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This is only the second of Ian McEwan’s novels that I’ve read, the first being his 1978 novel, the Cement Garden. The Cement Garden surprised me with how well it was written, so when I got a copy of Atonement I decided to give it a read.
I’ve just finished reading Dan Simmons’s “Ilium”. It’s a science fiction novel, set simultaneously in the past and the future, and centres itself around the siege of Troy (called Ilium in Latin, hence the name of the book). The main conceit is that the Greek gods are humanoids (possibly even human) from the distant future, empowered by technology to have godlike abilities. These “gods” are reaching back through time to act out the role of the Greek gods in the Trojan war.
The book is an interesting read, and fun, but pretty much standard science fiction fare. The one science-fictionism that stood out for me is science fiction’s need for unnecessary information. The characters, for instance, are often walking textbooks: Odysseus has the line, “If one of those asteroids — or even a big enough chunk of one — hits the ocean or land, it’ll throw enough garbage in the atmosphere to drop the temperature by sixty or seventy degrees Fahrenheit in a few hours.” While Odysseus could know about asteroids and the effect a large enough impact would have on the Earth, very few people could easily, and off the cuff, tell you that it would be a.) a drop in the range of sixty to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and b.) that this temperature change would take place over merely a few hours. The novel’s omniscient narrator also loves breaking in to a character’s point of view just to add unnecessary information (this limb is a vestigial limb, and this other item has this interesting but unnecessary factoid associated with it) which the view point character clearly doesn’t know. In fact, many of the characters have grown up in a society which seems to have forgotten much of what we today would consider trivial knowledge — such as the world being round — and that seems to actively look down upon obtaining any knowledge at all.
Now I imagine that there are people out there who squee whenever a character or the narrator can drop in unnecessarily detailed information, but doesn’t anyone else find that it just breaks the narrative flow? Aren’t there other readers out there who stop to wonder just how Odysseus knew the exact temperature range and time frame for the after effects of an asteroid impact? Does no one read a throw off remark about how a piece of anatomy is vestigial and wonder what addition that factoid has made to the novel?
I’ve just finished rereading Stardust, partly in preparation for the film, which should be opening sometime soonish here in SA. What really caught me was how gentle the ending is. I won’t give any Stardust spoilers here — I just found it interesting how well Gaiman makes use of anticlimax in his work to achieve an ending far more poignant and powerful than otherwise. I desperately hope that the film has the same ending as the book.
Gene Wolfe has a new book out, and to celebrate I ordered not only that book (the Soldier of Sidon), but the previous books in the series as well (Latro in the Mists). They’re waiting for me to find time to collect them from the post office, and I’m pretty excited about it.
Latro in the Mists is actually a collection of two books. I’d read the first one, Soldier in the Mists, when I was in high school. It was one of those books that stuck with me, even when I could no longer remember the book’s name and had long since forgotten the author’s. Every now and then I’d think back fondly to the book’s premise, and how much fun I’d had reading it. Thankfully I “rediscovered” it while looking through a list of Gene Wolfe’s publications.
Various other books I read in high school stick out in my memory. There was the first fantasy I ever read, Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara (which technically I read in primary school), and the Elfstones of Shannara. I suppose they only stick out because they really were the very first genre fantasy I ever read.
Then there was Stephen Donaldson’s Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The characters have stuck in my memory long after I began forgetting plot elements and the like. I love it to bits, and it’s one of the few things that I’ve reread multiple times.
And there’s the Wizard of Earthsea books, by Ursula Le Guin. I’ve always thought that this was the most magical story I’ve ever read, and every time I reread it I find new ways to look at the characters, and the story as a whole. I’m actually rereading it at the moment, and the quality of the story telling still amazes me.
And then there’s this weeks favourite post secret post.
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