And now we're suddenly in a spy/mystery novel, mainly following Prior. I suppose Barker tried to move away from the somewhat pastoral gaiety of the ofAnd now we're suddenly in a spy/mystery novel, mainly following Prior. I suppose Barker tried to move away from the somewhat pastoral gaiety of the officer class, contrasting it with the struggle of the worker class. But it feels rushed and sudden, and all these revelations about Prior's past feel forced. I mean, what are the chances that he's a boyhood neighbor of all these anti-war people. And yeah, the whole thing still feels largely pointless.
But on the positive side, Barker eventually got me to identify with Prior, whom I kinda loathed in the beginning. And the sex scenes are pretty great! Even when they're abhorrent....more
I started reading this because a friend pointed out that brief paragraph about a Chinese flu decimated the European populWell, what have I just read?
I started reading this because a friend pointed out that brief paragraph about a Chinese flu decimated the European population, leading to a breakdown of the EU is kind of, well, fitting right now. I figured I'd read this while it's still sci-fi, expecting a light techno-thriller or something. Definitely got more than that.
Deconstruction is the keyword, I guess. Deconstructing and subverting spy fiction, cyberpunk, the European and British ideals. That's the good part. For example, death and violence is not taken lightly in the book: it traumatizes the characters. That's so rare. And characters have families and friends, who are also actors in themselves, that's also rare. Loved the part about Rudi's father and brother, it's just so lifelike.
Another good part is how we just witness slices of things that just happen to the main character. I like it, really, though I understand other readers might dislike it. It's in many ways a difficult book, actually.
And now onto the worse part: somehow, quite without warning we just get thrown into magical realism. The blurb mentions Kafka, forget Kafka, it's more like Borges. And there's little to no buildup to it, no foreshadowing. Or maybe I just failed to notice? But the ending pissed me off so there's no way I'm going to re-read it just to see if there's foreshadowing. Because the book just... ends, without tying up ANY loose ends, and there's plenty of those.
Also the character development. Rudi's supposed to become harder and more professional and more proactive. Once this happens, the viewpoint shifts away from him, which is okay, but he also becomes a caricature of himself, and I don't think that's intentional.
Anyhow, it's kind of a flawed gem. I'm going to go on to the next book, definitely, though I must say I don't much care about the mysteries.
Oh and one more thing: for some reason I thought this was written in the 90s and aged fantastically! Then it turned out it was written in 2014, and compared to that it's vision is just not so great....more
Starts powerfully, but the third shift is just a drag.
I kind of had mixed feelings about Wool too, but while Wool was a late-coming classic of the genStarts powerfully, but the third shift is just a drag.
I kind of had mixed feelings about Wool too, but while Wool was a late-coming classic of the genre, Shift is just lacking. It's a fairly okay, badly edited, run-of-the-mill book. I still dig Howey's style, but the tension is gone from this. Maybe Wool was that cool because it was originally written as a series of novelettes? In Shift the tension is lacking, the pacing is uneven.
The book affected me, I won't deny it, but I often felt Howey trying really very hard to affect me. It felt artifical, not heartfelt. Wool had this too, but the mind-blowingness compensated for it. Not in Shift, unfortunately.
Characters: Donald struck home, that useless asshole resonates with me. Until the third shift, that is. He's totally unlike what I'd imagine a congressman, and that required some suspension of disbelief (like many other things in these books), but I could live with that, it was even refreshing. His love triangle thing resonates with me (of course) but it was totally lacking(view spoiler)[, and had zero conclusion (hide spoiler)]. In Silo #1 everybody else is a paper cut-out or practically nonexistent (Charlotte who). For all these characters, I kinda waited when they'd get into the limelight, but they just don't (view spoiler)[(they die randomly instead) (hide spoiler)].
In Silo 18, Mission is cool. The Crow is cool. Yeah, second shift was pretty cool. (It's also a pretty good self-contained novelette. So maybe it's really just that Howey is great at short stories, and a bit shit at novels.)
In Silo 17, we have Solo: the entire second shift is just padding, there only to have us catch up with Wool (providing some lame explanation to some things (view spoiler)[(the fresh corpses Jules encountered in Wool) (hide spoiler)]), and to make us sad and scared. Also, the characterisation of the 16-year-old Solo made me think he's retarded. One would think he's 12 or something. His descent to madness wasn't particularly convincing either. Oh well, the less said about third shift the better. I could crack sarcastic jokes about the crappiness of the third shift being a literary technique, intended to underline the message of how things are coming apart at the seams etc.
In my edition there are some questions at the end: "how did you feel when X? Why?" And I was all "Um, I felt pretty meh".
To be fair, though (and I'm writing this after sleeping on it), first shift has its moments (an awesomely terse description of a hollowing marriage springs to mind), and the time dilation/shifting timeline thing in third shift was nice. I actually wish there was less linearity in the book, more playing with timelines.
All that said, I read this in four days, and I do intend to read the next book. But not right now. I think I'll read non-fiction now....more
So, yes, I burned through the book in three days. Gripping and hard to put down.
The themes... well, there's nothing fully and absolutely new in the seSo, yes, I burned through the book in three days. Gripping and hard to put down.
The themes... well, there's nothing fully and absolutely new in the setting, it's pretty much a trope: post-apocalyptic survivors living in bunkers, kept in the dark about nefarious conspiracies. But Howey does somehow manages to present it in a new light, a new perspective. The description of the environment alone makes this a late-coming classic of the genre (view spoiler)[The stairs, the image of the stairs will haunt me. (hide spoiler)]
The writing is very solid: I like the way it's understated, calm and detached, but not afraid of waxing poetic once in a while. Great pacing! Some irregularities here and there, but the story flows along unstoppably, with a majestic ease. I always likened this style of writing to painting. If I were writing, I'd like to write like this. The characters are all very relatable, fleshed out, believable.
Why just three stars? Well, the writing does have its issues, sometimes gets too smart for its own good. There are some iconsistencies around that bothered me, probably due to the way this was written and published. The ending is shit. Some suspension of disbelief is required (view spoiler)[I don't really get why "showing the cleaners what they want", the simulated reality, works. Really, why? The whole simulated reality thing was a great PKDish plot twist at the end of the first novelette, but it loses relevance later. I GUESS it's supposed to be a nefarious conspiracy to make cleaners clean, expertly invented by master psychologists, but... um, no (hide spoiler)]. Unlike other reviewers, I had zero problems with the title (great, if a bit smartass, title), or the lack of elevators, but the fact so many people don't get these shows problems.
But anyway, it was a great quick read, left an impression on me, made me think, some parts of it resonated in me very deeply....more
There's a lot of things about Wilson's writing I absolutely love. Still so often he kind of... falls short. Now I'm after a Wilson binge, having read There's a lot of things about Wilson's writing I absolutely love. Still so often he kind of... falls short. Now I'm after a Wilson binge, having read Darwinia, the Spin trilogy, and now Blind Lake in short succession, and I'm so ambivalent about this guy.
Blind Lake, like Wilson's other novels, is soft science fiction of the best kind: the science is plausible, if largely handwaved, and the book concentrates on ideas, on humans, on society. Wilson is great at making me identify with his characters, and he expresses the wildly differing views of the characters with equal weight, and that's really great, I love this stuff. But the characters in Blind Lake are ultimately shallow, very convincing facades with little to no depth.
Wilson is great at world-building: Blind Lake offers an acceptable, believable near-future of the 2050s, though global warming is conspiciously absent, and the lack of smartphones is disconcerting (yeah, I know, he couldn't have known, and the book's "personal servers" are actually pretty good approximations of the real thing, but it's still a problem that makes ageing books so hard to read).
Wilson is good at technicalities, his is a solid, polished prose, no problems there. The narrative is ultimately well woven, a slow paced thriller, really nice. But Wilson often stumbles when trying to handle parallel narratives, some huge leaps in time left me disoriented, and the book often felt kind of unbalanced. These are all problems a better editor could have corrected.
Anyway, Blind Lake was a very satisfying read, despite all problems, and ultimately I can only recommend it, but I think I will put Wilson aside for a while: his books so often end up as largely unfulfilled promises (though Spin was awesome)....more
This is the second time I'm reading this. And you know what? Even though I do remember reading it seven, seven years ago, and I do remember rating it This is the second time I'm reading this. And you know what? Even though I do remember reading it seven, seven years ago, and I do remember rating it 5 stars, I don't remember it at all. Vague memories of the stories, practically nothing about the characters.
And yeah, this says something about me, and the way I voraciously read everything without paying too much attention. But it says something about the book as well, that it ended up this forgettable for me. Now that I've read it for the second time, I don't know why I rated it five stars. But now I'm older. I noticed new things about the main characters, looked at them in a different light, but they didn't come to life as much as they used to. Nor I felt Sitka, this alien city, as close as I used to, and the conspiracy wasn't that mind-blowing either. And I wonder why I had rated this five stars. Has the world changed, or have I changed....more
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