Andrew Call's Blog: Call's Creative Corner

The Chameleon Fallacy by Shane Norwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Talk about a doozy of a story. From start to finish, The Chameleon Fallacy is a hearty blend of intricate characters, overt sexuality, and salty dialogue, and it’s easily the most enjoyable R-rated piece of prose I’ve read in a while. It’s bold, vile, intelligent, naughty, violent, and tightly woven in its intricacy and almost-haphazard chaos. It reads like a high-brow Penthouse Letter at times, a long-winded modern Hemingway rant at others, and the book unashamedly lays Norwood’s insights and often-irreverent observations on the table as a feast for readers to have fun with.

I’d be doing the author a disservice if I didn’t mention the man’s knack for worming his insane vocabulary into every corner of the book. I’ll admit, I briefly retreated to the dictionary for handfuls of definitions, and Norwood seemed to let ridiculously intelligent words, jokes, and phrases roll off his tongue with ease. The man’s prose is impressive, to say the least. His ability to bounce around the world with both historical anecdotes and playful dialogue and still manage to bring his characters full circle and face to face is outrageous. He had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion, cringing in disgust a few times, and on the edge of my seat with my fingers curled tight during one particular fist fight/duel to the death that packed plenty of gut-wrenching punches.

If The Chameleon Fallacy had one over-the-top flaw that (in my opinion) hurt to book, it was reaching too high. There are two MacGuffins fighting for attention. One is a tangible, intriguing object that’s the focus of a heist story, and the other is a cerebral, mind-bending science fiction what-if that just never quite worked. I’d have been perfectly happy if the entire book played around with the first MacGuffin, something called the Fab 13, entirely, but instead halfway through the novel we’re introduced to a game-changer from far out in left field, something called the R3. Each object could have been the center of its own novel, and mixing them together became a bit...overambitious, but that’s really up to the reader to subjectively decide for themselves. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed The Chameleon Fallacy, and here’s hoping Norwood revisits these characters again sometime soon.



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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I know people who love this book. I really wanted to, but I came out the other end pretty disappointed.

Ready Player One is a book that panders/caters/speaks to hardcore role-playing gamers and '80s die-hards. If you don't fit into either group, there's a good chance you'll roll your eyes and even laugh out loud at how silly most of the book is. There are more '80s film/TV/game references packed into this book than you'll believe, and whole sections of the book are devoted to replaying (often word-for-word) movies like War Games and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The writing is sub-par, at best, and the attitudes throughout are often immature and reeking of gaming "geek" and teen boy stereotypes. Plus, there's never a moment when the main character doesn't have exactly what he needs in his "inventory," and he seemed to have unlimited knowledge/skill no matter what he encountered.

It's fantasy wish fulfillment at its worst, and I kind of hated it for what it was at times. I don't know how Spielberg is going to make this thing into a movie for the masses, but I'm interested to see how it evolves.



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