choose to risk their lives to remain blondes during the outbreak raises an interesting question: why are we all risking our bodies, our minds and our spirits to conform to the image of the ideal female body? Are we not all turning into zombies ourselves?

As a story, this novel is successful enough to keep me reading until the end. The pacing is good, and the framing story (Hazel recounting her homecoming adventures to her unborn daughter) provides a good motivation for her honesty and openness. But where I found it far more interesting (and far too undeveloped) is in its sociological and feminist implications.

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READ: The Angel by Tiffany Reisz

The Angel by Tiffany Reisz coverI don’t especially have the “fan girl” streak in me–people are people, no matter how well they do in any field, and fame isn’t especially attractive to me.

Well, good thing Tiffany Reisz isn’t that famous (not that she shouldn’t be, because, she totally should!) but, SQUEEEEEE.

*Straightens clothes* Sorry about that. Sometimes I can’t control my enthusiasm for something, and my usual calm and even tone goes away.

SQUEEEEE.

I dropped my other reading, a Peter F. Hamilton mammoth of a novel, as soon as I got the message from the library that the e-version of The Angel I’d been waiting for since September was finally mine. Mine. MINE! Well, for 14 days. Not that I needed that much. I read it in 3.

You may remember Tiffany Reisz from my review of her previous novel, The Siren. (If you don’t, FLY, don’t run, to get a copy. Trust me. You can thank me later.)

Okay, enough squeeing. Let’s get to the good stuff.

The Story

Nora, our favourite erotica-writing, switch priest’s lover is back. And this time, she’s training young Michael, a beautiful teenager with a submissive streak, on the estate of the wealthy Griffin Fiske. Soren, under investigation because of the recent retirement of the bishop, wants Nora away from him–and possible scandal. A journalist with a grudge against the Church is after him.

Good sex, shenanigans and emotions ensue. It’s all wonderful and well tied-up but still interesting enough that you won’t want to stop reading.

Did I say there was good sex? There’s good sex. Also, sex in a Rolls-Royce.

The review

Very few books make me cry. But Tiffany Reisz has been two in two. I’m not pulling your leg. And this time, I cried something like 3 times.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here’s a warning: Tiffany Reisz’s world is so vivid, so real and so full of sensual details that it will, sometimes, feel more real that reality. I would stop reading and stumble out of my couch, wondering which world was the dream and which one was real. I was always disappointed to realize that my world was the real one.

I found the tone of this novel more introspective and emotional than the first. I couldn’t help but get in the mind and heart of Michael, and he really pulled me in. His story is touching and beautiful and his relationship to Griffin is absolutely, wonderfully rendered.

Of course, Soren is still there, and so is Nora. Nora is still struggling between her love for both Soren and Wesley, but it’s toned down to leave space for Michael. The following novel, The Prince, will certainly develop the relationship between Nora and vanilla Wesley.

As with The Siren, the writing is terrific. It begins with an hommage to Emily Dickinson:

“Fudge.”

Mostly upside down with her head hanging off the bed, Nora saw the ominous slant of sunlight sliding through the window and across the floor. Soren pushed into her again, and she flinched with pleasure.

I can’t really copy any more because then I’d have to label this blog “mature”. But you can always be sure that with Reisz, you’ll get a great reading, no matter your level of literary knowledge. The sex is plain fun, and always meaningful, and the love story is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. Reisz has a way of conveying deep, moving emotions that I rarely see, even in canonized novelists.

If taught contemporary literature, I’d find a way to sneak in a Reisz novel or novella, because it is that rich and that deep. And I really think you should read her too, no matter your tastes in bed or your level of comfort with erotica. Trust me, it’s worth pushing your limits a little, because Reisz novels are ultimately rewarding.

So, basically, go get that book.

Now.

(The The Kindle edition is currently 3$. Definitely worth the price of a coffee.)

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READ: Amped by Daniel H. Wilson

Amped coverLast week, I reviewed Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse, a great plot-driven science-fiction novel concerning the day the robots take over.

His next book, Amped, became available right after I finished with Robopocalypse, so I got to reading it right away.

The story

In Amped, humans are now separated in two groups: those with neural implants, or “amps”, meant to solve neurological problems such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADD and ADHD, etc. However, some people have now started to get amps as elective surgery, basically overclocking their brain and become smarter in the process.

Owen, the main character, describes his encounter with such an elective neural implant in his third grade class:

Eight years ago a little kid named Samantha Blex missed a week of class. In the first photos on the news, you could see Sam was a little cross-eyed. She smiled a lot through her kid-sized purple eyeglasses. Cute. The kid was all slobber and grubby fingers and grins. Had a habit of putting blocks in her mouth.

That’s why, when Samantha walked back into school after her weeklong hiatus, a lot of the other kids’ parents were scared. Terrified is more like it. A textbook case of fight or flight, with a serious lean towards fight.

See, Sam wasn’t cross-eyed when she came back to class. She didn’t put blocks in her mouth anymore, either. In fact, Samantha Blex pretty quickly demonstrated that she was now the smartest kid in third grade. After a few breathless rounds of testing, Sam turned out to be in the top-hundredth percentile on citywide intelligence test.

The kid had one hell of a week away.

The book begins the day a judgement is passed where Amps are forbidden to enter in contractual relationships with “Pure” humans. The argument is thus: if regular people cannot enter in contracts with mentally challenged people because they can easily manipulate or defraud them, then Amps are in the same situation of power over regular, un-amped humans. Therefore, they should not be allowed to make contracts with people.

This effectively removes any claim to citizenship Amps might have: they cannot rent or buy homes, have jobs or get access to the justice system. They all become nobodies, a little like illegal immigrants.

As you can imagine, a resistance builds, and an almost-civil war ensues.

The review

The structure of Amped is more linear that than of Robopocalypse. It follows Owen, an amp himself (he believes it’s medical, for epilepsy) who ends up living on the run. He witnesses the cruelty of Pure behaviour against Amps, he joins a rebel group, and eventually uncovers a plot that was meant to create a civil war all along.

I didn’t quite get attached to Owen as much as I did the cast of Robopocalypse. The story itself is excellent, featuring technology just advanced enough to be eerily believable. But Owen himself didn’t quite get me. He was a bit whiny, even though he ends up being like super-hero strong at the end. His development was believable, but he just wasn’t sympathetic enough to grasp me.

The plot, however, is gripping. I was most fascinated with the imagined breakdown of society and the racist/essentialist overtones. It was another form of us vs. them, not based on race or gender or origin but rather on the choice to use or not to use a technological device. The bad guys are really bad, and the novel uncovers the deviousness and the dangers of essentialist rhetoric and of religious-like following of political figures.

It was, essentially, an allegory on one (or all) of these things: racism, anti-immigration, homophobia and religious essentialism. Interestingly, the people being rejected, Amps, are inherently stronger than Pures: they are smarter, often stronger and have better control of their bodies and of their minds. Yet, they cannot fight the force of a movement backed up by law. The book did a great job of illustrating the dangers of rejecting a part of humanity because of an inherent characteristic (inherited or chosen). And as a warning, it worked strongly on me.

The writing is, again, very visual. The details are neat and easily imaginable. I could see the trailer camp park, imagine the old stone houses with ivy devouring their walls, and picture the speed and agility of military Amps. It would make a great movie or short TV series. Wilson has a great ability to let us picture his scenes, both static and moving, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he started writing scripts.

It’s a fast read, so even though you don’t end up caring so much about Owen, I know you will care about seeing how the conflict between Pures and Amps develops.

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READ: Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

Robopocalypse coverEver since I heard Daniel H. Wilson in an interview onQ, I’ve wanted to read Robopocalypse. I finally got my hands on a copy from the library.

It was definitely worth the wait.

The story

The robots have become self-aware. They are now out to kill us… or most of us.

The book follows a group of characters mostly involved in the fight against Archos, the artificial intelligence behind the robot uprising. Most important is Cormac Wallace, the rebel who finds the recordings that are described in the novel.

Imagine waking up one day to find that your smart car wants to run you over, or your domestic robot strangle you to death. Technology has its own mind now… and it doesn’t like working for you.

This is the world of Robopocalypse
and maybe our own, soon.

The review

I read this book in at most 3 sittings. I couldn’t put it down. I especially appreciated the echoes of Asimov towards the end (for some reason I remember what I read but barely if at all understood when I was 14 years old… maybe it’s time to revisit the Foundation series?)

The plot was gripping. We know from the beginning that the humans win… but how did they manage? The book answers that question, not totally, but with an excellent sense of how people can connect together despite distance, racial and philosophical differences.

However, I had a few issues with the voice developed through the book. The only distinguishable voices were those of Cormac and Lonnie Wayne Blanton. It’s mostly Cormac Wallace narrating and commenting on some of the recordings, and so I found a little blandness in the voice where multiple characters are involved. It’s not bad, but it was just a bit annoying. At times, I even wondered if Cormac really had access to some elements of the scenes. Although it’s all supposed to be described from an observer point of view, unless otherwise specified, sometimes the third-person POV took over and my suspension of disbelief dropped a bit. But it shouldn’t stop you from reading the book at all.

Here’s an excerpt describing the birth of Archos:

“Archos?” asks the face. The man’s voice echoes in the empty lab. “Archos? Are you there? Is that you?”

The glasses reflect a glimmer of light from the computer screen. The man’s eyes widen, as though he sees something indescribably beautiful. He glances back at a laptop open on a table behind him. The desktop image on the laptop is of the scientist and a boy, playing in a park.

“You chose to appear as my son?” he asks.

The high-pitched voice of a young boy echoes out of the darkness.

“Did you create me?” it asks.

This entire chapter is rightfully creepy, and sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

One of the most fascinating and unusual elements of this novel (considering it is a technology-focused science-fiction work) is the interest in the link between nature and robotics. At one point, a year after the robot takeover, nature is taking control of the environment again, and far from disrupting this balance, as humans do, the robots take advantage and even accelerate it. It is both disturbing (the robots eventually start building nature-inspired machines to access difficult landscape) and hopeful (if only we gave up a little bit of our dependency to technology, the planet could repair itself).

The book also illustrates the counter-intuitive notion that in the case of a robot takeover, cities might actually be safer than the countryside, because nature can be just as lethal as technology. And given that most of us have forgotten how to survive in the wild, it’s not very surprising when you think about it.

But what really shines in this book is humanity. Human resilience and human creativity and human unpredictability. In the face of an apocalypse that we ourselves created, we are able to adapt and fight back. A lot is lost, but a few important things are gained.

I really enjoyed reading Robopocalypse. It was definitely a page-turner with an eerie sense of impending doom, and yet a hopeful ending. But we will only survive if we learn some really hard lessons.

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READ: Mr g by Alan Lightman

Cover for Mr g by Alan LightmanAnother happy random find at the library, Alan Lightman’s Mr G was a surprisingly delightful read. Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist and writer who was the first academic to receive a double assignment in physics and the humanities at MIT.

Such a description might seem daunting, but Lightman’s writing skills are the kind that I wish all academic writers had.

The story

This is not so much a plot-based book as a philosophical fable. One day, Mr g, living with his Aunt Penelope and his Uncle Deva, wakes up from a nap and makes a decision; thus, time begins.

From this single, original decision cascade a number of further creations like space, universes, the elemental laws of physics, atoms, stars, planets and life. Throughout his exploration of creation, Mr g is challenged by Belhol, a shrewd adversary.

The review

If you’ve ever wondered about current theories of creation, this is a great book to get you started. Sure, it’s told from the point of view of a divinity–and forget about the idea a Christian God that you may have. This Mr g is definitely no old white-bearded man living in clouds. He’s young and naive, a genial but inexperienced deity who suffers moral conundrums and questions his own decisions. He is all-powerful, but not all-knowing. He makes mistakes, too.

There is a lightness to this book, something… luminous. In a sense, it illuminates a lot of fundamental scientific and philosophical concepts that may be hard to grasp in other contexts. Take, for example, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. Descartes isn’t especially easy to read or understand, and his argument comes from complex ideas and thoughts.

In this passage, Mr g discusses a planet where the inhabitants have such advanced technology that they transferred their consciousness into small balls of titanium, finally getting rid of their bodies and living a life that’s purely of the mind.

I know that many of these bodiless creatures yearn for the bodies and physicality they once had. They are tormented. They worry that because their entire existence is now interior existence, then the exterior might be only an illusion. Carrying this logic one step further, they worry that even their interior world might be illusion, thatall is illusion. For how could they tell, within the confines of their little spheres, whether anything exists? All they know for sure is that they think. In a certain sense, isn’t this true of creatures with bodies as well?

There you go, Descartes in a paragraph.

Some people have criticised this book for avoiding to answer big moral questions such as “why would a benevolent God let evil and suffering exist”, but I think that one of the points of the book is to show two things: that these questions will never be fully answered and that it is our responsibility as living creatures to figure it out for ourselves. This deity is so large, so powerful, has seen millions of species and civilizations rise and fall–why would it be concerned with the petty wishes of singular entities?

Being more or less atheist myself, I find that his version of God is a version I can live with–the Prime Mover. But beyond that, we’re on our own, and questions of morality and ethics belong to us, not God.

I read this book in two sittings–it’s a short read, and the language, and the concepts, are clear as crystal. It won’t cause anyone any difficulty. It was a nice little philosophical interlude between two more frivolous reads, and I really enjoyed it. I think it’s best borrowed from a library–I wouldn’t buy it, but it’s worth reading nonetheless.

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