Reviews and Comments

Weiß gar nicht, wo ich über dieses Buch gestolpert bin. Gekauft habe ich es auch bereits vor dem 7. Oktober 2023, u.a. weil mir ähnliche antisemitische Indoktrination ab der frühen Bildung in Büchern wie z.B. "Der Araber von morgen" aufgefallen ist.

Hier Links zu Rezensionen:

• www.perlentaucher.de/buch/abdel-hakim-ourghi/die-juden-im-koran.html
• www.juedische-allgemeine.de/kultur/die-juden-im-koran-neues-buch-ueber-antisemitismus-im-islam/

Some people call this the first SciFi book ever written (in about 1816), and I found out I'm really into 19th century tone of narration.

Yet the plot is not so large that the book should need 200 pages to get through. There are many passages with tedious self-reflection of both Victor Frankenstein and his unnamed "monster". Also, the plot isn't really good - the monster behaves like a gentleman most of the times, he learns exceptional english by listening to a French family etc.

But the "monster" isn't really a monster, it's just made to be one by Victor, his creator who does not fill the role of dad he also has in relation to his creation. The monster kills, but only once enraged and made to be forlorn by Victor himself, and all other humans, who get enraged just by seeing him.

It appears also that Shelley was made to turn this into a novel by her husband, Piercey b. Shelley, and this might explain the unneeded length.

I was reading the 1962 reprint of the 1934 Heritage Press book with illustrations by Everett Henry and an introduction by Edmund Lester Pearson, which is a fantastic issue.

I'm reading the 1962 reprint of the 1934 Heritage Press book with illustrations by Everett Henry and an introduction by Edmund Lester Pearson.

This plot is set on a tourist ship that wants to fly about ten persons around a space station. Bad things happen to the station itself while on that 30 minute cruise around it, and all of a sudden the tourists, their guide and their pilot find themselves as basically the only humans alive in this quadrant of space. The only other living beings are on the space ship that attacked the station before their eyes. And now they are hunted by those attackers.

The plot is fast-paced: the minute it becomes slack, something happens. We get to know all the different tourists on board, and their dark or not so dark personal secrets. And we see them grapple with that big riddle: why was the space station attacked ten years after the war, why did they survive that initial attack of the space station, and is there any chance they can even make it back to Earth or any other planet?

I liked it alot. Will go and see if the author wrote anything else since then.

What Cronin is always good at is drawing you into the story. His great The Passage trilogy is a page-turner that creates a lively world in front of your eyes, with living, real human beings pushing on through a fantastic plot.

And this is obviously a strength of Cronin, for he does it again here. The story and most importantly, the protagonists, draw you in like you're there with them, actually. You want to know how they go on, what happens to them, what lies in their future.

Without saying too much, Cronin also tries to answer a very important question about the way our mind works, and what role dreams play in the maintenance of healthy, clean mind. This will be of utmost importance if humankind ever uses long sleep to, say, send astronauts on long pilgrimage across the vast distances of our universe, to the outer reaches of our solar system or beyond.

So, if you want to see it that way, Cronin was doing near-term mystery in The Passage, and is now doing long-term scifi in this book, yet the story's setting is itself actually much closer to The Passage than to any space opera. It's got not much to do with any SciFi at all.

The Ferryman lives in a future world populated by perfect humans living long and rich lives, before being sent off to be born again and live again. The Ferryman sees people off onto a ferry and welcomes them back again reborn. Where The Passage was a dystopia, the world of The Ferryman is an utopia. Yet The Ferryman dreams, which no one else does, and what he finds out because his dreams don't give him peace, is turning his world upside down, because nothing is really as it appears.

I'm going to read the next Cronin much sooner after its release than I did here, just because whatever Cronin writes is just such a joy to read.

Not the most philosophical SciFi available, but one with focus on fighting. The story is told by a female leader of a platoon of enhanced fighters. This is part three, that ends the Eternity War, and I feel it's only good if you really, really like action SciFi.

What a book, really. We get told the story of how a fourteen year old daughter sees the revenging dead of the killer of her father through, by contracting a US marshal and riding with him into Native territory. The story is told in her voice, with some southern dialect and some 19th century dialect, bringing her Old testament justice, her upraising, her intelligence and stuborness to funny, breathtaking life.

The marshal she obliges to catch or kill the killer is drunken Rooster Cogburn, a survivor of the Civil War who rode with a young Jesse James.

The plot mostly shows us Mattie Ross, Cogburn and the other marshal that rides with them, LaBoeuf. We only shortly meet Tom Chaney, the killer, or Lucky Ned the gang leader he rides with. It takes some wrangling for Mattie to get Cogburn to lift his arse, then to have Cogburn and LaBoeuf accepting her riding with them, until we get to the wilderness, the isolation, the snowy, empty country. But throughout the book, the story is fast paced and funny.

One of the better books I ever read, actually. Concise, single-minded, funny.