Curious, that. I hated Bester's The Stars My Destination, for much the same reasons as are outlined in the last five paragraphs of this review. The wonder show of technology has been entirely lost for me because of them.
I loved Hugh Howey's Wool, 1-5 in the Silo series. Parts of it are too painful to ever re-read, but I'll probably still do it. It's raw, it's intense, it commands empathy, and also -- there you have it -- there is the subtle romance.
I loved Hugh Howey's Wool, 1-5 in the Silo series. Parts of it are too painful to ever re-read, but I'll probably still do it. It's raw, it's intense, it commands empathy, and also -- there you have it -- there is the subtle romance.
Comments
Here, I've started putting my unhappiness into words:
"I could have liked this. For one, ‘jaunting’ is a great word. Bester puts thought into how the society would have changed with this discovery: protecting locations, building mazes and rooms with no doors or windows, the very rich preferring other means of transportation since jaunting is so simple and cheap every commoner can do it, et cetera. He puts thought into the tight coil of a plot. Among the ideas packed into the book are various kinds of cyborgization (for speed, for perception in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on), remote operations, and what a synaesthete could feel. Wikipedia mentions that ‘Bester's description of synesthesia is the first popular account in the English language’, and that’s quite something.
But I didn’t like it. Reason number one: women.
Women are no more than stage props, there to be raped or used or lusted for (Gully’s feelings towards Olivia are certainly not love). These women will flare up as needed, forgive as needed, and in general appear on stage to perform some service or disservice for the main character much in the way of the android in the last few pages, first springing to relevant life and then winding down into stillness as soon as the needed function has been performed. They are empty. Male characters other than Gully himself are equally empty, but they at least appear to have agency. The women do not. Jisbella attaches herself to the next convenient male. Robin is violated, then ‘forgives and forgets’. Why, Robin? Whatever possessed you to say you forgive and forget?"
In a certain sense, this is a book about Gully Foyle: he is a Gulliver, of course, thrown in a strange land of creatures who can never be known. Everybody else is a stage prop - any emotion we feel toward other characters is incidental.
You're wrong, however, to assume that this social fantasy is undermined by the simple fact that women can jaunt. Women can walk, too, and yet the nineteenth century saw the proliferation of invalids: women with "weak" nervous systems, who spent their lives in beds and wheelchairs. The ability to do something is less important than the social constructs that frame the ability in question. Robin works (she teaches jaunting!), but Robin is lower-class. Why on earth would a higher-class woman, brought up in fear of the world, kept as carefully as a glass vase, would want to jaunt somewhere on her own? Bester has very good historical precedent for this.
As to walking and jaunting, I think they aren't really comparable. Jaunting is that much more freedom, and most women are not from the high classes.
Yes, I emphasized with him fully. Not sure what that says about me. :)
Hmm. Are you by any chance plotting terrible revenge? :)