I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (OCTOBER 2020 EDITION)
And we’re getting our reading done somehow.
Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I generally like Bruce Sterling’s non-fiction and short stories, but his novels are a mixed bag - some are good, others are big on ideas but light on character and plot. Still, I keep coming back to him because the ideas are the hook, and it’s nice when they pay off. Which is more or less the case here with this novella that ostensibly imagines an alternate history for the Free State of Fiume, a real pirate utopia founded after WW1 by Futurist pirates and poets that was also the birthplace of Italian fascism.
The real Fiume lasted four years (1920-1924) - Sterling explores the possibility that it would have lasted longer with a little help from the US. The story follows Lorenzo Secondari, the “Pirate Engineer” who is a hardcore Futurist with dreams of building remote-controlled flying torpedoes and other high-tech military weapons. As he and his fellow Futurists make plans for Fiume’s greatness on the world stage, Sterling rearranges the chess board so that certain future world leaders get sidelined early and a team of US spies (which includes Harry Houdini, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard) comes calling with plans for a grand alliance.
There’s not much story here, and I would really recommend spending some time Googling “Futurism” and “Fiume” as a prerequisite if you’re going to get past the surface. But it’s a fun, dive into gonzo authoritarian politics that feels even more relevant in 2020 than it probably did in 2016 when it came out - so much so that Sterling’s deceptively light-hearted and cartoonish take on violent proto-fascist militarism might put some readers off. Meanwhile, there’s also entertainment value in trying to figure out how much of this is true vs how much is made up. If nothing else, you’ll learn about an obscure slice of post-WW1 history. Credit also to the Futurist-inspired art design from British illustrator John Coulthart.
Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen by Kage Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Kage Baker before - not exactly. Back in the Stone Age I started a Wattpad version of her first Company time-travel novel, In the Garden of Iden, but didn’t get far because, frankly Wattpad was a terrible format for e-books. I liked what I read enough to be open to trying her again, and as it happens, my first opportunity to do so wasn’t her fiction, but this collection of silent film reviews.
Baker wrote these for Tor.com in 2009 - which, sadly, turned out to be the last year of her life before she died of cancer in January 2010. It’s a neat premise - Baker was a cinephile who noticed that many silent films drew heavily on SF/F sources, and started a blog series reviewing whatever SF/F silent films she could find copies of. Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon is the obvious starting point, and Metropolis an obvious example, but as the series goes on, she expanded the criteria of SF/F to include anything involving vampires, dinosaurs, magic, Oz, horror and Tarzan.
Anyway, Baker does a good job of highlighting how so many silent filmmakers were poaching Verne, Wells, ER Burroughs and Poe for material, if only because of the visual possibilities. Her reviews are blog-style - i.e. punchy, snarky and opinionated. But she does a good job of not only summing up the plots and evaluating the good and the godawful, but also giving advice on where to find copies of them and (more importantly) which copies to watch, as many surviving copies of these films are missing reels (leading to incoherent narratives) or are in poor condition (though of course that info is likely outdated). If nothing else, her fan-girl enthusiasm for the better films is genuine enough to make you actually want to look for some of these (provided you like silent films).
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Stanislaw Lem is the only author ever successfully recommended to me by an internet quiz meme (i.e. “What SF writer are you?”, or something to that effect). I’ve read and enjoyed a number of his novels and short stories - this is the first of his books tried that is neither. Well, sort of. Here, Lem writes fake reviews of non-existent books. Unsurprisingly, the books are the sort of things he usually writes about - science fiction, philosophy, cosmogeny, technology and scientific theory.
I have to admit, as much as I appreciate the idea, I didn’t get much out of this one. There’s a lot of good ideas and a few good pieces, but many of them go on longer than they probably should. Even with Lem’s penchant for satire and wit, the more philosophical pieces are a slog to get through and perhaps rely on too many academic in-jokes. (That said, Lem pretending to be someone else reviewing and critiquing the very book you are reading is a nice touch.)
The ones that work for me are the reviews of novels that read like treatments for ideas Lem knew he would never have time to write - an ex-Nazi in Argentina recreates the pre-Revolutionary French Court in the jungle; a trio of megacorporations kill sexual desire by making sex the biggest industry on earth; a rewrite of Robinson Crusoe where the hero populates the island with his imagination, etc. Anyway, if you haven’t read Lem, this is not a recommended starting point unless you’re a philosophy major or a literature professor with a sense of humor, then sure, go ahead.
View all my reviews
Books I’ve never read,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1652598.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I generally like Bruce Sterling’s non-fiction and short stories, but his novels are a mixed bag - some are good, others are big on ideas but light on character and plot. Still, I keep coming back to him because the ideas are the hook, and it’s nice when they pay off. Which is more or less the case here with this novella that ostensibly imagines an alternate history for the Free State of Fiume, a real pirate utopia founded after WW1 by Futurist pirates and poets that was also the birthplace of Italian fascism.
The real Fiume lasted four years (1920-1924) - Sterling explores the possibility that it would have lasted longer with a little help from the US. The story follows Lorenzo Secondari, the “Pirate Engineer” who is a hardcore Futurist with dreams of building remote-controlled flying torpedoes and other high-tech military weapons. As he and his fellow Futurists make plans for Fiume’s greatness on the world stage, Sterling rearranges the chess board so that certain future world leaders get sidelined early and a team of US spies (which includes Harry Houdini, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard) comes calling with plans for a grand alliance.
There’s not much story here, and I would really recommend spending some time Googling “Futurism” and “Fiume” as a prerequisite if you’re going to get past the surface. But it’s a fun, dive into gonzo authoritarian politics that feels even more relevant in 2020 than it probably did in 2016 when it came out - so much so that Sterling’s deceptively light-hearted and cartoonish take on violent proto-fascist militarism might put some readers off. Meanwhile, there’s also entertainment value in trying to figure out how much of this is true vs how much is made up. If nothing else, you’ll learn about an obscure slice of post-WW1 history. Credit also to the Futurist-inspired art design from British illustrator John Coulthart.
Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen by Kage Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Kage Baker before - not exactly. Back in the Stone Age I started a Wattpad version of her first Company time-travel novel, In the Garden of Iden, but didn’t get far because, frankly Wattpad was a terrible format for e-books. I liked what I read enough to be open to trying her again, and as it happens, my first opportunity to do so wasn’t her fiction, but this collection of silent film reviews.
Baker wrote these for Tor.com in 2009 - which, sadly, turned out to be the last year of her life before she died of cancer in January 2010. It’s a neat premise - Baker was a cinephile who noticed that many silent films drew heavily on SF/F sources, and started a blog series reviewing whatever SF/F silent films she could find copies of. Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon is the obvious starting point, and Metropolis an obvious example, but as the series goes on, she expanded the criteria of SF/F to include anything involving vampires, dinosaurs, magic, Oz, horror and Tarzan.
Anyway, Baker does a good job of highlighting how so many silent filmmakers were poaching Verne, Wells, ER Burroughs and Poe for material, if only because of the visual possibilities. Her reviews are blog-style - i.e. punchy, snarky and opinionated. But she does a good job of not only summing up the plots and evaluating the good and the godawful, but also giving advice on where to find copies of them and (more importantly) which copies to watch, as many surviving copies of these films are missing reels (leading to incoherent narratives) or are in poor condition (though of course that info is likely outdated). If nothing else, her fan-girl enthusiasm for the better films is genuine enough to make you actually want to look for some of these (provided you like silent films).
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Stanislaw Lem is the only author ever successfully recommended to me by an internet quiz meme (i.e. “What SF writer are you?”, or something to that effect). I’ve read and enjoyed a number of his novels and short stories - this is the first of his books tried that is neither. Well, sort of. Here, Lem writes fake reviews of non-existent books. Unsurprisingly, the books are the sort of things he usually writes about - science fiction, philosophy, cosmogeny, technology and scientific theory.
I have to admit, as much as I appreciate the idea, I didn’t get much out of this one. There’s a lot of good ideas and a few good pieces, but many of them go on longer than they probably should. Even with Lem’s penchant for satire and wit, the more philosophical pieces are a slog to get through and perhaps rely on too many academic in-jokes. (That said, Lem pretending to be someone else reviewing and critiquing the very book you are reading is a nice touch.)
The ones that work for me are the reviews of novels that read like treatments for ideas Lem knew he would never have time to write - an ex-Nazi in Argentina recreates the pre-Revolutionary French Court in the jungle; a trio of megacorporations kill sexual desire by making sex the biggest industry on earth; a rewrite of Robinson Crusoe where the hero populates the island with his imagination, etc. Anyway, if you haven’t read Lem, this is not a recommended starting point unless you’re a philosophy major or a literature professor with a sense of humor, then sure, go ahead.
View all my reviews
Books I’ve never read,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1652598.html. Please comment there using OpenID.