What do you think?
Rate this book
Kampus
The college of the future has just one purpose: endless battle. Political organizations urge ruthless combat with an invisible opponent and each student is challenged to be more extreme than the rest. One man finds his fame by kidnapping and killing a professor. Instantly he is immersed into the world of grease-guns and grenades, where the anarchy is suspiciously formulated. The professors have forgotten their pursuit of knowledge, midnight groping at the point has turned into isolated sex with keyboards and the only goal is to completely in deadly political games. By becoming a shining example of academic excellence, Tom Gavin has tapped into the secrets inside the private chambers of the university. He finds it is either play the game or die beneath the latest revolutionary fire.
252 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1972
2 people are currently reading
267 people want to read
About the author
James E. Gunn
267 books117 followersAmerican science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He was named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 11, 2011
MOVE OVER “MOST POWERFUL DYSTOPIAN FICTION BOOKS” AND MAKE ROOM FOR KAMPUS RIGHT NEXT TO ORWELL’S 1984 ...
First off…this book has an average rating of 3.12…3.12? c’mon peeps are you kidding me? Having just read this, I have my label-maker out and I’m creating a “CLASSIC” tag to smack on this bad boy of dystopian literature. This story is well-written, intelligent and very powerful.
This book does for anarchy, licentiousness the complete breakdown of the “State” what 1984 did for totalitarianism, government control and the consolidation of total power by the “State.” As I mention below, I think Kampus had the much harder argument to make because “the State is evil” is one of those platitudes that most us can get behind whereas warning of out of control “freedom” and arguing that the status quo is not to be lightly thrown aside is a much harder sell.
This big, bad wolf in book’s clothing blew me down like a pork-sheltering shag pad of straw and had my expectations wee weeing all the way home. Based on the ratings (again, c’mon people) and its lack of inclusion among the giants of dystopian fiction, I was expecting slow moving, slog city getting through it. Instead, I rolled through it in a day like Schwarzkopf through the Republican Guard and found another “all time favorite” for my “world in the shitter” bookshelf.
Now, even though this book is 180 degree units different than 1984, I am still going to use the latter as a comparison tool because I hold Orwell’s masterpiece as the pinnacle of dystopian literature, so please forgive my references to it in this review. In some ways, Kampus may be more disturbing than 1984 because of the villain it portrays. While 1984 created dread by depicting a heavy, claustrophobic paranoia fostered by the State, the dread in Kampus comes from the frustration and despair of the perversion and desecration of our most important right…FREEDOM. Even worse, the bad guys are US (i.e., you and me) rather than some nameless THEM that we can nobly struggle against. In fact, I think that may account for some of the less than stellar ratings on this book. Some truths are harder to accept than others.
Before I get to the plot, he is a little background on the book and the world envisioned by the author.
GENERAL BACKGROUND:
Kampus was written in the 70’s during a time when just about every college campus in America was in turmoil. It was the time of the “Free Speech” movement as students passionately protested against the Vietnam war and the hippy and the radical rose as a force for social change. We had one U.S. President hiding in the Oval Office because he feared hostile demonstrations should he show his face in public and his successor, Tricky Dick, was on his way to being the first U.S. President to resign and required a pardon fromChevy Chase Gerald Ford to avoid criminal prosecution. It was a tumultuous time. Frederick Pohl put it this way in his introduction to this book: “There was a ferment in American life not seen since the days of the Great Depression and it expressed itself most visibly and worrisomely in the schools and universities of the nation.”
This background is important because it is the lens through which James Gunn created this cautionary tale. In Kampus, Gunn shows us where those “extreme anti establishment” tendencies might lead. As Orwell, having witnessed the rise of fascism and Nazism, created Big Brother to depict the dangers of allowing a government too much control over its people, so Gunn, having witnessed the worst aspects of the “revolutionary mindset”, created his own disturbing vision of a possible world gone mad from TOO MUCH FREEDOM. The lesson…extremes of even the best of things can be dangerous.
One of the most chilling aspects of the book for me personally is that I identify with the “idea being exaggerated” by Gunn. I think we all see ourselves, to varying degrees, as being “anti-establishment” and disenchanted with our leaders and the way our society is today. We are always hoping things will get better and railing against the entrenched powers of the status quo. This is what I found so powerful about the book. Whereas 1984 warned us to watch out for THEM (i.e., the government), Kampus makes us shine the critical light on ourselves. It shows us that screaming something’s wrong and tearing down society is easy, while actually solving problems and working together with people you may disagree with is hard.
PLOT BACKGROUND:
I don’t want to give away too much of the world of Kampus because I think it is slowly revealed over the course of the novel I don’t want to ruin it for you. Let me just say that Kampus takes place in the not to distant future where students have taken over the nations campuses and walls have been erected to separate the students from the country at large.
Outside of the walls, things are both better and worse. Cheap energy and technology have created the resources to provide every citizen with a basic subsistence, however, lawlessness also reigns the police and security apparatus have been completely eliminated. One of the mottos of the time is “Better individual injustice than state justice.”
This is a very political book and that is what I like about it. There is a lot of quotable material and the characters are generally fervent in their beliefs and defend them passionately. I can not recommend this book more highly and thought it was brilliant and certainly belongs among the classics of dystopian fiction.
KAMPUS QUOTABLES: (Emphasis added is mine)
I think I will end with a few of the quotes that I found memorable as I think it also provides insight into the tone and direction of the story.
HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!! 6.0 stars.
First off…this book has an average rating of 3.12…3.12? c’mon peeps are you kidding me? Having just read this, I have my label-maker out and I’m creating a “CLASSIC” tag to smack on this bad boy of dystopian literature. This story is well-written, intelligent and very powerful.
This book does for anarchy, licentiousness the complete breakdown of the “State” what 1984 did for totalitarianism, government control and the consolidation of total power by the “State.” As I mention below, I think Kampus had the much harder argument to make because “the State is evil” is one of those platitudes that most us can get behind whereas warning of out of control “freedom” and arguing that the status quo is not to be lightly thrown aside is a much harder sell.
This big, bad wolf in book’s clothing blew me down like a pork-sheltering shag pad of straw and had my expectations wee weeing all the way home. Based on the ratings (again, c’mon people) and its lack of inclusion among the giants of dystopian fiction, I was expecting slow moving, slog city getting through it. Instead, I rolled through it in a day like Schwarzkopf through the Republican Guard and found another “all time favorite” for my “world in the shitter” bookshelf.
Now, even though this book is 180 degree units different than 1984, I am still going to use the latter as a comparison tool because I hold Orwell’s masterpiece as the pinnacle of dystopian literature, so please forgive my references to it in this review. In some ways, Kampus may be more disturbing than 1984 because of the villain it portrays. While 1984 created dread by depicting a heavy, claustrophobic paranoia fostered by the State, the dread in Kampus comes from the frustration and despair of the perversion and desecration of our most important right…FREEDOM. Even worse, the bad guys are US (i.e., you and me) rather than some nameless THEM that we can nobly struggle against. In fact, I think that may account for some of the less than stellar ratings on this book. Some truths are harder to accept than others.
Before I get to the plot, he is a little background on the book and the world envisioned by the author.
GENERAL BACKGROUND:
Kampus was written in the 70’s during a time when just about every college campus in America was in turmoil. It was the time of the “Free Speech” movement as students passionately protested against the Vietnam war and the hippy and the radical rose as a force for social change. We had one U.S. President hiding in the Oval Office because he feared hostile demonstrations should he show his face in public and his successor, Tricky Dick, was on his way to being the first U.S. President to resign and required a pardon from
This background is important because it is the lens through which James Gunn created this cautionary tale. In Kampus, Gunn shows us where those “extreme anti establishment” tendencies might lead. As Orwell, having witnessed the rise of fascism and Nazism, created Big Brother to depict the dangers of allowing a government too much control over its people, so Gunn, having witnessed the worst aspects of the “revolutionary mindset”, created his own disturbing vision of a possible world gone mad from TOO MUCH FREEDOM. The lesson…extremes of even the best of things can be dangerous.
One of the most chilling aspects of the book for me personally is that I identify with the “idea being exaggerated” by Gunn. I think we all see ourselves, to varying degrees, as being “anti-establishment” and disenchanted with our leaders and the way our society is today. We are always hoping things will get better and railing against the entrenched powers of the status quo. This is what I found so powerful about the book. Whereas 1984 warned us to watch out for THEM (i.e., the government), Kampus makes us shine the critical light on ourselves. It shows us that screaming something’s wrong and tearing down society is easy, while actually solving problems and working together with people you may disagree with is hard.
PLOT BACKGROUND:
I don’t want to give away too much of the world of Kampus because I think it is slowly revealed over the course of the novel I don’t want to ruin it for you. Let me just say that Kampus takes place in the not to distant future where students have taken over the nations campuses and walls have been erected to separate the students from the country at large.
Outside of the walls, things are both better and worse. Cheap energy and technology have created the resources to provide every citizen with a basic subsistence, however, lawlessness also reigns the police and security apparatus have been completely eliminated. One of the mottos of the time is “Better individual injustice than state justice.”
This is a very political book and that is what I like about it. There is a lot of quotable material and the characters are generally fervent in their beliefs and defend them passionately. I can not recommend this book more highly and thought it was brilliant and certainly belongs among the classics of dystopian fiction.
KAMPUS QUOTABLES: (Emphasis added is mine)
I think I will end with a few of the quotes that I found memorable as I think it also provides insight into the tone and direction of the story.
Some [radicals] are only able to love people abstractly because they hate people individually, and they are perfectly willing therefore to sacrifice what they hate for what they love.–Chapter 2
The young always are opposed to what is. They suck in revolution with their mother’s milk. “Change the order!” they say, “Down with the establishment!” “First we make the revolution – then we’ll find out what for.” “Abolish injustice, destroy discrimination, share the wealth, shoot the bastards!” To shatter the old is easy; to make it work is hard. A civilized society makes itself sufficiently difficult to overthrow that the eternal young rebels must learn the system in order to achieve their ends –and then, of course, they have an investment in the system.– Chapter 4
‘I don’t believe in philosophies. They only serve to rationalize your prejudices or institutionalize your practices.’ ‘But I have a rule of thumb: do good slowly, if at all. That gives people a chance to protest the damage you are doing to them. Or, if you like more elegance in your rules of thumb, don’t do to other people as you would have them do to you, because we’re all different.’–Chapter 6
‘Then you consent to the oppression of the people,’ Gavin said.
‘I don’t know who ‘the people’ are or the nature of the oppression,’ Elaine said. ‘All I really know is that nobody authorized me to act on their behalf. And if ‘the people’ are ‘oppressed’ in sufficient numbers, they will know it and will do something about it.’
‘But they have no power.’
Elaine shook her head. ‘What you revolutionists object to is that they don’t know they’re oppressed, so you invent terms like, ‘brainwashing,’ ‘social behavior conditioning,’ ‘cooptation,’ ‘media message,’ ‘unconscious rebels,’ ‘mute protest,’ and all the rest—when what you mean is that you want revolution for your own purposes, to satisfy your own emotional needs, and you find that rationale distressingly insufficient to justify all the damage you are willing to inflict on others.’
The most dangerous human discovery may have been leisure. Hardship and necessity make cooperation essential; they rub people together and wear off the abrasive edges; they create a polite and gregarious society. Given half the chance, people will go off on their own tangents, cherishing their idiosyncrasies, glorifying their likes and dislikes into universal truths.-Chapter 8
HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!! 6.0 stars.
June 11, 2020
DAW Collectors #73
Cover Artist: Michael Gilbert
Name: Gunn, James Edwin, , Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 12 July 1923
Alternate Name: Hector Parl
Contents:
002 - Breaking Point (frontispiece) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan
007 - Introduction (Breaking Point) • (1972)
010 - Breaking Point • (1953)
054 - A Monster Named Smith • (1954)
078 - Cinderella Story • (1958) (variant of When the Shoe Fits)
094 - Teddy Bear • (1970)
111 - The Man Who Owned Tomorrow • (1953)
119 - Green Thumb • (1957)
139 - The Power and the Glory • (1969) (variant of The Man Who Would Not)
146 - The Listeners • [The Listeners] • (1968)
171 - Translations • (1972)
The book is a bit dated, but still a good read.
Cover Artist: Michael Gilbert
Name: Gunn, James Edwin, , Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 12 July 1923
Alternate Name: Hector Parl
Contents:
002 - Breaking Point (frontispiece) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan
007 - Introduction (Breaking Point) • (1972)
010 - Breaking Point • (1953)
054 - A Monster Named Smith • (1954)
078 - Cinderella Story • (1958) (variant of When the Shoe Fits)
094 - Teddy Bear • (1970)
111 - The Man Who Owned Tomorrow • (1953)
119 - Green Thumb • (1957)
139 - The Power and the Glory • (1969) (variant of The Man Who Would Not)
146 - The Listeners • [The Listeners] • (1968)
171 - Translations • (1972)
The book is a bit dated, but still a good read.
January 16, 2024
Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE. Near future dystopian novel where college campuses are walled in and mostly run by the students. The book starts out with a crazy drug induced Karnival/party and then each of the 11 chapters takes the reader to new unpredictable places. Lots of political and philosophical themes and extremely well written. This one is so much better than the current 3.28 goodreads score. Do yourself a favor and check this one out.
May 21, 2010
This is my favorite Gunn novel yet.. & yet I largely disagree w/ its philosophical thrust. Nonetheless, it seems like the most developed & accomplished novel of his that I've read. This is a picaresque novel - the anti-hero, Gavin, is fairly foolish & stupid but not necessarily any worse than pretty much everyone around him. Gunn places his adventures in what wd've been at the time of writing a near-future society (from our time now a time past) - a dystopia the product of unchecked 'radicalism'.
It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'.
The philosophy apparently intended to be that closest to Gunn's own is presented by the Professor thru monologues & dialogs & lectures near the beginning of the bk & thru quotes from the "Professor's notebook" in the rest of it, etc.. I find the Professor's opinions interesting enuf but, as w/ more or less everyone, I agree w/ some of it & disagree w/ some of it.
Gavin's adventures, joined for most of them by Elaine - a more pragmatic & sympathetic character, take him thru various extremes that a "Dionysian" society might offer. Like "Candy" or "Justine" there's more than a little cynicism at work. Interestingly, at one point someone's quoted as having a negative take on Apollinaire's respect for de Sade.
IN the beginning teachers at the university are pleading for students in their classes - mostly resorting to sexual manipulation. An English prof hawks his wares thusly:
""Many works of literature, many exciting - yes, even pornographic - passages have never been translated into visual form. Imagine the delight of reading Fanny Hill in the original or Justine or The Story of O! Even the best of translations leaves much to be desired; you cannot imagine, if you have never experienced it, the exquisite pleasure of summoning up your own images instead of having someone else's ideas thrust upon you.""
I reckon that part of Gunn's humor here is that "Justine", eg, isn't even IN ENGLISH in its original form, etc.. As for not "having someone else's ideas thrust upon you" just b/c it's a bk instead of a movie or whatnot? Nah, I don't really buy it.. I don't even borrow it.
The inside blurb reads: ""New Politics" . . . or Programmed Anarchy?" & what the fuck does that mean exactly? There's plenty of anti-'anarchist' thrust to this bk - written from the usual perspective of someone who appears to have little or no knowledge of actual anarchist theory or praxis. To me, as an anarchist, his use of the words "anarchy" & "anarchist" are sadly ludicrous. Here's an obviously literate man who throws literacy out the window as soon as he pulls his bogeyman out. Too bad. Gunn, you're intelligent, but you're not THAT intelligent.
On p 66 as Gavin's invited to be part of a militant mission he replies "I'm not an anarchist" & the reply is "Who is?". In other words, Gavin's saying he's not an extremist & won't attack the police barracks & the person trying to recruit him is saying that he's not an extremist either. This is a little inconsistent w/ other parts of the novel given that there don't appear to be cops anymore except "Kampus Kops" who don't appear to have much power. The gist here is that 'anarchy' is used as the name for total unleashed violent chaos, as (stupidly) usual, rather than, more accurately, as a referent for a more self-responsible philosophy.
On p 101, the Chancellor tells Gavin: ""After the uneasy quiet of the Apprehensive Decade, [..:] burned out by the riots of the sixties, alarmed by the shortages and inflation and unemployment, the overall trend established in the late sixties resumed its progress toward anarchy".
Gavin gets expelled from school & returns home to his parents only to find himself unwelcome. The "generation gap" that defined so many conflicts between parents & kids in the 1960s & '70s has the parents here as 'radicals' disgusted w/ the 'meaninglessness' of their son's struggles. Gavin's father rants: ""We were the generation of Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dorn, and Abbie Hoffman - the saints of the revolution.""
On 294, Gunn has students burning bks & has the now-very-changed Gavin (or is he?) thinking: "They were anarchists destroying their human heritage for the sport of it. The Professor would have called them barbarians and despised them." Funny, I don't usually associate anarchists w/ bk-burnings.
As the event that involves the bk-burning 'progresses' we read: "Here order made its last stand; here anarchy presented its final negation to tyranny. Here the world ended, Gavin thought." There's the usual cast of thoughtless clichés: anarchy vs order rather than anarchy as self-ordering; humanity self-destructing as the end of the world. Ho hum.
Gunn's apparent position, as presented thru the Professor, takes an anti-back-to-nature standpoint: "To what more glorious or more natural existence do we look back? Did the neolithic farmers envy the more natural lives of their paleolithic forefathers, and did those savage hunters, in turn, recall nostalgically the carefree careers of their arboreal ancestors?" To wch I reply: Was Gunn forced to work as a child in a factory by a robber baron? I think not - so its easy for him to glorify the industrial 'revolution', as he goes on to do here, b/c he's privileged enuf to not be its direct victim. I, too, am not exactly a 'back-to-nature' type or a so-called 'anarcho-primitivist' but I don't think the arguments for such things can be dismissed as easily as Gunn does. Of course, this review is using expediency & so does Gunn's novel.
Gunn's ultimate position is that of a SF writer: (he's prescient enuf to mention terra-forming on p 273) his role as one-time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America is perhaps most obvious in his most sympathetically presented community's being a thinly-veiled fantasy of what SF writers are: researchers of a technologically induced utopia, reasonable & even-tempered. In the "enchanted mountain" retreat, the Director explains that Science Fiction writers help disseminate the results of the retreat's inhabitants' research.
In the end, Gunn's naivity & limited bourgeois perspective is most clearly revealed when he has the Director say: ""The world is engaged in a dangerous experiment, [..:] a social experiment called freedom. The experiment began on this continent more than two hundred years ago, and spread eventually to the rest of the world."" Sheesh! In other words, the USA is the good old role model for democracy at its finest. It's in ludicrous opinions like these that Gunn's privileged deluded position as a univeristy professor become painfully obvious: since when is the USA anything other than yet-another place where brutality was used to put some in power & to displace & destroy those in-the-way?!
Thru the Professor mouthpiece he says: "slavery was dying before the Civil War; protests may've prolonged the Vietnam war through middle-class resentment of the protesters"! I think not, Gunn, I think not! If Gunn thinks that waiting for slavery to die off gradually wd've been somehow preferable to the Civil War I'd have to disagree; if he thinks that the Vietnam war wd've ended QUICKER w/o such widespread resistance to it at home I strongly disagree: the "middle-class resentment of the protesters" was, 1st & foremost, a resentment of their having the war shown to them at all. As long as it was something that happened over there to anonymous OTHERS they cd ignore it. I don't really believe that many people in the middle-class had anything but the foggiest notion of why to support the war in the 1st place & I don't think that changed as protest grew.
It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'.
The philosophy apparently intended to be that closest to Gunn's own is presented by the Professor thru monologues & dialogs & lectures near the beginning of the bk & thru quotes from the "Professor's notebook" in the rest of it, etc.. I find the Professor's opinions interesting enuf but, as w/ more or less everyone, I agree w/ some of it & disagree w/ some of it.
Gavin's adventures, joined for most of them by Elaine - a more pragmatic & sympathetic character, take him thru various extremes that a "Dionysian" society might offer. Like "Candy" or "Justine" there's more than a little cynicism at work. Interestingly, at one point someone's quoted as having a negative take on Apollinaire's respect for de Sade.
IN the beginning teachers at the university are pleading for students in their classes - mostly resorting to sexual manipulation. An English prof hawks his wares thusly:
""Many works of literature, many exciting - yes, even pornographic - passages have never been translated into visual form. Imagine the delight of reading Fanny Hill in the original or Justine or The Story of O! Even the best of translations leaves much to be desired; you cannot imagine, if you have never experienced it, the exquisite pleasure of summoning up your own images instead of having someone else's ideas thrust upon you.""
I reckon that part of Gunn's humor here is that "Justine", eg, isn't even IN ENGLISH in its original form, etc.. As for not "having someone else's ideas thrust upon you" just b/c it's a bk instead of a movie or whatnot? Nah, I don't really buy it.. I don't even borrow it.
The inside blurb reads: ""New Politics" . . . or Programmed Anarchy?" & what the fuck does that mean exactly? There's plenty of anti-'anarchist' thrust to this bk - written from the usual perspective of someone who appears to have little or no knowledge of actual anarchist theory or praxis. To me, as an anarchist, his use of the words "anarchy" & "anarchist" are sadly ludicrous. Here's an obviously literate man who throws literacy out the window as soon as he pulls his bogeyman out. Too bad. Gunn, you're intelligent, but you're not THAT intelligent.
On p 66 as Gavin's invited to be part of a militant mission he replies "I'm not an anarchist" & the reply is "Who is?". In other words, Gavin's saying he's not an extremist & won't attack the police barracks & the person trying to recruit him is saying that he's not an extremist either. This is a little inconsistent w/ other parts of the novel given that there don't appear to be cops anymore except "Kampus Kops" who don't appear to have much power. The gist here is that 'anarchy' is used as the name for total unleashed violent chaos, as (stupidly) usual, rather than, more accurately, as a referent for a more self-responsible philosophy.
On p 101, the Chancellor tells Gavin: ""After the uneasy quiet of the Apprehensive Decade, [..:] burned out by the riots of the sixties, alarmed by the shortages and inflation and unemployment, the overall trend established in the late sixties resumed its progress toward anarchy".
Gavin gets expelled from school & returns home to his parents only to find himself unwelcome. The "generation gap" that defined so many conflicts between parents & kids in the 1960s & '70s has the parents here as 'radicals' disgusted w/ the 'meaninglessness' of their son's struggles. Gavin's father rants: ""We were the generation of Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dorn, and Abbie Hoffman - the saints of the revolution.""
On 294, Gunn has students burning bks & has the now-very-changed Gavin (or is he?) thinking: "They were anarchists destroying their human heritage for the sport of it. The Professor would have called them barbarians and despised them." Funny, I don't usually associate anarchists w/ bk-burnings.
As the event that involves the bk-burning 'progresses' we read: "Here order made its last stand; here anarchy presented its final negation to tyranny. Here the world ended, Gavin thought." There's the usual cast of thoughtless clichés: anarchy vs order rather than anarchy as self-ordering; humanity self-destructing as the end of the world. Ho hum.
Gunn's apparent position, as presented thru the Professor, takes an anti-back-to-nature standpoint: "To what more glorious or more natural existence do we look back? Did the neolithic farmers envy the more natural lives of their paleolithic forefathers, and did those savage hunters, in turn, recall nostalgically the carefree careers of their arboreal ancestors?" To wch I reply: Was Gunn forced to work as a child in a factory by a robber baron? I think not - so its easy for him to glorify the industrial 'revolution', as he goes on to do here, b/c he's privileged enuf to not be its direct victim. I, too, am not exactly a 'back-to-nature' type or a so-called 'anarcho-primitivist' but I don't think the arguments for such things can be dismissed as easily as Gunn does. Of course, this review is using expediency & so does Gunn's novel.
Gunn's ultimate position is that of a SF writer: (he's prescient enuf to mention terra-forming on p 273) his role as one-time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America is perhaps most obvious in his most sympathetically presented community's being a thinly-veiled fantasy of what SF writers are: researchers of a technologically induced utopia, reasonable & even-tempered. In the "enchanted mountain" retreat, the Director explains that Science Fiction writers help disseminate the results of the retreat's inhabitants' research.
In the end, Gunn's naivity & limited bourgeois perspective is most clearly revealed when he has the Director say: ""The world is engaged in a dangerous experiment, [..:] a social experiment called freedom. The experiment began on this continent more than two hundred years ago, and spread eventually to the rest of the world."" Sheesh! In other words, the USA is the good old role model for democracy at its finest. It's in ludicrous opinions like these that Gunn's privileged deluded position as a univeristy professor become painfully obvious: since when is the USA anything other than yet-another place where brutality was used to put some in power & to displace & destroy those in-the-way?!
Thru the Professor mouthpiece he says: "slavery was dying before the Civil War; protests may've prolonged the Vietnam war through middle-class resentment of the protesters"! I think not, Gunn, I think not! If Gunn thinks that waiting for slavery to die off gradually wd've been somehow preferable to the Civil War I'd have to disagree; if he thinks that the Vietnam war wd've ended QUICKER w/o such widespread resistance to it at home I strongly disagree: the "middle-class resentment of the protesters" was, 1st & foremost, a resentment of their having the war shown to them at all. As long as it was something that happened over there to anonymous OTHERS they cd ignore it. I don't really believe that many people in the middle-class had anything but the foggiest notion of why to support the war in the 1st place & I don't think that changed as protest grew.
July 12, 2014
How did I miss James Gunn until now? How?? I can't imagine, but it's a gap I plan to rectify as rapidly as possible.
This is a terrific collection of stories that merge "hard" SF (spaceships, aliens) with intellectual puzzles and ethical conundrums. My favorite is the one where you start out loathing the creepy alien who's hitchhiked back to Earth, only to eventually realize that the monster might not be what you thought it was. Good stuff all around.
This is a terrific collection of stories that merge "hard" SF (spaceships, aliens) with intellectual puzzles and ethical conundrums. My favorite is the one where you start out loathing the creepy alien who's hitchhiked back to Earth, only to eventually realize that the monster might not be what you thought it was. Good stuff all around.
January 13, 2013
Read this way back in the day. Did not like it much then, and I suspect that if I had a copy to re-read now, I would like it even less. A rather silly romp through a redneck interpretation of a future USA based on the perceived culture of the 1960s left-wing, hippie student world. The novel attempts to highlight the faults of the alternative cultural movement. It just did not work for me. Dumb.
January 13, 2016
I had to keep pinching myself, keep reminding myself that this book was published in the 70s. There are simply way too many things that Gunn got exactly on the nose.
This was wild and dark and twisted and all-too-close-to-home. What if students were completely in charge of their university campuses and courses? What kind of learning would they partake in? Would they ever come home? What would the rest of the world be like? Where would the intellectuals and scientists go? Gunn does an excellent job of fleshing-out this world and scenarios. I chuckled at some of the biting-commentary and was throughly disturbed by others.
This seriously was a great book and completely unexpected.
This was wild and dark and twisted and all-too-close-to-home. What if students were completely in charge of their university campuses and courses? What kind of learning would they partake in? Would they ever come home? What would the rest of the world be like? Where would the intellectuals and scientists go? Gunn does an excellent job of fleshing-out this world and scenarios. I chuckled at some of the biting-commentary and was throughly disturbed by others.
This seriously was a great book and completely unexpected.
June 4, 2015
review of
James Gunn's Breaking Point
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 3, 2015
I spent 4 wks reviewing the Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn edited Source - Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 ( "Re: Source": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ) & while I was reviewing it & working & otherwise busy I read 5 other bks that went unreviewed at the time I finished them. This was one of them. I finished reading it a mnth ago.
This is a short story collection. I often say I avoid reading short stories, preferring novels. That's true. I also end up liking the short stories much more than I expect to. That's true in this case. This was one of my favorite bks by Gunn. In his introduction, it's written:
"For nearly two hundred years—since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century—science fiction was a part of the spectrum of general literature. It was so much a part of the rest of fiction that there wasn't even a name for it: the man who proved that science fiction could be popular, Jules Verne, called his novels "voyages extraordinaires"; the man who proved that science fiction could be art, H. G. Wells, found his earliest, most successful novels labeled "scientific romances."
"Then in 1926 the German immigrant inventor, science enthusiast, and publishing entrepreneur, Hugo Gernsback, created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He also invented a word to describe the type of stories he was going to publish, "scientifiction"; it wasn't until 1929, when he lost control of Amazing Stories and started a competing publication, Wonder Stories, that he created the phrase "science fiction."" - p 7
All hail Hugo Gernsback! I have an issue of Amazing, Amazing Stories's descendent, from 1967. Close, but no cigar-shaped rocket ship. In the 1st story, "Breaking Point", the one the bk's named after, some astronauts have landed on a new planet & they're welcomed in English by a mysterious voice on their radio:
"A soft, smooth hum filled the room. "Carrier," said Ives.
"Then the words came. They were English words, faultlessly spoken, loud and clear and precise. They were harmless words, pleasant words even.
"They were: "Men of earth! Welcome to our planet.."" - p 15
Unfortunately, the astronauts were Russian & didn't speak a word of English & everyone died. Just Kidding. Later, one of the astronauts using the expression ""If we don't win the fur-lined teacup . . ."" (p 20) Is that reference to Mérit Oppenheim's sculpture, "Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)" (1936), or did her sculpture refer to some pre-existing expression that the story is also referring to? Apparently, Oppenheim wins the prize! & now I find a "furlinedteacup" blog online for "san francisco food, film pop culture and music".
But, alas, even a fur-lined teacup won't help these astronauts. they're trapped in their space-ship & the claustrophobia is increasing:
"The Engineer came into the cabin, crossed over to his station, and began opening and closing drawers. "They've moved." From the bottom drawer he pulled out a folded chessboard and a rectangular box. Only then did he look directly at them. "The food's gone."" - p 32
I'm reminded of Stanislav Lem's excellent Solaris. I don't want to give too much of the story away but the Russian astronaut heads turn into pumpkins at midnight. After that, in "A Monster Named Smith", the blob loses control to his host's sex-drive. "Uncontrolled sensations quiver along the nerves inside the body, quiver along the feelers that lie microscopically inside the nerves. Glands are discharging their secretions into the body. The process seems automatic; I can't stop them. The body, too, must have automatic responses. It reaches toward the woman." (p 75) "Cinderella Story" starts off w/ a reasonable enough premise:
"Private enterprise made ET exploration possible. Government could do it, but Government wouldn't. That had been proved. Space was fantastically big, and ET exploration was fantastically expensive. Et exploration was also vital: humanity needed a frontier for the good of its soul; for the good of its body it needed that frontier as far as possible from Earth,
"Laws were drafted to make exploration profitable, and humanity was unleashed upon the galaxy, Jonathan Craddock, Exploiters and Importers, was born—along with one hundred competitors, more or less." - p 78
This reasonable premise is followed up by a description of one of the new technologies:
"Fairfax himself had always insisted that it did no more than satisfy the brain's visual scanning mechanism, the alpha rhythm; it stopped—or interfered with—the scanning sweep, giving the watcher the sense of seeing something without specifying what that something was. From there on, the incredulity factor took over—that habit of the mind which directs it to seek always the simpler explanation. That there are aliens among us is a wild fantasy; it is simpler to assume that what one sees is something ordinary, seen badly.
"But not every mind has an alpha rhythm to iterrupt—for instance, M-types. Some epistemologists doubted that the field affected the mind at all, and photographs supported them: an object inside a Fairfax Field was optically blurred, even to the mindless eye of a camera." - p 82
Interesting, eh? On http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.c... it's written that:
"They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. THEY LIVE.
"A rugged loner (RODDY PIPER) stumbles upon a terrifying discovery: goulish creatures are masquerading as humans while they lull the public into submission through subliminal advertising messages. Only specially made sunglasses make the deadly truth visible."
Many people know & love the movie "THEY LIVE" but, as I recall, it's never explained how the "g[h]oulish creatures" [maybe they mean goulash creatures?] succeed as "masquerading as humans" unless it's all done thru advertising subliminal messages. Gunn explores how one might fool the eye of another creature to make them accept one as one-of-them. I don't remember running across that idea before.
&, yeah, "The Cinderella Story" has tech update:
"Suddenly she said, "Pip! I lost my show!"
""Which shoe?"
""The right shoe. The one with the unit in it!"" - p 89
At least she's probably still got her keys & her cellphone. In "Teddy Bear", Gunn uses his name for one of the characters:
"And then the cold thoughts: Some of us aren't real. And: Somebody slipped.
"But that was a foolish thought. I wasn't prepared to accept the inevitable consequences. It meant—
""Mr. Gunn?"
"I swung around." - p 95
&, yes, they made James Gunn into paperback bks. This one talks to me from time-to-time. It says things like "In such a world of law and order, nothing should be inexplicable. There should be no such mysterious disappearances as those of Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater. (Had they learned too much?) There should be no mysterious appearances of men who are dead or long lost, who should be gone forever. But Enoch Arden returns—so often that we need an Enoch Arden law to protect the "widow."" (p 102)
"The Enoch Arden doctrine consists of the legal principles involved when a person leaves his or her spouse under such circumstances and for such a period of time as to make the other spouse believe that the first spouse is dead, with the result that the remaining spouse marries another, only to discover later the return of the first spouse. Generally, in most states, it is safer for the remaining spouse to secure a Divorce before marrying again." - http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictio...
If I ever get married, I think I'll change my name to "Enoch", ask my wife to change hers to "Arden" & propose that our last name be "Divarriage". That shd get us off to a good start. Speaking of the future,
"["]Can you fix that thing?"
"The plumber flinched. he said meekly, "What seems to be wrong with it?"
""It—won't—flush."
"Gingerly the red-haired plumber twisted the handle on the water closet. Water gurgled into the bowl and swirled up dangerously close to the edge before it subsided. Slowly the level dropped. "Well," said the plumber. "Well. My suggestion is that you get rid of the whole affair. I can get a crew of men in a few days, rip this thing out, and put in a modern disposerbot—"" - p 122
Car w/ a computer in it anyone? Gunn even gets into what seems to be his literary philosophy:
""Every science that deals with man ignores everything except what it deals with. Medicine deals with the physical man, economics with that simplification known as Economic Man, psychiatry with a fictitious creature in whom it would have no interest if he were 'normal,' and one branch of psychology with I.Q. Man, whose only significant aspect is his ability to solve puzzles.
""Literature is the only thing that deals with the whole complex phenomena at once. If it were to cease to exist, whatever is not considered by one or another of the sciences would no longer be considered at all and would perhaps vanish completely." - p 129
Fair enuf. More philosophizing:
"The most important single gift of science to civilization was freedom from superstition: the idea that order, not caprice, governs the world, that man was capable of understanding it. Beginning with Newton's discovery of the universal sway of the law of gravitation, am felt himself to be in a congenial universe; all things were subject to universal laws.
"But that conviction arose from the narrowness of his horizons. When he extended his range he found that nature was neither understandable nor subject to law. For this we may thank Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg." - p 134
Speaking of scientists, "The Power and the Glory" has this set-up:
""What are you then?"
""Scientists, experimenters. In your language those words might describe us best."
""And we are your experiment."
"The visitor turned around. His face, too, was shadowed.
""Yes."
""And now the experiment is over."
""We have found out what we wished to know. We clean the test tube, sterilize the equipment. You should understand."" - p 140
I like it, the idea of Earth as an experiment, the scientists who created the experiment are done. Imagine if you were experimenting w/ incorporating a plant from yr backyard in a recipe & yr dog ate it & died. Wdn't you throw the food away?
Finally, the last story, "The Listeners", originally published as a short story in September, 1968, is verbatim the 1st chapter of a novel of the same name published in 1972. I've reviewed that bk here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10... .
Plenty of thoughtful ideas in this one & it was very entertaining too. A Good Read for GoodReads.
James Gunn's Breaking Point
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 3, 2015
I spent 4 wks reviewing the Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn edited Source - Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 ( "Re: Source": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ) & while I was reviewing it & working & otherwise busy I read 5 other bks that went unreviewed at the time I finished them. This was one of them. I finished reading it a mnth ago.
This is a short story collection. I often say I avoid reading short stories, preferring novels. That's true. I also end up liking the short stories much more than I expect to. That's true in this case. This was one of my favorite bks by Gunn. In his introduction, it's written:
"For nearly two hundred years—since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century—science fiction was a part of the spectrum of general literature. It was so much a part of the rest of fiction that there wasn't even a name for it: the man who proved that science fiction could be popular, Jules Verne, called his novels "voyages extraordinaires"; the man who proved that science fiction could be art, H. G. Wells, found his earliest, most successful novels labeled "scientific romances."
"Then in 1926 the German immigrant inventor, science enthusiast, and publishing entrepreneur, Hugo Gernsback, created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He also invented a word to describe the type of stories he was going to publish, "scientifiction"; it wasn't until 1929, when he lost control of Amazing Stories and started a competing publication, Wonder Stories, that he created the phrase "science fiction."" - p 7
All hail Hugo Gernsback! I have an issue of Amazing, Amazing Stories's descendent, from 1967. Close, but no cigar-shaped rocket ship. In the 1st story, "Breaking Point", the one the bk's named after, some astronauts have landed on a new planet & they're welcomed in English by a mysterious voice on their radio:
"A soft, smooth hum filled the room. "Carrier," said Ives.
"Then the words came. They were English words, faultlessly spoken, loud and clear and precise. They were harmless words, pleasant words even.
"They were: "Men of earth! Welcome to our planet.."" - p 15
Unfortunately, the astronauts were Russian & didn't speak a word of English & everyone died. Just Kidding. Later, one of the astronauts using the expression ""If we don't win the fur-lined teacup . . ."" (p 20) Is that reference to Mérit Oppenheim's sculpture, "Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)" (1936), or did her sculpture refer to some pre-existing expression that the story is also referring to? Apparently, Oppenheim wins the prize! & now I find a "furlinedteacup" blog online for "san francisco food, film pop culture and music".
But, alas, even a fur-lined teacup won't help these astronauts. they're trapped in their space-ship & the claustrophobia is increasing:
"The Engineer came into the cabin, crossed over to his station, and began opening and closing drawers. "They've moved." From the bottom drawer he pulled out a folded chessboard and a rectangular box. Only then did he look directly at them. "The food's gone."" - p 32
I'm reminded of Stanislav Lem's excellent Solaris. I don't want to give too much of the story away but the Russian astronaut heads turn into pumpkins at midnight. After that, in "A Monster Named Smith", the blob loses control to his host's sex-drive. "Uncontrolled sensations quiver along the nerves inside the body, quiver along the feelers that lie microscopically inside the nerves. Glands are discharging their secretions into the body. The process seems automatic; I can't stop them. The body, too, must have automatic responses. It reaches toward the woman." (p 75) "Cinderella Story" starts off w/ a reasonable enough premise:
"Private enterprise made ET exploration possible. Government could do it, but Government wouldn't. That had been proved. Space was fantastically big, and ET exploration was fantastically expensive. Et exploration was also vital: humanity needed a frontier for the good of its soul; for the good of its body it needed that frontier as far as possible from Earth,
"Laws were drafted to make exploration profitable, and humanity was unleashed upon the galaxy, Jonathan Craddock, Exploiters and Importers, was born—along with one hundred competitors, more or less." - p 78
This reasonable premise is followed up by a description of one of the new technologies:
"Fairfax himself had always insisted that it did no more than satisfy the brain's visual scanning mechanism, the alpha rhythm; it stopped—or interfered with—the scanning sweep, giving the watcher the sense of seeing something without specifying what that something was. From there on, the incredulity factor took over—that habit of the mind which directs it to seek always the simpler explanation. That there are aliens among us is a wild fantasy; it is simpler to assume that what one sees is something ordinary, seen badly.
"But not every mind has an alpha rhythm to iterrupt—for instance, M-types. Some epistemologists doubted that the field affected the mind at all, and photographs supported them: an object inside a Fairfax Field was optically blurred, even to the mindless eye of a camera." - p 82
Interesting, eh? On http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.c... it's written that:
"They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. THEY LIVE.
"A rugged loner (RODDY PIPER) stumbles upon a terrifying discovery: goulish creatures are masquerading as humans while they lull the public into submission through subliminal advertising messages. Only specially made sunglasses make the deadly truth visible."
Many people know & love the movie "THEY LIVE" but, as I recall, it's never explained how the "g[h]oulish creatures" [maybe they mean goulash creatures?] succeed as "masquerading as humans" unless it's all done thru advertising subliminal messages. Gunn explores how one might fool the eye of another creature to make them accept one as one-of-them. I don't remember running across that idea before.
&, yeah, "The Cinderella Story" has tech update:
"Suddenly she said, "Pip! I lost my show!"
""Which shoe?"
""The right shoe. The one with the unit in it!"" - p 89
At least she's probably still got her keys & her cellphone. In "Teddy Bear", Gunn uses his name for one of the characters:
"And then the cold thoughts: Some of us aren't real. And: Somebody slipped.
"But that was a foolish thought. I wasn't prepared to accept the inevitable consequences. It meant—
""Mr. Gunn?"
"I swung around." - p 95
&, yes, they made James Gunn into paperback bks. This one talks to me from time-to-time. It says things like "In such a world of law and order, nothing should be inexplicable. There should be no such mysterious disappearances as those of Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater. (Had they learned too much?) There should be no mysterious appearances of men who are dead or long lost, who should be gone forever. But Enoch Arden returns—so often that we need an Enoch Arden law to protect the "widow."" (p 102)
"The Enoch Arden doctrine consists of the legal principles involved when a person leaves his or her spouse under such circumstances and for such a period of time as to make the other spouse believe that the first spouse is dead, with the result that the remaining spouse marries another, only to discover later the return of the first spouse. Generally, in most states, it is safer for the remaining spouse to secure a Divorce before marrying again." - http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictio...
If I ever get married, I think I'll change my name to "Enoch", ask my wife to change hers to "Arden" & propose that our last name be "Divarriage". That shd get us off to a good start. Speaking of the future,
"["]Can you fix that thing?"
"The plumber flinched. he said meekly, "What seems to be wrong with it?"
""It—won't—flush."
"Gingerly the red-haired plumber twisted the handle on the water closet. Water gurgled into the bowl and swirled up dangerously close to the edge before it subsided. Slowly the level dropped. "Well," said the plumber. "Well. My suggestion is that you get rid of the whole affair. I can get a crew of men in a few days, rip this thing out, and put in a modern disposerbot—"" - p 122
Car w/ a computer in it anyone? Gunn even gets into what seems to be his literary philosophy:
""Every science that deals with man ignores everything except what it deals with. Medicine deals with the physical man, economics with that simplification known as Economic Man, psychiatry with a fictitious creature in whom it would have no interest if he were 'normal,' and one branch of psychology with I.Q. Man, whose only significant aspect is his ability to solve puzzles.
""Literature is the only thing that deals with the whole complex phenomena at once. If it were to cease to exist, whatever is not considered by one or another of the sciences would no longer be considered at all and would perhaps vanish completely." - p 129
Fair enuf. More philosophizing:
"The most important single gift of science to civilization was freedom from superstition: the idea that order, not caprice, governs the world, that man was capable of understanding it. Beginning with Newton's discovery of the universal sway of the law of gravitation, am felt himself to be in a congenial universe; all things were subject to universal laws.
"But that conviction arose from the narrowness of his horizons. When he extended his range he found that nature was neither understandable nor subject to law. For this we may thank Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg." - p 134
Speaking of scientists, "The Power and the Glory" has this set-up:
""What are you then?"
""Scientists, experimenters. In your language those words might describe us best."
""And we are your experiment."
"The visitor turned around. His face, too, was shadowed.
""Yes."
""And now the experiment is over."
""We have found out what we wished to know. We clean the test tube, sterilize the equipment. You should understand."" - p 140
I like it, the idea of Earth as an experiment, the scientists who created the experiment are done. Imagine if you were experimenting w/ incorporating a plant from yr backyard in a recipe & yr dog ate it & died. Wdn't you throw the food away?
Finally, the last story, "The Listeners", originally published as a short story in September, 1968, is verbatim the 1st chapter of a novel of the same name published in 1972. I've reviewed that bk here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10... .
Plenty of thoughtful ideas in this one & it was very entertaining too. A Good Read for GoodReads.
June 14, 2016
Breaking Point is a fascinating and slightly quaint look at a first contact situation. A team of space travelers go to a distant planet to retrieve the Survey box. They don't handle things very well...
June 24, 2022
Really nice effort with some astute philosophical aspects but to the last page it never had me 100%. Something is missing. This is often the case with James Gunn.
July 16, 2011
My wife is baking bread.
That fact is more interesting than this book.
That fact is more interesting than this book.
September 15, 2018
I bought this book from an antique shop for about a dollar. This isn't an insult, in fact this is what drew me to the book in the first place.
Reading though it, the book has vibes of dystopia throughout the first act, defined by heavy, philosophic discussions punctuated by quick, violent action. Violence and Vulgarity defines the world crafted by the novel, or, at least, the universities. We see Marxist strongholds kept in check by autonomy, external authority and internal conspiracy. Enter Tom Gavin, totally indoctrinated youth.
Thrilled by the intellectual, fatherly influence of 'The Professor', Gavin enacts a daring kidnapping that unfortunately ends in the professor's death, which itself leads to the extraction and imbibing of his brain by Gavin and others.
THEN things get weird. And kind of boring.
I'd call the novel a Heinlein-esque traipse through political and lifestyle choices. Science fiction is all about social critique and speculation and what have you, but after Gavin gets expelled from school, then leaves his family's home, it becomes a very weak Gulliver's travels. Individual chapters become brief, wordy glimpses into random ideologies, with stock characters, bland dialogue, and over it all hanging the threat of the eventual avalanche of counter-argument from the floating phantom of the Professor. Race, sexuality, sex itself, society, all of it is handled with stock perspectives, stock characters and stock outcomes.
Overall, it's a quick, meh read and I don't know if I'd recommend it.
Reading though it, the book has vibes of dystopia throughout the first act, defined by heavy, philosophic discussions punctuated by quick, violent action. Violence and Vulgarity defines the world crafted by the novel, or, at least, the universities. We see Marxist strongholds kept in check by autonomy, external authority and internal conspiracy. Enter Tom Gavin, totally indoctrinated youth.
Thrilled by the intellectual, fatherly influence of 'The Professor', Gavin enacts a daring kidnapping that unfortunately ends in the professor's death, which itself leads to the extraction and imbibing of his brain by Gavin and others.
THEN things get weird. And kind of boring.
I'd call the novel a Heinlein-esque traipse through political and lifestyle choices. Science fiction is all about social critique and speculation and what have you, but after Gavin gets expelled from school, then leaves his family's home, it becomes a very weak Gulliver's travels. Individual chapters become brief, wordy glimpses into random ideologies, with stock characters, bland dialogue, and over it all hanging the threat of the eventual avalanche of counter-argument from the floating phantom of the Professor. Race, sexuality, sex itself, society, all of it is handled with stock perspectives, stock characters and stock outcomes.
Overall, it's a quick, meh read and I don't know if I'd recommend it.
June 22, 2024
Certainly, Professor Gunn, a long-time college faculty member, saw exactly where the train track was running. This book is remarkably prescient, and my timing in taking it off the shelf could not have been better. The recent rash of antisemitism on campus associated with muscling Jewish students is exactly the sort of behavior Gunn saw coming.
This book cries out for a high-end reprint.
Many passages are worth quoting, this is my favorite.
"In the past few weeks," the Professor continued, "we have discussed the contradictions implicit in our society. Marcuse's concept of 'liberating tolerance' which practices tyranny in the name of freedom. The state of education which glorifies the democratic ideal of political equality into a debilitating doctrine of educational equality. The decay of the so-called Puritan ethic into a general acceptance of pleasure-seeking hedonism, of man's unique time-binding ability into a hatred of history and a forgetfulness of the future, of language itself into degraded meanings, autonomic responses of abstractions, and ritual words scarcely distinguishable from the grunts and sighs of cavemen. The elevation of youth into a cult, and ignorance into a virtue. How did we get here?"
Beautifully packaged with a good collector note.
This book cries out for a high-end reprint.
Many passages are worth quoting, this is my favorite.
"In the past few weeks," the Professor continued, "we have discussed the contradictions implicit in our society. Marcuse's concept of 'liberating tolerance' which practices tyranny in the name of freedom. The state of education which glorifies the democratic ideal of political equality into a debilitating doctrine of educational equality. The decay of the so-called Puritan ethic into a general acceptance of pleasure-seeking hedonism, of man's unique time-binding ability into a hatred of history and a forgetfulness of the future, of language itself into degraded meanings, autonomic responses of abstractions, and ritual words scarcely distinguishable from the grunts and sighs of cavemen. The elevation of youth into a cult, and ignorance into a virtue. How did we get here?"
Beautifully packaged with a good collector note.
May 18, 2022
I think I'm lukewarm on this book because I don't like the world it shows me... but I'm uncomfortably aware that a lot of the attitudes in that world could reasonably grow from where we are today (or where we were in the 70s, which is probably the basis for Gunn's work). I don't like the protagonist, I don't like the biggest action scene that happens early on when he tries to "become" his Professor... I did not enjoy this book. But if you want to read about a dystopian future that starts with what the universities become, this is a book to put on your reading list.
November 22, 2020
Kind of preachy in the beginning but once you get out of there it's interesting. I do hope this imagined future is not where the world eventually ends up, though I see a lot of similarities of attitude with today's mindsets. I'm definitely team Elaine. Gavin is a self absorbed jerk for most of the book, with far more luck at getting out of sticky situations than he deserves, usually because someone else takes a good portion of the lumps for him. Overall though a good read.
February 20, 2019
Written from the viewpoint of a college student in a dystopian future - Kampus follows this student through expulsion due to mercy killing his professor, across the country to Berkley. Reminds this reader of a futuristic dystopian version of the Odyssey.
July 27, 2016
Not for those who cannot abide in the tools of logic being used on arguments they agree with.
Synopsis:
Absolutely hilarious dark romp through college campuses ruled by wildly competitive political student groups, promoting anarchy and revolution, each attempting to redefine the cause fast enough to declare their predecessors as reactionary, thus winning the right to define curriculum, admission standards, etc. Such dystopian areas that their neighboring communities build walls around them. One student, in a desperate act to stay relevant, kidnaps a professor to steal his knowledge (by sampling his blood, etc), potentially becoming a threat to the currently ruling council. When the professor dies in the process, a power grab is made and he sent to a sister campus on a political mission.
Personal Observation related to the content:
I attended school in the mid 70s, amid the freedom gained so that we could sit at the student union with a few pitchers of beer and have wild discussions, passionately arguing about all forms of politics, including the left wing views that might have seen us censured 10 years earlier. When the arguing died down, we finished the beer and went home friends.
I later attended school in the early 90s. A completely different situation. Freedom of speech is now curtailed, any opinion expressed that disagreed with liberal philosophy is shouted down and the speaker is ostracized by classmates and faculty alike. During office hours, I asked a Logic & Arguments associate professor why we only analyzed the writing and speeches of conservatives for logical fallacies. He refused to discuss the topic, but agreed to meet me off campus. Then he told me that the curriculum had been passed to him by others in the department, and that he valued his job, so he wouldn't ever subject a liberal writer to the same analysis.
In an education class, peer reviews were returned on an orally presented overview of science and physics, which pointed out that women, observing the sky to track their menstrual cycle, were the first astronomers. Five of twenty reviews included the comment that physics was a tool to control women and people of color.
Draw your own conclusions. You probably will.
Synopsis:
Absolutely hilarious dark romp through college campuses ruled by wildly competitive political student groups, promoting anarchy and revolution, each attempting to redefine the cause fast enough to declare their predecessors as reactionary, thus winning the right to define curriculum, admission standards, etc. Such dystopian areas that their neighboring communities build walls around them. One student, in a desperate act to stay relevant, kidnaps a professor to steal his knowledge (by sampling his blood, etc), potentially becoming a threat to the currently ruling council. When the professor dies in the process, a power grab is made and he sent to a sister campus on a political mission.
Personal Observation related to the content:
I attended school in the mid 70s, amid the freedom gained so that we could sit at the student union with a few pitchers of beer and have wild discussions, passionately arguing about all forms of politics, including the left wing views that might have seen us censured 10 years earlier. When the arguing died down, we finished the beer and went home friends.
I later attended school in the early 90s. A completely different situation. Freedom of speech is now curtailed, any opinion expressed that disagreed with liberal philosophy is shouted down and the speaker is ostracized by classmates and faculty alike. During office hours, I asked a Logic & Arguments associate professor why we only analyzed the writing and speeches of conservatives for logical fallacies. He refused to discuss the topic, but agreed to meet me off campus. Then he told me that the curriculum had been passed to him by others in the department, and that he valued his job, so he wouldn't ever subject a liberal writer to the same analysis.
In an education class, peer reviews were returned on an orally presented overview of science and physics, which pointed out that women, observing the sky to track their menstrual cycle, were the first astronomers. Five of twenty reviews included the comment that physics was a tool to control women and people of color.
Draw your own conclusions. You probably will.
October 22, 2012
A dystopian society, anarchy and philosophy. What's not to like? Well I loved this book so much when I first read it 20+ years ago, that it influenced my politics, the degree I ended up studying and my belief that everything is FUBAR and that we're all just children playing in a world that if we were more grown up about it, we could make life a Heaven.
Gunn's writing here - I've yet to read anything else by him - is pithy, punchy and funny. His eye for absurdity, for paradox and the stupidity of man could lead you into an anti-intellectualist stance, but he's far too clever for that, and whilst accepting that there are problems with intellectual endeavour and how that is applied to society, he points out that there is no easy answer, so that intellectualism is, after all, the only way we'll evolve beyond our teenage years, as a race - though it's my belief we're still at the toddler stage.
A deeply philosophical book, couched in an action-thriller living room, it goes beyond the bare plotting and formulaic characterisation of other novelists of ideas such as Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse and Robert Pirsig, and gives a story that contains many prescient ideas.
Without it, I'd never have studied Philosophy and remained a happy pig, with it, I became a disillusioned idealist with a sliver of hope for humanity.
Gunn's writing here - I've yet to read anything else by him - is pithy, punchy and funny. His eye for absurdity, for paradox and the stupidity of man could lead you into an anti-intellectualist stance, but he's far too clever for that, and whilst accepting that there are problems with intellectual endeavour and how that is applied to society, he points out that there is no easy answer, so that intellectualism is, after all, the only way we'll evolve beyond our teenage years, as a race - though it's my belief we're still at the toddler stage.
A deeply philosophical book, couched in an action-thriller living room, it goes beyond the bare plotting and formulaic characterisation of other novelists of ideas such as Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse and Robert Pirsig, and gives a story that contains many prescient ideas.
Without it, I'd never have studied Philosophy and remained a happy pig, with it, I became a disillusioned idealist with a sliver of hope for humanity.
July 8, 2009
Not particularly well aged -- the psychology is trite and the physics is cartoon-simple, but there isn't much left.
April 27, 2010
Predicted all of the silliness with computer/social interaction. Maybe other things as well.
August 8, 2014
Interesting, but not worth a reread.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews