Reviews and Comments

A novel from the 1970s (unwittingly) about the 2010s. Our titular character attempts an escape from the camera of the TV show chronicling her life. Low plot and high concept. Took me several sittings go get through, not due to length or writing style, but rather how sparse the plot is. I love the way Compton doles out information to the reader; it never feels rushed or overbearing.

Compton alternates the perspective between Katherine and the show producer, Roddie. We get separate takes on a lot of the same events, in immediate succession, and it becomes a great device for Compton to explore the impact of events on the producer. It's no accident that Roddie has to undergo an irreversible, shocking change in order to properly 'see' his subject.

Impostorhood is a huge motif - being one, the realization of such, and its rationalization. The leads adopt disguises to be mistaken for an underclass. They gatecrash a private gathering. There's an unholy alliance between the media apparatus and the state that's regularly implied throughout - in almost all cases in the novel, you cannot help but be aware that police business is effectively aligned with the interests of the TV network behind the program. Even the medical field winds up playing handmaiden to the network's interests.

It makes a great comparison work to The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir), and a good companion to Neil Postman's ideas on television.

This can be read in a weekend. I found it compelling: Raymond's style is economic and unassuming. Set around the 2050s after globe-wide political ructions (referred to as the 'Upheavals') have lead to executives involved in fossil fuel production being held criminally liable for environmental damage.

We follow Jack an investigative journalist on a reconnaisance mission whose target is Cave, one such ex-executive, now a fugitive in Mexico. The ultimate aim is to capture a confrontation and send 'justice' raining down on his head. And that's what his novel is really about - what kind of justice is being served, and whether any is being served at all in the fullness of time. The book's title takes a double meaning.

I'd definitely read more by the author.

This novel has no plot, virtually no dialogue and centers on a single character, Des Esseintes, an ailing French aristocrat who has exiled himself to a villa outside Paris in pursuit of a life of decadent fixation on his favourite possessions.

Whether it's the classics of antiquity, the merits of French Catholic authors or the supremacy of plainsong in sacred music, Esseintes' musings go on page after page. You needn't be familiar with the subject matter to get something out of the novel, but you must be curious by nature, otherwise it will quickly infuriate you. The labor of his musings is the point - the book revels in a kind of excruciating indulgence, portraying a listless mind which has made for itself a labyrinth from objets d'art. Three pages might be spent on the changes in Latin vernacular across a range of writers from classical antiquity (much of the book feels like heading down a Wikipedia rabbithole where all the articles are highly opinionated). To borrow from Kipling, Esseintes is someone who has made thoughts his aim.

So why read this at all? Because it's fiercely strange, incredibly silly its own way, and Huysman's prose is beautiful and routinely surprising. The Penguin translation comes packed with supplements including notes, intro, a retrospective essay on the novel by Huysmans, and contemporary receptions from Zola et al.

Well done Tor for kicking DRM to the gutter.

But this is two-and-a-half star affair. All the male characters are one-dimensionally unpleasant save for the love interest. The protagonist, while a bit a of girlboss, does have your sympathy for much of the story, but that goodwill gets drawn way down in the last 60-odd pages, once her background is further detailed. Some of the similes struck me as juvenile; there's a lot of things I'd call the Milky Way before calling it a cum stain.

I like the parallel Ashby draws between the abusive relationship between for-profit vendor and end user, and the abusiveness in relationships, but it doesn't get used to much effect. The company, Wuv, is such a vile vision I have no doubt capital will have it ready to inflict on people by the 2030s. So I enjoyed some of its themes but plot- and content-wise it felt somewhat thin. I would read another Ashby novel but it's going to have come with rave reviews.

This is a quasi-DNF, because I've got the last fifth of the novel to go but it's starting to drag, and the protagonist is worthless. It has the feeling of something quickly edited and put to market (perhaps the author needed to fufil a contractual requirement?). Who knows, it's ancient history now.

It's main point of interest is Vinge's take on the proliferation of augmented reality and mesh network technology, and sadly I find his observations pretty plausible - namely that the infrastructure becomes a theatre of war for state actors, which leads to network balkanization and the subordination of all private ownership of technology to the demands of state (the novel has a tinkerer character who has managed to assemble a PC whose CPU isn't 'in thrall' to the Department of Homeland Security). It's sobering to compare the world in the novel to our current-day situation of nation-states hoarding (and protecting) software vulnerabilities for exploitation, zero-click malware vendors like Pegasus, automated-decision defense systems, etc.

‘When I am taking a walk through the fields and get one of my feet deeper than usual into the mud, I always endeavour to bear it as well as I may before the eyes of those who meet me rather than make futile efforts to get rid of the dirt and look as though nothing had happened. The dirt, when it is rubbed and smudged and scraped, is more palpably dirt than the honest mud.’ ‘I will not admit that I am dirty at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Nor do I, in the case which I describe. I admit nothing; but I let those who see me form their own opinion. If any one asks me about my boot I tell him that it is a matter of no consequence. I advise you to do the same. You will only make the smudges more palpable[...]'

My first Trollope. It's a focused narrative coming in at about 200 pages, concerning a scandal around the private life of Wortle's best employee. I loved the matter-of-fact Puddicombe, a fellow rector of the Doctor's who is used as a sounding board, and hope to see him again in another novel. Trollope's a good observer of contradition, namely stated preference versus revealed preference. The book isn't about the nature of the scandal, which involves bigamy - Trollope intentionally spoils it in the beginning - but rather how the characters deal with revelations, and pinpointing exactly what wider society really finds objectionable about it.

A portrait of a family in 1960s India, elegantly observed; the blurb says 'lyrical' and that's probably the best descriptor for Roy's style. But I found the increasing use of mid-sentence capitalization to highlight the Important Things toward the end a bit offputting, particularly when combined with a host of other choices such as phonetic spellings. Nearly a 4/5