Anodyne
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
 

Recent reading, particularly notable titles in red as usual:

Ian McEwen, Enduring Love
Frederik Pohl, The Boy Who Would Live Forever

The Pohl is a Gateway novel, his first in sixteen years, a kind of potpourri, stirring various unresolved plot elements together. The book doesn't flow particularly well -- it's more a collection of thematically linked short pieces, a la 1990's The Gateway Trip -- but there are some strong sequences, including a piched Iain Banks/Alistair Reynolds-style space battle fought by machine intelligences, and an account of building a huge space telescope, just in order to watch a supernova eat an inhabited planet.

The McEwen's plot ticks steadily like clockwork, but its jumps between the various characters' points of view work well, as do the plot points concealed in the fake "documents" inserted into the text's body.
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 PM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }