Posts

Review of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Image
Kindred is a harrowing time-travel novel that is rightly acknowledged as a science-fiction classic. It is the story of a black American writer, Dana, living in 1976 with her white writer husband Kevin. They are moving into a new house when she collapses and is transported back to the America of 1815. There she meets one of her ancestors, Rufus, the white child of a slave owner. A boy who she will encounter many times over his life. She saves Rufus’ life but is still treated like a slave by the boy’s father. A special slave with medical knowledge that is useful to them, but she is still beaten and whipped when they deem that she has misbehaved. The novel very much explores what it was like to be a slave, a possession that can be used as the owner likes. It could be worked until it collapsed, beaten when it disobeyed, raped, bred and its children sold. It was not human, just a farm animal. The slaves don’t behave like farm animals as they create their own community. They look after each ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Post a Comment
Read more

Back with more posts soon

I haven't posted for a while due to work and before that study and I now have long covid, but I hope to reverse that trend and start posting book reviews once more and information about writing. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Quick review of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Image
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz My rating: 3 of 5 stars Occurs in a universe where there are six mounds of rock that when hit in the right combination allow time-travel througout earth's history. They are well known and time geologists use them all the time to not only view history but edit it. This is different from most time-travel stories where the characters are usually worried about changing history and causing unexpected results. They can't make massive instantenous changes (like killing Hitler) to history, the changes have to be slow, like planting a seed of a thought in a person's mind. In this version of the timeline the supression of women is slowly being increased, but a group of women are fighting back by editing the timeline. Learnt a bit about a few historical figures like Anthony Comstock, a special agent in the 1890's who was allowed to read every suspected liberated women's mail and arrest them for anything he deemed obsecene. Th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Novels I read last year.

Image
It has been a while since I posted anything. I was way too busy last year to regularly post (I started up a web design business on March 19 - Wangaratta Website Design Services - and before that I did a six week intensive NEIS course on how to start and run a business). I had many long weeks of work, working late into the night some nights and on the weekends. But I still managed to read 17 novels by setting aside a couple of hours on three nights a week to read. Here's what I read:  1. Purity, Jonathan Frazen  2. Testaments, Margaret Atwood 3. The Drowned World, JG Ballard 4. The Wall, John Lanchester 5. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu 6. The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Richard Flanagan 7. The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman 8. Engine Summer, John Crowley 9. Wake, Elizabeth Knox 10. Clade, James Bradley 11. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson 12. The Affirmation, Christopher Priest 13. The Swan Book, Alexis Wright 14. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson 15. Lone Wolf World, Anthony ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments

Image
Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump authorised news source, you’d   know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaids Tale . I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course, where we studied the text in-depth, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series, so maybe people who have will have made different connections to The Testaments than I did, and have different reactions. The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale . It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Post a Comment
Read more