Science fiction
“Spook Country,” by William Gibson(2007, Penguin Group, 373 pages, $15, paperback)
I confess that I’m one of many people who have not read William Gibson’s first novel, “Neuromancer,” so I had little more than the cover art and blurbs on which to build preconceptions when I sat down to read this book.
“Neuromancer,” according to Wikipedia, is one of the seminal works of cyberpunk science fiction, some of which I’ve enjoyed very much.
But “Spook Country” is not science fiction. In fact, it more resembles highly tech-oriented noir.
The book begins with a former rock musician — still famous in the story — named Hollis Henry, who is trying to get started as a journalist. In her first big assignment, she visits the scene of River Phoenix’s death with an artist who asks her to don a visor that looks like a welder’s face-guard. She then sees a three-dimensional virtual-reality recreation of Phoenix’s death scene.
This brings us into the concept of linking virtual reality with global positioning systems, creating the possibility of somehow inhabiting a world that is not at all what it seems.
Within about twelve hours last week, I had seen the latest Pixar masterpiece Wall E as well as read the bulk of Jeanette Winterson’s newest tome, The Stone Gods (Harcourt, $24).
That’s a lot of heavy, bleak post-apocalyptic themes to process on a lazy Sunday. I was a bit surprised how similar the animated tale’s vision of the future is to Winterson’s, though maybe I shouldn’t have been; both stories concern themselves with some pretty typical sci-fi themes: isolation, loneliness, over-consumption, a dying/dead planet, space travel, robots. And both, of course, are about love.
I’ve been a big Winterson fan for a while, so I was looking forward to digging into her latest book. And sure enough, it’s every bit as Wintersonian as I could have expected — visceral, descriptive, nearly poetic narration; crackling banter; stream-of-consciousness observations on the nature of existential things; one story told in many different stories. And so on.
So why did I get to the end and feel disappointed by the whole thing?
“Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates”
By Martin Caidin
First published December 1993, Bantam reissue April 2008
Paperback, $6.99
311 pages
Just in time for this week’s release of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Bantam has reissued a series of adventure novels based on the George Lucas movie character.
I came across five of them in what could be called the “slush pile” of books considered inauspicious candidates for reviewing in TheShelfLifeBlog.com.
I’d had my fill of reviewing books outside my reading “comfort zone,” and wanted something I was pretty sure to enjoy — at least not to actively dislike.
My modest expectations were not disappointed by this book by an accomplished British aviator whose earlier novel, “Cyborg,” was developed into the “Six Million Dollar Man” and “Bionic Woman” TV series.
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Books on Film, Historical Fiction, Mystery, New in Paperback, Review, Science fiction, Suspense
BSI-Starside: Final Inquiries
By Roger MacBride Allen
Bantam Spectra, 2008
Paperback, $6.99
421 pages
If you’re looking for something light, not too disturbing, that combines police procedurals with speculative science fiction, this may be worth picking up.
“Final Inquiries” seems to be the second in a series about a couple of “space-cops,” as it were, in an organization called the Bureau of Special Investigations, which has the duty of looking into crimes involving humans outside of the Earth system and those that involve interactions between humans and alien intelligent beings.
Allen is the spouse of a U.S. Foreign Service operative, and he uses that experience to build interesting details into this particular work, involving high-stakes interstellar diplomacy and death.
The human heroes of the story are Hannah Wolfson, the senior BSI agent, and Jamie Mendez. (Romance isn’t really a factor in this story.)
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