Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Speaking of Wars, and Bugs



If you can at all manage to get a hold of it at your favorite book retailer, or even one you don't particularly like, but has it, might I recommend a dark and thoughtful novella by Charles Stross?

I know how you might go about purchasing the thing--count the pages, consider the expense (shoot, book-lover--this is not a pennies-to-pages deal--it's about the quality of the allegory!). Are you a Stross compleatist, really (if you aren't--well, um, why aren't you? I was lucky enough to get a copy of On Her Majesty's Occult Service from an SF book club by neglecting to cancel the favored selection--and had my world rocked--so--um, get that one, at least)--nuts, do you even like science fiction?

As an informative genre? As a method for conveying ideas besides, you know, the science-related ones?

That's right. You. The one who kind of thought you might have liked that Wells story you read in high school about the guy who could see in the country of the blind? The one who wondered why you were reading Vonnegut as literature and then, well, got it--and so it goes? Who kind of considered 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, like, to be a different kind of lit, because they might have been about a presumptive future and all, but were they...really...like, the same thing as Star Trek? (Or were they even more so?)

If you don't mind a little deep thinkery with your reading entertainment, this is an impressive read. It's short, but very to the point. Pay a little attention: what I thought was an sf-buff in-joke regarding the names of two of the characters becomes a particular point of the story. Synopsizing from the blurb: it's the '70's, the Earth has been translated to Flatland--do you know where your Cold War is? And what does Carl Sagan have to do with any of it?

I recommend it.

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