Tag: audiobooks

Micro Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

I was reminded of this book while reading the short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, which was reprinted in Trigger Warning.

I realized I’ve read very little of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, and I thought I should fill this void a bit.

Given the crazy amount of stuff he wrote, I would have been troubled to choose. Likely, this one has the catchiest title.

In some ways, it was exactly the story I expected: Small Town America gets in touch with capital case Evil. A Carnival is involved, which seem to be a scary thing in US pop culture, like clowns. Or perhaps they started being scary with this story, it’s hard to tell.

The story has kids in it, so, to me, it felt like going home. How many stories I’ve enjoyed, of kids dealing with the supernatural in small american towns? From King’s “IT” to Netflix’s “Stranger Things”, I’ve visited this topos a hundred times.

And as usual, I enjoyed it. I didn’t find this book particularly original (could be a case of Once Original, Now Common), but it is certainly well written and entertaining, the characters are lively and the dialogs feel real. I also feel I missed some sub-text and meanings, so I welcome anyone who’d like to point me to some literary analysis of the work.

It did not leave me wanting for more tho, so I think it’ll be a while before I move on to other Bradbury works.

Vote: 6.5/10, good, just not as good as I expected.

Micro Review: Way Station

I don’t have proof, but I think the ’60s had the best sci-fi. Looking at the list of Hugo Award for best novel there’s not a book in the ’60s which isn’t absolutely great. But I have not read them all, so I decided to pick up the missing ones.

I think this one is free if you have an audible subscription, so if audiobooks are your thing give it a go.

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak is one I missed. The premise is quite original: Enoch Wallace is an American civil war veteran who ends up managing an interstellar traveling station in his house, apparently made immortal, and being more in touch with aliens who pass by than with his own world.

I won’t give spoilers, but the book seems to have a few ideas that may have deserved a better exposition, and some things seem just a bit forced. Enoch is a wonderful character, but there’s basically little else.

Still it’s a an original and optimistic piece from 80 years ago, and I enjoyed it.

Vote: 6.5/10, you can’t go wrong with the ’60s sci-fi

Micro Review: You Like It Darker

Following up on my summer trend of reading short stories, I got this recent collection of Stephen King’s short fiction.

I remember reading Night Shift when I was a kid (my dad loved King, and we had plenty of his books around) and it’s probably one of the things that stayed with me the most from that era.

I mostly forget everything I read, but I can still remember most of the stories in tt. I like to think it’s because they were really, really, good.1

Quitters, Inc may be my favorite short story after Asimov’s The Last Question and Brown’s Sentry, it’s just so powerful.

Anyway, when I noticed there was a new short story collection I decided to give it a go. And well, Stephen delivers.

If you haven’t read a lot of King and you’re only familiar with It or Cujo, you may think he’s mostly an horror writer. But he’s not, in fact his best fiction (see Quitters, Inc) is speculative fiction at it’s best.

It’s our world but a little off . A little something that makes it uncomfortable, scary, or just makes you think harder. Just like in Night Shift, some stories have zero paranormal and are just unsettling. Unlike Night Shift, many (most?) stories seem to have a positive ending.

I guess Stephen got softer with age, just like me.

Vote: 7-/10, not all stories are great, and overall this is not as good as some of his older collections, but it’s still good.

  1. . Rather than think my memory was better 20+ years ago. ↩︎

Micro Review: Trigger Warning

Some time ago I listened to Neil Gaiman’s short story collection Smoke and Mirrors and I liked it and thought I should read more like it. So I did, and I listened to Trigger Warning.

This collection is just as good as the other one: a few stories are fantastic, most are good, some are meh. It’s been a few months since I went through this, and like for most short story collections I have since forgotten most of them.

Still, I recommend it. There are occasional poems in it. Many stories refer or happen in worlds by other authors, so you may enjoy them more, or less, if you are familiar with the source material. But this is just normal for Gaiman stuff.

There’s also a short story where we meet again Shadow Moon, the protagonist of the (wonderful) novel “American Gods”. But somehow stuff happened to him between that novel and this short story. That’s cause there was another collection between this and the other one I read, and for some reason I skipped it.

It is one of the blessed rights of readers, to read books out of order.

Vote: 7/10, I need to get more of his other short story collections, possibly in order.

Micro review: The Atrocity Archives (The Laundry Files, book 1)

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go.

I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist and governments have secret departments in charge of keeping the world safe. I like this premise already.

But it’s a well trodden trope, and what differentiates this from, say, Hellboy, or Man in Black§ is that it’s crossed with the “bureacracy rules the world” meme.

These aren’t your all-action cool guys with magic weapons and super boomsticks, these are the policemen at the embassy when you try to renew your passport. It’s a government job, it has its own quirks, but it’s not glamorous.

Given all these premises, I should have loved the book, but I didn’t.

I found it pretty predictable, the humor uninspired and a bit too much of the “I know about IT, so here’s a joke about it, wink wink” stuff.

This is a pretty long series so it may get better in later books§, but I’m not sure I’m going to give it another try.

Vote: 6.5/10, not great, not as bad as things from the dungeon dimensions.

Micro Review: Smoke and Mirrors

This is the first collection of Neil Gaiman’s short stories.

I knew many of these already, having experienced them in various formats (I highly recommend you the Neil Gaiman Dark Horse comics collection on Humble Bundle) and I listened to this on Audible, read by The Author Himself.

He’s quite good at reading his own stuff.

Like many short stories collection, it’s a mixed bag: some are good, some are great, some are hard to evaluate, and some are just meh.

But it’s quite fun overall, and I would, and probably will, read it again.

Vote: 7/10, I need to get his other short story collections.

Micro Review: The Peripheral

When it came out, I started watching Amazon’s show based on this book, and I felt it was probably the best new Sci-Fi show to come out in many years. I didn’t have much hope it would end as good as it started, but I didn’t have the chance to be disappointed: Amazon show was cancelled after one season.

So I thought, well, I’m going to read the book. I’ve read a few books by William Gibson (namely, all the sprawl trilogy, some of the bridge trilogy, and some random stories), and I have a positive memory of that, although an hazy one.

So I proceeded to get the Audiobook version of The Peripheral, which in turn is the start of another trilogy§.

What the book is about

Spoilers ahead.

The Peripheral setting is a rural backwater in a future post-civil-war USA, which would be interesting by itself. But this is William Gibson, so there are layers and layers of interesting world building.

So the people in this world are contacted from an even further future where the human population has shrunk to minimal numbers due to some events referred to as “the jackpot“. Gibson hates being obvious so the jackpot is not a single event, (e.g. global warming, aliens) but an unspecified list of “many things went wrong and here we are“.

The post-jackpot world has developed two interesting technologies: one that allows people to operate a remote body (the peripheral of the title), and one which allows connecting to a point in the past. Of course, someone had the idea of combining the two, so they sent information in their past to build a controller that can operate a peripheral in their time.

Even this would be interesting on its own, but what makes it more interesting (Gibson!) is that every time a connection is made, time bifurcates, so the timeline in the past is not connected to the future timeline anymore.

So, what is the effect of someone with superior technology being able to act on a remote playground with no consequences? Well, a sort of colonialism, of course. Post-jackpot people even developed a vocabulary to detach them from this colonized pasts, so that they call each past a stub, not even granting it the dignity of considering a timeline.

In medio stat tedium

I have no complaint about the narration, but going through the book I remember why I have not read more of Gibson’s works. I don’t like them.

William Gibson is, in my humble opinion, a genius. A lot of what he writes is prescient, the themes are original, the world building is masterful. I want to know more about this world. I want to have more insightful thinking and exposition.

Gibson is also, for what I can judge, very good at writing characters. I can see the main character, Flynne Fisher, just ad I could see Molly Millions in Neuromancer.

But Gibson is, for my taste, terrible at writing plots. As I read to the end of the book, I tried to remember what happened in it, and I could not. As I remember, something happens that sets things in motion (future contact). something happens that closes the plot (bad people get what they deserve, good people are happy) but I have no idea about what happened in the middle. It’s just flyover country, boring stuff I need to get through to finish the book.

And I suddenly realized this is also what I remember of Neuromancer and Idoru. I do not know why. I have clear visions of specific scenes and paragraphs and characters, but I have no idea of what things actually happened.

BTW, I feel the Amazon show deviated from the book in good ways and was far more interesting, and it’s a pity it was cancelled. It had a heck of a good cast too!

So, if you already liked Gibson, go read this because you’ll love it. If you can get through a few hundred pages just for the sake of the world building, you’ll also like this. As for me, I won’t be reading the following books in the trilogy. Until In forget about this again, anyway.

Vote: 6.5/10, I wish this was a tv show.

Mini Review: The Road

I’ve watched a bunch of post-apocalyptic content when I was a kid.

I grew up with post-apocalyptic anime of the desert kind and of the non-desert kind (Italy in the ’80s was a weird place where everything animated was supposed to be for kids).

And post-apocalyptic movies were a staple in ’80s and ’90s: the Mad Max movies sure, but also The Salute of the Jugger, Waterworld, The Postman, 12 Monkeys…

I think this was mostly related to the fact that film makers back then had been really, really scared of atomic bombs growing up.

I think my generation was afraid of ecological collapse of some kind, but not as much. Might be the reason why we didn’t get a nuclear war, but we are getting an ecological collapse.

Mild spoilers ahead!

Anyway, The Road by  Cormac McCarthy is the story of a man and his son living in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to go south hoping not to die of cold.

It’s incredibly bleak. If you watched any Mad Max movie, the world is generally fucked up, dried up, and life only survives in a few spots dominated by violence and such. But you see, life goes on, it’s our current world which is fucked. We don’t consider ourselves a post-apocalyptic dinosaur story§.

In this book, life does not go on. Everything is dead. There are no surviving trees, no animals, no fish. Mankind survives on tin cans, and you know those will run out too, and so do they.

This would be sad and depressing on its own, but the hardest thing of the book is that this is the story of a father and a small boy.

The father knows they’re going to die too, and so does the boy. They go through the motions of surviving, but they know (or, you do) that canned food won’t last forever. Maybe they’ll find a cache of some sort of nutrition). But then what happens when that is over?

They have a gun with two bullets, and they have to choose whether to use them to protect themselves or kill themselves when things get too bad. But as a father, what do you do? You can’t kill your kid while there’s hope he won’t die.

And there’s always hope. In Italian we say “la Speranza è l’ultima a morire” (~ “Hope dies last”), and one wonders who died before her. The answer is You. You die before Hope dies.

So the father goes through the motions of living, teaching the kid that they are The Good Guys, and they Carry The Fire. The father does not generally lie to the kid, but you can feel he’d like to.

Well, I‘d like to at least. Lies are bad, but what do you tell a kid when he cries at night? I’ll be there for you, I’ll protect you forever, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. But you don’t have the power to hold that promise.

By chance, I also happened to be reading a different book to my son yesterday, and it’s an amazingly good book§, with many good stories, and one had this bit:

– how much does a teardrop weight?

– it depends: the teardrop of a spoiled kid weighs less than the wind, the teardrop of a hungry kid weighs more than the whole Earth.

And we sometimes forget this, but it is true.

This is a perfect book. It’s short, it’s well written, the story is gripping, the characters are three dimensional and faceted. I believe it’s also part of the free library for Audible subscribers, so if you have a subscription go check it out.

Vote: 10/10, I wish I had read this before having kids.

Micro Review: Permutation City

This book by Greg Egan  had been on my todo list for years, I kept forgetting it and rediscovering it and thinking it sounded great, but then not reading it anyway.

In short, it’s a story about virtual worlds, uploaded minds, the meaning of consciousness, what it means to live in a simulation, and how to know if you do.

These are topics which are very fashionable in the 2020’s, but this book was written in 1994, the author was way ahead of his time.

It is not a super-easy read, but it will give you a lot to think about. Some of that lot is deeply tragic and depressing, but I guess it depends on how you read it.

Maybe don’t read it if you’re depressed.

I listened to this in audiobook form from Audible, and tbh I hated the narration. But hey, maybe it’s just me.

Vote: 7/10, read it before uploading your mind.

Micro review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I really enjoyed this book.

I like Neil Gaiman quite a bit, but this book felt somewhat different: it felt somehow like a Stephen King story.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The book is written as the main character, as an adult, visits the place where he grew up. There’s a pond there, but he knew, as a kid, that it was no pond, it was the ocean. And there was a girl, somewhat special. And a man, who killed himself.

See? Isn’t this your Kingesque coming-of-age/did-we-imagine-it-or-was-it-real plot?

It also feels pretty intimate, you are led to immediately visualize young Neil in the story, not a random kid. It’s a good book, well written, with a good story and characters.

And a big difference between King and Gaiman is that Stephen is not very good at endings, but Neil is great.

Vote: 8/10