The Bookian » Artifice

The Demolished Man

Bookian — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:31:17 +0000

Alfred Bester… a hard-sf writer buried in the body of a florid linguistic dandy. The Demolished Man is one of Besters best known novels, and for anyone who appreciates the density of the Media environment in which humanity finds itself trapped in increasingly smaller concentricitys, a candy store of novelistic complication. Highly psychological, but overlaid with an artifice that seems to be the end result of putting technology into the interface between individual organic thalamaic response nodes. If you know what I mean. – reviewed by demolished

Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker

Bookian — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:53:17 +0000

For those who have read Ruckers novels, many of these storys are familiar, with a few add in tweaks. For those who havent, lord only knows what theyll think. Not a bad collection but I preferred his very early shorts. They had a roughness and less formulaic infectiousness, not that his writing ever lacks infectiousness. A three for homogenity. The novels are better. – reviewed by eigenvector

V.

Bookian — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:29:17 +0000

No, not V for Vendetta, as most readers, or readers of palmpilot blackberry ebooks, under the age of 30 might identify it as. V as in Thomas Pynchon. This V is a mysterious entity, the target of a search by Pynchonesque characters. After a recent re-reading of V, I was awed at the artifice of Pynchons mastery. This was one of his earliest books, and the language and complexity is utterly twisted up. The Whole Sick Crew of contemporary readers must devolve to the earlier age of the 1960s to see through the onslaught of hyper-marketing bohemian language and baroque plottings. Aside from Vineland and the Crying of Lot 49, all of pynchons other novels have remained true to density, a density which seems so much less dense because of being trapped in it. Gotta go, blackberry is ringing. – reviewed by Be Profane